“Our SEO program would be much more successful if only our CIO understood…”
As the executive responsible for managing, implementing, and overseeing information and technology in your organization, the Chief Information Officer is an essential SEO ally.
Having the support and understanding of the CIO during the decision-making and prioritization processes can be very helpful for the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer).
Indeed, this is not a relationship you want to be adversarial with. On the contrary, it must be symbiotic.
Fostering a strong relationship between marketing and technology at the executive level is essential to creating the rich, personalized experiences that today’s hyper-connected consumer expects.
According to analyst data, more than 20% of the marketing budget is used for technology, and a third of marketing organizations already have a dedicated technology team.
How can you best educate your CIO about the value of SEO and foster rapport in this essential cross-departmental relationship?
Here are some search concepts you’ll want your CIO to know.
1. The impacts of page speed and UX on SEO
Core Web Vitals and the broader page experience update emphasized the importance of a fast and seamless browsing experience for searchers.
Google uses the CWV metrics (biggest content paint, first entry delay, and cumulative design change) to better understand people’s experience on your page.
If you meet the minimum thresholds for CWVs, you are meeting Google’s page speed requirements.
Your pages will not be penalized for not excelling in Core Web Vitals metrics.
Rather, you may be missing out on valuable opportunities to gain an extra boost that could help you outperform your competition in search.
Make sure your CIO has access to this advanced SEO Core Web Vitals technical guide so they can develop an appreciation for how those requests from your support tickets translate directly into increased site visibility and traffic.
Using a content delivery network (CDN) can also help support your SEO page speed goals by serving content from geographically distributed servers closer to the search engine.
These servers cache your page content so it can be served faster and easier when needed, reducing page latency and load time.
When CIOs collaborate with SEO and content marketing, the business impacts can be clearly seen.
This is especially true with Core Web Vitals, as research (disclosure from my company BrightEdge) has recently shown that this collaboration can lead to performance improvements of up to 58%.
Image by BrightEdge, June 2022
2. Technical site and CMS errors can be critical
Technical errors in your code and CMS (content management system) can cause all kinds of problems, from hindering crawling and preventing indexing to security issues, orphaned pages, and duplicate content.
It can help your CIO and their development team provide a method for prioritizing your SEO-related technical requests.
Does this error prevent users from accessing the site or does it cause a vulnerability?
Don’t let this get buried in redirect requests.
Helping your CIO learn about the most common types of technical errors that can affect rankings allows them to spot potential problems that arise in requests from other departments.
Another critical area where CIO and SEO come together is the utilization and implementation of AI (artificial intelligence).
This is where many CMSs fall short.
Artificial intelligence can be leveraged to improve site and customer experiences with intelligent content recommendations, SEO-friendly outputs, and automated quick fixes for critical errors.
3. Data security and SEO implications
The CIO is very aware of security and compliance issues; you don’t need to educate here.
What can help is to show your CIO that you are also aware of security risks and take care to assess those risks before making requests of his team.
The worst case scenario is an anti-SEO CIO who became anti-SEO after a breach or other major issue they attribute to an optimization requested by SEO or marketing.
Show your CIO that you know the SEO spam tactics that hackers use to inject code, implement harmful redirects, and manipulate your site.
As we find ourselves in the midst of an explosive revolution in data growth and Web 3.0, data compliance and user privacy become important to the SEO, data scientist, and CIO.
Share your risk assessment when making a request that might raise eyebrows on the development team.
Be proactive and get ahead of these arguments against optimization by showing the CIO that you care about security as much as they do.
4. How the scheme works
Structured data tagging is not a ranking factor, but it helps search engines better understand your page content.
From there, it can help trigger valuable featured snippets that give your brand extra real estate and added functionality in the SERPs (search engine results page).
Schema is the type of markup preferred by search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yandex.
Adding an outline to your pages helps provide the context that allows Google to match your page to a relevant query, making it an essential element of your SEO strategy.
Adding and properly testing schema becomes more difficult the larger the site, making your CIO’s understanding essential at the business level.
It’s worth sharing details from schema.org and pages like this that Google digs into structure data.
Image from Google, June 2022
You can automate the scheme with the right technology.
However, manual checks and balances should still be in place to make sure it’s actually getting the job done.
It only works if the meaning and context your markup conveys to the search engine is accurate.
You can invite your CIO to sit at the table as you determine what dialing you want to automate and what is best coded by hand, so they understand what is being dialed and why.
5. SEO CRM support
Customers should be the priority for any CIO and any type of SEO platform.
As SEO becomes a topic on the boardroom agenda, ensuring your CRM system helps you manage your leads and customer data is imperative.
SEO professionals use CRM to convert leads into sales and also increase their performance throughout the organization.
While different CRM systems serve other purposes, it’s essential for the CIO to help choose which one aligns with the goals of the SEO and content teams.
With the rise of CDPs (Customer Data Platforms), DAMs (Digital Asset Management) and DMPs (digital management platforms), the role of the CIO is fundamental in:
Choosing the right system and ecosystem partners in SEO and marketing technology. Integration of technologies that better serve the customer and the user experience.
conclusion
As the relationship between CMO and CIO aligns, so does the relationship with SEO. A successful customer experience on the web requires speed and responsiveness.
The seismic shift and interest in technical SEO as the most profitable and long-lasting marketing channel means that the CIO has become a central part of the SEO revenue equation.
More resources:
Featured image: Panchenko Vladimir/Shutterstock
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