Digital Marketing

Productivity Tools for a Strong SEO Team

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Last Updated on September 28, 2022 by Kuldeep Bisht

To turn your customers into brand promoters is necessary to build a powerful SEO team that provides measurable results.

In this blog post, you’ll see how to build an SEO team from scratch and how to improve their productivity while using tools.

By reshaping your staff’s perception of effectiveness and implementing the right methods of influence along with incorporating the best tools to streamline the process. You can be successful in producing a powerful SEO team and provide results that will create some unpaid preachers for your services.

time to be productive

How to Build (And Structure) an SEO Team?

Every team has basic building blocks, and when it comes to SEO, the following key players have the responsibility to deliver success:

  1. Account Manager
  2. SEO Analyst
  3. Link Builder and Outreach Executive
  4. Content Writer & Researcher
  5. Infographic, Video, and Image Designer
  6. Social Media Manager

To achieve maximum productivity, each and every block of your SEO team needs to become more productive and efficient.

Let’s discuss the roles and responsibilities of each SEO Team member. How much time they should devote to any task that can hamper the entire team’s productivity and what are the best productivity tools for an SEO team?

#1 – Account Manager

Is this the reaction of your account manager when a project is derailed?

seo account manager

Take a look at some ways mentioned below that will help you to make your account manager more productive.

Primary Responsibilities – The main functions of an account manager are:

  • Coordinating and implementing SEO/SMO strategies for clients.
  • Taking full ownership of the client’s account.
  • Conducting staff meetings to share his/her knowledge, challenges, insights, and game plans.
  • Communicating with the clients, preparing proposals, creating strategies for achieving goals, and managing newer employees in a productive manner.

Time Breakdown – Account managers need to divide their time between client projects, internal projects, and office duties. I suggest 3–4 hours per day on client communications and spending the rest of their time preparing strategies and managing co-workers.

How to Improve the Productivity of an Account Manager?

Account Managers are spending the majority of their time communicating with clients, interacting with the team, and deciding KPIs. Well, It is their responsibility to keep the strategy aligned with the marketing trends and understand the client’s requirements. If You are able to reduce the time spent on communications, then you can significantly improve your productivity.

Here are some productivity tools that are extremely useful to be more efficient with your time as an account manager.

1. Time Doctor This specific time tracking software is excellent for accurately measuring the performance of team members and is a must in the arsenal of an account manager. It ensures that every team member is working efficiently by tracking the total time spent on each project. It dramatically reduces wasted time by easily tracking and managing priorities and facilitating team collaboration.

time doctor team productivity tool

2. TeuxDeux This app can be used to manage personal day-to-day tasks. It keeps you organized and sets a schedule for your daily tasks.

3. Asana It helps the entire team to stay focused on work. It lets you store and retrieve work details at any point in time. Each team member’s responsibilities can be quickly assigned and clearly tracked.

4. WorkflowMax It is an all-in-one cloud-based job management software that lets you manage projects and tasks easily under one platform. It is a single software needed for lead management, job management, job costing, and invoicing. All your data remains in one place, and there is no need to check different tools and apps frequently. Data is accessible from anywhere and built-in insightful reports are available in real time-saving lots of time and money.

5. Cloudvote It allows you to prepare interactive Powerpoint presentations. Clouvote’s trainee response system allows the creation of collaborative learning environments that help in improving productivity and profitability. Real-time feedback can be obtained from the participants, and proper data can be maintained for analysis at a later stage.

6. Bidsketch No need to spend hours preparing business proposals anymore. Bidsketch lets you create proposals for your clients in minutes using an extensive library of pre-existing templates to make this normally time-consuming task fast and easy.

#2 – SEO Analyst

Primary responsibilities – Main responsibilities include website analysis, conversion rate optimization, keyword research analysis, technical SEO audits, GSC/GA analysis, and communication with co-workers.

Time breakdown – The majority of their time is spent doing research and online analysis.

Productivity Tools for an SEO

If we can reduce the time spent on research and analysis, then we can significantly enhance their productivity. The following tools can help:

1. SEMrush – “Your Global Campaign Manager.”
Have a peek at your competitor’s data. Cross, combine, and visualize data to compare competitive domains. It’s the most comprehensive competitive intelligence suite to improve your entire online marketing efforts. The below image displays the Organic Research Positions report. This report shows you where your competitors are ranking for specific keywords.

semrush seo productivity tool

With SEMrush, you can find related and phrase-match keywords for generating specific keyword ideas. The backlinks tool allows you to see which landing pages are getting maximum links, the domain vs domain tool lets you compare your position with that of your competitor, and the position tracking feature allows you to monitor any domain or keyword from any location, etc. There are tons of other similar functions that make your site analysis work much easier.

