SEO Project Management for Agencies: How to Successfully Manage an SEO Process as an Agency

Welcome to the Project Management for SEO, specifically SEO agencies edition of Crawling Mondays. In today's episode, I have invited 2 heads or managers at agencies that provide SEO services to go through some of the most challenging scenarios, issues, problems that in SEO processes you end up handling wet clients and how to solve them. I have to say that I do believe that a high share of issues that arise in SEO processes and why SEO processes fail is because of project management problems, not necessarily purely technical issues. And today I'm going to cover these issues with my 2 guests. On one hand, I have Miracle Inameti Archibong. Head of SEO at Eredit. And on the other hand, I have Mark Williams Cook, Director at Kandor. Thank you very much for joining. So let's start with the topic in hand. SEO project management or managing SEO processes as agencies with clients. One of the most complex things within the agency. I think that most agencies agree that Good sound management and coordination, communication of the SEO process is key for its success with companies, right? How do you handle this? Which are the influence of the management of SEO processes in the success of SEO in general?

So I've seen, I've worked in agencies where they had like specific account managers who were non-SEO focused, and then they just came in because they had good experience with client management, related, that kind of stuff. And now I work with an agency where our account director comes from an SEO background. And I see that that works better for me because so many times with relationship managers, they just overpromise. And then when you come to the tech person and you're the one who has to implement, and then you're like, well, how do we justify any ROI on this? And it becomes a question of now we need to tweak the reports, we need to tweak things. It just, for me, that process works better. better if you have an account manager who's from an SEO background. So that's the first thing I'll say.

Yeah, I think, I think I'd agree with that. So I've, I've worked at 4 different agencies over the last kind of 14, 15 years. And like you said, Aleyda, I've seen all different approaches, um, been tried out, some very successful, many not so successful. Um, and I think project management for SEO is particularly interesting because If you think about project management for something like a web build, there's a very defined beginning and end point. And you're just trying to juggle people's time and money and reach that point. And the interesting thing about SEO is the target a lot of the time is moving, right? There's always another piece of content and there's always another link. And so everything you're doing is prioritized. There's no, okay, we'll get through every single task. So I think that's— a challenge for project managing SEO. And it's super important as well, I think, because when you do your pitch and you explain a strategy to a client and they get really excited about it, it's very easy for them to underestimate the amount of work that actually goes in. So that first project plan is so important to say, okay, well, let's just think about the content we've spoken about. You know, by the time we've been through some ideation and validation and then, you know, we've worked out who in and your team is gonna deliver this and by when, suddenly the project plan's already very long and you haven't even spoken about the other 6 things that they think, yeah, we just wanna do that from a standing start. So I think that's one important thing, which is it gives the client that more realistic view of actually what's involved.

Oh my God, you are making me remember some not necessarily positive moments from my agency life in which unfortunately I wasn't a decision maker. So I just had to accept I just accept what I was given at the time. It's like, especially in the SEO selling process, indeed, if there's a salesperson that has these goals to sell, sell, sell, then if there isn't an SEO involved to validate that what is being sold is, well, the best possible solution for that given situation, if there's a real fit, that there's a validation based on the goals of the brand or the client, the timelines, the scope, the resources, the viability, the flexibility in general. That is 100%, especially as agencies, because you need to do this at scale, right? It is so important to have this very well-aligned pre-sales SEO validation process. I think that that is definitely key for the success of everything else. If you start with a client that already has no resources, that has been overpromised, that expects results in 2 months, things like that, it will be very, very difficult that even if you have superb communication skills or prioritization skills, nothing will realistically go well, even despite all of that. So that is definitely important. How do you think that on a day-to-day basis, this sort of roles of being the spokesperson or being like the interface with the client can interact well? Because this is sometimes what is tricky, right? If you have a person handling and promising and organizing like being like that layer can be sometimes also a little bit of like a bottleneck of the whole process.

