By OLIVER ANDREWS
5 Tips to Help You Manage Up as an SEO Associate
5 Tips to Help You Manage Up as an SEO Associate
The ownership and levels of responsibility often vary when it comes to the supporting role in any digital marketing agency. On many occasions, playing the SEO supporting role plays a critical role in encouraging people to take on ownership of many tasks and challenges that would have otherwise been set aside for Account Managers in any other agency. As an SEO Associate, you need to be challenged to find ways you can manage up and find a place in managerial roles.
What does ‘manage up’ mean?
To ‘manage up’ essentially means to not only create a communicative but also a productive working relationship, between you and the manager. In another person’s perspective, it could easily mean working to make sure that your manager’s job becomes easier. However, you should do this by ensuring that you establish a smooth communication line and an effective working style so that both you benefit from it.
Benefits of Managing Up
Choosing to use these important tips to manage up, you will be:
- Establishing a level of trust.
- Increasing your ownership.
- Boosting your level of productivity.
- allowing yourself to step up and into the manager role.
Managing Up as an SEO Associate
The process of managing up as an SEO Associate is something you learn every day. As an Associate, you need to build new relationships daily, especially with account managers and at the same time onboard new accounts. Therefore, to manage up, there are a few crucial ways you need to learn.
1. Bring suggestions and ideas to the table
When you are in meetings with your manager, find ways to offer ideas and suggestions that can boost project performance or fix an issue. This is when you can rope in a tactic you once saw work somewhere or use industry-related news to help. You might just provide an idea that could be the catalyst for the success of the next project. Sometimes your ideas may not be implemented but your effort and thought will be recognised.
2. Open a line of communication
Nothing beats an effective two-way communication. For purposes of facilitating an open line of communication, some few things can help with that:
- Roadblocks: If you discover that there are any roadblocks in your channels of communication, always make sure that you inform your manager as soon as possible and work your way through it together.
- Strengths and weaknesses: As a normal human being, it is natural that there are those areas that you are excel in and there are those that you struggle too. Do this by keeping your manager in the know of the areas that you are keen on achieving some growth.
- Bandwidth: In case you feel like your schedule is swamped for that week, especially because they may not have a clue or an idea about your other projects, come up with a dashboard or spreadsheet. These tools will help you layout your week’s biggest priorities then loop in your manager.
Some of these tips will mutually benefit you and your manager because an open communication line helps your Account Manager find out ways to help find the right direction in your career.
3. Always stay up-to-date on projects
As an SEO Associate, it is in your best interest to keep an eye out for any spikes or dips in the performance of projects. This entails alerting red flags and reporting every win to the managers. It helps in establishing trust and goes a long way in opening up opportunities that you jolt you into taking ownership. Staying updated involves:
- Monitoring the SEO-related updates.
- Creating alerts to inform you of nay leaps in the industry’s projects.
- Always checking the statuses of deliverables and tasks.
- Keeping an eye out for the keyword performance and overall traffic daily.
Even as you monitor what goes on in the industry, ensure that you always take on threads and tasks that you are fully confident about handling. This helps in making your manager recognise just how proactive you are.
4. Look out for mistakes before your manager
You can do this by saving copies of your work with enough feedback and create checklists to weed out frequent errors. The checklist will help in auditing mistakes, which will help save yourself and the manager too some time that the manager could have used to crack down the errors.
5. As much as you ask questions, be one to offer answers too
If you are unfamiliar with any process or task, it always good practice to ask good questions. Just ensure that you don’t consistently ask questions and not proposing or offering answers. If not, you might seem not at all solution-oriented. Arming yourself with confident answers just as your questions shows that you put in thought and effort.
