Managing projects, be it, web migrations, Develop Reports on Websites, Creating an SEO Strategy for a Website, or audits, make the most of your SEO work. Effective Project management helps you achieve SEO objectives more easily.
Montse Cano leads this lesson. She is a seasoned digital marketer and project manager with all-around experience gained in a range of companies operating worldwide.
Name: Montse Cano
What She Does: Montse is an International SEO & digital strategist for marketing, product & e-commerce growth.
Company: Montserrat Cano
Noteworthy: She is a mentor, has spoken at international industry events, has delivered some training, and a judge for prestigious industry sector awards.
💡All Projects have a degree of Uncertainty
Uncertainty is inevitable when dealing with projects, even the best managers may encounter difficulty when handling it.
💡Projects have 5 basic elements.
Montse explains that every project has the following:
Each of these elements is important and must be well-defined at the planning stage, if not the project will end up being chaotic.
💡Every Single Project has a phase.
Montse explains that the very first stage of Project management isn’t planning. It is actually CONCEPT & INITIATION. This is where we identify a business need and how to go about meeting that needs, feasibility tests are carried out, and more in this stage.
What is a project?
Montse references the project management institutes when defining what exactly a project is as ” A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique project service or result.”
What does it imply to manage an (SEO) project?
As an SEO here are some things to consider when managing SEO projects:
Click here to view her presentation slides
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Montse Cano 0:03
All right. So first was Thank you very much for having me here today. I am very excited, very excited to be presenting here. to you all today, happy to answer any questions after the presentation. And so let’s start. So I am going to be talking to you about managing projects, which I know might be slightly different from all of the other presentations or blog posts that you might attend to read. But it is essential, because there are so many moving parts, that we need to be able to make sure that we actually know how to tackle every situation. But first of all, I would like you to think about one time, just one time in your career.
However, however big however long however short has been? Well, you have felt slightly slightly out of there. When you’re when you have thought, oh my goodness, I’m not going to be able to make this, I’m not going to be able to deliver this project. Yeah. And I would ask you to keep that on the back of your mind during this presentation. Because later on, you will be able perhaps to revisit it and maybe think about what went wrong, how you could have sorted out in the first place or prevented it from happening? And what can you do, what you can do the future. So I want to say about the situations in which we felt we feel bad. I mean, not everybody will knows absolutely everything. This is why we’re here we are learning all of us are learning every day.
There’s something new to be learned or to be remember, etc, etc. So in those situations, we tend to think Oh, my goodness, our skill sets is just wrong. But it’s just possibly could possibly a negative view of those a reflection of our present circle stances in the workplace or outside the workplace that make us doubt of ourselves, right? Particularly when we’ve have somebody who is who is maybe on board, and who steps out of it just to tip an interest on your work. And say, for example, a migration Yeah, website migration, which we know is actually a very big task and very high responsibility there. For them is kind of new, it’s new. And it’s kind of perhaps not so interesting and important kind of thing is very small.
And that might make us think, Oh, my God, this room feel very nervous about this. But it’s normally our skill set is normally fine. It’s just those situations. Yeah, I wanted to say that. Project management is all about doing puzzles, it really is all about that. There’s nothing else apart from the portfolio, just making sure that all the pieces kind of go together in the right place. So that we can actually reach products to promote the product that we are trying to to do.
Yeah. And I also want to say to you, this is not going to be an inspirational talk. And many of the things that you will hear many of the aspects that you will be hearing today are more to do with things that you hear every day, such as value cetera, et cetera. It’s all about making sure that you put all the pieces together everything in context, and basically give names to things that you didn’t think existed somehow, because it’s part of your day to day.
Yeah, it’s so many moving parts is really, really difficult sometimes with SEO, because there’s SEO sorry, on page SEO, there’s upside. There’s content there’s various with some businesses just all about making sure that you know how to set them up into something that you can manage. So I just wanted to say a little bit about myself international SEO and digital marketing consultants working between consultancy and in house clients always cm petitioners Work Project Management has been a requirement and in various countries so are you aiming as you knowing a little bit more of what’s aware so that you can you can actually work and use them to your own benefit?
