Essentials of Enterprise SEO Strategy

Posted by Alexander Tsatkin

February 12, 2008

If you are an avid reader of SEO materials out there, it should not take you long to realize that almost 90% of SEOs out there are either small time webmasters, spammers, or the guru types who leverage their status for their own agendas.

To make matters worse a lot of the information is mis informed making the noise to quality ratio quite high.

I have compiled my experiences of what it is like working on Enterprise SEO along with some tips on how to best manage clients and workload to deliver the most value and keep your sanity.

Brand - One of the most important things to consider when working with a Fortune 1000 client is their brand. The reason a client has reached this status is through years of building their brand value and perception. A lot of tactics that may work for clients looking to build the brand will fail miserably for an established brand. One example I can think of is soliciting for links. You contact the wrong blogger, or approach them the wrong way, and you can have a PR nightmare on your hands.

Page Rank - Most fortune 1000 clients enjoy home pages that have PRs of 7 8 9 and even 10. With page rank that high the approach to internal linking and other content should be much different then a website that has yet to gain significant links. It may seem that having this advantage would make things easier, but take a look at the next point to understand why sometimes it does not.

Bureaucracy and Red Tape - The toughest part about working with Enterprise level clients is the difficulty in implementing any recommendations. With a homepage PR of 10 it should be easy to rank for any term by simply having a links with the right anchor text pointing to various pages on your site. But here is a list of things you have to consider which will make this seemingly simple task almost imposible:

Legal Issues -It doesn’t matter how people search for products or services if the legal team thinks its not an accurate description. A simple change in the body copy can turn into months of back and forth to find the exact phrases which pass legal approval.
Egos - in a large corporate environment there are many different people who may influence a key page in your strategy. From the head of the web development team, to specific product or service heads, the the marketing director, and the online marketing strategy, and even in-house SEOs. They will all have an opinion and an interest in the page which will ultimately interfere with your recommendations.
Internal Politics - Sometimes there are greater forces that you can image going on behind the scenes that can make your work very difficult. For example there may be other agencies auditing your business. Maybe there is someone who was a key player that is getting ready for a promotion. Perhaps a department you work with is being outsourced.

Off line Activity - Activity that is outside of your realm can be both a blessing and a curse. For example you can leverage activity to gain links through press releases. On the other hand another agency maybe be behind design the brand choosing keywords to describe the product that no one in their right mind would ever use in search.

So what is an SEO to do to overcome a lot of these issues? Below are some strategies that have worked for me and I recommend for consideration about anyone about to conduct Enterprise SEO.

Constantly Educate Your Audience - Never assume that the person you are talking to or presenting to knows even the basics of SEO strategy. There are many groups and random people who you will be talking to. It is helpful to have charts and graphs that illustrate how SEO works and key elements/terms you will be using during your presentation.
Patience - You have to be patient when working with Enterprise Level clients. Changes may take a long time to come to fruition so you have to be patient and continue working on other strategies assuming that those changes will be implemented in the end.
Don’t Take Things to Heart - It is easy to get discouraged when initiatives or strategies you worked on get a cold shoulder. The key is to remember there are a lot of reasons behind the scenes why your brilliant idea did not strike a chord. Never take things to heart and assume it was your inadequacy that caused such poor response.
Be Creative - Enterprise SEO is like a chess game. There are rules which you will soon learn that you can not bend. Rules about what page elements you can change, wording you can use, who you can talk to about different initiatives. You have to rely on your creativity to solve of the problems and obstacles in your way.

I hope this helps put into perspective what it is like to work for Enterprise Clients. It is not an easy thing to do, but it is something that can be very fulfilling and financially rewarding.

If you have any stories or other points that you would like to bring up feel free to drop a comment.