How to Form a Kickass Content Team

Wait! Don’t turn to the next section. We know what you’re thinking:

"I’m an SEO, not an HR person. What the heck does my job have to do with building a team?"

The answer is "a lot."

Humor us for a moment and consider two brief examples:

• Phuong has been a one-man SEO crew at his small agency for more than three years. Not only does he make sure the company’s website is crawl-friendly for search engines, but he also spends parts of his days helping out in design (where he lends a hand in creating images) and does a fair share of writing content, as well. He leaves work every day thinking, “I need help. Something has to give.”

• Alex has been the lead SEO for their company, a large e-commerce brand, for three years. They have a small team of SEOs, most of whom are overworked from being pulled into numerous directions by other teams. The team enjoys what they do and they kick butt at their jobs, but with an acquisition underway, Alex finds themself thinking, “There’s not enough hours in the day to get our work done.”

Now imagine yourself as Phuong or Alex. Wouldn’t you want to have a say in the building of your team, even if it was only to make recommendations about the skills the new team member(s) would need to have?

It’s been said that the number-one determinant of the success of a brand is neither the products nor the services it offers. Success, the saying goes, is largely the byproduct of having the right people in the right jobs.

SEO is no different.

Despite the size of your team, people play a huge role in making content marketing successful. If your team has the right people in place, everyone likely enjoys the benefits that come from a well-performing site, content optimized to meet the needs of web searchers, and greater search visibility for the brand.

Let’s make one thing clear at the outset: No one can tell you what you need in a teammate or who to hire. That’s entirely dependent on your brand’s needs and goals.

The main thrust of what we’ll share are the skills a potential teammate should have to best assist an SEO or SEO team achieve greater success with content marketing. You need people on staff who understand your brand and audience — and who are capable of understanding the content needs for each.

Below you’ll find three categories of skills we view as essential to have as your brand goes about creating a content team.

Keep in mind, however, that no team has the same needs and very few teams, regardless of size, will have individual team members with all of these skills.

It’s best to view the categories and their antecedent skills as a checklist of sorts that can be used to guide you as you go about the team-building process. That is, you can decide which characteristics are most important based on where you are in your content marketing journey.

Project management

The people possessing these skills keep everything rolling smoothly, whether internally between stakeholders and the teams doing the day-to-day work, or externally, between the SEO, content and account management, and clients.

As an SEO, you want the right people here so that the changes you recommend or the suggestions you make get heard. In fact, a great project manager is an invaluable asset, ensuring SEO always has a seat at the table.

• Has a passion for managements projects of all sizes

• Possesses a working knowledge of marketing (e.g., branding, SEO, PPC, social, design, etc.)

• Is extremely organized and attentive to detail

• Knows how to keep the team on track and execute on deadlines

• Understands the budget for a project and will ensure the scope is always kept in mind.

• Has the ability to keep projects on track or get them back on track — even if it means finding an alternative solution

Strong strategy capabilities

When things are going smoothly, teammates with strong strategy chops can help you see around the corner and plot the next steps for SEO — and content marketing overall. When things go wrong, though, strategy-minded folks can become strong defenders of SEO, backing your logic and supporting your efforts to move the brand forward.

Any recommendations or changes you make need to be tested in the real world. The real world doesn’t always listen to our brilliant logic. So when the site structure and user path changes you recommended don’t quite live up to the potential you’d said they would, as it relates to user path on the site, you’d better have teammates who understand that SEO is an iterative process.

• Has knowledge of multiple marketing channels and the ability to build a tactical roadmap that will ensure all pieces are in place to complete a marketing project

• Knows how to collect and analyze industry data to drive a strategy before executing on a plan.

• Accepts challenges, using them as a guide for building content and solving challenges for the company or customers

• Willing to think outside of the box — constantly pushes themselves to think differently about how to approach and build interesting new content

Brand and audience prowess

People possessing these characteristics help tie all of the client-facing content together. That is, the people with these skill sets can best ensure the SEO team’s H1s and H2s have the correct voice and tone, making the content work for real people — not just search engines.

What’s more, these team members are on the frontlines for the brand, making sure the audience’s goals and pain points are considered and addressed when the brand creates content.

• Understands the brand’s audience inside and out. If a new question comes up, they know how to engage and connect with the brand’s audience to find an answer. (In many agencies, this person is known as a client advocate; inside a brand, this person might be known as a customer advocate.)

• Can see the big picture and align a team (or themselves if it’s a team of one) to get behind the strategy

• Can sit at the C-Suite table and advocate for content during important budget and planning meetings.

• Understands what the business’ overall goals are and knows how to prioritize marketing efforts to reach those goals.

Now that we have a clear and thorough view of the skills that will come in handy for content marketing, let’s take a look at some of those that typically comprise strong content marketing teams.

Most important, these are the people SEOs typically work alongside and partner with to help their brands be successful.

As an SEO, it’s important to think of these positions in the context of who provides the most help for your company, both now and in the future.

For example, if your brand has a strong team of SEOs, a few of whom enjoy writing and have decent design abilities, it might make sense to add someone who can coordinate those efforts or edit and proof the content you’re producing.

It’ll be valuable for you to have an informed opinion and be able to discern who can best help the SEO team and make content marketing work for the brand overall.

