Image Souce: Pexels
Countless startups hire remote marketing teams that help grow their online presence without a colossal budget.
While cheaper, managing professionals from miles or even continents away is definitely challenging. But with the right strategies, your remote team can perform just as well as —if not better than—an in-house team.
Here are six ways to maximize the productivity, efficiency, and work quality of your remote-based SEO team:
1. Leverage a Project Management System
If you’re still using emails to collaborate with your remote SEO team, you’re doing it wrong.
Your team will be considerably more productive with a project management platform with visual collaboration and task tracking tools.
For example, Trello features Kanban-style task planning boards that will give you a bird’s-eye view of your SEO campaigns. It lets you collaborate with your team by assigning cards containing details about their tasks, including links, attachments, and checklists.
You can also use Trello to share important documents, like keyword lists and brand guidelines, as well as communicate with your team through comments.
Image Souce: Trello
Another reason to use Trello is for setting task deadlines, which can help your SEO team stay productive and meet a schedule. But if this feature is important to you, there are other time tracking platforms out there with more robust attendance and time management features.
Some examples are:
- Monday.com
- Buddy Punch
- Rippling
- BambooHR
- QuickBooks Time
2. Create Visual Audience Personas
Visual audience personas have loads of benefits for SEO teams.
Personas can help writers fine-tune their writing style and language to match their target audience’s preferences. It’s also helpful in utilizing angles for value propositions that directly address their pain points.
SEO specialists, on the other hand, can use personas to discover seed keywords, which can be expanded into long-tail keyword variations. Detailed personas also reveal the audience’s preferred content channels, enabling SEOs to handpick the right guest posting sites for link building.
To create detailed personas from scratch, use tools like HubSpot’s Make My Persona.
It features a seven-step walkthrough that will help you build detailed audience personas in minutes.
Image Source: HubSpot.com
After creating audience personas, make them accessible by uploading a copy to your project management system. You may also copy key details into project outlines, which brings us to the next strategy.
3. Prepare Reusable Post Templates
Prepare reusable templates to ensure consistent quality for SEO content.
First, establish brand guidelines that cover your designated writing style, identity/voice, value propositions, and differentiators from competitors. Weave these into templates for different content formats like listicles, how-to guides, product reviews, and news articles.
Consider including structured outlines that guide content creators on what subheadings to include. You should also insert content tips to help them maintain consistent quality across every piece, such as:
- Write short paragraphs that are only up to 3-4 sentences long.
- Use catchy, keyword-optimized subheadings.
- Improve readability using formatting tools like bullet points and numbered lists.
- Show, don’t tell—use visual content like screenshots, charts, and infographics to share technical information.
Each outline should also come with a set of SEO goals, including target keywords and a word count requirement.
Use keyword research tools like Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic to viable target keyword ideas. As for a target word count, get the average length of the top 10 results for your focus keyword.
Alternatively, use content optimization tools like Surfer to get instant keyword ideas and a target word count for your draft. It features a Chrome extension that provides real-time SEO suggestions as you write your piece on Google Docs.
Image Source: Docs.Google.com (with the Surfer extension)
4. Make Quality Control More Efficient
Quality control measures are important, especially if you outsource SEO content.
Here’s a tip when using Surfer: aim to have a “Content Score” of at least 67 in every post.
Getting a high score improves your content’s chances of getting high search engine rankings.
You can use Surfer’s content scoring system as an automated quality control measure. When assigning articles to remote content writers, don’t approve their draft unless they hit or exceed the target content score.
Grammarly is another tool you can use to control content quality.
It is an automated content proofreading and editing tool that automatically checks for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and readability issues. It also allows you to define your brand’s SEO content writing goals, which are based on the following aspects:
- Target audience: Are you targeting the general crowd, knowledgeable enthusiasts, or experts in your niche?
- Formality: Does your brand communicate with informal or formal language—or somewhere in the middle?
- Domain: Are you writing for business, email marketing, academic purposes, or anything else specific?
- Intent: Do you want to educate readers, explain concepts, convince prospective buyers, or simply tell a story?
Using handy tools like Surfer and Grammarly significantly reduces the time it takes to build quality content for SEO. Over time, your remote SEO team will grow familiar with these tools and, in turn, be more productive and efficient.
5. Streamline Content Distribution
Content distribution is just as important as your content creation strategy.
It’s also crucial to have a streamlined content distribution and promotion strategy if you’re working with a team. This includes important steps like post approvals, scheduling, and social media sharing.
Social media management platforms like CoSchedule, Vista Social, and Buffer have the tools you need to keep your team on the same page.
These platforms can help you create an automated social media posting calendar, which you can manage together with your team on a single dashboard. They also let you track social media conversations, manage useful assets (e.g. photos, video clips, TikTok post templates, hashtag lists, etc.), and generate unified social media reports.
Most importantly, social media management platforms come with collaborative features like task tracking, file-sharing, post approvals, and in-app communications.
6. Embed Tracking in Your Culture
Performance tracking is a surefire way to identify bottlenecks in your team’s productivity, efficiency, and results.
Using a project management system with built-in time tracking is a good first step. Take it to the next level using a website and content tracking platforms like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Semrush.
These tools will give you an in-depth look at the performance of your SEO strategies and website content. They reveal critical metrics like page views, bounce rate, keyword rankings, and top traffic sources.
Conclusion
Use the strategies above to unlock the full potential of your remote-based SEO team.
Make collaboration easier, streamline content production, automate your quality checks, and measure results to ensure everyone is doing their best to achieve your brand’s SEO goals.
Good luck!