The Enterprise AEO CoE Playbook: Conductor’s Approach

How to build a center of excellence

At first, you may look at the title of this and say to yourself: How hard can this be?

Or maybe you’re reading this because, despite your best efforts, it’s just not happening.

When you think about top-performing AEO/SEO and digital marketing organizations, it really comes down to one main thing: getting everyone talking to each other.

Like getting the folks running AEO/SEO to talk to the content team and the technical team, and in turn get those teams to talk to one another, eventually creating an airtight workflow where everything is happening seamlessly.

It’s deceptively simple, but due largely to the lack of internal knowledge and education that most organizations have around AEO/SEO and other digital marketing team activities, this should be viewed more as a transformational effort vs. a simple communication breakdown, especially with the hot new topic (and chaos) of AI.

AEO/SEO has transformed from a singular profession into a company-wide practice where the folks that are responsible for AEO/SEO have become internal educators and evangelists, spending time on keeping other groups up to speed on best practices and installing foundational processes vs. pushing buttons and writing title tags.

The simple truth is that the best AEO/SEO campaigns in the world are mechanical and rely on technology, automation (yes, including AI), and education. Once these principles are instilled in your organization, you can create efficiencies beyond your wildest dreams, test, learn, and execute faster, and have confidence that the system you created will work in perpetuity and allow different players to enter and exit seamlessly.

This comprehensive eBook is meant to lay out Conductor’s approach to helping organizations achieve this type of transformation.

What are the different kinds of AEO/SEO CoEs

There are plenty of different types of centers of excellence, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Here are some examples of the CoEs you might consider.

• Centralized: One core team drives strategy, tools, and standards for the entire org.
• Hub & Spoke: A central hub governs, while spoke teams in business units execute locally.
• Embedded: AEO/SEO experts are embedded within other departments to ensure alignment.
• Virtual: A cross-functional team collaborates without a formal reporting structure.

The type of CoE that works best will be entirely dependent on your organization, and may evolve into a different structure type over time. However, no matter the type, the steps below remain the same.

How do I build my own CoE?

When it comes to building a center of excellence, it’s unfortunately a bigger lift than just deciding you need one and getting on your way. It’s a multi-step process that requires collaboration from teams across your organization and buy-in from leadership. When you’re getting started on your CoE journey, follow these seven steps to ensure you’re on the right track.

1. Educate leadership to secure buy-in
2. Identify key players
3. Set expectations
4. Create the plan
5. Standardize reporting
6. Continued education & support
7. Bring it all together

Step 1: Educate leadership to secure buy-in

Before you do anything, you have to make sure the folks who sign the checks are on board with it. Folks are always eager to get right into doing “stuff” so they feel things are moving forward, but I promise you that even if you put the greatest plan in history together, if the powers that be don’t know what you’re talking about or why you’re talking about it, you might as well frame the plan and put it on a wall because that’s as far as it will go.

Educating leaders across all the pertinent groups (and at times, some random individuals across the org that are involved for various reasons) needs to be your first stop.

What you need to show them

This part is actually easier than you think, and most tend to overthink it. You have to remember that executives and leaders do not care about how many title tags you will write or how many backlinks you think this will gain. They simply do not have time. You have to elevate your talk to meet them where they’re at and only get into the weeds if you are asked to.

Your presentation or discussion should cover the following:

• Tell them the why: Be bold, kid! This is the chance to lay out the vision of why this effort needs to be funded and resourced. Tell them the problems that currently exist across the organization that are negatively impacting the AEO/SEO program and how this effort can help streamline, create efficiencies, and drive better performance.
• Highlight bad processes, not people: I cannot stress this point enough: this is not a finger-pointing presentation. Your only job is to highlight processes/areas that you see an opportunity for improvement, you will gain nothing by saying Keith’s process stinks and you want to fix it. Your goal here is to get leaders on board with making things easier and more efficient for these teams and everything should be framed as an opportunity, not a problem.
• Tell them the high-level how: We’ll get more into the specifics on this below, but this is where you give them the high-level plan of attack. What groups need to be involved, what process changes you are considering, how long do you think this will take, what technologies are necessary, etc. Don’t be shy and be open that these are the major parts of the plan and that you will deliver the specifics once everyone is in agreement to do it, and this is simply to gain buy-in for the effort before any resources are spent too deeply on it.
• Present the ideal state & what that could mean for the business: The question is going to come up so you should come prepared with some preliminary ROI for the effort. First, talk about the groups working together with a shared technology foundation.

This is a great segue into what we call Agility Metrics, which measure instances where you are not necessarily selling more traffic and revenue, not directly anyway, you are selling agility and efficiency.

Things to consider:

• Content process improvements
  • Research is done faster by x
  • Content is created faster by x
  • Content is updated faster by x
• Technical process improvements
  • Changes happen every x sprint
  • # of technical changes per spring increased by x
  • We now monitor and have alerts set for x amount of issues
• Reporting process improvements
  • We now show weekly, monthly, and quarterly views vs. only quarterly
  • X amount of shareholders now receive a report every x
  • We now have access to x data

The goal here is to paint a picture that by creating organizational alignment and efficiency, we will be able to test, learn, and execute faster which will lead to better performance overall. As discussed earlier, the best AEO/SEO campaigns in the world are mechanical and require buy-in from across an organization, not just a few disparate parts. (Which is why implementing “time to act” metrics of measurement can help drive individual contributor buy-in!)

Now that you know what to put into your presentation, let’s talk about the people you are going to have to present it to. One thing to note is that you must prepare to give this presentation multiple times. If you can get everyone in one room at once, that’s great, but realistically, you are probably going to be giving this presentation at least three times with all of the major stakeholders.

Four groups typically exist in this situation, and they all come with different challenges and questions that you’re going to have to answer.

Executive leadership

This effort is large in scale, so be prepared for executive leadership to take notice and interest in this. This is a good thing; lean into it and be succinct and confident with them. Don’t get into the weeds unless asked.

Example questions you may (aka probably will) be asked:

Content leadership

This is one of the key teams you need to buy in and be on board with because you are asking them to change their processes which is not an easy task. Be empathetic to this and make sure to hit on the message that you want to make their team's jobs easier, as well as highlight their performance to the organization more broadly. What type of leader would they be if they said no to that, right?

