internetservice

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”.

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 services campaign, you should know you will need to budget sufficient resources to support it.

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 search engine optimization 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.