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Today we’re talking about a much-neglected aspect of search: how people work together. Recently I was on a Google hangout sponsored by the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO). The focus of the conversation was making site search more effective. As you’d expect, when you get a lot of those professionals together, we talked a lot about technology, and tools, and techniques — but didn’t spend a lot of time on one element that I think is really important, and that is the people element. For mid-market and large enterprise companies, that’s often an organizational discussion.

There are generally four main components to search within large companies. There’s folks doing external search, that’s the organic and paid element. Then there are folks doing website search, that’s the business perspective. Add to that two technology teams, supporting each of them. As many of you know, search internally and search externally are very close cousins. Usually the things that you do to make internal search better, make external search better.

So what I want to encourage organizations to do is create the management systems that more tightly integrate all four of these elements. Bring the two business teams together, the ones focused on internal and external search, as well as the IT teams together. Even if for no other reason than, say, content optimization — low hanging fruit. Internal teams are going to want better product content so that they can get better relevancy rankings. External teams are going to benefit from that as well because better product content is going to rank better in Google. There are lots of opportunities, and content is just one example.

What’s important is creating the right environment for that kind of collaboration. Creating the right management system is an important critical success factor for most teams working on search both internally and externally at large companies. Best of luck on improving your search results!