Yeah, and so Miracle may have a different view of this though. I mean, CANDOR's, we've only got an in-house staff at the moment of around 15. So we're not a large agency, but that's certainly something that we've had to tackle. So I think this is again, the difference maybe we're looking at between agencies or I'd say micro agencies and freelancers, which is when we first started, several years ago, we didn't have that account manager role because you just can't have that many extra people in the process, right? And obviously as you grow, as, as you said, there's, there's a very basic agency problem of you want people that are skilled in SEO to be doing SEO work that they're being paid for. You don't necessarily want them in long conversations with clients because their time is better used elsewhere, right? And of course, they, they probably don't enjoy that. They enjoy doing SEO, so that's what they want to do. Now that's a role that's always been a little bit of a bugbear for me at other agencies I've worked at. So we don't have a what I would call kind of a client director type person, that agent, that, that management kind of person. We've, we've gone for a slightly different role, which is, um, that we call account strategist. And this is a person who has marketing skills and they have some understanding of SEO and PPC in that process. And their role is essentially to act as an advocate of the client in the agency. So they almost pretend that they are the client and saying, where's this and what's going on with this? And their role is that communication side. And I think as Miracle kind of mentioned earlier, it is absolutely vital to have someone in that role or, you know, as an agency all of the time of everyone who's meant to be doing the work will just get sucked up into that. And I think there's some really interesting challenges around communication in that, um, you know, it comes down to individuals at the end of the day, but, you know, a common theme is when you get into this SEO bubble of you're dealing with canonical tags and hreflang tags every day, sometimes it's hard to take a step back and put yourself into the mind of someone that has absolutely no idea what those things mean. and adjusting that conversation. So having someone sitting outside of that in the project management process, we found really helpful. So they understand the client's business objectives and about their brand and their business, and they've got a hand in and they understand SEO and they can facilitate that a lot easier.

This is a person that we've had, 'cause we are a boutique agency where we have like 8 people in the SEO team. And what would the person we've identified is someone who's also very commercial minded. So in that sense, where Mark says that she thinks about the client, she's always thinking about how does this make sense to the client? How does it help their ROI? How does it help their bottom line?

To focus a little bit more on the challenges and the issues and mistakes that you have seen in the past, especially with the struggles of trying to incentivize the implementation of our recommendations, right? How do you deal with that? What are the success stories that you have seen or the Or the dos and also the don'ts that you have seen during the management of SEO processes?

I'd say the first most important thing for me is setting realistic expectations because I see that so often where, you know, especially when there's a divide in the salesperson and whoever's technical, that someone's overpromised and now how do you deliver? And then the clients as well, they always overestimate how much development time they have or how much they can actually implement. So it's the same time and time again, like, oh, we can do all of this. And then they somehow feel that once they sign the contract and like you're their SEO agency, their SEO is fixed. It's almost this— it's just, it's amazing. It's just amazing. And then you're like, well, you actually have to do the work. So it's that setting realistic expectation, letting them know that, okay, The first 3 months, we're going to be onboarding and firefighting. You know, things like that that make them know that not because, you know, you contracted us from month 1, you're going to see results 2 weeks later. So I'll say that's the most important thing for me, setting realistic challenges. I think the second thing I will say is challenging old ideas, because you might come on board, especially when you've inherited a client from an old agency, and there will be a list of things which devs say, we can't do this. now, you know. And so the tendency is to be like, okay, we'll park those for now. But constant— even if it's a new client, if they say no today, go back, you know, chase it up, see if anything's changed. And then another thing is following up. I think sometimes when we have a long list of tech things to do, we just want to, you know, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Well, this month we've done— but not following up to see, have they implemented it? What changes it causes? Is this negative? Do we need to reverse? So those are like the top 3 things. I see. Perfect.

It's great when you ask about things maybe that have gone wrong or stuff, because there's just so many to pick from.

Pick the worst ones.

