Implementing an SEO strategy for BT, EE, and Plusnet
Where do you start when coordinating a joined-up SEO strategy across a large, complex business area? In this post, SEO Manager Jack Sperry talks about how his team has risen to the challenge.
I manage the SEO squad, a small (but powerful) group of SEO experts who are part of BT’s design team. We help to optimise the BT, EE, and Plusnet sites to deliver better information to search engines which in turn helps people to answer their questions or find the product they are looking for.
The challenge of establishing SEO standards across such a large design team
BT’s design team is big. Around 170 strong and growing. And we’ve got hundreds more colleagues across the Digital Directorate. The main challenge has been the scale of the team, and the velocity of change within the business. As an SEO squad, we have to engage with many people and do so at speed. In a smaller business, typically we’d talk with various people and teams directly to make sure SEO standards are followed. Due to the size of the BT design team and the different brands and different journeys we work across, it’s quite hard for us to do that. We’ve had to pivot to a different way of working in order to enable us to meet that challenge, thinking about our dual role as internal consultants in SEO and as enablers of SEO skills growth.
Adopting the idea of ‘Build, Measure, Learn’ in SEO
Our Build, Measure, Learn approach is at the very core of SEO. In the SEO world, we’d form our analysis and understand the search market. We’d then benchmark against competitors, see what improvements we could make on the site using that data and then work with the various squads to get it implemented and then measure it.
From those measurements, we would then learn what we need to do next and whether we need to do anything differently. We were constantly going through this process to ensure we’re always improving. It’s been reflected in our results that have been very strong year-on-year.
A lesson from SEO to the wider digital team
As the SEO team stretches across a wide variety of user journeys across our three brands, one thing we’ve found very useful is taking a lesson from one part of the business and applying it to another part of the business.
BT Consumer digital is split into alliances containing multidisciplinary squads that focus on specific user experiences based on customer behaviours, goals, motivations, and needs. While this is a great journey-based approach, this also risks us looking at problems in a siloed way and potentially trying to solve the same thing twice.
For the SEO team, if we’ve released a piece of work into a squad, or group of squads, and we’ve seen its progress and it’s worked really well in that area, we take that example and work with other squads to implement the improvements through technical or content changes.
Working with content designers to make sure SEO is part of the content design process
We’re a small, nimble team and have created a lot of SEO tools and processes that help content designers and other team members to self-serve when it comes to SEO. We’ve also created a set of best-practice guides to which content designers can refer to help them build experiences and journeys that are optimised from the get-go, without having to rely on us. It also means the SEO team doesn’t become a blocker.
We’ve also created a maturity model where we benchmark squads and the journeys they’re responsible for from an SEO perspective. This allows us to identify commonalities in SEO across BT Consumer. For example, if we see there’s a big issue around page speed or alt tags, we know we need to invest more time into those areas to educate and upskill the squads to enable them to get that right in the first instance.
We’re also on the cusp of doing some face-to-face SEO training (this on hold due to lockdown as the whole BT design team is working remotely). When this starts it will give content designers a really good foundation in SEO without having to read the best practice guides — although we’ll always have those for reference.
We also have numerous cloud-based tools that measure performance, crawl the site and identify issues. We’re in the process of building dashboards for all of the squads we work with so that content designers can see the latest data and create their own demand based on what they’re seeing from a performance or technical hygiene perspective.
So, what’s next for the SEO squad?
Like the rest of our colleagues in the design team, our SEO squad takes pride in being user-centric. Google is often the first step for online journeys and our squad helps people find what they need by optimising journeys using search data.
Our next steps are all about building SEO knowledge and capability so we can do this more effectively at scale. We’re gearing up to deliver face-to-face training for content designers mentioned above and, at the same time, we’re looking at how we can launch more online training so people can log in and get training remotely.
We’re also working with our analytics team to combine different dashboards into one single, easy reference source of SEO data as we realise that all our squads are extremely busy and need to see everything in one place.
It’s fair to say the Coronavirus lockdown has delayed us a little bit, but we’re getting back on track.
We’ll be blogging about how we’ve responded to some specific challenges in the world of search soon. If you have any questions about our SEO strategy or want to share some of your own expertise on scaling SEO support for large teams, let us know by responding below.
