SEO is a marketing function, and like any other marketing function, its goal is to help your organization grow and prosper. For a business, this means bringing in more revenue. What makes SEO different from any other function in your organization is the depth and breadth of its influence on every other role that influences and/or touches the website.

SEO is also a bit of a strange beast, because much of it is nonintuitive. As an SEO practitioner, you can explain things to people and then they will look at you like you have three heads and say, “Huh?” Building an SEO culture requires that you get the organization as a whole to accept a few really important facts:

These concepts are pretty high-level and very simple by design. If you can get all parts of the organization buying into them, though, it will have a very powerful impact on your chances for success. Once everyone agrees that SEO is needed, you will have taken the first step in building an SEO culture.

The value of this is that you will have all team members aware, at least at a basic level, of how SEO affects them. Before the senior manager makes a sweeping policy decision about something, she may pause to consider the SEO impact and get the advice she needs on the topic. Before the developer implements something a particular way, he will likely make sure he is doing the right thing from an SEO point of view.

To build an SEO culture at your organization, you need to institutionalize SEO by integrating SEO into everyday business activities and making it part of everyone’s job description. Successful SEO will not be the result of your in-house SEO practitioner(s); it will come from collaboration with everyone who influences and touches the website.