2. Bing Ads Intelligence – “Direct Download”

With this tool, data is exported straight to Excel, where you want it. Some say the traffic estimates are a little unreliable, but it’s OK as long as you check the AdWords Keyword Planner (see below) before launch.

3. SpyFu – “Steal from the Competition”

What’s the competition up to? See their ad copy, history, and what worked. It gives you data for every keyword your competitors have bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last nine years.

4. Ubersuggest – “Variations on a Theme”

This tool works by pulling all of Google’s “suggested searches” from the
bottom of your search into one spot. It’s great for coming up with new ideas in a particular category or for content research.

5. NerdyData – “Show Me The Code”

This tool helps you find keywords and pull title tags, meta descriptions, or meta keywords directly from the code of other websites. Overall, this helps you see what similar keywords other people are using. I love this tool,
but it’s super geeky. No credentials – just sign up.

6. Serpstat – “The Growth Hacking Tool”

Competitor analysis is one of the crucial aspects of a successful SEO strategy, and Serpstat lets you automate competitor analysis up to a great extent and save a lot of time. This tool allows you to identify your online competitors and compare their performance metrics in Google with yours. You can discover search suggestions, conduct a side-by-side comparison of your rankings with your competitor, automate reports, analyze advertising trends, perform batch analysis of domains, and much more.

7. Adwords Keyword Planner – “The Last Hurrah”

After you’ve built your list of keywords, stick it in AdWords to find out which ones are worth keeping. On the other hand, if you haven’t had luck with the other methods, you can use this tool to find more.

#3 – Link Builder and Outreach Executive

Primary responsibilities – It’s all about partnerships! The blogger outreach or link-building executive is responsible for contacting webmasters and bloggers and researching relevant websites. They are also responsible for suggesting strategies for producing viral content that is shareable across social media for link earning.

link building & outreach expert

Time breakdown – The majority of their time is spent on finding relevant websites and emailing webmasters.

Productivity Tools to Boost Your Link Building & Outreach

If we can reduce the time spent on finding sites and communicating with webmasters, then we can improve their productivity. The following tools are extremely helpful:

1. Inkybee A tool for delivering smarter outreach for remarkable campaigns. You can use their unique blog discovery tool that finds and highlights new influencer opportunities automatically. Manage all your blogs in user-friendly lists and folders, discover your influencers and followers, and find relevant bloggers of any niche.

inkybee outreach tool

2. Ninja Outreach This all-purpose influencer marketing tool lets you easily find thousands of influencers in your niche and reach out to them at a fraction of time and cost.

3. SEnuke The only software you will ever need to automate the process of building links without having to write a single piece of code. It comes with a powerful scheduler and an indexing module that ensure that your links are indexed by Google. A word of caution: use this tool smartly or else Google might penalize your site.

4. Whitespark Local Citation Finder Local backlinks and local citations produce the best results. The local citation finder discovers where to list your business for better local rankings. You can discover and start building citations in an organized manner.

#4 – Content Writer & Researcher

Primary responsibilities – A Content Writer is responsible for researching & producing high-quality, useful, and user-friendly content.

Time breakdown – They spent the majority of time researching proper references to find relevant materials, preparing catchy titles, and preparing the main content body.

How to Improve the Productivity of a Content Writer?

If we can reduce the time taken by a writer to find a content idea, search for relevant materials and references for preparing the draft, and to create the title, then it can have an impact on productivity. The below productivity tools are great to help content writers.

A- Portent’s Content Idea Generator Just enter the subject of your content and this tool will present great content topics within seconds.

content topic generator tool

B- Hemingway Editor Users as well as Google does not like the low-quality content or fluff text. The Hemingway editor automatically highlights the garbage text and makes your writing bold and clear.

C- Grammarly A Chrome plugin that finds and corrects mistakes in your word processor. With contextual spelling checker and vocabulary enhancement modules, it quickly scans your text to for proper use of more than 250 advanced grammar rules.

D- Zenpen A minimalist writing zone for distraction-free writing. Simply open the URL and start writing. Bolding and hyperlinking are damn easy with this tool.

