Why Your SEO Playbooks Need To Collaborate With Sales And Brand Teams

The SEO Handbook serves as a guide to creating, executing, and maintaining effective SEO strategies.

It ensures that all participants, from retailers to developers, adhere to a uniform and methodical approach.

Typically, the playbook covers essential elements that guide SEO initiatives, aligning them with business goals and promoting teamwork among different teams.

Communicating and working with most of the C-suite is rewarding and collaborative. While the overall “SEO know-how” may not be that high (which is why we, as experts, are involved), the core goals provide a common basis for alignment:

• Creating an effective SEO contribution (as a channel) to overall marketing key performance indicators (KPI).
• Effective communication with all business departments (C-suite, product, brand, sales, engineering) and obtaining “SEO buy-in.”
• Reaching your Serviceable Market (SAM), Serviceable Market (SOM) and Total Addressable Market (TAM) with relevant brand touch points.

This is where SEO development manuals come into play.

In my experience, your SEO playbook needs to be put together in collaboration with other MarComm teams and agencies, and teams like product and engineering.

When I was consulting with Gitlab, one of the biggest opportunities we discovered was talking to the product team and asking for their unfiltered opinions and input on how the products were presented on the website.

The combination of these insights from engaged non-marketing teams allowed for a simpler approach to SEO initiatives.

By integrating SEO into every aspect of an organization’s marketing communications strategy, brands can ensure that all channels work effectively together to improve visibility, engage audiences and contribute to overall, meaningful KPIs.

Development of a manual for SEO

The first step in developing a successful SEO playbook in collaboration with sales, product, and engineering teams is to understand each team’s unique goals, priorities, and workflow.

While all teams are moving in the same direction towards overall business goals, their individual team goals, KPIs and how they contribute to the bigger picture will differ.

By understanding and respecting each team’s unique priorities, you can create a foundation for collaboration and an impactful SEO playbook, as well as how to more effectively communicate how your SEO initiatives can positively impact their goals.

Sales team priorities

The main focus of the sales team is on converting potential customers into customers and increase in income. Their priorities (and direct responsibilities) often include:

• Using data to increase the likelihood that potential customers will complete desired actions (eg sign up for a product demo, trial or purchase).
• Understanding the pain points, objections and decision-making factors of potential customers. Then, providing feedback to other MarComms teams on how products/features are presented at various touch points.
• Meeting or exceeding monthly, quarterly and annual sales targets.
• Ensuring effective management of leads generated through SEO efforts groomed.

Brand team priorities

The goal of the brand team is to create a cohesive and compelling an identity that resonates with the target audience.

There is significant overlap here with the SEO team. We’re more likely to see elements of the brand team in every tone of voice guide content we receive. Their main responsibilities include:

• Ensuring all communications reflect the company’s tone, voice and values.
• Building strong customer relationships through storytelling i emotionally resonant content.
• Maintaining a consistent look and feel across all digital and offline touchpoints.

Engineering team priorities

The engineering team plays a key role in ensuring technical infrastructure supports SEO initiatives and provides a seamless user experience.

Understanding their processes from the outset is imperative not only for implementing the technical SEO recommendations you make, but also for proactively monitoring and reporting on any implementations that could impact SEO performance.

Depending on the structure of the engineering team, their responsibilities will range from proactive development and bug fixing to infrastructure management.

Define the objectives of the manual

The basic definition must contain a manual for SEO purposes so that all teams have common common goals.

Such goals create the guiding principle behind measuring SEO performance against the brand’s business and sales priorities.

Set clear goals to align SEO with business priorities:

• Increase organic trafficimprove conversion rates and increase brand awareness.
• Track keyword rankings and clicks from keyword clusters (aligned with funnel stages/your audience segments).
• Measure organic leads, SEO-driven conversions and revenue attribution.
• Branded search volume, content alignment and engagement (measured through events in Google Analytics 4).

These goals create a measurable framework for success.

Create Playbook sections for each team

Create separate sections for each team to ensure the manual is functional and relevant to the teams.

Specific strategies and guidelines should be derived from the objectives and responsibilities of each part.

Encourage sales team members to submit content related to typical complaints or questions from potential customers, ensuring SEO efforts bring in qualified leads and content not only ranks for search terms, but resonates with prospects on a level that keyword research tools and basic intent classification don’t tell us.

Brand teams should contribute clear guidelines for consistently branding meta-descriptions, titles, alt texts, and other SEO elements.

They need to share positive reviews, customer testimonials and stories to help build trust and credibility and provide SEO teams with a better understanding of what their target audience values ​​before and after conversion.

Engineering teams should contribute and (in collaboration with the SEO team) define the process for issue initiation, prioritization and implementation.

They should also share their overall processes and include the SEO team in notes or plans so that any major potential issues can be understood and mitigated if necessary.

Feedback loops and reporting

Regular check-ins create a continuous rhythm for teams to hear updates on progress and resolve issues.

Weekly or bi-weekly meetings would provide an opportunity to review ongoing SEO initiatives, address roadblocks, and maintain alignment across departments.

Sessions of this nature would also provide an open platform for communication and keep the focus on the same goals.

Cross-departmental reporting links core SEO performance metrics like keyword rankings and organic traffic to tangible business results like conversion and brand engagement.

This would illustrate the impact that SEO efforts have on revenue or brand visibility to stakeholders regarding the strategic value of SEO and its continued investment.

The SEO Handbook is a dynamic resource

Your SEO playbook should contain useful insights to guide next steps in poorly performing pages, highlighting technical issues or suggesting areas to strengthen conversion paths so teams can quickly address such issues and capitalize on new growth opportunities.

Data visualization lead these on. Instead of dashboards, graphs or interactive tools, show stakeholders the different possibilities that data presents.

Tracking and analyzing metrics at a more granular level will allow you to better visualize user engagement, making it much easier to spot trends, measure progress, and prioritize strategic actions.

The inclusion of structured feedback loops and transparent reporting turns the SEO Handbook into a dynamic, ever-evolving resource.

It continuously adapts, driven by new data, open communication and collective insights, ensuring that every SEO initiative delivers maximum value.

More resources:

---

Featured Image: Face Stock/Shutterstock