Yeah. It's pretty easy for me. It's getting changes prioritized, getting SEO changes prioritized with, certainly with larger clients. That's, that's always an issue. And I think that comes down to a loss of information fidelity. So when I'm, when you're trying to explain why an hreflang tag needs to be bidirectional to be valid. And how that impacts rankings. And therefore, you know, it's very easy for people to switch off. And by the time that's explained by the SEO person to their manager, and then it's gone into the dev queue, it's just like, yeah, that's a low priority ticket. And working kind of solutions to get those things through has been a process. But I think understanding what their business levers are, what motivates change, what gets tickets higher in their dev queue is really important. And there was actually a book that really helped me with that, which is called Will It Make the Boat Go Faster? And it's about the Olympic rowing team training. And it was all about every decision they made from how much they slept to what they ate when they trained. They just first asked the question, will it make the boat go faster? And if the answer was no, they didn't do it.

I love that because I can definitely see a lot of stuff that is added to SEO recommendations because these are things that have been validated at some point, which are okay, but don't necessarily need to be there because they will generate just more noise. And because if you ask that question about will this change make the website rank better with the tools that we need, the answer will be not really.

This can be—

so yeah, from a prioritization perspective, this question is definitely critical for sure.

And that's where the, that account manager role comes in. They can keep pushing that question to the client in that simple terms, like this needs to be done, it will make the website rank better. And we all know why we're doing that. So, and you've got your technical team there to back you up if there's any, well, well, but sorry, Melka, I interrupted you.

I know, that's fine. I call it best practice fits all, where because something is best practice, you just, you roll it out, you roll it out, best practice, but best practice doesn't fit all. Best practice doesn't, you know, the goal is not just to send traffic and rankings. The goal is revenue. And if that thing isn't going to affect the bottom line, then what is the point?

I think with that complexity as well, comms management, so the actual communication management, and by that I mean the systems and having some discipline there is really helpful. So obviously different clients all have different kind of systems and ways they want to communicate. And I mean, I've been on, I've had clients from really big companies and everything just gets put into an email thread with like 30 people on it. And I've received emails saying, can we start a new email thread because this one crashes my Outlook? And so the way we're managing this is, you know, we have a project kind of management communication system for SEO and we have to be quite disciplined and say to the clients, you know, if you want to discuss These bits of work we're doing, or if you want, if you've got a request or a change, it needs to go in this system. And if it doesn't exist in this system, you know, it doesn't exist. If you email it to me, you know, I won't be difficult. I will try and remember to put it on that system. But if you email it, there's no guarantees. If it slips through the cracks, should have gone that system. And I think being disciplined as an agency there will save you a lot, and the client save you a lot of problems because nobody wants to obviously have things get forgotten or anything. And it's not possible for an agency. agency to have 5 different ways of communicating and work well as a team?

Having a good consistency in the communication protocols, independently of the tools, I will say, is to set the protocols in a way that the clients know that, for example, you will have a weekly call or you will have like this certain consistency in the exchange and the communication. So they are always on the loop. They know what is happening also, because sometimes like lack of information, not understanding where you are, even if you're any results is what makes the client to feel not necessarily happy with the process and end up finishing the process. So setting the expectations, not only for like the implementation, but on what they can expect, the interaction that they will need, the involvement, where that needs to happen, to be well communicated, and also the format. So for example, one of the things that I have started to do, I know that right after I present the recommendations, the first thing that I will do with them afterwards is to do a little webinar, a little online training with their technical team in charge to implement the recommendations and the content team. And this won't be like a generic training, but I will use as examples what I have found in the recommendations. And then after that, I will give like a personalized checklist that they can use on a day-to-day basis. This sets a good base to start with the conversation of Now, how we can actually start implementing those issues that were found in the SEO analysis. They have seen the issues like in the trainings. But of course, like this is the type of communication that is fairly technical, that is not expected and is not reasonable to try to have with a decision maker or a C-suite person or the director of the company that you need to convince sometimes even to allocate more resources and money. So I think that is good to also acknowledge when you have to reformat the communication, that it's not only delivering a document or writing a few messages over the PM system, but also like how you are creative enough to connect with each kind of stakeholder that you need to deal with within the SEO process to make sure that your message goes and is really received by the other parts in in a way that they understand, that they like, that they feel connected and feel included to support you.

