Search is one of the big ways to get answers on the intranet. Navigation is the other way. Both must work if you want your intranet to be a real efficiency-enchancing bussiness tool.
Therefore, when you have an intranet team with more than one member, you should concider making one member in the team “the SEO specialist”, at least part-time.
What should the intranet SEO specialist do? The Intranet Governance Game gives the answer.
Operations/daily work
- Make sure the search engine has the right editor’s choices/best bets
- Make sure the content pages have the right metadata
- Make sure the search engine has the right synonymes
- Have contact with the search engine provider
- Make sure the global search box and the search results page deliver a good end-user experience (probably together with your organization’s GUI/UX expert)
- Make sure the advances search functionality delivers a good end-user experience (probably together with your organization’s GUI/UX expert)
Development
- Gather data about how search is used
- Analyse how search is used and give recommendations for changes
- Decide what to change/develop in the seach solution (probably together with the intranet product manager + intranet owner)
- Order changes in the search solution from the search engine provider (probably together with the intranet product manager)
The SEO specialist should work with this at least one day/week, preferably more. The SEO role is perfect as a “transverse role”, shared between the intranet team and the external web team. Becoming a great SEO specialist requires time, commitment, and experience. You could appoint an ordinary team colleague (who, over time, will learn), but the ideal way would be to hire someone with SEO as a university degree/profession and let the person have time enough to follow this checklist.
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Jesper Bylund – Intranet Manager 