In an effort to help those SEO’s out there who may be looking for something to streamline SEO campaign management I’m giving away our SEO campaign management workflow document that I’ve created for our St. Louis SEO company. With SEO being part art and part science I think it can be very easy to get lost in the process and become inefficient or unproductive at worst. 

This doc is a high level overview of the resources, relationships, and responsibilities that we have found work best to streamline SEO campaign management and reduce the total cost of SEO.

Internally we use this document to help new hires understand our style of SEO campaign management. Since each step is linked down to an actual procedural document that outlines the steps necessary to complete the step we have the tools in place to get our junior SEO's up to speed on our way of thinking. Equipping people with the right tools to do the job and helping them understand the big picture are two important aspects of creating a strong team.  

You’ll find three roles represented in this workflow as that is what works best for our company. If you’re an independent consultant then you may be wearing all three of these hats, but I believe you will still find value in understanding where these roles and responsibilities overlap. 

For the sake of clarity I’ve detailed the positions below:

•  Account Executive – This person is COMMUNICATING the deliverables to the client. They should be handling the output from the SEO campaign management tools and understand the analysis enough to make the clients comfortable with information backed recommendations to improve the business.  We’ve found that communicating the value of the work is as important as actually doing the work, especially when results aren’t coming quickly.  This person should work from an established communication plan that defines frequency and depth of client contact. 
• SEO Engineer – This person is handling STRATEGY and IMPLEMENTATION for the campaign.  They should work hand in hand with the Account Executive to understand the client goals and should be communicating internally with the Account Executive at each point in the research, strategy, and implementation phases. It is this person’s job to communicate findings and recommendations internally to the Account Executive who can then relay that information to the client. 
• Project Manager – This position is pretty self explanatory so I won’t go into much detail. The important point to take away here is that this position is about managing the project and not the people.  With the workflow we have outlined here we layout the reports necessary for the project manager to make sure that the campaign is yielding results for the client. This person works closely with both the AE and the SEO Engineer to plan the project and keeps a close eye on reports to head off problems before they get out of hand.

This workflow is based on the SEO campaign management software that we use to provide our clients and management team with visibility into our project management, activity schedules, and reporting.  It not only helps to provide a consistent quality level of service and better results for the clients, but it reduces our costs and if there are ever any problems it helps us to troubleshoot the issues so they don’t continue to put a drain on our resources

I hope this has proven valuable to at least some of you.  If you are interested in an in depth look at how each step is documented, which tools we use, and how we use the tools to manage campaigns efficiently please give us a shout in the comments.  I’d love to contribute anything that helps SEO’s improve quality of service because I think together we can improve the reputation of SEO’s everywhere!

James Scaggs is an SEO Engineer at Evolve.  You can connect with him online by following him on Twitter or LinkedIn.