Example questions you will likely be asked:

Dev leadership

This is going to be the most difficult conversation you will face during this process because you are going to be asking for room in the sprint schedule specifically for AEO/SEO-related activities. While this doesn’t sound like a big deal, many organizations will not include projects like this in sprints without a business case, which you will not be providing.

You have to make this leader understand that a lot of the things you are suggesting are table stakes and need to be done regardless of whether they will impact performance directly. Also, lean on the fact that part of this process is adopting a technology that monitors the site in real-time, which can be utilized for things other than AEO/SEO. This will pique their interest.

Example questions you will likely be asked:

Other contributors

These people probably won’t be part of this for you, but I have seen them come into play and even if they don’t have anything to do with what you’re trying to accomplish, they certainly can stand in your way and you need to get them on board. This may be a consultant, a board member, etc.

Their questions will be a flavor of what the other groups will be asking you but be prepared for anything, especially if they really don’t understand the industry.

Step 2: Identify your key players

Congratulations, you’ve gotten buy-in; now you have to find people to come along for the ride. You can have the greatest plan in the world but if you don’t have the right people within your organization to help you execute on it you might as well not even start.

Appoint a captain for each group

All of the leaders you just convinced of this project aren’t going to be the folks that actually do anything, so you will need to identify someone in each organization to be their group's representative. While you will wind up working with multiple people across the group, you need a captain to steer that ship and help their team stay on course. Their responsibilities:

• Helping you understand their group: Knowing how a group currently operates will help you understand how to best get your ideas across to them. This person can be your personal insider and help you gain buy-in as the changes start to roll out.
• Holding their group accountable: Just because this person raised their hand (or had their hand raised for them) doesn’t mean they don’t hold any responsibility for their group's success. This individual needs to make sure that folks are following the processes, using the technology, and paying attention to/understanding the reporting that is being sent to them. While you are going to be moving across each of the groups, making sure everything is moving, you are going to need this support from this individual to make it all come together.
• Fielding & aggregating questions: Questions are going to come in and a lot of them are going to be similar and this person can help you filter and aggregate them so you can get answers to folks quicker. Ultimately the goal would be for this person to be able to field the questions but that will happen naturally over time as they learn/you teach them.
• Collecting feedback: The group is going to have feedback with how things are going, some good, some bad. I would argue the bad feedback is more important but all feedback is good and it is this individual's responsibility to collect that feedback and bring it back to you so you can properly adjust and/or address concerns.

Step 3: Set clear expectations

This step is critical for everyone’s sake, including your own.

Now that you have buy-in and understand the key players, you have to make sure everyone understands what is possible and the timelines associated with it. You can easily sink the entire project by not setting the proper expectations and ensuring everyone understands that this isn’t a few emails that are going to be sent, but rather an ongoing process of education, enablement, and support.

Here’s what everyone needs to understand:

• The vision: This is reiterating the why to the larger group to make sure that everyone understands the point of doing all of this. This is something that you have to constantly remind folks of and should be the guiding light to the entire effort.
• Timelines: Make sure everyone involved understands the best-case and worst-case scenarios when it comes to your timelines. Typically, projects like this take at least 2 years but can also take longer to get working the way you want them to, depending on the size of your organization. Make sure everyone knows that and, more importantly, that these timelines are dependent on the support and commitment they give to you.
• Resources: Who is going to be involved and how much of their time it is going to take. This effort is also going to include rethinking some folks' roles/time (and is a great opportunity for them, which you should promote) as you’ll need someone from each group to work directly with to help you understand the in’s and out’s of each.
• Technology needs: None of this works without a technology as the foundation, while people are driving and maintaining the process, technology enables it and is the common central point and language everyone is using.
• What ROI we’re focusing on: One point that you will have to continue to drive home is that this is an efficiency, governance, and process effort, and that’s how everyone should be looking at it. If done correctly, in time, this will create cost savings and drive long-term performance, but you cannot let short-term pressures sneak their way into this, or corners will start to get cut. There will be work going on outside of this project that will drive short-term performance goals, make sure they recognize the difference and what the point of this effort is.

Step 4: Formulating the plan

If you’ve made it this far that means you now have the opportunity to make your vision a reality and start to get this process moving. Below I am going to outline what I believe is the ideal way that this program should look and work. Your program may only include some of these depending on the size and makeup of your organization, but all things below should be considered.

Philosophies to live by

We have found that the two philosophies below can help bring folks together during a process like this, and it’s good to have a north star that everyone is marching towards.

• Adopting an “always on” mentality: The first thing that you should be focusing on is teaching your organization to adopt an “always on” mentality. What does that mean? It’s a philosophy built on the understanding that your site is always on, and your AEO/SEO campaign is always on, so you should build a process and system that is also always on.

I believe this is important for folks to understand as they should feel ownership over their piece of the process (no matter how big or small) and ensure they don’t slow it down. For the process to be always on, they have to make sure that they follow the process and keep it moving. This is a philosophy that is easy to grasp, but also can unite the teams as you go through this process.

• Agility drives performance: At the core of what we’re trying to do is create agility within the organization so that we can test, learn, move, implement, and get results faster. While this effort is not focused specifically on performance, I have found over my years of doing this that companies that move faster, win faster.
• Technology is the foundation of your success: Companies that utilize technology are 10x more likely to be successful than those that do things manually. The word “manually” is our largest enemy here, and there are going to be folks who are tough to convince to allow technology to handle certain things, but I promise you, you will get them there once they see how much easier it makes their jobs. Teaching folks how to use the technology needs to come before you introduce process changes, as it will be easier for folks to handle them separately.

The plan involves walking various teams through various demos and workflows. If teaching and demoing workflows feels foreign to you, you’re not alone! The most important thing to remember is: there is no perfect demo, there is only the demo that is *perfect* for that team. Speak their language, and tie the actions to the things that the team you’re teaching cares most about.

Below, I will walk through the most important ways to utilize technology and train each team on it.

Content teams

These folks are going to be mainly focused on and responsible for the following areas, and each should be broken out into its own session:

• Session 1: Topic Research
• Session 2: Content creation
• Session 3: Content updates

Your goal: Make it as easy for them as possible to understand how the features work and only focus on the things they need to do (top 3 if possible). Use real-world examples for each area so it’s easy for them to visualize.