Your own benefits think about think about your own happiness in the first place in the in the workplace because it We spend so long on the work in the workplace, eight hours a day, seven hours a day. So we might as well be happy. And we can’t be happy if we are feeling out of our depth at all times. So by managing the projects correctly, you will get all these benefits, which you may already be getting at this moment in time, it doesn’t mean that you’re not getting them, it’s just that you might be able to do so in a more in a in an easier way here, easier, maybe Quicker, quicker as well. So today, I am going to talk to you about what’s the project, the skills needed, the benefits for SEO and the benefits for yourselves.
First things first, what’s a project? Because what happens with words, and I’m drawing on my linguistics background, is that we tend to use the in a, you know, ambiguous way. Yeah. So we tend to call project something which is not a project is for lack of a better word to at the moment in time. And I’ve heard it at all times seems like marketing, philosophy, etc, etc. But you didn’t know that philosophy was a technical term, but it is, you relate. So I am aiming here, as I’m giving you the, the more or less precise definition of that.
So the PMI Institute, which is one of the institutions that look after project management and project managers who say that it’s a temporary endeavour, undertaken to create a unique service or results, the end of it. Every single projects has the specific elements of it objectives, scope, resources, timing, and costs. All of them are very well defined and tied up at the very beginning of every single project. And that is very important, because otherwise is, well, managing a project can be absolutely chaotic, if anything, kind of falls, falls in between cracks, etc, etc. Anything that is out of scope, everything which is not set up on the scope at the very beginning of the project is not part of the project, right, it can be done later, but not as part of this project.
And this is something I really, really want you to take away from this one from from today. Just because it’s going to help you managing your workload a bit better. So managing a project is the use of a specific knowledge or skill set framework, just to deliver something of value. And this is really important because in marketing, we deliver something of value. However, what is valuable to you is not going to be vulnerable to that director I was talking about earlier who steps out of his words of their words to, to come to you and take an interest in your work.
So that you’re going to see your project. And this is my own definition, by the way, is pretty much the same thing. It’s just that what we do is that we take away a little bit of this anxiety that we actually feel when we start when we start a project. And also we actually make it with greater reliability, we achieve our objectives with much more reliability. And this is because every single project has a degree of uncertainty. So it’s all about making sure that you actually do the project, actually your objective job objectives in with less with more centred certainty, right? Less uncertainty.
Every single project has phases. Yeah. And contrary to what most people tend to think planning is not the first one. The first one is initiation, which is where, which is when we define or identify a business need, and figure out how best to go about meeting that need. Yeah, we read ideas in here. We have we carry out visible visibility tasks, visibility tests, etc, cetera. Once we have all that all wealth tied up, we start to plan it out. Yeah, because we’ve got something to plan out. Only then only at that moment in time. And planning something out means making sure that there is a roadmap. But also, we plan for resources and resources include human resources.
stuff, skill set that you might need, and that you don’t have. Or maybe you don’t have the time to, to deliver that. equipments and budget really, really important. We also think about timing, yeah, when we are going to be able to deliver that project by that, and that is one of the most difficult things to do. Because every single circumstance and projects are unique. Something else that we think about is risk. We to undertake a risk assessment.
And we plan for every single risk that can happen. So for example, what happens if we need to pause the project? Yeah. What happens if somebody leaves the team, what happens if something else happens to you, you just kind of, in your own personal circumstance, at that moment in time, think about what happens and how you can actually tackle. The most fun is the execution phase. It definitely is the most fun, but it’s quite an important one, because no great idea is a great idea without a good execution.
So you need to execute a great idea. But otherwise, it’s just something up in the air. During this phase, the project manager may actually redirect to the project, think about when you’ve got a huge enterprise website audit. And these, these website has a subdomain, which might be a blog, and that blog has not been updated since 2016. It’s like I’ve seen recently, some of them. I don’t know maybe it’s dependencies, there may be problems with that blog, there might be problems with that subdomain, things that work, might actually take a little bit longer to test or to, to check and maybe it’s not worth going so much deeper into that subdomain, you might actually leave that out for later out of this project is carried out for at a later stage.
Yeah, that can be that can be an option. We also monitor the performance of every project. And we don’t do it in the same way, as we do the performance monitoring for SEO or digital behaviour, what we do is we think about what we are going to be monitoring at the very beginning. And when we apply the, the the actual, the actual metrics, those metrics can be things like cost versus effort, or how well we are placed to deliver the project in time.
