You're busy, and SEO isn't your only job, so we're pretty sure you won't be thrilled to hear this:

Your SEO campaign will incorporate a wide variety of tasks: writing and editing, web page design, programming, ad copy creation, research, web analytics, and interpersonal communication for link building. If you're doing this all yourself, bravo! You're just the sort of multitasking do-it-yourselfer who thrives in SEO. If your entire company can't ride to lunch on the same motorcycle, we're putting you in charge of coordinating the SEO team. Either way, once you've read this article, you'll be the in-house SEO expert, so the responsibility for all of these tasks ultimately falls on you.

Before you close this article forever and run for the antacid, let's clarify a bit. We're not saying that you have to be the one to code the website or set up the analytics software. We're saying you need to know enough to be able to speak intelligently to the people who do these tasks. And here's the hard part: You also need to convince them to spend some of their precious time working on Your SEO Plan.

SEO requires you to be proficient in several different areas.

Why is it, after all, that organizing an SEO team is so hard? We have observed four common reasons:

- SEO requires effort from multiple departments and a variety of skills, such as marketing, sales, IT, public relations (PR), and creative/editorial.

- SEO is a new discipline and doesn't have established processes in the corporate system.

- The SEO budget will have to come from somewhere. That means somebody may have to give up some funding.

- The SEO industry carries around a bit of a bad reputation and some folks still think SEO is about tricking or spamming the search engines.

This article is here to guide you through the SEO crusade within your organization. There are some common patterns of resistance you might meet in each of the departments discussed here, and we'll share with you the most effective ways to counteract them.

As with any team-building effort, building your SEO team will be an exercise in communication.

Marketing, Sales, and Public Relations

Marketing, Sales, and Public Relations make up a corporate SEO trifecta. Get all three excited about your SEO campaign, and you'll have built your “brain trust” foundation for success. Here's some food for thought that should come in handy when you need to deal with these departments.

Marketing: VIPs of SEO

In most organizations, the marketing department serves as the hub of SEO operations. We're guessing you're a member of this department yourself. It's a natural progression: The marketing department may already be handling the website as well as offline marketing such as print ads, television, radio, billboards and online marketing such as banner ads and direct e-mails.

The marketing team will likely be instrumental in SEO tasks like keyword brainstorming and research, writing text for descriptions and page titles, writing sponsored listings, managing paid search campaigns, and executing link-building campaigns. The folks on the marketing team have, quite literally, the skills to pay the bills, and they probably don't need any convincing that SEO is a worthwhile effort. What they will need, however, is some organization and some focusing.

What does your marketing team know about the importance of robot-readable text, keyword placement, and paid search campaign management? Maybe a lot. Maybe nothing. Maybe they know something that was worthwhile a few years ago but is now outdated. Since you're in charge of the SEO team, it will help you to know what the general knowledge level is and then think of yourself as the on-site SEO educator. We have found that marketing staffers are almost always open to a little education about how the search engines work, as long as the information is provided on a need-to-know basis. For example, whenever we brainstorm for keywords with a marketing manager, inevitably their list contains terms that are extremely vague (“quality”) or so specific that nobody is searching for them (“geometric specifications of duckpin bowling balls”). When we trim down that list, we always explain the basic concept of search popularity vs. relevance. That lesson is easily delivered in a two-paragraph e-mail or a three-minute phone call.

But what if you're not working in such a receptive environment? Maybe you are the only one convinced of the positive powers of SEO. Perhaps, for reasons of budget or time, you don't have the buy-in you need to move forward. Perhaps other marketing programs are taking precedence, or the department can't seem to make the leap from offline to online marketing. If that's the case, it's time to convince the marketing manager of the importance of your SEO project!

Here's one way to approach it: Focus on the needs of the marketing department. Go into therapy mode: “You seem a little stressed. How can SEO help?” Here's how: SEO can provide the trackability that your colleagues have been waiting for. Or justify an overdue website revamp. It may provide an argument for dropping less-successful advertising venues. It can forge new alliances between Marketing and IT. On the “warm and fuzzy” side, it may provide an outlet for a creative soul who feels trapped in marketing-speak and wants to do more creative writing. And SEO is an extremely telecommuting-friendly enterprise. Is there a new dad in the department who would love to spend a portion of his week working from home? Once you've found some common ground and the enthusiasm is starting to grow, consider starting Your SEO Plan with a pilot project that you can focus your SEO efforts on together. Pick something close to the hearts of the marketing staff: a recent or upcoming launch, a section of your site devoted to a special event, a promotion, or a product line that's down in the dumps. Cherry-pick if you can! It's important that these early experiences be positive ones.

What If You're at the Bottom of the Pecking Order?

