These days, you can’t run a successful online company without a little help from Google. If you want to bring up your search rankings and drive more traffic to your website, you need a strategy that can take your ideas and optimize them for Google’s algorithms. However, it takes the work of more than one department to tackle search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO concerns many different levels of your website, from the amount of keywords on the page to the way the features load and display for users. This means that to master SEO, many of your teams must work together to meet Google’s standards for content, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI). In particular, encouraging close partnerships between your media buying, content, design and tech teams can help your website soar to the top of the rankings.

Media Buying and Content

Where your SEO strategy begins is with the media buying team. You can consider these team members the catalysts for your entire website, as they generate ideas for the other departments to build off of.

This means that your media buyers will likely work with many other teams, including design for ad placement, and tech when there are issues with ad performance. However, it’s this department’s close relationship with the content team that determines how well your site generates traffic in the first place.

At its core, the media buying team decides which ads and keywords to buy based on the site’s purpose and target audience. The content team then writes copy around these ads, while incorporating the keywords provided.

However, simply filling a webpage with copy is not enough to climb the search rankings. Google places a lot of value in relevant, informative content, which means websites that offer this usually receive higher rankings. To meet Google’s standards, these teams need to work together to make sure that:

• The content is relevant to the ads that appear on the page.
• The keywords are relevant to the written content and appear with the appropriate density.
• The tone and style of the content matches the purpose of the site.

Having content and keywords that are irrelevant to the ads and the website overall will drive users away and ultimately hurt your ranking with Google. When the media buying and content teams communicate effectively, they can ensure that their efforts work in tandem, rather than against each other.

Content and Design

So we already know that the partnership between content and media buying plays a crucial role in your site’s standing with Google. However, there’s another partner that is just as invaluable to content: the design team.

The design department is responsible for taking the written copy and organizing it into a flow that is easy to follow, and leads visitors towards conversion. Ultimately, the design of a website’s content can affect the way your users view and interact with it. Known as user experience (UX), this is another major factor that Google now takes into account when ranking a website.

While UX has a lot to do with the quality of the copy itself, how those words appear on the page is just as crucial. Even though the content is what initially attracts users to your website, a solid design encourages them to stay, browse and keep coming back for more. Meanwhile, even quality content quickly becomes ineffective if the information is hard to navigate or understand.

To create a successful website, the design and content teams must work together to ensure that the layout fits the content it displays, and vice versa. Here are a few steps these departments can take to keep the focus on UX:

• Develop formatting guides to help writers create content that is optimized for a specific layout, covering aspects like paragraph length, word count and the incorporation of bulleted lists.
• Perform regular testing to see how different types of content and alternate layouts affect the site’s traffic and conversion rates.
• Encourage a feedback culture, in which content members can review copy once it goes through design so they can discuss whether any changes will better fit the format.

Design and Tech

Like the content team, the design department also has a vital relationship with another department: tech. Your software developers are in charge of building the front- and backend of your website from the ground up. This means they ultimately control how the website loads, functions and allows users to interact with it – in other words, its user interface (UI).

While there is no doubt that your tech team members have the skills to build great websites on their own, working with the design team is a must if you want a successful website. This partnership helps to ensure that your website’s UI is up to Google’s standards, along with its UX.

One of the many ways these teams can work together is by building a site that is optimized for mobile, which is how the majority of users now view websites. This means the software developers work on creating a mobile-compatible site, while design make sure to optimize the layout for mobile devices.

That way, users can view the content on nearly any device without experiencing difficulties with the interface. If issues do arise, these teams can then work together to tweak different aspects of the site until it’s fully optimized.