#5 – Infographic, Video, Image Designer

Primary responsibilities – A designer needs to create stunning graphics and videos that attract user attention over social media platforms. Infographics play a significant role in link earning. The designer should be able to think logically and creatively making use of tools that prepares images relevant to the text content.

Time breakdown – The majority of the time is consumed in thinking creatively, obtaining new ideas, and preparing the image using the software.

Ways to Boost Your Design Productivity

If we can reduce the time they spend on thinking creatively and preparing the images using traditional software like Photoshop or Corel Draw, we can greatly improve productivity. I recommend opting for WordPress as your CMS (Content Management System). The major benefit is, you can make use of free WordPress themes and plugins like Infogram to create stunning infographics easily. Below are some productivity apps or online tools that are great for an image designer:

1 – PicMonkey The online graphic design tool that is clean and easy to use with pre-loaded templates. Have a look at the clarity of the below image generated via PicMonkey:

picmonkey designer tool

2 – Canva It offers photo effects, free icons, design grids, and stickers to make image design more meaningful and attractive.

3 – Piktochart The easy-to-use infographic creator with 500+ professionally designed templates. You can crunch data in style with ready-to-use infographics and high-resolution downloads.

#6 – Social Media Manager

Yes, I included this because the integration of social media and SEO provides better results.

Primary responsibilities – The person responsible for social media promotion has the main responsibility of generating engagement and social branding. Tasks of a social media executive include but are not limited to sharing posts and images on social media, finding influencers and following them, analyzing the behavior of popular trends, identifying demographics, regularly monitoring social campaigns, etc.

Time breakdown – Most of the time is spent on updating the social profiles, finding influencers, and analyzing the social behavior of the main competitors.

Social Media Marketing Productivity Tools

If we are able to reduce the time taken on updating social profiles or finding influencers, then we can greatly improve the performance. The below tools are extremely useful for social media promotion, and it also reduces the time taken by the executive to monitor the social campaigns regularly.

1 – Klout It lets you create content that generates engagement. You can also track how retweets, likes, and shares make an impact on overall engagement.

klout smo tool

2 – Hootsuite This allows you to manage your social campaigns over 35 popular social networks and schedule your updates.

3 – IFTTT It Lets you create custom recipes that are triggered automatically based on custom events.

4 – Buffer It allows you to share content at the best times of the day in order to generate maximum engagement and get the most out of each post. Moreover, you can customize every update that you are sharing on social media.

Tried and Tested Ways to Improve Employee Productivity

There are certain studies that have been found to have an impact on overall employee productivity. The ‘C’ level executives should utilize these experiments in order to improve the output of the company.

A – The “Hawthorne” Effect

It is a psychological phenomenon in which the person changes their behavior or performance (works harder or performs better) in response to being observed by a superior.

Hawthorne Effect on team

For example – Sam’s output was more when he worked closely with his colleagues and when his work was judged by a superior. However, the work quality declined when Sam worked alone, and there was no one to supervise him.

The Crux of this study is – Foster employee collaboration, the senior-level executives should keep an eye on the juniors and provide proper feedback whenever required.

B – The “Happiness” Effect

Making employees happier helps in the longer run. Higher levels of happiness are associated with higher levels of productivity.

Happiness Effect on team

For example – Sam was able to deliver more when he was shown a movie clip or was treated with free chocolates and drinks. On the other hand, his productivity declined when he was questioned about recent family tragedies or other similar negative talks.

The Crux of this study – The employee productivity was 13% more when there were kept happy, so it is suggested to keep the employees happy as happier subjects are more productive.

C – The “Motivation” Effect

Motivating the employee has been believed to have a positive effect on overall productivity.

seo team Motivation

For example – Sam was able to deliver more when he was praised and paid incentives for his recent performances. On the other hand, his productivity declined when he received poor remarks from his seniors and wasn’t paid any incentives for his performances.

The Crux of this study – A happy employee is a productive employee. Don’t kill motivation! Set clear goals, provide proper feedback, communicate effectively, provide opportunities for skill development, arrange for office parties, workshops, movies, and pay incentives if the employee is achieving his targets.

Conclusion

Alright, we are all set to raise the productivity of an SEO team. Hope this article provided some insights as to how you can easily increase the output of your SEO team using some tools and tricks.

Please feel free to rate the article and comment below regarding your opinions on how we can build a productive SEO team.

Kuldeep Bisht

I'm a blogger. I help you succeed online. I write actionable tips & tricks, product reviews, SEO resources & tools. Join my digital journey.

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