Visibility

In our everyday lives we each see training everywhere we turn. Does anyone remember having to take a training course for that new phone system, accessing and using e-mail, or for some new software or equipment? Every job has at least an orientation session to train new employees. IT departments may only hire people with certain certifications received from specific training courses, and we are starting to see the same for marketing departments. Writers take workshop training courses to grow and sharpen their skills. There are training programs for Managers and staff right down to every specific job function in the company. Depending upon your industry, continuing education is often mandated to retain credentials and licenses.
 
Competition heats up during a recession as firms fight harder to stay in business, and knowledge is a wonderful weapon in that fight. It would be depressing to think that past prosperity and a previously low unemployment rate has resulted in management teams that cannot recognize the advantages of training as while they fight to stay in business.
 
When it comes to internet marketing, many senior managers do clearly see the value of a well developed SEO training course to help their teams win. Only by understanding the interrelated process and functions that will need to be performed across their respective companies to build a successful digital initiative system can these companies survive, or hopefully thrive.
 
Let’s start at the beginning and agree that a SEO training course is good. But let’s also agree that not all training courses are created equal. Conferences certainly educate but seldom train, offering many tips and tasks without developing the wisdom to understand and adapt them to your business. Online courses offer the training on many topics and some are better than others, but the hoped for knowledge transfer is minimal without real-time interaction and intense Q&A discussions intertwined with the material. Proper training with a knowledgeable instructor and with integrated topics paced for the immersion of the student to the point of comprehensive knowledge is exactly what is needed for most advanced topics, and SEO is certainly no exception. After taking a real SEO training course you should walk away feeling it was the best course of your life… is that how you felt in your last conference or course?
 
Did your SEO training course improve communication and awareness?

Properly done, an educated team will be speaking and understanding the same language. Just like the game of telephone, if something is said by one person and then passed to another, no matter how one tries the exact message will never be passed. In the exceptionally competitive internet marketing space it is critical that there be a simple and uniform way to communicate or your competition will certainly win every time.
 
Did your SEO training course improve cooperation between business teams?

If you are a large company with multiple business silos, then chances are that the teams are not aware or communicate enough with the business silos that are before or after them in the company chain. Just like in a relay race they may very well be doing a spectacular job within their portion or leg of the race but if the transition to the next business group is not smooth then chances are you will lose the race and your team has failed. This also holds true for small and medium sized companies, because you wear multiple hats so often the likelihood that you will have to communicate across so many different topics simply screams for the need to get a soup to nuts SEO training course. Imagine a marketing team that understands SEO dealing with an IT production team that doesn’t – not a pretty picture.
 
Did your SEO training course help build a strong foundation?

Now that the specific business groups have been identified and are communicating with each other, they will begin to operate as one. Just like the foundation to a building, if subsequent employees and team members share a common foundation, future progress is accelerated and on target. This allows multiple teams to operate as a tightly woven unit. In contrast, a lack of uniform understanding is a solid foundation upon which you build disasters.
 
Did your SEO training course help improve efficiencies?

When each group understands the specific needs of the other as they are working towards a common goal then each group has the ability to focus on where they connect to the next. Sharing SEO knowledge and the acceptance of SEO priorities can help assure that the outcome of their efforts are best prepared for the next group to accept and take control. And you will be pleased at how the baton pass from team to team is expedited as opposed to incurring annoying and painful delays.
 
Did your SEO training course lower cost and improve ROI?

Through a shared knowledge and communication across your teams and an expedited baton pass between them, the SEO implementation efficiencies will improve, the time to realize improvements in web traffic will shorten, your duplicated efforts will be reduced, and the holistic sharing of knowledge with elevate the entire team. No one unit will be judged any more important then the next and no one unit will be allowed to be the cause of a failure point. And the cornerstone of this process is training.

I suppose that if you took several people speaking different languages and with different training and priorities and asked them to do SEO that it would prove to be difficult at best and certainly not as efficient as a well trained team with common goals and speaking the same language. This is the difference between a successful company realizing ranking dominance and a company that plays lip service to SEO and never gets momentum from their diverse mission segregated teams.

Now it gets a bit more complex. Google recently announced that they had performed over 450 algorithm changes in the previous twelve months. The training you had a year ago may not help. Google Universal Search changed a lot of things known about search, and the addition of many more algorithm variables screams about changes we have yet to fully see. Have you noticed how the results seem to be erratic lately?

Engagement Objects™ are coming of age, and we are going to see the items contributing to increased engagement on your ranked pages helping your rankings in the search results. We believe that after the first of the year we will see the slow emergence of engagement as an algorithm powerhouse, rivaling links and content in their impact on traffic. We absolutely believe that engaging sites are more interesting, and will be seen as more relevant. What could your trained staff do with this knowledge?

Behavioral Search will impact the filtering of the search results, seen where fifty people searching for the same term will result in fifty different sets of top-10 pages. A search for Java might be filtered by programmers, coffee drinkers and travelers, and sub-filters within those, and so on, until we have fifty relatively different sets of results for the identical query. If we have unique results for each person doing the query, what does ranking mean? And how is this information ever going to reach those not trained to understand it and explain it to others?

Intent-based Search is reminiscent of the clear message sent by Yahoo! Mindset. The intent of every search is specific: research or shopping. And the search engines can sense that intent and present results appropriate to the query. Appropriate is easily seen in the architecture and word usage of your site, so it is rather important that your site architecture and content appear natural for that intent. So, while it is easy to say that your teams will inherently knows and understands the subtleties of this SEO issue, it certainly is not something known by everyone. Can you see that training on advanced topics is important in a highly competitive space?

And so we come to local search. This has always been in the unrealized realm of “maybe soon”, but even with recent progress it remains far from perfected. If the intent is to shop and the query is location specific, those appropriate sites within that region will be very appropriate results. We have already seen this occurring, and with increasing frequency. Within a few months we can expect localized results for shopping intent queries to be common and a mainstream SEO consideration.

Given the advantages of speaking the same language, teams feeling empowered as a result of knowledge and accomplishment, facing the constant shifts in the algorithms, the impact of Universal Search, behavior-aligned search, intent-based search leading to selective local search, the failure of any company to obtain training for key internet marketing staff is the same as volunteering for failure.

And so, to many companies a successful SEO project starts with training. So should yours.