No Touching Unless You’re Trained
How many people do you pay to touch your web presence? Nowadays, anyone 
who changes your site or outbound communication has the potential to derail your hard-earned search marketing progress.
Sure, your staff and consultants are smart - and well intended. But this isn’t enough today. Anyone with access must now have a basic knowledge of search marketing. If you have a large staff, I’ll bet you’re starting to get the picture.
Are you already familiar with some of the following mistakes? Perhaps your:
- Writers didn’t include your top keywords in the main copy
- Design team blocked your top content from the search engines via JavaScript and Flash.
- IT group copied robots.txt from the staged server, blocking all search robots
- PR group has no idea how distribute online or measure the success of a release
- Boss doesn’t understand why you need to pay for web analytics help
- Advertising manager misses the chance to A/B test the latest campaign
- Web team thought it was someone else’s job to submit an XML site map
I’ll bet there are dozens more. Have some infamous ones to add?
In the end, it’s your responsibility to make sure that each person who touches your site, ads, content, or analytics has some level of search marketing education. This includes contractors and consultants!
The rewards are great. We’ve observed significant competitive gains when base-level training is required for all staff that touch the company site, advertising or outbound copy. In fact, it’s why we started Market Motive in the first place - to get the training to the masses.
Where to start?
Get your staff into sessions at Search Engine Strategies, Online Market World, Pubcon, SMX and other quality conferences. Can’t fly everyone out? [pitch] Sign your staff up for online Market Motive training and consultant access for $299/month [/pitch]. Ask your expert consultants to run workshops on-site to teach optimization techniques. Hold weekly topical lunches discussing SEO, web analytics and site structure. And lastly, reimburse your staff on purchases of books covering search marketing topics.