Session 1: Content ideation & Topic research

The message here is that they shouldn’t be picking topics out of thin air and writing things just because they saw it on another site, or because it’s a topic that came up in an internal planning meeting.

Regardless of if this is the case or not at your organization, you must impart the importance of properly researching topics and showing off how easy it is.

To ensure stickiness, we should consider how to frame the importance to each team. For the content team: of course, they want more people to find their great, helpful content! Knowing how people are searching makes it easier for them to actually find it. (And you’re going to show them just how easy it is to find that out.)

Research Pt. 1

• Conductor feature to focus on:
  • Research: Topic
• What to teach them: I implore you to keep this as simple as possible and only teach them the three things they need to do with the feature at first. You can always go deeper in future sessions.

“Pick a topic and put it into the search bar.”

• Overview tab: Monthly search interest
• Overview tab: People Also Ask
• Related keywords tab: How to filter & sort

If they understand these three areas of Explorer, they will be able to do effective keyword research at any skill level, and it is extremely approachable. Once they see how easy this is, it will start to build their confidence that they can indeed do this, and they will also see how much time it can save them.

Research Pt. 2

• Conductor feature to focus on:
  • AI Topic Maps
• What to teach them: This is a different flavor of the above as it’s bigger picture thinking about increasing their overall coverage within a topic cluster that already exists on the site. The goal here is to teach them how to identify areas of weakness or gaps within a topic cluster to create or optimize content for.

“What areas/details within a particular topic are we weak or invisible in?”

• Feature intro: By visualizing your site the way AI sees it, we can uncover topic opportunities to strengthen our overall topic authority
• Topic opportunity: Uncover which topics have gaps, and how to dive into the opportunities
• New content or optimization opportunity: What to do to address identified gaps

When you are teaching folks about this feature make sure they understand what the bubbles represent on the map as this will help them with their optimization efforts. The workflow here is pretty straightforward, but it can be overwhelming at first, so make sure to keep it very simple to start and then you can dive in deeper in later sessions.

Session 2: Content creation

Now that the group understands how to research topics and pick keywords, it’s time to get into actually creating content.

Pre-Work: Before this session, it’s helpful to have already set up the Content Profiles, or have prompted this team to come to the session with Tone, Voice, and Style information.

Create draft

• Conductor feature to focus on
  • Writing Assistant
• What to teach them: When you first learned SEO, you were probably introduced to Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary keywords. This foundational concept is still critical, but we now need to think about it in the context of modern search behavior. AI-powered search is shifting from broad topics to personalized, specific queries. To help folks embrace this shift while still anchoring to SEO “101”, here is how we can guide them:

“Map three keywords to a page to capture its general theme. You don’t need to have every keyword on the page to rank for them all. Think about the primary topic of the page and then add in additional, more specific supporting keywords.”

Using AI: The message here is that AI is not bad and not here to take their jobs, but instead, to enhance them. Lean into this and make sure you reiterate that it’s fine to start a piece of content with AI and then have a human edit it. This is key to creating agility in your content creation process.

It's also important to teach the group that AI-generated content is not inherently bad; its quality depends on the input provided. The more information they provide—whether in Content Profiles, summary cards, or additional instructions—the more unique the output will be. This is how they add their organization’s internal wisdom to the content. You can use the talk track that by doing this, they are actually training their own little AI model for the page. This typically gets people excited and more open to adopting the technology.

Some examples of internal wisdom are:

• Answers to the question: What is our POV on a particular question? Not just the general answer.
• Data points: Do we have a study that can be referenced or a specific data point that will attract the attention of LLMs?

A good question to pose to get them thinking this way is:

“What is the unique point of view or data point that we have for this piece of content?”

If you have a particularly hesitant group, you can ease them into "full draft generation." This could look like starting with just an outline or demonstrating how they can expand or shorten sections of an existing draft.

Session 3: Content updates

The group should now understand how to do keyword research and create content for a product, which means they can combine those newly gained powers to update content that already exists on the site. Once a piece of content has been flagged for an update (the content writer is typically not the person to do this), we can now introduce Content Guidance to work in concert with the other two features they have learned and start to upskill their analysis capabilities. The message here is that they can handle all aspects of content creation and improvement.

Underperforming content

• Conductor features to focus on
  • AI Topic Maps
  • Research
  • Writing Assistant
• What to teach them: This will be a more advanced session, as you will be teaching them to use one feature that leads to an action within another. This is not that dissimilar from the above, but if they master the first lessons, this should be a breeze.

“Identify a topic or page that needs improvement, and then update it using the suggestions in Writing Assistant.”

Identify opportunities via a Topic:

An easy workflow for using Topic Maps to identify Optimization Opportunities:

1. Identify opportunities within a topic →
2. Look for a red dot in the topic map →
3. Look at the opportunity dropdown in the feature →
4. Add topics to a draft →
5. Update the content in Writing Assistant following the recommendations

Identify Opportunities via a Page:

“We are trying to understand why our page isn’t performing well.”

This is an opportunity to remind them that this is a team effort. You (the SEO leader) will decide on a cadence to surface underperforming pages, then they can:

1. Enter URL Into Research →
2. Review Keywords →
3. Use Writing Assistant To Update Content for Target Keyword(s)

Best Practices for working with the Content Team:

• Let it marinate, provide recordings, and offer office hours: It’s important to let the lessons sink in and give everyone ample time to master the foundational tactics. In reality, these are the only things that most of the team will need to know how to do. Make sure to record the sessions and send them out to the team, and have the captain of this team set monthly office hours so questions can be easily asked and answered.
• Reporting cadence: From a content perspective, it is the team's captain and the AEO/SEO leader’s (your) responsibility to set up reporting and make sure it reaches the appropriate parties with the correct views.
  • AEO/SEO leaders/Captain: An in-depth overview of what is happening so you can gauge if the program is gaining traction on a week-to-week basis. The timeframes can be determined by you and the captain, but make sure to pay attention to visibility, traffic, GSC, and market share shifts.
  • Content leader/Executive: High-level overview of what is happening on a monthly basis. I would focus only on visibility, traffic, conversions, and market share.
• Individual contributors: I believe strongly that the best way to create a spark for this is for people to see their work actually working. Creating a simple view with the pages each writer works on so they can see their individual contribution is a nice way for them to see this. If this is too much upkeep or the team is too big, you can also create a general overview that goes out to the team once a week that is similar to the Content Leader/Executive report, but with top organic driving pages included as a widget.