Yeah, because sometimes we actually say we are going to be delivering a project within three months, but maybe, but maybe we are able to delivery before or, or maybe we are going to be delivering later on, which we need to avoid at all costs. Now, the project closure is the last party, I think most involved phase within a project. So this is where we actually sit back. as project managers we sit back, think about what has happened during these projects, and through these, all these all these times you have been working together with your team, what kind of things you will need to do later, perhaps next steps, any issues that you have sorted out any other issues that you may not have been able to sort it out to sort out.
So you think about all this. And then also there’s the admin tasks, such as holding the brief meetings, and projects, project documentation, cetera, et cetera. Every single project is another difference, it really is very different, you have to be able to apply every single project to your own circumstance, because it’s not the same as working for Coca Cola and running a project there and working for an SME, right? Or for a FinTech or for a startup. But what we know for a fact that is not a project is account management.
So everything that the county managers do, for example, at marketing agencies, is is about making sure that their clients are happy. So they are solely solely dedicated to that, whereas project manager is solely dedicated to achieving the project delivering that project achieving that objective, thus how they do those tasks are not a project Definitely not. Remember when I said at the very beginning that you needed to think about the start the project what you need to do, and how you need to do it, you need to make sure that everything is very well defined at the very beginning, because otherwise becomes chaotic, and it does have a very bad reflection on yourselves as professionals.
And now, I keep talking about project managers, they are the ones who put the pieces of the puzzle together, the their role is actually quite involved is making sure that everything and everyone is working within the same barrel in the same direction. And they are motivated to do so, because otherwise you will not be able to achieve the project or the objective of the project. Yeah. Their role is no small whatsoever. So they do absolutely everything from visibility tasks at the very beginning. So for example, minimal viable products, lean methodology is visibility tasks are can be fought about some visibility task. They managed communications, which is a very important part of this, of managing a project.
They manage risks, they manage the team that redirects the project when necessary, etc, etc. It’s rather a complex. And as project managers, we need to make sure that everyone understands what it involves what functional project involves, particularly people who are outside the project team. Yeah, other stakeholders and other departments whose job is not perhaps looking after your work or they just don’t have to know what you do. But the what you do actually touches upon their own work. And they need to understand how complicated it is.
They also choose a productivity tool such as slack or Asana or score cetera, et cetera. Now, you need to be aware what is out there in the market, because in sometimes in job descriptions, you you get things like familiarity with notion or half use Zoho for a number of years, etc, etc. JIRA is a very popular one tier project manager. So, so choose the methodology. And the methodology in this is really important is not chosen according to facts, no fashion thinking. So, the fact that lean methodology or hybrid methodology may be fashionable, does not mean that you need to use them.
Yeah. Project Manager normally sits back as well and thinks about what needs to be achieved, the size of the project, the size of the ATM, the size of the company, and a couple of other things as well, just to define what best to help us to do and in this case, this graph from Mr. Batiste, which is a website which if you don’t know it, you should definitely take a look. And perhaps Tagalog membership is for statistics, which you can use for marketing purposes.
This graph is from thing a couple of years, I don’t really think things will have changed so much with the pandemic at all. And I just wanted to make sure that you understand, predictive is the is another word for waterfall, right, I almost forgot the term waterfall, which is the one of the most as you can see one of the most methodologies used in the world, not just by marketers, but by IT project managers who are engineers, etc, etc.
People do use other approaches, approaches, as you can see agile or hybrid, which may be very good for specific projects. But when you have, for example, a project such as website migration, you definitely don’t want to use a hybrid or an agile approach because you don’t want to have any opinions around you want to make sure you want to make sure that you actually tackle the high level of uncertainty that our website migration project has have with a waterfall methodology.
The skills needed definitely if you haven’t dealt so far organisational 110% really important that you are very organised people. If you are not by nature, you will need to develop that side of things. Yeah, communication is limited. portlets as well, because communication comes with resilience actually, is very important because you need to make sure people understand what you are doing and why you’re doing it, and why you are going to be able to deliver.
Yeah. And there have been so many times when people just come to you and say, Well, I just don’t understand what you’re doing. Sometimes you need to think about who you’re communicating with, what you’re communicating with them. When Yeah, and how they are they use you can we can use graphics, I will talk about them later on, such as, for example, Gantt charts, or decision making trees or decision making flows, Cetera cetera. Timekeeping is really important, because think about dependencies.