If you're on the bottom of the food chain in your organization, you may be either ignored or micromanaged by the people you answer to. Here are some tips that might work for you no matter what department you're dealing with:

- Create regular reports, even if nobody's looking at them. As consultants,we have often asked ourselves,“What's the point of documenting everything if nobody reads our reports?” But it always comes down to this:We need them for our own reference. After several months, stats begin to blur together don't expect to keep this stuff in your head.

- Don't report too often.We recommend at least a month between reports, even if you are asked for more frequent data.There are rare exceptions to this rule, such as extremely shortlived promotions or unusually volatile PPC campaigns. But for almost everything else, it is helpful to set expectations that SEO is about long-term trends, not daily numbers.

- Deliver meaningful information.When you e-mail your boss a spreadsheet detailing your ranks for the last six months, you're delivering raw information.You can turn that into meaningful information when you summarize it in your e-mail: “Dear Boss, This month, traffic to three of our top-priority pages increased across three search engines. Five of our pages improved in rank, but our traffic for the term ‘industrial strength pencils' continued to slide.”

- Likewise, if you have to deliver bad news, always deliver a plan of action for addressing it. You're the in-house SEO expert, like it or not, and your boss is looking to you for guidance. The boss doesn't want to hear, “Holy moly! Google dropped all our pages!”The boss wouldn't mind hearing this explanation: “It looks like our pages have been dropped from Google. This is probably a temporary problem, caused by Googlebot trying to crawl our site during our server outage last week. I'll verify that there are no indexing errors using Google's Webmaster Tools and keep a close eye on the situation.”

- Don't take all the credit for your success.This is not just to be humble; it's also because you actually aren't responsible for every SEO success. Even if you do everything right, you can't control what your competitors are doing or the nature of the next big search engine algorithm change. If you set your boss's expectations along these lines, you won't be blamed for every little failure, either.

SEO and PR Can Relate

If your company has a PR department, you're in luck. If not, think about this: If you got a phone call tomorrow from a radio station wanting to do a story on your company, who would they speak with? That's your PR department.

PR folks are very well suited to work with you on your SEO campaign. They're careful about words, they're excellent communicators, and they probably know how to track their results. They are the keepers of the brand, creating and monitoring the face that your organization puts forth to the public. Look to PR for help with keyword brainstorming, optimizing press releases, link building, and keeping your paid and unpaid search engine listings and other links in line with your branding.

A typical PR department is primarily concerned with getting your company mentioned in the media and making sure that the publicity is accurate and ideally positive. Many newspaper and magazine articles, not to mention blog postings, are triggered by press releases or other forms of contact from a PR department. And it's fair to say that search engines deserve a place among these media sources: Just like magazines, newspapers, and the like, search engines provide a free, ostensibly unbiased third-party source of publicity for your organization.

Even more important from a PR point of view, search engines have become a key research tool for those very journalists, bloggers, and thought leaders PR is chatting up in the first place.

Did someone say “bloggers”? Our elbows are sore from bumping into our PR brethren as we navigate the blogosphere, asking for a little recognition for our clients. We're all essentially saying the same thing: “Hey, can you link to our site?” “Hey, would you mind spreading the word about our new product?” And on the flip side of that coin, there are lots of PR folks working as “ghost bloggers,” crafting the oh-so-casualyet- always-right-on-the-company-line postings that emanate from slick corporate blogs. (Oh, don't look so surprised we told you blogging was a business!) If you have a PR team doing these kinds of activities, your challenge will be to inject some SEO best practices into their work without overstepping your boundaries. Give your ghost blogging colleague a little list of keywords to consider using. Offer to run your eye over casual communications to make sure PR is asking for links to the best landing pages. Your SEO skills can fit nicely into their procedures.

You might meet some resistance from a PR department that thinks of SEO as strictly a form of advertising. In truth, SEO often does walk a fine line. A paid search campaign is most clearly within the advertising classification, but other SEO tasks, such as including target keywords in press releases or gaining incoming links from business contacts, fall more directly into the PR bucket. Once you explain to your PR folks that you will be seeking their assistance only with organic SEO activity, they should be more open to the possibilities.

As the department that protects the company brand, PR will likely have a great deal of interest in the brand maintenance tasks that fall under the SEO umbrella: monitoring search engine listings and other online mentions for currency and accuracy. You may need to educate the PR team about how to find outdated information online, but once they know where (and how) to look, don't be surprised if they develop a passion for rooting out the “uglies.”

What if your website is not trying to sell anything or gather leads, or run advertising for revenue? What if the only goal of your website is brand awareness? This is when you need your PR department most of all. The folks in PR are already skilled in handling those difficult-to-measure soft targets offline through clipping services and surveys. They may even be doing some tracking of online mentions. Now you need to tie their tracking efforts together with the SEO campaign to make sure that SEO gets credit where credit is due. Luckily, PR people are generally very comfortable with documentation. You shouldn't have too hard a time convincing them to document their SEO successes.