The most important thing here is that everyone is receiving data on a regular basis and understands what is happening and how their work is contributing to that. The more they see, the more they’ll understand, which will create more buy-in for the program.

Technical teams

This team will be responsible for the following, which should be broken down into separate sessions:

1. Website monitoring 101
2. Issue/Incident/Custom alerting
3. Issue resolution
4. Alert creation

Your goal: Teach them why real-time monitoring and alerting are valuable and how they can make their team more efficient.

Session 1: Website Monitoring

This session will cover the basics of how the technology works, the issues that are important to pay attention to, and the insights you can gain from it. The message here is that we need to monitor the site in real-time to ensure our technical health is consistently above 800, with the ultimate goal of keeping it over 900, which is best in class. This gives them a benchmark against what good looks like while also setting a common goal for everyone to work towards, which will help pave the road for future implementations without business cases.

• CWM features to focus on
  • Dashboard
  • Pages
  • Platform
  • Issues

What to teach them:

This should look like a typical CWM training session, and there is no reason to do anything out of the ordinary other than get the team comfortable with how the platform works and the insights they can gain from it. The message here is that this will make monitoring the site easier and they will have the ability to set alerts for issues that are important to them.

“To streamline our technical auditing process, we need to have a technology that is running in real-time to ensure we get alerted to issues as they happen and not only when we push a button.”

Once they are comfortable with how the platform operates and see how to extrapolate insights, you can move onto what types of insights they would like to see on a regular basis which leads into the next session.

Session 2: Issue/Incident/Custom alerting

The argument could be made that this is the most important session for this team, as it will more than likely be the most interesting because you can get into the customization that the Conductor Website Monitoring provides. The message here is that they can set up an alert for anything that is important to them, as long as it exists in their code. In my experience, this is what raises the most eyebrows during conversations and is typically the doorway into more in-depth conversations on what their true use cases are. Use these sessions to scratch their nerd itch and be prepared to get into the weeds.

• CWM feature to focus on:
  • Alerts

What to teach them:

The goal here is not to create alerts during the session, I want to be clear about that, it’s to showcase what’s possible with the technology out of the box and from a customer perspective. At the end of this session tell them to go back and discuss what alerts they would like to see, including custom ones.

“If you can dream it, we can create an alert for it.”

I also like posing the question, “has there been anything that’s happened with the site in the last few months that would’ve been really nice to get an alert about? What caused the biggest headache?” This gives them homework and will prompt them to be in the product and discussing how it can be used moving forward which will help create excitement, exploration, and ultimately adoption.

Session 3: Issue resolution

While the team is noodling on the types of alerts they want to see, use this next session to talk about the process of issue resolution, i.e. implementation. One of the greatest hurdles in AEO/SEO is implementation because many companies require a business case to get certain things done. The message is that this is not the path that we are going down here, in fact, we are here to cut a completely new path and avoid that one altogether.

• Conductor Monitoring feature to focus on:
  • Entire product

What to teach them:

This session is the first foray into the process changes that you would like to make, but it isn’t solely focused on that and can be viewed as a discovery session with the team. Now that they understand what the product is capable of, this is the time to start talking about how they currently resolve issues. The message here is that CWM can enhance the current processes and make them more efficient. Things to hit on (that you will circle back to in later process-specific sessions that are detailed below):

“Let’s start talking about who is getting these insights and how they are being addressed.”

• Sprint schedule: What is it? How often? How does it work? Do you use a system like JIRA (we have an app for that), or is work prioritized in a different way? This is your opportunity to do discovery and really dig into how their current implementation process works and where AEO/SEO sits within it (spoiler: it’s probably de-prioritized).
• Who handles the requests? I implore you to strive for agreement that the captain of this team is not the only individual who implements the AEO/SEO changes. If that person is the only one who handles it, the team will not value it as much. Push for this, if it starts out this way, that’s fine
• What can CWM replace? Not people, but other technologies that they are currently using to monitor the site (they more than likely don’t have one), but this is the time to deploy any other solution they have and double down on CWM being the technical system of record moving forward. Do not start with this topic, but rather, end with it, so they don’t think you are simply trying to cut down what they already have, but that you have taken your time to learn about their system, and want to enhance it with CWM.

The reason we are wading into the process portion of the effort here is because for this team the technology needs to be the star and you need to help them understand how it will all work together earlier on. Devs are historically more impatient than other groups so you have to have this conversation in concert with the product training.

Session 4: Alert creation

Now that you have given the team time to think about what alerts they want to create, you can hold a session that implements some of the alerts that they want to see in real time so that they can see and understand how it works. Make sure to bring someone from support who can help implement a few of the alerts in real-time, but be clear that everything is not going to be completed by the end of this session, and we will work with them over the next few weeks to get everything they want into place. The message here is that setting up the right alerts will make you more agile and able to respond to incidents on the site in a faster and more efficient way.

• CWM feature to focus on
  • Alerts

What to teach them:

The goal here is to teach them how to properly set up basic and custom alerts based on the list that they have created. Do not be afraid to tell them that the alerts they are suggesting aren’t valuable if you believe they will only create noise. The goal is to see valuable alerts, not just alerts in general.

“Let’s get a few of these alerts set up so you can see how it works and then we’ll work with you over the next few weeks to get the rest working.”

If you can get through this session with everyone on board and understanding how the product works and the value that it brings you will have crossed one of the first major hurdles to making this effort a success. Be courteous, but be persistent. You need to get this team on board and excited.

Session 5: Log file analysis

This is a more advanced session, but a critical one for folks who want to understand how search engine bots and LLMs are accessing their sites. While it is considered a nice-to-have for traditional search for most people (honestly, most people don’t even know what this is or how to do it properly), it is an absolute must for “AEO” and AI search.

Traditional Bots

• CWM feature to focus on:
  • Log File Analysis

What to teach them:

The lesson here is teaching folks that are interested in what to look for, which is: which search engines are accessing which pages and how often. This is a way that folks can manage and optimize crawl budget, and see what pages may have accessibility issues for traditional crawlers.

“Look for pages that are not being accessed often or ever and decide whether or not they need to be updated or removed.”