Content strategists

This person helps manage the playbook, ensuring your brand makes the right calls at the right time. A strong content strategist audits existing content, determining what’s missing and what’s needed, then organizes the content team’s efforts to put the brand’s best foot forward.

Content strategists are the SEO's allies. The former typically has a greater understanding of the role of content and its value to both the brand and the audience. They’re generally analytically minded and are used to getting their hands dirty with conducting research, creating personas, and managing audits. They’re also typically quite skilled at developing and managing editorial strategy functions — for instance, writing brand and/or style guidelines.

(At brands where there is no content strategist on staff, SEOs will often perform these functions.)

Writers

You likely saw “writer” and thought “Thank you!”

Most SEOs love strong writers. And rightly so. Having a team of capable writers means the SEO team can get back to doing their work, and not have to write.

At most brands, SEOs and writers work together closely, and for good reason: both are often close to the action and instrumental in search visibility success. As an SEO, you might see a “money” keyword you know your brand can rank for if you create the right content. If the writing team nails the topic, includes the right keywords, H1s, and actually gives readers the information they’re looking for, you can both capitalize on this opportunity and rank. It’s cases like this (which are far from uncommon) where having a top-notch writer or writing team who can translate your SEO research into solid, kick-butt content can make the difference between your content showing up on the fifth page of SERPs versus the first.

For an SEO working in content marketing, words are a vehicle by which brands achieve their goals. Any writer you bring aboard needs to understand that. You’ll want to ensure any newbie writers coming aboard have an appreciation for search and the role content plays within it, rather than simply viewing words from the standpoint of high-quality writing.

That is, writers must be able to understand the audience’s pain points the brand’s content is meant to address.

Content creators

These are the teammates who can help your team execute content beyond blogs and infographics. Their job title could be videographer, designer, media manager, podcaster… the possibilities are almost endless. When the SEO team has a cool idea for presenting content in a unique or interactive fashion, these creative types come in handy real fast.

Editors

I hate to break it to you, but even the best writers shouldn't edit their own work. Therefore, if you can afford an editor to add that extra level of polish to your content, do so.

Content marketing editors come in several stripes, but the most important types for your purposes are managing editors and content editors. (Keep in mind that these roles can be combined to be handled by a single person. Or, your team could decide they need one position more than the other at a given time, and then hire for the other position later. There is no one right way to do things.)

• Managing editors work at a higher level, making certain the content your team produces is in alignment with the brand’s overarching content marketing goals.

• Content editors work closely with the writers and other members of the team and act as one of the last lines of defense to ensure the content being produced is accurate and of high quality.

Proofers

These teammates help prevent embarrassment by reviewing content for grammatical errors, typos and such. (Many teams roll the proofing function into an editing role; others might use a writer who’s well-versed in proper grammar and syntax to handle proofing.)

Coordinators

Coordinators help track everything from the details to the deliverable, from ensuring freelancers have contracts in place to making certain the content team listens to the SEO team’s suggestion to stop adding oversized images to the blog.

This person should be quick on their feet, have a can-do attitude, and come to the table with a healthy respect for what each team brings to the table.

The ideal coordinator is an exceedingly rare beast, but when you've found someone who's both organized and creative, someone who cares about relationships and quality of work, and someone who can keep track of all the cats you didn't even know you had, you've found yourself a coordinator.

Designers

Strong visuals are invaluable for a brand’s content marketing. Having a designer on staff (or working closely with a contractor) can help retain brand consistency and make your content stand out.

Developer

Very few content teams will have a developer as part of the team, but it’s not because they aren’t valuable. They are. At the very least, reach across teams and find a developer who is willing to teach a member or two of the content team some basic HTML. It’ll serve both teams well.

Plus, it never hurts to have a trusted but impartial ally in another vital department.

Reporting analyst

This position is another down-the-road nice-to-have, but having someone who can match the work the content team is doing to the brand key performance indicators (KPIs) will help the team gain additional buy-in from the C-Suite.

As we mentioned earlier, no brand likely has all of the teammates or skill sets represented inside their walls.

The key is to discern what skills or personnel are the best fits for your brand at a given time, then make those skills and positions a priority when making hires or, if hiring is not feasible, shifting the responsibilities of existing team members. Content marketing success depends more on a commitment to quality than it does on the size of your team. Focus less on how big of a team you have and more on doing the best you can with the team you can build.

Outsourcing help, and a word on quality

Hiring freelancers, especially when you're not sure if you're experiencing a blip of growth or a long-term trend, is a completely reasonable practice. Trusting a low-cost content mill is not. Your brand’s reputation is too important to trust to simply anyone, for the hallmark of lasting content marketing success is a commitment to quality. That goal remains the same regardless of the size of your team.

One of the biggest takeaways we’d like you to have from this chapter is to never, ever sacrifice quality for quantity.

Focus on doing the best you can with what you have. Contrary to what many believe or think, this philosophy is scalable and can ensure your brand’s reputation remains stellar even as it grows in popularity.

Now that we have our foundations, it's time to start getting our hands dirty with content. Next, we'll head over to Chapter 5: Content Planning.

Written by the Moz staff and our good friends at Seer Interactive.