We have, with every different stakeholder we meet, we have a different approach. So if you're meeting the CFO, who's financial, then we go with the forecast and we say, what's the KPIs of the business, you know, the first 2 years? This is how we can contribute to that overall goal financially. And then we say, if we're sending recommendations in, then we need to speak with dev. Because I have been, when we talk about SEO fails, I've been in a situation where I was on the call with the marketing person telling her, you know, going through recommendations with her. And I could see her screen. I don't know if she forgot, but she was Googling like things I was telling her. And I was just like, this is all going to be lost in translation. Because unfortunately, you have some clients that would not let you speak, that they don't have time to come on the call. But these are things that when we are, you know, pitching, we say, do we have access to dev? Because that's so important. And another thing, as you mentioned earlier, with underestimating issues. And because we've seen an example of something, we just think it's going to be so easy. I've made a recommendation once to change images to WebP for a client. And I was like, this is the fastest thing I can save speed. And I was like, you know, and the developer pushed back. And then after I spoke to the developers, I realized that because of the way their system was configured, they'll have to buy more space on Amazon. And that was going to cost them so much more money. Have a more collaborative mindset. That way you can get more people on board.

The point you made, Aleyda, I think is a really good long-term goal of any agency, which is essentially trying to build advocacy for SEO within the company. And that's done through knowledge and that's done through training and it's done by people understanding why they're doing this. So why as a content writer, uh, do I care about header tags and questions and why am I using this tool and why is it, um, as a developer, am I, am I worried about these things. So that, you know, the start of a project can sometimes be the SEO input is almost work's being produced and you're going and like correcting it. And also importantly, it improves the results you get because you can focus on other things rather than redoing things.

Starting with the why makes all the difference to make all the people to support the project. And then the relationship side of things. At the end of the day, we're all humans and they buy from you or from them. Because they trust you or them or anybody better to solve that issue within their company and organization. And having a good relationship with someone that you trust and you feel like comfortable with, et cetera, can make or break a project. To move forward with another very important topic that you also started to cover a little bit, the tools. And of course, I know that there is like a high spread of tools. Sometimes I have seen especially freelance use tools like that are much simpler, like Trello or Basecamp. Then mid-sized agencies using a lot Asana, for example. Those more tech-oriented agencies use more even Jira because they know that they will be handling a lot with developers. So this can change a lot from agency to agency. I would love to hear first, what are, what are your experiences with the tools that you have used, what you are using right now, what have worked better for you, and in general, more than And then the tool itself, right? Which are the features and the functionalities that you think that are critical, important to have within these tools to make them successful in SEO processes?

Well, we use Basecamp, and even though it's pretty basic, but I like Basecamp because you can track conversations, start new threads, and Everything is all there. You get your notifications to your emails and you can set tasks and follow it up. I think one of the mistakes I made with Basecamp in the beginning was like, oh, I've sent a task to a client and then I'll tick it off. And then all of a sudden it disappears into a black hole and I forget to follow up. So now I've just, you know, but you can set date ranges, change time. I really like Basecamp in terms of tracking client conversations and things like that. And I think we use Toggl to track time and efficiency. I think one of the features that I would really love toggle to do. These tools are based around projects and are not based around like retained clients. And one of the things I would really like is them to change that so I can assign like a client gets 3 days a month. And so I can, because now I have to go out and manually reconcile time, reconcile like how much the client paid for and how much we did and try to track efficiency. So things like that, that's, that's okay. And then we use tools like HubSpot for tracking like sales leads, deals, and things like that. I don't know what you use, Mark, but that's our 3 like basic tools apart from all the free Google.

