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Corporate SEO Preparation
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
March 16, 2005
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Understanding the value of global communications, nearly every organized
organization in the world has a website. From grassroot community groups
to major corporations, the World Wide Web has expanded by billions of
websites over the past half decade. Because the medium is easy, cheap
and absurdly
flexible, it has become the backbone of a “people’s global communications
network”.
Seven years ago most corporate CEOs saw the Web as a secondary communications
device, a brochure rack of sorts. The brick and mortar sector was wary of
the over-hype but wise enough to pay some attention regardless. Five years
ago, the glass-sky fell in the dot-com crash of 2K. Since then however,
the web’s amazing usability has interwoven itself throughout our social
and business networks. In today’s tech-driven information society,
the web participates in almost every aspect of the product cycle for virtually
every product from crop-seed to aircraft.
Large companies are just now starting to recognize the wisdom behind a
full spectrum approach to search engine marketing and the marching orders
seem to have gone out to the marketing divisions. There has been a notable
increase in both SEO/SEM outsourcing and in-house hiring of search marketers
over the past few months. Before embarking on a major search marketing campaign,
large companies should consider a number of options, obligations and potential
obstacles. Once you know you want to embark on an SEO campaign, you should
know you will need to budget sufficient resources to support it.
Like any other corporate endeavor, a search marketing campaign involves
a high degree of cooperation and communication between different divisions
ranging from the boardroom to marketing to IT to the mailroom. The marketing
department and the wholesale purchasing department in a retail-based business
might both take a great interest in the shopping cart section of the corporate
website, which is the traditional domain of the IT department. What are
the chances that anyone in any of these departments specializes in the relatively
new field of search engine marketing?
March like ducks…
Ensuring everyone shares an understanding of their roles and responsibilities
in regards to the website is an essential first step. Many corporate websites
are now designed to provide a direct conduit to consumers as opposed to
acting as a simple brochure site. Examples include the travel sector,
large retailers, home electronics and the home entertainment industry.
In the past five years, each of these sectors has transitioned from typical
brochure websites to direct-to-consumer information/sales sites, and businesses
in each of these sectors rely on a number of different people performing
different tasks in the organization. This is why many firms are starting
to hire a seo consultant or bring on an in-house specialist. Internal
education is the key to turning your SEO from a harried cat-herder into
a mellow mother-duck.
Listen to your genius…
As the separate but similar fields of SEO and SEM are both becoming more
complicated, good practitioners need good support networks. Many SEOs
working for large organizations spend most of their time teaching sales,
marketing, finance and legal departments about SEO. Sales and marketing
personnel need to learn how to write search engine friendly content. Finance
needs to understand the intricacies of bid-per-click systems and the necessity
to make funds available.
After hiring an SEO consultant, it is important to actually listen to the
genius you’ve hired. As a moderator in a SEO web forum geared for
techies, I read about a number of experiences from both in-house and contracted
SEO and SEM practitioners who just can’t seem to get the various departments
to listen to them.
One brilliant SEO who was hired by a large east-coast firm lamented that
work she performed one week would be consistently written over the next.
She would complain about it to her boss (who managed the IT division), but
the problem persisted for months until something was done. Not only was
this demoralizing for the SEO, it obviously prevented the site from achieving
as many strong rankings as it could have if the over-writes had not been
made. As it turned out, someone in the marketing department was updating
based on information from the wholesale purchasing manager and it wasn’t
dealt with until a new corporate policy was devised and debated, months
into what should have been a strong SEO campaign. What the marketing and
purchasing departments failed to grasp is unlike an easily changeable paid
search advertising campaign like Overture or AdWords, getting strong organic
(free) listings requires patience. Strong communication between the SEO
and all divisions responsible for onsite content is also required.
