Welcome back. In this lesson, we'll be talking about working with stakeholders. Unless you own your own website and are the main implementor of these skills, implementing technical SEO requires working with stakeholders or other teams. They typically have many other priorities besides yours, and so it's important to get clear about how to relay your request in a way that they can act on it. One of the key ways to do this is by using competitive data, and so I'll share some of the competitive analysis tools that might help you get influence with stakeholders in a way that you wouldn't otherwise be able to. What's also important is to understand how to identify the level of effort and impact in implementing these broad technical changes you want to make to the website. In this lesson, you'll learn how best to work with key stakeholders to implement the technical fixes to the site, what competitive analysis tools are available that can help you become influential in getting buy-in for some of the changes you want to make, and you'll gain an understanding of the effort and impact, and how to scale your fixes in a way that your teams can implement in the right priority order. Working efficiently with client teams are stakeholders requires a unique focus and skill set to get things done. It's one thing to list everything that could be done to make improvements, but it's entirely different to execute changes while working with teams and stakeholders. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind; clarify and focus on the most important objectives, determine which elements can be implemented with the highest level of business impact, prioritize things that require the lowest relative effort for the highest impact, present all suggestions in a way that you highlight the benefit to stakeholders or clients and have their best interests in mind. This focus will help you quickly get traction and build credibility with stakeholders. Competitive analysis is one of the most effective ways to get your client's attention and influence decisions. Use search results to show stakeholders what the competition is doing online that works. Doesn't mean you will do exactly what competitors do, I'm definitely not suggesting you follow rather than lead, but this is a powerful yet easy way to move the needle. Number of platforms on the market do competitive analysis, they're worth researching in more detail. Here's some I recommend, SEMrush, gives competitive analysis from a keyword and campaign standpoint, KeywordSpy, looks at competitive keywords and how to gain an advantage, SimilarWeb, provides insights about any website or app showing your traffic statistics versus your competitors, SpyFu, is another keyword and ad space analysis tool, finally, AddGooroo gives actionable insights on paid and organic searches. It helps you benchmark campaigns uncover competitors search strategies and find additional performance stats. Any of these competitive analysis tools is worth considering. There's a cost for most of them but use a free trial to determine if you can profitably make use of their data. This data can influence stakeholders to take action. According to Peter Drucker, business has only two basic functions, marketing and innovation. You may not agree entirely, but I think the premise rings true, anytime you can innovate, whether around a product or a process, you're helping further the bottom line goals of the business that you're working on. Over time, all systems naturally move toward chaos. This is the essence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This presents challenges when working with teams and executing projects. Whether it would be a project plan or technical analysis or recommendations you put forward for SEO, things don't always work as planned, your great intentions sometimes run off the rails, projects get delayed or may go sideways, this is often referred to as scope creep. This is classic, everyone runs into it, but there are ways to counteract these chaos. One method I suggest is a process called Scrum, the leading framework for Agile software development. Scrum Alliance is the organization that focuses on the Scrum knowledge-base and the Agile Manifesto. Scrum is designed to foster greater collaboration, productivity, and success among team members, and is becoming more common in the marketing discipline, even though it's very traditional in the software development space. This is worth exploring to become more effective in any form whether SEO, business or any complex project. I recommend the Agile Process that I'll describe here. This methodology requires first that you are customer-centric. Once you are, this focus on the customer, gathering information about them will inspire a product vision and a project plan. This plan requires teams to work in a lean format. This could be a team of two or three people that execute on a weekly or bi-weekly basis focusing on specific deliverables. The team executes on the simple, short, and basic deliverables which are called sprints. These sprints are evaluated after one or two weeks. The feedback learned from sprints is taken into account and informs the next deliverables. This is an ongoing cycle. The intent is to see quick fixes and immediate gratification to limit big problems and fail first, and to have work constantly progressing without too much delay. Agile is not for everyone, especially not in marketing where projects don't have the same linear approach that the software world does, not every client or team will adopt it. Those who come from an IT or software development background may be more inclined to use Agile, some use Kanban, which is a different project methodology. However, your goal is to create a culture with clients or stakeholders where you have a commitment to be more fully aligned, take feedback into account, consider how to prioritize any backlog of initiatives, and put initiatives into the marketplace by considering effective website changes. If your internal team clients and stakeholders want to execute work in a cooperative and innovative culture, consider using something like Agile. How does Agile work in practice? Here's an example; recently we needed to make quick changes to improve website performance across multiple teams. It was a classic complex problem. We held an initial meeting where we define the scope of the problem, we identified key players, and we considered what could be done to improve performance. Fortunately, all team members had an understanding already of the Agile and Scrum methodology. Therefore, we were able to implement weekly sprints with product owners and Scrum Masters. The benefits were clear communication, regular updates, efficient execution of our work, limited delays because we each had a clear objective each week, and agreed upon manner in which we would communicate and accountability. When working with complex projects and big teams where you need to be effective in accomplishing your work, this Agile methodology can bring your team to a higher level of efficiency. Therefore, I recommend you consider it.
