10 Things You Must Do to Prepare Your Business for SEO Greg Shuey details the top 10 things a business must do to prepare for an SEO campaign. See the full blog post here: http://www.seo.com/blog/10-things-you-must-do-to-prepare-your-business-for-seo/

1. 10 Things You Must
Do to Prepare Your
Business for SEO
By Greg Shuey

2. #1: Accept SEO Agency as Part of Your Marketing Department
Share insight into your other marketing
initiatives with your in-house SEO or SEO agency
– To help them integrate with your team
– Will help create synergies (+1 for using a
buzzword!)
– Accomplish much more than if you leave them to
fend for themselves

3. #2: Establish/Work Towards Real Online Marketing Goals
• Ranking #1 for a trophy keyword is not a valid
SEO marketing goal
• Real online marketing goals should be
established before starting your SEO campaign
• Real online marketing goals should be revenue
driven
• Example: I need to increase online leads by
15%

4. #3: Give Up Full Analytics Access
• Whatever analytics package you are
using, your SEO needs daily insight to set
proper SEO strategy.
• If you don’t give up full access, your SEO will
not be able to help you accomplish your goals.
• Your SEO can take your money, and perform
work, but without the proper analytics, you
aren’t going to get anything out of it.

5. #4: Share Sales Data
• Goes hand-in-hand with sharing analytics data
• Some business are really nervous about
sharing sales data - get over it
• Sales data helps your SEO to see how much
ROI their efforts are producing
• Share how much products/services cost,
margins, etc.

6. #5: Put Your Ego Aside
• Forget what you learned 5 years ago
• Nothing can kill and SEO campaign faster than
OLD out-of-date best practices
• Check your ego at the door
• Your agency lives and breathes this stuff every
day – they know the current best practices

7. #6: Change Your Website
• Ties directly to putting your ego aside
• Your SEO will perform a site optimization with
a list of changes
– MAKE these changes
• There is only so much an SEO can do through
“off-page” efforts
• When you get a list of site optimization
recommendations – Please MAKE them

8. #7: Priortize I.T.
• This goes with making changes to your
website
• Many sites use complicated back-ends that
only the I.T. department can touch
• Prioritize your initiatives with I.T. to be ready
to make the site optimization changes as
quickly as possible

9. #8: Blog Your Heart Out
• Search engines love fresh, quality, relevant
content => Company Blog
• Have everyone in the organization participate!
• Ideally -> 1 piece of blog content per day
• Your SEO can help create some content, but
they should be more focused on strategy

10. #9: Give Up an Email Address
• This is a sticking point with a lot of businesses
• They feel they cannot trust their SEO with a
company issued email
• If you want to be uber successful -> integrate
your SEO fully, which includes giving them an
email address
• Will be used for link development and content
placement outreach
• A real email address will provide much much
better results to your SEO’s efforts

11. #10: Leverage Business Development and Partnership Relationships
• Very difficult to secure top-tier links
• Leverage current business development and
partnership relationships
• Requires ample effort between your SEO and
biz dev guy, and possibly the head of your
sales team
• These are the type of links that will be game-
changers for your SEO efforts

12. Conclusion
In order to prepare your business for SEO, it will
require a lot of team work. This is not a “pass
the baton” effort, it requires integration and
collaboration between all parties.
Visit http//www.SEO.com/blog to learn more
about SEO.