Prince2 & SEO – 4 useful tips

How to guarantee the success of a SEO project? The secret is to have the right management method to obtain results on time avoiding (bad) surprises. At Nubo, one consultant is Prince2 (Foundation) certified, which guarantees our clients a perfect handling of its method principles.

Why this methodology could make a difference in a project? Let’s make a point on the “Digital Marketing” experience.

But first, let us explain this important fact.

Can the Prince2 project-management methodology be used in Digital Marketing?

Prince2 is a methodology for project-management, which can be used in different environments such as IT, finance or internet.

In Prince2, a der project is temporary. It can involve one or more organisations. These will create a dedicated expert team, the project board, which will deliver a project according to objectives.

At first glance, Prince2, which is a well known tool in the industrial world, may appear too complicated or even overdimensioned for digital marketing projects. In general, this method is used for large-scale projects, such as IT for instance, to redesign an infrastructure or in the planification of a complex product (e.g. aviation or aerospace).

However, Prince2 can be easily adapted for multiple digital marketing projects.

Long-run Digital Marketing Projects

In comparison to the industrial world, digital marketing projects and particularly organic search or Adwords campaign management are projects that have an impact in the long-run.
They require constant work rather than a specific actions in a short period of time (aside from specific operations such as promoting sales via AdWords or events such as Christmas for example). Prince2 isn’t suitable for these type of projects.

However, multiple principles of this method are pretty interesting and could be applied to digital marketing projects long-term.

Getting inspired by Prince2 and try these 4 great techniques with your digital marketing:

1. Define the approach and objectives in a document and stick to them!

“The business case” as it is called in Prince2, is an essential document which initiates the project, stipulates why it was set up and its purpose. Once the briefing is ready, you will certainly adjust some details over time but you should always refer to it for your digital marketing strategy.

Example from Nubo: We prepare a briefing at the beginning of each project with the project board. The entire team is committed to it and the client can hope for precise operations and deliverables.

2. Plan your project logically

One of its essential principles is managing by stages. It involves planning all the steps of the project and group/consolidate them into a “stage”. In terms of SEO, it is common to take actions out of opportunity, without sticking to planned steps. This is why it is important to group the different steps into stages and to define actions that must be taken on a weekly or on a monthly basis for instance.

Example from Nubo: creating a strategy and an operational agenda, involves a series of actions and analyses – technical audits with their implementation stage, a lexical audit as well as implementation and finally a review plan on the topics and their contents and an editorial plan for writing content, etc.

3. Defining responsibilities for all members of the project

While doing SEO or digital marketing in general, project members will have to deal with a large variety of tasks. They must be polyvalent and provide a high level of competence in both, IT and language.
This can make defining actions for each project member pretty difficult. Anyway, this is essential for managing the project and to know who to contact if questions should arise, as well as define responsibilities to involve people.

Example from Nubo: the content manager prepares the press releases for the outreach team. The outreach and redistribution are coordinated by the outreach manager Find Out More. Meanwhile, wholesale jerseys the Google Analytics code snippet of the PR, which was sent by mail will be verified and Google Analytics stats will finally be collected into a report. Last but not least, the client relationship manager and head of the project keeps an eye on the entire procedure, coordinates the actions of the different managers and makes sure that the client gets its report on time.

4. Monitoring the validation process

It is important to know who is creating and is validating things. You can’t do both. A validation must be neutral. This is why it is important to assign responsibilities to different people. That can be difficult because resources for digital marketing actions, SEO and SEM are limited. So, it may happen that someone who has produced something will also evaluate its quality. It is important that the person who created can defend its work. But the evaluation must be done by another person, in order to judge its quality in an objective manner.

The extreme opposite would be to validate each small action, which is not really necessary (one of the Prince2 principles is tailoring to circumstances – Great if something the method includes is not necessary, you don’t have to do it). For the project, it’s important to learn when a step requires no validation or if it is maybe too important that it needs to be checked by the head of the project directly. It can also be the other way around. In any case, complicating the validation process by taking wrong decisions should be avoided.

Example from Nubo: The content manager organises the creation of some content, which is validated by himself as soon as it is finished. The client relationship manager will then validate the final form and check, without going into detail, if it suits the planning and the customer’s demand. He may seek advice from the digital marketing director, if important decisions are to be taken or if a high level of SEO expertise is required.

(Re)Creating a website

Creating or redesigning a website may require a huge amount of resources (workforce, material, budget, etc.) depending on its complexity, size or amount of information. Often it is a question of a few pages or deploying a small e-commerce site. As there are only a couple of people involved, managing the project will be far less complex. The situation will of course be different if the project is more complex and if more budget is allocated.

Some of Nubo’s projects deal with site redesigning, collaborating with almost a dozen suppliers:

• A digital agency working on the front end
• A digital agency working on the back-office
• An IT provider, providing technical solutions, such as setting up complex search engines
• A digital marketing agency for SEO (that’s us!)
• A digital communication agency for social media strategy
• Another digital marketing agency for SEA (sometimes it is also us)
• Another agency Cheap for Google Analytics implementation plan (often it is also us)

In that case, focus and coordination flori are required otherwise the projects could quickly become a mess. There you will notice how useful Prince2 is.

The project manager plays a key role in the organisation. He has to coordinate all project members to get Tadoba the project done in a logical manner. Digital marketing, SEO and SEA services are a bit less involved to the project and their impact is limited.

In a situation with important parts such as:

• The user – the person who will use the delivery,
• The main supplier – the agency doing the main work on the site,
• And the executive – the customer,

the digital marketing agency will play the role of the supplier for the main supplier and its actions will be restricted to the ones determined by the project manager.
Therefore, it is interesting to know this methodology or even to have a Prince2 consultant on board. This will guarantee a perfect follow-up of the project as well as the correct use of technical terms, accessible to other partners.

Regardless of the fact that Prince2 principles do not have to be adopted at 100%, Prince2 methodology is a flexible method, which will allow to frame and supervise the collaboration on a project.