The goal here is to make the site as streamlined as possible and only keep content that bots are actively coming to and not just have a bunch of pages for the sake of having them. This is mostly a crawl budget exercise to make sure that the most important pages on the site are being seen often and not being lost in the shuffle amongst a bunch of unnecessary or valueless pages.

LLM Bots

• CWM feature to focus on
  • AI Crawler Activity

What to teach them: As mentioned above, understanding how LLMs are accessing your pages and how often is going to be critical to your success in AI search. So while log file analysis in traditional search is something most folks ignore, in the world of AI search, it should be looked at as a critical step in your optimization process.

• “Look for pages that LLMs are not accessing often or at all and update them with more specific content or combine/remove them.”
• “Look at the pages that LLMs are visiting most frequently. As more and more LLM responses are grounded in search, LLMs will visit the pages related to those queries more frequently.”

While it sounds similar to the above, it actually isn’t. While there are arguments in traditional search that a page that search engines are not crawling often still has value, in the world of AI search, if the LLMs are not actively accessing and retrieving the content on those pages, they are most likely invisible to both the LLMs and the LLM users.

Best Practices for working with the Tech Team:

• Let it marinate, provide recordings, offer office hours: It’s important to let the lessons sink in and give everyone ample time to master the foundational tactics. In reality, these are the only things that most of the team will need to know how to do. Make sure to record the sessions and send them out to the team, and have the captain of this team set monthly office hours so questions can be easily asked and answered.
• Reporting cadence: From a technical perspective you should be expecting the team to be paying attention to the real-time alerting and to be checking in on our health score on a monthly basis.
• AEO/SEO leader/Captain: This group should be aware of what type of alerts are coming in on a week-to-week basis and also have a handle on how our health score is progressing month to month. While there is no way to add these elements to workspaces yet, accessing CWM directly during your regular check-ins (we’ll get to this later in the document) will be the best time to do this.
• Content leader/Executive: Monthly, quarterly, and annual reports will be the right way to report on technical progress on the site. Focus on the health score and major projects that were completed, or any major incidents that were caught and corrected.
• Individual contributors: The goal is to have these folks in the product regularly so there is no need to send out any additional reporting, as they should be paying attention to these metrics as part of their normal day-to-day.
• Executive team: Didn’t think you were going to be seeing this group here, did you? While this group does not need to know every in and out of the product, it’s imperative that they understand the power of the insights it holds and how we are going to be using it.

Leadership

Session 1: Conductor/CWM Overview

In this step, your goal is to ensure that the folks who are signing the checks and supporting you in the effort understand how the product works, the types of insights we are gleaning, and how we are incorporating it into the new system that you are building together.

This should not stray far, or at all, from our normal product overview that a Customer Success Manager would cover when a new customer is onboarded. We want to showcase all of the main features that we will be utilizing for the effort, without going too far into the weeds. We are trying to raise eyebrows, not wristwatches in this session, so keep it high-level and speak to how the product will help ensure best practices are being followed across the organization.

• Conductor Intelligence features to focus on (can vary):
  • AI Topic Maps
  • Writing Assistant
  • Market Share (Execs Love Market Share)
  • Rank Comparisons (Execs Love Competitive Insights)
  • Workspaces (This is where you can show them the reports that they will be receiving and cover visibility and analytics data, don’t get into the weeds with the individual features)
• Conductor Website Monitoring features to focus on:
  • Dashboard
  • Pages
  • Issues
  • Alerts

What to teach them:

As stated above, the goal here is to give them a high-level overview of how the product works, how the teams will be leveraging it, and what the reporting they will be receiving will look like.

“This overview is meant to give you a high-level overview of how the product works and how it’s going to be driving the transformational effort we are embarking on.”

The last thing you want is for the folks who are writing the checks to not have a basic understanding of what the technology can do and ignore the reports that are sent to them. Your job will be to continuously check in with this group and ensure they are finding value in the data and adjusting when needed.

Process is the key

Now that everyone has an understanding of the technology that we are using and they are speaking the same language, you can make your way into the hardest part of all of this: streamlining processes. This is undoubtedly the hardest part of this effort, as folks are typically set in their ways and don’t want to change the way they do things. This is why we did the product training first, because if that part was done correctly, then we would have already started that process without ever saying it out loud.

Each team is going to require a lot of attention at first, and you, as the owner of this effort, need to make yourself available and rely on your captains to help you through the first year. People are going to have a lot of questions, complaints, critical feedback, constructive feedback, etc and you need to be able to take it all in stride and keep everyone focused on the north star of adopting the “always on” mentality.

In this section we will talk about the process changes for each team that you need to lead to make this effort a success.

AEO/SEO team = You + your captains

Just because you are leading this effort doesn’t mean that you don’t have a day-to-day role to play here. The AEO/SEO leader/team needs to make sure the site continues to move forward in the short term while the long term plan is being built out. One of the deals you should/will be making with your executive/leadership team is that you will continue to drive short term efforts on the site while you build out this process so no time is lost.

While this sounds like too much at once, I promise you that it’s possible if you focus on the basics and incorporate them into the larger plan that you are rolling out and use the work that you need to get done as a training tool for the content and technical teams.

Here is how you should be thinking about this:

Short-term tasks

I implore you to keep these simple so that you can spend the majority of your time on the long-term vision. 85% of your time should be spent on the long-term effort, with only 15% spent on short-term activities. If you stick to the basics, you’ll still be able to show progress because the site(s) you are currently working on probably have plenty of AEO/SEO 101 work that needs to be done that you can put into a queue and somewhat set and forget. How you should consider handling this:

• Perform an initial audit: Before you even get to step 1 of this document, you should have already performed a site audit and identified areas of opportunity on the site that led you to the conclusion that a transformational effort is needed.
• Create a list of content opportunities: During the auditing process, you are going to compile a list of pages that need to be optimized and a list of pages that should be written to enhance the site's organic presence. Create a backlog of both of these that you can put on autopilot while you are working through the long-term plan. Once that initial list is complete, you should be able to buy yourself months of time, and even if you reach the end of the list, creating a new one is simple. You should be using these pages as training material and kill two birds with one stone.
• Create a list of technical opportunities: You actually won’t have to do anything with these until you have the conversation with the tech team and get them on board with actually fixing them, but it will be good to have the list ready to go and use this as training material with that team.