So if you see part of your project is content production, you can’t definitely do content production with without a without keyword research. And if you don’t deliver pure research, by the time established or agreed upon, then maybe content production cannot start when it should. And then this may delay things, what to avoid or how to avoid having headaches? Well, these are most of the things that I have come across during my career, some of them have experienced some others I have seen other people experiencing around me, I think the most important one is probably lack of communication.
And this is when I said earlier, you need to be able to communicate effectively and sometimes communicating effectively, is just thinking outside the box, how best to reach out to that manager at another department who is a snort Hunter, who should be looking after bits and pieces of your work perhaps or providing you with this and that information, but he can’t do it because he literally can’t do it. And maybe they don’t even know what you’re doing.
Or you might have explained it. So many times or produced a lovely concise report, which probably many people have skimmed through to be perfectly honest rather than read properly. So, you might have to stay there and explain very calmly, what you have done. Some examples of graphics that you can use to help you to this sense are these ones.
These one on the left hand side is a decision making tree decision cloud which was done by a leader and you will have you have the the URL address and again, this is just to to deal with migrations, but you can use these kinds of things this kind of graphics just to show your team why you are redirecting a project for example, why you are you have decided to do XY set up the flowchart exactly the same thing or you can do a visualisation of your of the roadmap which is very very useful for your manager for example to just take a look at and see at a glance what exactly it is that you are doing and where you are with your project not knowing the business is really really bad because let’s be honest,
we can’t do keyword research nor anything really if we don’t know what the business does company culture processes etc etc yet just make sure you understand very well motivations, Vision etc etc losing sight of a specific very specific objectives as they had been set up at the very beginning is a very common issue and you need to avoid at all times because there are so many things so many aspects that you may I might undertake that are so nice to do.
But maybe they are not useful for you to understand what exactly what exactly you need to do you know, you know, for example, we know that keyword research is struggling important. But sometimes when we are doing certain projects, keyword research by not be at that moment in time as important, but we can actually pencil it and say well, next steps are Yeah, for example is actually not yet so I’m thinking starting a website audience do not carry website research or content analysis, but rather is something that stems out of that, that website audit. And those would be the next steps to take. Not being assertive, is something that if you don’t know how to do you need to develop at all times.
This is, this is a synonym of getting a thick skin. Sometimes people will come to you and say, What the heck are you doing? They know already, because we have produced your report, you have done your meetings, etc, etc. But, but maybe they just don’t remember they don’t understand. And now I have five minutes late and have realised that they don’t know what you’re doing. But just breathe and explain calmly and firmly what you’re doing, you only will have to do that once only once, probably. And then later on, they will be able to leave you alone and to your to your work and smile, always smile. In fact, a good or bad project normally, is to do with how well you’ll have been able to avoid all the bad stuff and have just mentioned.
Yeah, something that I really want to mention here is that if projects are too quick, perhaps they are not projects of all right, projects by nature tend to be slightly lower, the origin is longer than two days or two weeks. And also each project is unique and should be unique. Because the objectives tend to be unique. Otherwise, there might be a an organisational problem, which is not your your, your issue, rarely. But a project that was undertaken before, and a project that was undertaken perhaps later, or will be undertaken later by yourself or somebody else. Or not the same as the projects, that the project that you are running at this moment in time.
Yeah, they are unique. The benefits for a CEO are, wow, amazing, the productivity is a lot higher, and you don’t even realise it, but you have everything very well tied up, and you deliver it because you feel comfortable within that framework. And in this way, you produce more. You don’t We don’t do siloed work, that is something that you really need to just think about, you can print it and then reframe it and you have the up on the war is very important that you understand that we don’t do tight at work. And most of the times in this project, you will be managing different actors, people perhaps not reporting to you directly, but maybe part of your own projects, which you weren’t running. And they may be from different departments, different skill sets, different relationships within other with other departments, etc, etc. So it’s an opportunity, a golden opportunity for you to understand how other people work within your company.
It also avoids execution issues or this playground, school five, so why should we in the end, why should we in that whether everything is really well tied up the very beginning, and if everybody is not on board, then you shouldn’t have them on the project. And then your work is also taking more seriously because I don’t know if you’re aware, but maybe many departments at the very beginning of the year are required to produce a particular paper where they set up their objectives for the rest of the year. So if you produce produce a project charter or project documentation of any time, they will understand that it’s a language that they will be able to understand.