There's an excellent business opportunity, I think, here for someone because I have experienced exactly the same issue Miracle's had here for years, which is that I've tried many different tools for project managing basically retainers, and I've never found anything that does it well because almost all of the project management tools are, as I said right at the beginning, project-based. So when does it start? When does does it end? And then it's kind of, it vanishes and there's no way to take that over. We use 2 main tools for the project management of digital marketing retainers and they're split for, so one side kind of project manages the agency and the agency staff and the other side is for clients. So the agency staff kind of thing, and I don't know whether to admit this, is kind of some shadow IT that I've built over years in Google Sheets. And this is essentially working out, you know, how many staff do we have? How many hours do we have available from them? You know, and how many hours of specializations have we got? So I know if we've got this many technical SEOs, we have this many hours per month that can, you know, be used for clients, but this many are taken in retainers already because they've got clients and they've got this much holiday. So that helps us from a resource planning side, from an agency point of view. And it's a really handy tool because it will highlight when potentially we need to hire because we can plug in a client for the next month and see, oh, we're overcapacity, say for content or for technical, so we need to look at hiring. So, and I've never found anything that's done that well, and I've liked it because it's simple. And I'm always a real fan of keeping things as simple and almost single use as possible. And it's served really well, it's a single sheet. So that's what we use for that side of things. For clients, we use a system called ActiveCollab, which is actually something we originally used to manage web project builds. And the reason we use this is I've— we found a way to make it work on a monthly basis. So for each client has, um, their own record, which has then kind of like a, you know, January 2021, February 2021, etc. And inside those months are individual tasks, um, and each of those tasks can be assigned to one or multiple people, including clients. And the tasks you can leave messages on. And also what's important is how it's tied into the rest of the communication systems we use. So much of the formal, I need this done type communication starts on email regardless of whether we want it to happen on this system. But this system integrates with email and will send out alerts with previews of when messages are there. And there's a good labeling system. And of course, all the basics, like you can set deadlines and it will email you reminders. So you don't have to live inside that tool. It will kind of poke you through email when you're needed. And it's a centralized place for all comms, which is really great. And then that also plugs into the other tools we use to kind of support the management are more SEO tools. So things like, you know, Little Warden or Content King, which can then plug into like our Slack. So if something breaks that's affecting a project, it's immediately notified.

And as Mark said, we also have a Google Sheet that I've built to track capacity. Like—

I knew there'd be one hidden there somewhere.

Google Sheets are everywhere.

I thought we were talking about like the standard tools. So my, um, yeah. So I spoke to a data analyst and he's helped me build this complex sheet with formulas where, and again, we use it to track, you know, Are we at capacity? When do we need to hire someone? Which which team you know is has more work distribution and that who's on holiday and how would that affect our team efficiency? How much can we sell?

I love Miracle how you mentioned Basecamp because sometimes people like I I am throwing shade at are you still using Basecamp? Like yes, because I don't need all this noise. I know I'm not a big agency and sometimes I perceive that there might be a little bit of friction, so I am open to use. The project management system of my clients and sometimes they come with, let's say, very complex, very expensive project management system. And then when I start navigating through them, it's like, why? Why all this unneeded? Like 80% of the features that are there are not serving at least maybe for other purposes, but not for SEO for sure, right? And it makes it all so much more complex. Then another thing that I love that you mentioned is how to glue together many different SEO tools with a project management system or communication system that you use for that will send you a warning or an alert to your PM system or Slack. I also love that you mentioned Slack for internal communication and not for client communication. I think this is one of the mistakes that at some point I have done in the past where a couple of clients, right, wanted me to have me in their Slack besides the PM system, but then you realize soon— that they sort of overlook the PM system to try to easily send you everything over Slack, which is like having everything on email, right? Because it's so much more difficult to track and point out, et cetera. So, at the end of the day, it's about setting good communication protocols and having the tools to support them. I have to say though, that thankfully I haven't heard you mentioning— like, I have heard some crazy stories about Clients following up SEOs in WhatsApp and then like sending messages at crazy times. So definitely don't do that. Don't do that. So to start wrapping up, I want to finish with a last tip, a last big tip, advice, something potentially that we haven't mentioned yet.