Understand your audience
After ascertaining a corporate order and work-plan for the SEO campaign,
the first thing a good SEO will want to do is figure out what he or she
is marketing and who it is being marketing to. This stage involves a great
deal of research into products, their uses and what consumers have to
say about them. Quite often we find the words or terms used by the companies
we serve are somewhat different from the words or terms used by their
customers. Keyword selection is one of the most important phases of an
optimization campaign. Your SEO will likely want input from every division
involved in a product or service. When working for a very large company,
a good SEO is interested in how manufacturers, vendors, consumers and
competitors describe products. Large campaigns can involve days of tedious
keyword research to hone in on the most beneficial keywords to target.
Large firms should be prepared to offer their SEO support for this research.
The IT department for instance should provide server-logs to the SEO.
The marketing department should supply as much sales materials as possible.
Other departments or divisions should be canvassed for their ideas on
product descriptions as well. Chances are, everyone in the organization
will share many terms but also have task-specific terms for products or
their components.
Allow for change
Organic SEO relies on titles, text, links and spider-accessibility. Changes
to a corporate website often necessitate several meetings to work out
messaging, presentation and design. To achieve strong rankings in the
organic listings, the changes recommended by your SEO are almost certainly
vital; otherwise the SEO would not have suggested them. Large organizations
can prepare for these changes by budgeting staff time in advance. Your
SEO will want to affect a number of issues ranging from on-site factors
such as site structure to off-site factors such as link building.
Give the SEO time to perform
Time expectations can be frustrating for SEOs when working with corporate
organizations. While paid-advertising can offer a virtually instant road
to the front page of a search engine, organic results take weeks or even
months to achieve. These results can only come after the SEO has had time
to perform his or her initial optimization work on the site and has seen
site modifications uploaded to the server. Once the original optimization
work is uploaded, it might take up to three months to see a Top10 placement.
For very large sites, chances are the SEO will do their hardest initial
work on the index page and the main pages of each section in the site
while giving the internal pages a light SEO update. After their first
pass at the site is complete and they are satisfied a spider will be able
to move from one end to the other without obstruction, they will upload
the modifications to the host-server. They will then start to concentrate
on the internal pages individually, a process that doesn’t actually
have an end point but becomes a constant task for the SEO. After a few
months, the SEO will take a second pass at the initial work to fine-tune
the optimization as much as possible in order to achieve or shore-up Top10
placements. The important things to realize are that a) it takes time
and b) it is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring and maintenance.
A measure of success
The last basic element a large organization needs to have in place before
embarking on an SEO campaign is a way to measure the success of that campaign.
There are some in the SEO/SEM industry who insist the only measurement
is return on investment. There are others who believe that a measurable
increase in traffic (regardless of sales) is the best measure. There is
a third stream of thought that says that site placement is the goal and
that is the ultimate measure of success. From the point of view of a corporate
marketer, each of the three measurements has validity and each has limitations.
Return on investment is probably the most important but least practical
of the measurements. Research from within and from outside the SEM industry
shows that search marketing is more about branding and recognition than
it is about direct sales. Like a television commercial or magazine advertisement,
consumers see search results as a form of advertising. It is very difficult
to determine the ultimate factors that push a consumer to decide to make
a purchase but we do know that availability and familiarity are the two
most important factors on the web.
An increase in site traffic is another way to measure the success of a
campaign. This is probably the best of the three as it is affected most
by the SEO’s choice of titles and descriptive text. Sites with Top10
placement can expect to see a dramatic increase in site visitors. If the
SEO writes attractive titles and strong text, and those titles and text
appear on a search engine results page, chances are that title and descriptive
text helped push the visitor to the site. Site traffic is a good long-term
measurement of success for an SEO campaign.
The best measure of short-term success is actual site placements. An SEO
is hired to achieve the strongest organic placements possible. SEOs are
not in charge of making sales or designing the best possible product to
sell to the public. The actual audience for SEOs is a small number of electronic
search spiders. Good SEOs can get your site in the Top10 if given sufficient
support and resources. That’s what they were hired for and that’s
how they would like to be measured in the short-term. In the long run though,
most SEOs would agree that their real goal is to increase site traffic by
making the site appear more often under an increasing number of keywords.
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