Integrating Enterprise SEO into Your Current Marcom Strategy

1. Integrating Enterprise SEO into Your Current Marcom Strategy

2. Introduction Traditional SEO methodologies, though effective for small to medium businesses, usually fail to deliver for large enterprises with complex infrastructures, multi departments, multiple sites and multiple products. This led to the evolution of a more comprehensive set of client-specific optimization methodologies – Enterprise SEO. Unlike standalone SEO programs, enterprise SEO is implemented as a part of an enterprise’s overall marketing strategy. It requires cooperation across the organization’s marketing, IT, legal, PR, social-media, sales, and management teams. Designed for large portals and other comprehensive online endeavors, enterprise SEO takes into account numerous business dynamics to make the strategy fairly resilient to the uncertainties of the future. In contrast to the conventional analysis-implementation-maintenance approach, the program must comprise of discovery of company goals, opportunities and challenges, which should be followed by strategizing the key elements of the campaign, course of action for their implementation, support, reporting, and lastly, analysis of the results to facilitate further improvements.  Business objectives  Challenges and Opportunities  Existing channels  Competitive analysis Discover  Internal update and team building  Best practices  Social and PPC  Implementation Tools Strategize  Kick offs  IT/Development recommendations  Design comps  Content recos Integrate  Executive summary  Periodic reports  Social reports  Comprehensive project reports Report  Changes in site traffic  Conversion rate  Click through rate  Link performance Analyze

3. Phase 1: Discover The foundation of effective implementation of enterprise SEO is the evaluation of your business objectives, the existing performance metrics, opportunities, and the challenges. BUSINESS OBJECTIVES The first step towards the integration is to underline the core objectives to be accomplished. Apart from the fundamental goal of increasing business, you need to be certain of the long term objectives as well as ROI. Enterprise SEO is mostly about your business objectives than anything else. What can help achieve your enterprise objectives, you ask? In short, it’s more than just keyword rankings. Some of the contributing factors include:  Site performance  Visual appeal  User experience  Information architecture  Layout  Content  Social media performance  PPC campaigns OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES Identifying the opportunities and challenges in the target market will require you to leverage internal analysis data, market polls, and research data from third party organizations. To get focused outcomes, SWOT analysis may also come in handy. OPPORTUNITIES You need to identify and think through what can help you make most of your enterprise SEO budget. Simply put, you should research all the possible opportunities and understand what further investment you can make. Say, for example, you’ve been doing content marketing for quite a while. That’s good but you need to vet what you’ve been doing in content marketing. Check all the content models you’ve exploited and all those you haven’t yet (open discussions, podcasts, webinars, infographics, etc.). You’ll also need to look into cost-reducing areas: some businesses prefer outsourcing, for others contracted employment makes more sense. You need to vet all your digital marcom channels in a somewhat similar way so you know where you can take your enterprise campaign. CHALLENGES Duplicate content Duplicate content issues can terribly affect the health of any site, irrespective of its size. Unfortunately, as the size of the site increases, so does its vulnerability: CMS problems, sponsored opportunities, improper internal linking, URL problems, improper response code configuration, and multiple near-duplicate pages requiring only a single page.

4. Information architecture It’s important to have a clean, simple and yet effective information architecture so neither users nor search engines have any problem navigating your site. But this has its own challenges. For example, the low-tier pages of enterprise sites are often not indexed by Google because they don’t receive sufficient reputation or “link juice” from the home page. Indexation It’s simple: the more pages you get indexed, the better search engine visibility and traffic you enjoy. Getting a large website completely indexed, however, may sound out an uphill battle. Aside from poor information architecture, indexation can be hampered by multiple reasons: duplicate content, Flash/Ajax issues, improper response code configuration, URL issues, page speed, and other such factors. User experience An optimal user experience is at the bottom of it all. You want your site to give that no matter what. For this, there are several bottlenecks you may need to tackle: slow site speed, broken links, poor navigation, poor site search, drab content, mobile friendliness, etc., all of which affect a user’s experience. EXISTING CHANNELS The next phase is to determine the channels you are using for digital marketing and their respective returns. This is particularly critical to help you determine the ones delivering results and eliminate the ones that are proving to be ineffective. For example, you’re doing email marketing but it’s not yielding the desired results. Now instead of eliminating it outright from your campaign, you may want to look whether it’s the content of the email that’s not compelling enough or if any other factor is hampering the yield. You also need to dive knee-deep into how you do what you do and whether you need to change the way you do it. This is because digital marketing keeps on evolving and therefore it’s a must to embrace the changes as they happen if you wish to stay ahead of your competition. COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS Evaluating the current stature of the competitors is another key element of the discovery phase and plays a pivotal role in the successful implementation of enterprise SEO. Use sales data, market share stats, marcom budget, etc. to find out where you stand in your segment. Competitive analysis not just helps you discover new opportunities – it helps you discover the secrets for the success of your competitors, which can of course come in handy for your enterprise campaign.