So think about that with this is also communication. And in fact, this is this is a the SEO set of SEO survey which was carried out last year and it was published by Kelly Walsh late last year where one of the issues identified was exactly that was the fact that approvals relationships within departments internal relationships, internal buy in cetera cetera, were certainly one of the biggest problems. EMS I think I feel a bit this is my experience managing a project and producing project documentation and communicating the project correctly can be very, very useful to avoid or to minimise these kinds of problems, because we don’t have, I mean, we have so many problems in our workplace, we don’t want anymore to weigh the benefits for you.
Well, if project management, money management, is of benefit to your work is going to be of benefit to your own, to your to yourself to your career, just think about how much more easily you’re going to be able to deliver, internal buying cetera, et cetera, none of these things, I mean, project management is not a bullet, silver bullet, is something that’s going to help you, but it’s not going to be a silver bullet. So don’t take it as that. However, the possibilities, the odds that that you are actually delivering more easily that you are advancing in your career, that you raise your internal profile cetera, et cetera.
And at some much higher, yeah, think about this. So I’m finishing now, my main takeaways. So first of all, managing a project, well can take up some of that anxiety that you might have remember, the very beginning, I was asking you to think about one time, when you thought, Oh, my God, I’m not delivering this project. This is too big for me. Yeah, this is when this is when you can revisit that and think, oh, maybe maybe I could have done this.
Good luck done that. Yeah. And always cover your back, always in writing. And it needs to be on a scope. Budgets also need to meet a business need 100%. Otherwise, there’s no need. So for example, just to give you an example, an extreme one, if you’re an engineer, there’s an area, there’s, you’re having tasks, you build a bridge somewhere, maybe in that area, there is no river, there is no cliff, there’s nothing. So there’s no, there’s no reason for you to build a bridge guide. So if there’s not a business need that is that is not a business needs, then why carrying out a project like that.
And also your skills are transferable from project to project and from company to company. And I have been seeing project management on job descriptions over the past at least seven, eight years. Yeah. So think about this. Think about the benefits again. And think about the fact that the project economy, which is how the PMI calls, it is here to stay. It definitely is we are just a, we just have to think about the the amount of money that productivity tools are being being given. Here are some resources, I can share the screen this this deck with you. And this is me. Thank you so much.
Chima Mmeje 32:58
Once it does brilliance, that was brilliant. That was brilliant. Yes, I think I think it’s something that a lot of people established as you struggle with managing projects, but not just mostly has to do with how do I put this managing project when working with other teams?
Basically, that’s one of the one of the biggest things that I see as an issue, managing projects when you work with other teams. So just generally, what advice would you give for people who are just coming in, into SEO? And then they have to collaborate with other teams and then do like cross functional collaborations? What kind of what kind of advice would you give to them?
Montse Cano 33:46
Oh, yeah, definitely. That is, that is a big project. Because sometimes I keep thinking, I keep saying that we don’t do siloed work. But sometimes we are siloed within our own company. So make yourself by just have well known for the right reasons, right? Get your boss and the top level managers on your side at all times. You can you can, you can sit down and think about what project is exactly that you actually are going to undertake the business needs cetera, et cetera, I believe I have been talking about just now and then present it to your boss and to another manager asking for their collaboration. You’re not asking them to do their job.
You’re not asking them to assist me to attend to meetings nor anything, you’re not asking them to assist in anything. Just make sure that they understand that you need x y Zed from them perhaps from your teams, because maybe those managers do you have a content writer? Yeah. Or they have a PPC person or the lawyer depends on the kind of project that you are running because if it is a digitisation project whereas he always also included, you might actually need other skill sets here. Or you might need a technical manager or maybe you need a Google analytics person on site and analyst. Yeah. So you might just make sure that you get everybody on your site at the very beginning. And that will save you a lot of time. I learned that the hard way.
Chima Mmeje 35:26
Yeah, that’s, that’s really good advice. Because the more quickly you can get yourself known, not just within your team, but with all of the other things I think you’re going to be collaborating with, the easier is going to be for you to work with the same. So yes, really good advice. All right. It does anyone have any questions for Monday? I think we’re in the question pod. Now, if nobody has any questions, I don’t think we have any questions. I think it was very clear. Yes. Everything you said was very, very clear. I must say thank you so much for joining us. This has been very informative. Thank you so much for joining us.
Unknown Speaker 36:05
Now. Thank you very much.
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