While the above seems basic, that’s the point. Where most AEO/SEOs fail in projects like these is that they get caught up being AEO/SEOs. You have to think about your role differently here. You are not here to push buttons and write title tags; you are here to lead a transformational effort and elevate your position. If the former appeals to you more than the latter, then you’re in the wrong place.

Get this list of activities together, use it as training material, take care of some of it yourself if you need to, but make sure that at least 85% of your time can be dedicated to the long-term effort. Good AEO/SEOs know how to make a small amount of work look like a ton of work; you need to flex this muscle here to make this work.

Long-term tasks

These are the day-to-day tasks that are going to work towards the overall transformation effort. You can incorporate short-term tasks here as training opportunities, but you must ensure that most of your time is spent in this area, vs. getting caught up in daily grunt work, which is where many AEO/SEO leaders fail.

Educating/evangelizing

The most important role that you have is being the center of everything that is happening with this effort. Your knowledge is the cornerstone of making this all work and the best way to do that is by continuously educating the teams on industry best practice and happenings, and evangelizing the effort internally. This is a full time job and if you want to make this work you need to be up to the task.

Here are ways to do this efficiently (these are just a few ways I have done this in the past and are certainly not the only ways this can be accomplished):

• 30-minute monthly webinars: Record webinars on updated best practices and industry happenings on a monthly basis. Keep it to 30 minutes and just focus on the most important things that people need to know. (I hear this format works great)
• Quick hit videos: Record 1-2 minute videos with specific things you want the team to be thinking about or know that will help them either improve a workflow, or better understand a concept you have recently spoken about.
• How-to decks: 3-5 Page slide decks that explain something that is happening or reinforce a concept that you have recently spoken about.
• Dedicated Slack/Teams Channel: Having a dedicated channel for your CoE can provide a place for you to share wins, updates, or foster questions and collaboration.
• Email check-in’s: Based on conversations with your team captains you can send emails to individuals or groups of folks that might be having a hard time and see where you can help and work with them specifically.

The point of the above is to make people feel supported, which is your job. You are asking a lot of folks here, and you need to find creative ways to engage them, regardless of how big or small the group is.

Process audit

During your training sessions one thing that you should always be paying attention to and asking about is how the current process works from a content and technical perspective. Once you understand how everything works you can start to break it down and identify where time is being wasted and how you can replace certain steps with efficiencies from the platform.

• Common things you are looking for:
  • Unnecessary approval processes
  • Tasks that can be done by one person are being done by multiple people
  • Unnecessary back and forths
  • Processes that require people to push buttons that the technology can handle
  • Manual reporting/auditing/tasks that can be automated
  • Unnecessary hurdles (prickly leadership, gatekeepers, etc.)
  • Apathetic team members (this is a tough one, but sometimes people need a change)
  • Unnecessary/redundant technologies
  • Cumbersome/time-intensive processes

Pretty much everything you find is going to fall into either the content teams or development teams bucket of activities which is where most of the process change will take place, though you may find efficiencies elsewhere depending on the makeup of your organization.

Owning the system, not the day-to-day

The ultimate goal is that you are floating above the system and making sure that everything is working and not owning the majority, or any, of the day-to-day tasks. As stated above this is an opportunity to elevate your role and enable the organization to run a sustainable program that doesn’t need any one person to be there for it to operate. While you are not trying to operationalize yourself out of a job, you are aiming to move away from daily tactical work to more meaningful strategic work.

Content team

As stated earlier, now that the content team has been enabled on the platform, they should already be on their way to changing their process to incorporate the technology. This is the time to start talking about their day-to-day processes and how we can improve them and create efficiencies.

Your goal here is standardization, plain and simple. You have to make sure that everyone on the content team is doing the workflows the same way (with room for individual flair, of course, but only one piece of flair, not 15). A lot of this comes down to revisiting the training that you already went through and hammering home that everyone needs to be following the same workflows, speaking about things in the same language, and not straying from the path or going completely AWOL.

Here is how you can go about moving the process forward:

• Telling them their baby is ugly: During your process audit you are more than likely going to find some major process inefficiencies that the team has been sustaining for whatever reason and the first step is point it out to them. This may rub some people the wrong way (especially the folks that put the system into place) but it’s a necessary step to make sure they understand that what they have been doing is problematic.
• Point out specific inefficiencies: Be as specific as possible when pointing out issues that exist in the process, even going as far as using real-world examples (excluding names, of course) that you have seen during the audit process. You can’t argue with something that has happened and has a paper trail. While this may be a tough conversation, most of the time, once you point it out, you’ll be surprised by how many people will start nodding their heads and agreeing with you. Typically, there is probably one or two people that have been keeping the bad process alive, and once you get the group behind you, that wall will fal,l and there is no better ammo than real-world examples.

Some common things to look out for:

• Approval processes
• Too much back & forth
• Blockers/Gatekeepers
• Manual work is being done
• Things that generally don’t make sense
• Siloed/Manual/No reporting

• Always speak to inefficiencies as opportunities, not problems: As was mentioned earlier in this document, this is not a finger-pointing exercise; it’s an efficiency exercise and it doesn’t matter who’s “fault” this is. Who gives a crap who created the process? You’re just here to make it better so always keep the conversation positive and forward moving.
• Connecting their training to the inefficiencies: Everyone should be using the product regularly in their day to day by this meeting (with a mandate from their executive and enforced by their team captain), and once you call out the inefficiencies in their processes, this is the time to relate back to how the product can make it better. This is the time to hammer home that the new process is easier and more effective.
  • Recruit people to tell success stories: One of the best ways to get folks on board is to show them colleagues who are being successful in the new system. Look for volunteers to get up in front of the group and speak about their success and how it has helped them do their job better/made their job easier. This not only gives that individual a chance to get some personal recognition but also creates a sense of internal competition, which is a good thing. Everyone wants to be successful and recognized. If Jane gets up and tells a great story, people clap, and leadership recognizes her accomplishments, everyone is going to want to be Jane. Hell, I want to be Jane.
• Haunt people & hold them accountable: Last but not least, the crux of this entire thing is that you have to make sure that the content team follows the training and workflows that you have taught them day in and day out. At the end of the day, they need to adopt this system; it’s not an option, and you and your captains have to play the part of the enforcers. You may rub some people the wrong way while it’s getting off the ground, but you need to keep pushing people to use the workflows that you taught them and make sure they are following the plan.
  • Weekly check-in’s with your captain: At this point you should be having weekly check-in’s with your captain to ensure you have a finger on the pulse of what is happening in the group. Make sure they are collecting feedback and fielding/forwarding questions that are coming up.
  • Do not let questions/Concerns linger: When someone has a question, you have to be there to answer. The sooner you can address someone's question and/or frustration, the quicker you will get them on board. Support needs to be available always and often, and until your captain upskills to the point where they can field those questions, they’re all coming to you.
  • Hold office hours: One of the best ways to address the questions and concerns that come through at scale is to hold monthly office hours where folks can come and learn together. These are some of the most valuable meetings that you can hold because you can address a multitude of topics:
    • General Q&A’s
    • Industry Best Practices & Happenings
    • Product Training (Refreshes and New Features)
    • Show & Tell (Internal Success Stories)
    • Guest Speakers

This is a great way to get the group together on a regular cadence and get important and useful information out to them.

