How To Work With Four Common SEO Leadership Styles

What follows are four extreme leadership caricatures, vis-a-vis search, and recommendations on how to most effectively work search into an organization within a specific leadership perspective regarding search leadership styles.

Hands Off Leaders

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The hands-off leader is usually old school and has been successful either prior to the advent of the Interweb or through other online channels such as highly measureable PPC, email or display. Mr. Hands Off probably still has an AOL email address for personal use.

In these organizations, search probably doesn’t exist as a function, and if it does, it’s probably grouped under an entry level PPC or display person. The Hands Off leader has either never decided to push search as a channel or worse (and more likely), has proactively chosen to steer clear of it.

How To Manage Hands Off

This is actually a great opportunity for a search marketer – as the Hands Off leader probably has built a successful business ripe with low hanging search fruit. Your challenge, here, is to get some early easy wins and report metrics up as widely and as high as possible.

Use business metrics such as ROI, cost of sales, cost of acquisition etc., to compare search against other channels. Search will (almost) always outperform.

The biggest challenge in a Hands Off organization is the cross-departmental cooperation that must happen for most search efforts to be effective.

Conquer this by over communicating and always awarding the success of those aforementioned business metrics to other departments. It’s amazing how you can make friends by turning cost centers into profit centers.

Confidently Ignorant

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The Confidently Ignorant leader is a garbled mess of buzzwords and directives. This leader is usually someone who has worked at, but not on an online property and wouldn’t know the difference between a canonical tag and a magic wand.

While she speaks confidently of GoogleJuice, the nuance between linkbait and spam is a mystery to Confidently Ignorant. You’ve never heard her say, “I don’t know,” but she frequently spouts off on dated information she picked up at a networking event that was trendy months or years ago. “We need more Pinterest Juice!”

Usually, nothing substantial ever really happens under Confidently Ignorant.

How To Manage Confidently Ignorant

The good news is that Confidently Ignorant knows that search is important – just not what to do about it. The primary challenge, here, is to focus on those things that do move the needle and minimize the garbage. Use Confidently Ignorant’s bluster to gather resources across departments to push through your search agenda.

Managing in this organization requires a disciplined approach to project management, i.e., identify business objectives before a project is undertaken and then regularly go back and post-mortem every project. This provides you with a structure to demonstrate (privately) that Confidently Ignorant’s  pet project that she crammed through wasn’t a great investment.

In fact, over time, these post-mortems, may serve to simultaneously educate and bore her with the technical details of search. Victory. Unlike every other situation – ascribe search success directly to Confidently Ignorant (instead of the departments who actually did the work) to garner further support for projects you want to undertake.

Aspiring Growth

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The Aspiring Growth leader often runs a start-up, is confident that his product is desperately needed and is certain that the Interweb will deliver a flood of business; he’s just not sure how. Aspiring Growth has picked up a few things here or there, but knows what he doesn’t know. He is admittedly (and appropriately) focused on his area of expertise (usually building out a product that people don’t even know they need yet.)

Additionally, he has limited understanding of the time and competitive factors around search – i.e., it’s going to take a lot more time and resources to get traffic for “mesothelioma lawyer” than “pink fuzzy bunny slippers.” He probably thinks of search in terms of ranking reports.

How To Manage Aspiring Growth

Aspiring Growth needs a lesson in reality. I’ve found that the best way to work with Aspiring Growth leaders is to overwhelm them with education around the technical and tactical components of search, communicating this early on and often. This does two things:  1) grounds them in reality that search isn’t an immediate payoff, and 2) bores them with the details. This provides them with the confidence to let you do your job, while they return to what they do best.

Aspiring Growth is highly susceptible to unscrupulous or just really bad search and Web development agencies, and you may find yourself spending most of your effort unraveling legacy issues that were offshored.

SEO Maven

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The SEO Maven leaders are few and far between. She’s probably has a high-end technical degree and sold her first business, that she coded entirely on her own.

The SEO Maven has inculcated search best practices across the organization, does nothing at all to the site without A/B/C/D/E . . . testing, and has created some impressive in-house reporting tools that she replaced Google Analytics with because she’s paranoid about sharing site data. She could probably sell these tools to the agency world, but would never consider it as she’s too focused on using them to build her business.

How To Manage the SEO Maven

This is both a hard and easy place to be as an in-house search marketer. First, there is no way you are going to be the search subject-matter expert, so eat a humility pill every day at breakfast. However, working for the SEO Maven minimizes the political battles and interdepartmental struggles that so frequently occur otherwise when dealing with search.

In SEO Maven organizations, “what have you done for me lately” is the overriding perspective. Test, test, test. Be creative and then test again. These businesses are the ultimate training grounds for search marketers – if someone was getting out of college who wanted to get into the business, this is where I’d recommend they go (especially instead of the agency route.)

Due to the connected nature of our business, highly political corporate cultures tend to flounder in their search efforts while focused, nimble companies often succeed. While we may bemoan this reality, as search marketers, learning to function within the leadership and political structure of our organization is a necessarily skill.