I’m not going all political here, but bear with me for a second. The United States government was set up with three branches of government, each with their own authority and power: Presidency, Congress and the Courts (Executive, Legislative, Judicial, if you want to get technical about it). It’s a great model, provided that all three both exercise and stay within their given power. Things start going bad when one oversteps and the other does nothing to rein it in.
So what does this have to do with SEO? Put simply, SEO works best when there is a similar distinctions in place.
There are many components to SEO: Site Architecture, Keyword Optimization, Troubleshooting and review. Not all of these must be handled by separate entities (people), but maintaining a balance of power somewhere in there is always beneficial to the success of the overall campaign.
Let’s take content for example. The idea of a proofreader is well-established, and certainly applies here, but SEO requires more than simple proofing for grammer and typos.
When a page of content is being optimized, there are two primary functions going on. The first is to optimize the content for topic/keywords. I’m not talking about counting keywords or looking at keyword density, but simply writing great content that fully covers the intended topic so that both the reader and the search engines are satisfied.
But the other aspect of that is the actual messaging of the page. Beyond considering the topical authority of the content, the page also has to communicate a particular message to the reader. Every page must have a purpose beyond achieving top rankings. It must provide the visitor with needed information and propel the visitor to take a next step.
Optimized content only does half the job. If the reader is not brought into a journey of sorts through a conversion process, the content, ultimately, has failed, regardless of how informative it is. No, not every visitor will be inclined to take that journey, but no one will if the messaging isn’t right.
And that’s where the separation of powers comes into play in the content aspect of SEO. One person should review the content for keyword/topical authority, and another should be focused on the overall messaging. And similar to how Congress and the Senate come together with similar bills for reconciliation, the goals of these two focuses must merge together into a single document.
One person focused on both may tend to favor one over the other. But if you have two separate people, each looking at the content with an eye for something different, that allows the best of both to come together into a single piece of extraordinary content.