• Usage tracking: You need to ensure that everyone is using the proper workflows and features and not reverting back to whatever their old habits were. Usage is easy to track on the user/feature level in Conductor (just ask your CSM for assistance), so you’ll be able to see who is and isn’t using the feature, which will allow you to reach out and ask why. While this is a bit big brother-ish, that’s your role in all of this, and you must ensure that folks are adopting and utilizing your team captains to help you enforce. It’s not meant to be punitive if they aren’t doing it; it’s meant the help them adopt a sustainable system.

At the end of the day, what you are doing here is beating the drum and making sure everyone is staying in rhythm. At first, you will have a mixed bag, but as time goes on and the workflows start to take hold, folks are seeing their work make an impact, and as you address their concerns, you will start to see the tide shift in your favor. You have given them the tools to make this successful; now you just have to make sure they stay on track by beating that drum and reiterating their training, the goal, and the vision.

Technical team

Now that the team has been using the platform and understanding the insights, it’s time to build it into their day-to-day processes so that it becomes hard to replace.

Here is how you can go about moving the process forward. For starters, you need to understand that every sprint has optimizations. Tech teams typically don’t prioritize AEO/SEO optimizations, and this is one of the major things that you will be changing. Once you have an understanding of what the sprint schedule looks like, the first thing that needs to be done is bartering to get at least 1-2 AEO/SEO items into each one. You need to create consistency here until the team can see the impact these types of changes can have in the long term, but you should always be working on something to keep AEO/SEO top of mind

Here are tactics that have worked for me in the past:

• Start small: You are not here to tell them not to work on other things or to delay other projects they are working on. You are here to ask for a small amount of time in each sprint to start building the technical health and foundation of the site. Your captain on this team will more than likely be the person who is either implementing these changes or directing them to the individuals who are making the changes, so you need to start slicing into their time carefully. Start with 1 or 2 things per sprint, and I advise you to make small changes. Broken links, wrong canonical tags, title tag updates, etc. are a good way to show the team that your asks are not going to be sky high most of the time and that a lot of the work is more sweeping the floors vs. replacing them.

As time goes on and the team understands more and more, bigger projects will come along, and you will get more prioritization in sprints. Rely on the technical health score improving to make your case and prove to them that the work they are doing is having an impact. Tell them about it often.

• Ditch the business cases: In tandem with bartering for sprint time, you also need to make sure everyone understands that a lot of the changes you are going to be asking for are table stakes, and there may be no direct performance improvement outside of the technical health score. What we are trying to do here is create efficiencies and move quicker, and nothing will stall that out quicker than having to argue a case to fix some broken links on the site. Be stern about this and do not back down. In my experience, this is a short-term challenge, and you can use the sprint time you bartered for above to prove to them that business cases are not necessary for every ask.
• Hold pre-sprint meetings & hold them accountable: Tech folks are typically blunt folks and appreciate being told that they are doing something wrong instead of talking around it. Before each sprint, make sure you have a check-in with your captain to discuss and prioritize the AEO/SEO work that is being done and the timelines associated with it. Make sure you are holding the captain accountable and that they are doing the same if they are responsible for folks implementing. Eventually, your captain should be able to take this responsibility on themselves without you having to hover, but in the early stages, you want to make yourself as available as possible.
• Do not let questions/Concerns linger: Much like the content team, if there are questions that are floating out there you don’t want to let them linger, especially with the tech folks. Make sure you are available to field these questions and be ready to get into the weeds with them. Eventually your captain will be the go-to person but as you're getting this up and running everyone will be coming to you, including your captain.
  • Encourage folks to join office hours: In my experience, tech folks do not typically join the office hours meeting that you will be holding with the rest of the group, as they tend to email directly. If this is the case for you, encourage them to join the monthly sessions above not only to get questions answered, but also just to absorb and understand what everyone else is doing. The more that they can learn, the more bought in they’ll be.

Step 5: Standardized reporting

Up until this point, you’ve probably been wondering: Why haven’t we taught anyone how to use Workspaces?

There is a good reason for that. We don’t want anyone to change anything within their Workspaces just yet, because we want to introduce standardized reporting so everyone is looking at the same thing in the same way, depending on what level they are on.

For weekly or bi-weekly rolling reporting (that you are not adding analysis to, just data going out to folks) it should look something like this (you customize it as you see fit, but the goal is to keep it simple):

Leadership & Executives

• Traffic Performance (Pages For Rolling 90 Day Period)
• Visibility Performance (Lifesaver Chart For Rolling 90 Day Period)
• Market Share (Pie Chart + Percentage Change Widget)
• Cadence: Bi-weekly

Individual contributor: Content

• Traffic performance pages for a rolling 90-day period
  • Page group containing only the pages they worked on
• Visibility performance lifesaver chart for rolling 90-day period
  • Keyword group containing only the topics they worked on
• Market share (Pie chart + Percentage change widget)
• Cadence: Weekly

Individual contributor: Tech team

• Embed A Screenshot of the CWM Dashboard
• Custom Widget Showcasing Positive or Negative Movement
• Traffic Performance (Pages For Rolling 90 Day Period)
• Visibility Performance (Lifesaver Chart For Rolling 90 Day Period)
• Market Share (Pie Chart + Percentage Change Widget)
• Cadence: Bi-weekly

For quarterly reporting that goes out to everyone, you can use an enhanced version of the leadership dashboard with customer widgets to input your thoughts, analysis, and next steps. The following breakdown is also in line with how Conductor is shifting reporting structure in the new SEO/AEO landscape with the buckets: Your Brand, Your Website, and Your Content.