My final tip would be to leave time for support. Because so many times, like, when I've seen, especially when it's a salesperson who is doing all the pitching and then comes to SEO, there's no time for— it's like, these are the time we need to do the work, this is what you need to do, and then there's no time left for support and change. And you need that flexibility because by the time you've communicated this to developers and whoever, content writers and PR, whoever needs to do that work, and they come, there's a lot of back and forth. There is so much account management that goes through, and so you need to leave time, you need to set a special time aside to give room for that account management, because it's a collaborative process. And sometimes we feel like they've come to us as the expert, we're going to tell them what to do, and you forget that it's their site, they know it better than you, in and out, and there will be complexities. So it's just that, you know, Be more collaborative, leave time for support, and just don't feel like you know everything.

I think this is gonna be a really interesting session for people, Aleyda, because I've mirrored a lot of the issues that Miracle's obviously experienced with expectation management. I had down here as well about the mistake of people not setting time aside in the project management plan for account management, because it, you know, it doesn't just happen, oh, the SEO's gonna take this much time and then it just happens. There is always this back and forth. So I guess the other thing that I'd leave as a tip, and I think it's hard to spot, so maybe it is worth talking about as a tip, which is that when you think about the relationship and the people you're working with, normally they are trying to obviously do their best to get results, to show their manager and do well at their kind of career. And they may not always have the the same level of understanding as SEO as you. And sometimes with projects I've seen, um, you set out, you do your SEO strategy, you know, you talk about it, you get into a project plan, and then after a few months, especially with larger companies, that you get stuck in this conversation that comes a little bit perverted around what are the deliverables. And it rather than becoming our strategy is, you know, to do this type of content to this type of people to win links, to get rankings, to get sales. The project plan almost becomes the deliverables is 6 pieces of content or 7 pieces of content, and then that becomes what they are showing internally as, look, with the SEO, yeah, we did these 6 pieces of content. So, and that then can derail what the results you're going to get, which ultimately you're going to be held responsible for, right? So my advice, the tip I'd give on how to do that is to regularly review the strategy. So every quarter, look at— don't get stuck in tactics and then go off, off kind of track. Think about the strategy, review it with the client, review why you are doing these things and what the SEO outcome is. And again, is it making the boat go faster? Is it contributing to rankings? What are we doing for the sake of it. Because I've seen that happen a lot and it slowly goes off course.

And that the KPIs that are being tracked and monitored and expected to receive are actually the right ones and that they are measuring success in the right way, right? It's not the number of like the how big is the recommendation or how many recommendations you send per day or yeah how much content are you sending to be published. It's like how much is attracted by that or achieved with that, right? And it's really great to to that you mentioned the review thing. Imagine last year with COVID right? We all were pushed to review, even for good or for bad, those projections and that we had, or plans that we had done at the beginning of the year, not only because of the change of search behavior and trends across many industries, but also the allocation of budget. I agree 100%, very important to be flexible enough and also set the right expectation at the beginning of the process. It's like, since the SEO process is so long-term, it's important to every quarter, at the end of each quarter, to revise something to see if it still makes sense to do or not, completely based on the current context.

Yeah, definitely.

So thank you, thank you very much. I love that we have, I think, discussed this big elephant in the room, I think, in a way that tackles the main issues and challenges. Hopefully after this, agencies won't feel like You are not alone. This is an issue that we all share. Hopefully, also many tools will realize that we need more flexibility, and there's a really good room of opportunity here. If you want to learn more about these sort of topics, please, please, please follow Miracle. Follow Mark. They are also very active over social networks. Really appreciate your your great input and feedback, and thank you for watching. Stay tuned for the next. Crawling Mondays, and remember to like the video if you like it and leave your comments. I will make sure to give the heads up to Miracle Landmark in case you have any question. Thank you very much. Bye bye.

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