5. Phase 2: Strategize For enterprise SEO to yield the results desired, the strategizing stage is unarguably the most critical. During this phase, you need to evaluate the various tactics and tools you may leverage to integrate enterprise SEO in your existing marcom strategy. INTERNAL UPDATE AND TEAM BUILDING If you are contemplating enterprise SEO, it’s time you think about building a dedicated SEO team. Before recruiting search engine specialists, you should determine their specific roles. An ideal SEO team should include –  A specialist with a comprehensive exposure to online marketing  A writer who is capable of writing valuable, share-worthy content  An analytics professional specializing in using SEO tools  A team of link building experts For enterprise-level sites, usually a large team of SEO professionals is required. That’s because there’re a lot of things to optimize and improve. Moreover, you need to understand SEO is an evolving process, which means the long-term success of your SEO campaign would require periodic skill updates. BEST PRACTICES Definitely the most critical of all, the selection of the practices to be followed lays the foundation of a successful enterprise SEO campaign. You need to ensure that the best practices you choose have proven ability to deliver positive results for your segment. Let’s walk through some of them: GET TO THE ‘WHY’ BEHIND WHAT YOU DO It’s important for you to get to the why behind what you sell. You quite possibly know what you do and how you do it, but it’s more imperative to know why you do it, because your audience is more interested in just that. This will help you do better business and of course, better enterprise SEO. FORECAST POTENTIAL RETURNS BEFORE INVESTING Enterprises strive to be driven by 100% data all the time – and rightly so. Forecasting potential results precisely helps them do that. To make the most of this, you need to build a forecasting model and an opportunity model.

6. RISE ABOVE TRADITIONAL SEO PERFORMANCE METRICS Over the last few years, SEO has undergone various landslide changes. Yet, some companies still use traditional SEO performance metrics, such as rankings to measure their success. You need to change this and think about other important factors such as crawl depth, search referral data, bounce rate, brand awareness and conversions (not just from search but referrals, social media, call to action, etc.) to measure the success of your SEO campaign. FOCUS ON DEEP LINKS You quite probably don’t worry much about links. It’s actually common with almost all enterprise sites; being backed by big brands, they usually get links for free. Here, it is worth mentioning that most of the free links are targeted to the homepage of enterprise websites and therefore are often irrelevant. So, it becomes pivotal for them to focus on deep, relevant links. Educating social, press relations and other teams can be of great help. STAY AWAY FROM KNOWN HAZARDS Basics are often the major problem with enterprise-level sites. To deal with duplicate content issues, use XML sitemaps and rel=canonical. Most indexation issues can be solved by avoiding Ajax/Flash; by finding out all your internal linked-to pages and then cross linking low-authority pages across the site. For page speed issues, you need to set maximum page size; zero in on approaches such as lazy loading and conditional loading. THINK ABOUT ON-THE-GO USERS With mobile penetration tremendously increasing, mobile search is exploding too. According to a study by Google and Nielsen, 73% of mobile searches trigger additional action and conversions. First off, you need a mobile presence. Decide which mobile Web approach is best for you: is it responsive Web design or separate mobile website? If you choose the latter, cross link your mobile site with the main site and make sure that your users are redirected to the correct version. If you go for an app, think about optimizing it for app store search too. Whatever you may choose, measure your success and strive to give a better experience to your audience – wherever they are.

7. SOCIAL AND PPC According to a recent Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 83% of marketers say that social media is important for their business whereas most online marketing gurus agree that Pay-Per-Click, if executed right, can yield remarkable returns. In enterprises, a holistic marketing approach often works better. This means you should make your enterprise SEO strategy a mix of SEO, social and PPC. While SEO is a slow process, Social Media and PPC can start delivering results within a remarkably short span of time. While SEO is cost-effective, leveraging PPC and social may prove to be relatively costlier. However, it is certainly capable of yielding great returns and connecting you with a large number of potential customers. SOCIAL Google started using social signals as a ranking factor in 2010. In 2012, Google launched authorship markup. Today, it has become much evident that social media may become more important than links some years from now. Your social strategy may consist of:  Making strong social profiles of the key persons of the company  Leveraging hashtags for researching your customers, real-time conversations and branding (all three major social networks, Facebook, Twitter and Google+, support hashtags)  Tracking trends and keeping an eye on what your customers have to say about you and improve their experience  Posting an important update more than once (to cater different time zones)  Sponsored social ads (if your budget allows that) PAY-PER-CLICK MARKETING Most enterprises leverage both SEO and PPC to make their website more likely to get clicked in SERPs (search engine results pages). That makes sense on more than one front but it sure needs a well-organized PPC campaign that adds value. Your PPC strategy should:  Make the most of negative keywords  Make sure that your targeted keywords are terribly relevant  Have compelling landing pages  Take care of mapping and budgeting  Never forget PPC best practices

