5 Tips For Maintaining International SEO Knowledge With Training
Talking to the Global SEO manager of a large organization with offices around the world, he was bemoaning the high turnover of staff and the difficulty of keeping people in SEO posts around the world with the right level of SEO knowledge and expertise to achieve their goals.
Its a challenge many organizations face. Thats not to say that these businesses are bad at retaining staff the very fact that they are global often means that they offer something special to the world. Their staff are often not moving onto other organziations either but simply are being promoted to a different position, team or department. Some, of course, are leaving the company too.
Another issue is that SEO responsibilities around the world arent often held by people who are dedicated to the cause of SEO. Mostly, they have other marketing tasks to handle too and have a relatively limited bandwidth for SEO.
Before going further, I have to declare two areas of personal interest. My company runs the International Search Summit with SMX and training programs. Im also a long standing fan of SMX and SearchEngineLand and first attended conferences by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman in 2003 in the UK and 2004 in the US. So this gives me something of a bias, but also I think a unique insight into the industry were all in.
In many sectors there have been studies into the value of training. I dont propose to labour this point I think were all aware of the rapidly changing nature of the business.
The value of keeping abreast of search engine and social media developments pays for itself many times over Im sure we all agree. You would think that investing in training would be a no-brainer but its still a cost and its value isnt always recognized. (My staff at this point are also nodding.)
We also have to recognize at this point that for those working in international SEO the challenges are particularly tough. No one speaks 20 or even 10 languages well. If you see someone who claims that, I suggest you challenge it. So how can a normal human being SEO working internationally actually cope? Lets look at some strategies.
If you think Im about to say its a good idea to go to conferences, youd only be half right. There are conferences all over the world so you could quite easily send staff to the most local conference for them. I think there is a better strategy which Ive seen a few companies deploy.
A good strategy is to choose a big and wide ranging conference somewhere in the world and then to fly in the relevant staff from all over the world. Yes I can hear the sharp intake of breath and I know theres a little more cost involved with that, but the value is clear.
With all of the global SEO team in one place, they can discuss not just what theyve seen and heard but also their own issues. In effect you can organise a parallel conference for you own organisation alongside the main conference with the inspiration of the main conference in the teams minds.
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5 Tips For Maintaining International SEO Knowledge With Training