Quarterly reports

• Custom widget detailing your overall synopsis/Headline about how the quarter went
• Custom widget calling out key metrics (i.e., x amount of folks trained, x amount of time in the platform, x amount of performance increase, etc.)
• Your Brand Performance
  • Branded Search Demand
  • Brand Sentiment on LLMs
  • Brand Sentiment on Social (available in Research)
• Your Website & Content Performance
  • Traffic performance
    • Custom widget, specifically speaking to traffic insights
    • Pages widget for specified time period (yoy comparison if available)
    • Top traffic-driving pages
    • Custom widget highlighting top content performers (optional, yet encouraged)
  • Visibility performance
    • Custom widget, specifically speaking to visibility insights
    • Lifesaver chart for the specified time period
    • Custom widget highlighting big ranking wins & who contributed (optional, yet encouraged) for both Organic & AI Search
  • Market Share for Organic & LLMs
    • Custom widget, specifically speaking to market share insights
    • Pie chart
    • Percentage change widget
• Next Steps
  • A custom widget that outlines the initiatives you will be focusing on next quarter

I strongly suggest you do a year-to-date report at the end of each fiscal year that mimics the quarterly report. In my experience, this has always sparked valuable conversation around planning time for the next year and is a good way to take a step back and see what you should start, stop, and continue.

Step 6: Ongoing education & support

If you’ve made it this far high-five yourself and go grab a cold one. The hardest work is most likely behind you and now all you have to do is continue to connect with your captains, the teams, and keep everyone up to date on how the industry is changing and what needs to change in the process to accommodate them.

Below are the three ways that you can continue your education and evangelism efforts and ensure they have the maximum impact:

Ongoing education

This is something (I hope) you are already doing for yourself, so don’t forget to take note of things that will need to be brought to the group. You do not have to bring every single thing that happens in the industry to the table; actually, that would be ill-advised, but cherry-pick the things that make sense for both the whole group and individual groups alike. I always advise doing a big quarterly training session on any process changes that need to be made (shouldn’t need to happen more than that, if at all) and to cover off on industry happenings in office hours. Speaking of office hours…

Office hours

Do not let these fall off the calendar! Continuously connecting with folks on a monthly basis is the best way to keep them engaged, and also remind them that you are still watching. Use these meetings to answer questions, update everyone on industry best practices, invite guest speakers, and praise folks that are having the biggest impact. Speaking of folks having the biggest impact…

Gamify it if you can

Everyone loves a little friendly competition, and I have worked with several companies that have successfully gamified the process to help incentivize people to buy in and, more importantly, keep going. You can do it on an individual level or a group level, seeing who had the best month, quarter, or year, and can reward them in whatever way you see fit. I have seen folks use extra days off, gift cards, partner swag (Conductor can help with that!), and happy hours. Different companies have different rules around this, but if you can figure out something here, you can make some real magic happen.

Step 7: Tying it all together

This eBook covers a lot of tactics that you can use to build an AEO/SEO center of excellence, and the time and effort it takes. To tie all of these things together and ensure the effort’s success, below are a few commonalities between some of the most successful programs I have seen:

Keep everyone together

Do not let any group stray, especially those tech folks. A lot of folks wind up spending most of their time with the content side of the house, which you still might, but if you don't spend any time with the tech folks or vice versa, you may come back and find out that they weren’t following any of it all along. Make sure you continue to connect with everyone, but more importantly, you are connecting with everyone at the same time on a regular cadence.

Keep executives informed & engaged

The reporting will be the foundation of this but it's up to you to make sure they are actually reading them. Shoot notes to them regularly, ask if they have any questions, and continue to engage them directly. Even if you have a simple back and forth with them every couple of weeks, that’s fine. You don’t want to get to a quarterly meeting and have them have no idea what is going on.

Make sure people are using the technology

None of this works if everyone isn’t in the technology and following the workflows. You must be diligent in making sure that no one has gone rogue and introduced another third-party tool/platform into the mix that all of a sudden half the team is using regularly. If the current technology doesn’t do something they need, explore that and understand what you can do to rectify it. In my experience, as long as you continue to engage the group and answer their questions and address their concerns, this shouldn’t be an issue.

Resist pressure to change something too soon

As has been stated throughout this document, this is a long process that is looking to install long-term success. There will be pressures coming from many angles to get you to change something, whether it is from executives who read about something in the journal, or shiny new toys that other folks have started to use. I am not saying that you shouldn’t change anything; I am saying that you need to be thoughtful about when you change it. Listen to the groups, receive feedback and take it in, monitor to see what is happening across the landscape, and then make a change if you feel it’s necessary. Most of the time, what you are doing is working just fine, but you should always stay open-minded.

Building an AEO/SEO CoE in review

Congratulations, you have made it to the end and are now ready to start building your AEO/SEO/Digital center of excellence. It will be one of the hardest, yet most rewarding things if you pull it off correctly and the magic that you will see happen across your organization will be priceless.

Remember, your goal is to create efficiency and agility within your organization. Organizations that move faster, test faster, learn faster, implement faster, and get results faster. That is what you are trying to achieve.

The best AEO/SEO programs in the world are mechanical. Happy building! Thanks for reading & good luck!

If you need help, please feel free to reach out to us:

Pat: [email protected]

Rachel: [email protected]

About the authors

Patrick Reinhart

Patrick Reinhart leads enterprise digital strategy for Conductor’s Customer Success team as Vice President of Services and Thought Leadership. He helps some of the largest brands in the world with their organic search initiatives. Patrick brings over 15 years of organic search and digital marketing experience to his work. Before joining Conductor, Patrick led the U.S. organic search practice at New York-based agency Prime Visibility. Prior to his agency and technology experience, Patrick was an accomplished entrepreneur, founding an eCommerce appliance retailer and a music management company.

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Rachel Schardt

Rachel is currently a Customer Success Team Lead at Conductor, joining the team after freelancing in the SEO space for several years. She has worked with all types of business: from solopreneurs to enterprise companies spanning across multiple industries. Rachel is passionate about SEO education, and helping bridge the gap between marketers' multiple organic channel responsibilities.

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