SEO for large corporations and organizations can be a daunting task, especially if you are one of the first to begin it. In this article, I will detail some basic steps that will help you structure your SEO campaign for success. This article is about basic principles and process, not any specific technical details which vary from platform to platform.
1) First, figure out what you are trying to accomplish. Ask yourself why you need the SEO campaign in the first place. What is your primary objective?
2) Don’t just go for traffic. It’s easy to get swept away with traffic numbers, but think about the quality of that traffic as well. If you receive a lot of traffic that leads to very few conversions, you’ve been undone by poor quality.
3) Tie your SEO campaign into the overall marketing strategy. If it’s not clear how SEO ties in with what you are doing, it’ll be easy for your company to ignore everything after the first month or so.
4) Make sure your Corporate SEO campaign ties in with the entire company. If you are only focusing on one department, such as Sales or Engineering, then it will be easy to ignore everything that doesn’t benefit them immediately. Treat the whole thing as a project and try to see how everything can work together.
5) Build your internal resources. Internal resources are the most important. If you have employees that are able to research, write, and optimize your content then it will be much easier for you to handle SEO. Having an employee focus on one project will also ensure that there is accountability for results.
It’s easy to hire low-cost agency help to start out with, but don’t expect it to be a long term solution. If you have the right in-house resources then it will be much easier for you to scale up your team when the time comes.
6) Make sure your expectations are realistic. SEO takes a long time and it’s not guaranteed to work 100%. Don’t expect overnight results, but know that you are working toward something that will take many months before it begins to pay off.
7) Have clear goals in mind for each campaign. Sometimes this is called a “keyword matrix” or even just a list of keywords without the actual rankings for each term. You need to know what your primary goal is and what supporting goals there are.
8) Track everything. Without tracking, you won’t know if your campaign is working or not. You can track rankings but also conversions as well as other elements such as time on page, bounce rates, etc.
9) Don’t be afraid to try new things and go in different directions when it’s appropriate. If you just do the same thing forever and ever, you’ll be stuck with the same results. Be willing to adapt and change your strategy as needed.
10) Don’t treat all keywords equally. You don’t want to spend time optimizing for non-converting keywords such as “shoes” or “car insurance”, but if the right person searches for “cheap shoes in Jacksonville” then it might be worth the effort.
SEO for Corporations can be difficult at first, but with the right tools and help from experts, like San Jose SEO, you can see how they work and deal with big projects. With this, you will gain even more knowledge on how to maneuver this task.
