When I started off in Search Engine Optimization, I was a young affiliate marketer working from the bedroom in my college apartment. Though plenty of people recommend coworking spaces these days, I always found that working alone is often the best way to stay focused. However, as I began growing my skills as a consultant, I found that it became increasingly important to learn how to handle projects as part of a team.

Now that I have years of experience under my belt, I’d like to share some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned about project management and SEO up until this point.

1. Project Management is Crucial in SEO

Most people assume that the most crucial part of SEO project management is having the latest information about tools and algorithms. While a good knowledge of the industry is crucial, the best consultants also know how to manage the projects, people and clients they work with every day in an efficient and lucrative manner.

I believe that the skills I’ve developed as a project manager makes me a more effective SEO partner for my clients. After all, the best SEO strategies don’t look at search optimization as a single and isolated practice – they consider it as a component of a complete strategy for business success.

2. Defining and Executing Goals is Essential

“Goals” are a valuable component of an SEO strategy. It’s much easier to get to where you’re going, if you know what the final destination looks like. When I’m evaluating and executing a project, I generally start with 5 key steps:

• Client conversations: This is where I discuss goals and expectations with a client and launch the beginning of our working relationship.
• Monthly scrum: Each month, I meet with offshore teams to discuss the last 30 days and the things we accomplished during that time. Task completion levels are reviewed, and the new tasks for the month ahead are delegated to those with the right skills.
• Weekly sprint: On a weekly basis, me and my offshore teams get together for quick conversations similar to the monthly scrum. We talk about specialty link building, task completion, and new tasks for the week ahead.
• Monthly reports: This is how I prove my value to the client, showing them exactly what’s been accomplished to achieve their end goals. Monthly reports also include a color-coded outline of any project milestones and achievements to date.
• Line manager meetings: Finally, during personal meetings with the clients, I discuss my personal progress, give input into how the projects are going and set up a strategy for ongoing success.

Because goals can change rapidly from one month to the next, the evaluation and execution process needs to be a dynamic one, which can adapt to changing demands. In the SEO world, unexpected events can happen. A piece of link bait might take longer to earn a bite than expected, or developers might struggle to execute a request on time. By staying agile, I can ensure that I’m always ready to pivot according to client needs.

3. Always Use the Right Tools for the Job

Any true SEO expert knows that having the right tools for a project is crucial. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be wasting time on an overly complicated system. I’d like to share with you our mini project management tools and the strategies we use.

To win an SEO campaign, there needs to be a process where links, dates, and other vital information can be tracked. For this purpose, I use:

• GTalk and Gmail for communication
• Google Docs for information sharing
• Google calendar to keep up with dates
• Google Word and Excel for reports and spreadsheets

I find that it’s particularly useful to combine applications on the same cloud platform wherever possible.

[here is the video training]

4. Communication is Critical

Any great business leader knows that communication is a crucial characteristic of a successful operation. In the SEO consultancy world, it’s important for people like me to stay close to my client, because I find that few problems can’t be solved via effective communication.

Professional, yet friendly relationships with clients are essential to ensuring long-term success. The better you know the people you’re working with, the more you can manage their expectations. Even something simple, like a weekly email recapping the events of the last 7 days can help a lot by eliminating surprises and paving the way for input.

Though we’re all guilty of avoiding the phone or ignoring our email inboxes sometimes, a quick conversation can clear things up rapidly for both you and your client. In fact, voice conversations can be one of the best ways to communicate (other than face to face interactions).

5. Show Your Leadership Potential

When you’re the lead on a SEO project, you’re responsible for the work produced by your team. Even if a project gets frustrating or aggravating, you need to keep producing the same amazing quality. This means stepping up to set exceptional service standards and reviewing the work that you create before it goes out.

Remember, SEO is a people-based business, and that means that you won’t be able to predict everything. No matter what, you’ll need to keep calm and maintain the right attitude when you’re dealing with clients. A real leader knows how to keep their team motivated and keep their cool.

6. Client Happiness is Crucial

In a service-oriented business-like SEO consulting, you only have one boss that you need to answer to – and that’s your customer.

As Sam Walton says, the customer can “fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

As an SEO expert, it’s up to me to optimize client campaigns, improve rankings, build links, encourage traffic and boost conversions. However, the most important job I have of all is keeping my client happy. This means that sometimes I’ll have to work at mitigating potential problems and educating my clients on tactics, rather than just doing something that I think is right. It’s about staying on your client’s good side.

7. Know Your Resources and Tactics

Finally, before you come up with a strategy to serve your client, you need to know which resources and methodologies you have available. For instance, this is the process that I follow for link-building:

• Seek out top experts by creating lists featuring the top influencers and bloggers in a client’s niche, then notifying these people to encourage them to link to the content. Top experts will help you to build credibility and authority for a website in no time.
• Blog commenting: Though the amount of weight Google gives to links from blog content is always fluctuating, blog commenting is still a highly effective link-building strategy. It’s a great way to boost brand recognition in a specific niche, build a natural linking profile, and develop relationships and traffic for a site. I conduct my blog commenting strategy by finding the highest quality of blogs to comment on for my audience and focusing on quality over quantity.
• Guest posting: Guest-posting is one of the best-known and most popular strategies for link-building. It appears in virtually every SEO campaign because it works! All you need to do is find the right sites to guest post on. Fortunately, I have a tried-and-tested strategy for ensuring that my clients appear on authoritative websites.
• Guestographics: One of the easiest ways to gain attention for a client beyond blogging, is with “guestographics.” These visual pieces of informative content are processed 60,000 times faster than standard articles. Since 40% of people respond better to images than text, it makes sense to consider guestographics as part of a comprehensive backlinking strategy.

Following these steps, we move onto the 5-month link building plan. If our clients have a site with at least 20-high quality articles, a good design, and a persona that represents their brand, along with social media profiles and custom email addresses, we can embark on the 5-month link-building plan.

With the right selection of tactics and resources, we can then create a comprehensive campaign that gets our clients at least 50 high-quality links within 5 months.