Making Enterprise SEO A Priority Across Your Departments
Unlike a small business where the owner handles SEO, or even a mid-sized firm with a marketing manager or marketing director, an enterprise can have multiple teams and departments that contribute to the ultimate success or failure of an enterprise SEO campaign. The key is to make SEO a priority across your departments and make sure everyone is on the same page!
Content Creators
Most enterprises have a team of content creators that churn out new content for the corporate website, a company blog (or four), community sites, offline and online magazines and so forth. Is each of these content creators always writing for SEO? Most great content is well-optimized (at least partially) naturally because it’s being written for a human reader and not necessarily just for the search engines. But even great content can be tweaked a little bit to help it get noticed by the search spiders sooner and perform better in the SERPs for related searches.
Chances are your enterprise SEO campaign is targeting a wide range of keywords, especially if you have a lot of products and services for sale, and each piece of content that goes live anywhere on the web needs to be optimized for SEO. This includes incorporating long-tail and broad keywords into title and content body, a mix of branded and non-branded anchor text and full http links, and so forth.
If your enterprise content creators AREN’T optimizing their work for SEO, in whatever form it may take, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to attract quality links and build your online brand.
PR Firm
Some enterprises have an in-house PR team while others might outsource their PR to a 3rd party vendor. Either way, your PR team needs to keep your enterprise SEO goals in the back of their mind when writing a press release. Online press releases are a great source of inbound links so it’s imperative that you add a few links to each of your press releases (usually 1 per 100 words) and target a variety of anchor text. I actually recommend that you give your PR firm/team a slightly different list of anchor text from your content creators so you keep your link building as natural as possible.
One way to keep your link building natural with online PR is to create a few versions of the company boilerplate and target different anchor text in each version.
The C-Suite
Like most business initiatives, it’s hard to have a successful enterprise SEO campaign without the support of the C-Suite. However, since the C-Suite is usually fairly removed from the day-to-day of enterprise SEO, it’s critical that you make sure they understand the goals of your campaign, as well as outline what kind of results you expect to see. If your CMO thinks your company should be ranking #1 for 20 different keywords by next month chances are they are going to be disappointed. You want to make sure your C-Suite sees the small victories like going from page 3 to page 2, getting more visitors from new long-tail keywords, driving traffic to more internal pages, and so forth for the enterprise SEO wins that they are. 100 new visitors this month might not seem like much but every little bit counts and overtime it will definitely add up!
Product Managers
I know that enterprises have a lot more red tape and internal egos to deal with than most small businesses. Everyone wants to know how your enterprise SEO efforts are going to impact them and their quarterly goals. Product managers usually think their product is the most important (that’s why they are the product manager!) so they might decide your enterprise SEO campaign should focus mainly on their section of the site. When you have a large site with lots of verticals it’s important that you get your product managers on board from the get-go. Your goal is to improve the website overall, but they can definitely do a little SEO on their own to boost their own section.
Categorized in: SEO
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