8. IMPLEMENTATION TOOLS For enterprise-level campaigns, it’s a real must to automate some tasks so that you can invest your time and energy in more important areas. But choosing the right tools can be a problem. To help solve that, let’s go through what to look for in an enterprise SEO tool. Your tool needs to:  Let you know your SEO audit score.  Help you keep track of all your links.  Have the automatic-notification feature which can come handy when there’s some problem with the campaign.  Have the ability to give instant data so what’s important is done at the earliest.  Have the keyword discovery feature so you can do keyword research without going to Google’s keyword tool.  Support international languages and search engines.  Be customizable so you can set what’s important and what’s not.  Be backed by a reliable developer offering reliable after-sales-support.

9. Phase 3: Integrate After the completion of the strategizing phase, you need to start integrating the tactics selected in your organization’s overall marketing strategy. If you have an in-house team to handle the execution, the first stage of integration will involve training the other teams working in your organization. This is particularly important as enterprise SEO requires cooperation from all internal departments. The integration phase also includes evaluation of the existing marcom strategies being leveraged by your organization. This is where the SEO experts working on your campaign assess the overall marketing spend being incurred by your organization and provide recommendations for budget optimization. If you rope in a third party specialist for enterprise SEO, the integration will begin with a kick-off call in which you will be introduced to the Account Manager who will manage your campaign delivery. Let us take a closer look at the steps followed during this phase. ON-PAGE MODIFICATIONS Though the search visibility of a website depends on on-page as well as off-page factors, SEO implementation usually begins with on-page activities. The team handling the campaigns initiates a series of changes on your website to make it more receptive to web search engines. These methodologies include but are not limited to –  Site coding optimization  Design optimization  Content optimization  Tags optimization (Title, Heading, Description, Keywords, etc.)  URL restructuring  Internal Linking  Sitemap Creation and Submission (Dynamic/Static)  Domain Canonicalization  IP Canonicalization  Blog Integration  Rich Snippet Integration  Social Media Logos/Plugins IMPLEMENTATION OF OFF-PAGE TACTICS For the success of an SEO campaign, making on-page modifications is just half the job done. As most companies leverage SEO, the scope of improvement with on-page modifications is quite limited. However, when on-page changes are clubbed with effective implementation of off-page methodologies, the results can be worth writing home about. After the completion of on-page activities, the focus needs to be shifted on the implementation of suitable off-page methodologies. Some of the off-page methodologies implemented during the integration phase –  Directory Submissions  Social Bookmarking  Article Submission  Link Wheel  Press Release Submission  Web 2.0 Activities  Forum Posting  Blog Commenting Chasing Competitor Backlinks

10. IMPLEMENTATION OF SOCIAL STRATEGIES With the advent of the second generation of the web, social websites have emerged as a remarkably efficient tool for reaching any target audience. The selection and implementation of social strategies is based on the nature of your business. The implementation may include –  Creation and placement of paid ads on prominent social networks  Creation and promotion of business pages  Participation in discussion pertaining to your industry  Sharing updates about your organization on social networks  Creation of a digital rolodex of contacts and content  Analysis of results to facilitate improvement IMPLEMENTATION OF SEM STRATEGIES The SEM campaign is another key element of the integration phase. Targeted Pay-Per-Click management can help your organization to connect with a large number of prospective customers. Through SEM, you can get enhanced visibility on Google, and relevant content networks and websites. The channels used in SEM include paid placements, paid inclusions and contextual advertising. The integration includes –  Comprehensive Keyword Research  Creation of Ad Designs and Copies  Creation and Optimization of Landing Pages  Active Bid Management Monthly Maintenance and Recommendations When it comes to Pay-Per-Click or Search Engine Marketing (SEM), getting people to click on your ad is only half the battle won as it is usually not enough for mining the results desired. This is because the success of an SEM campaign majorly relies on the appeal of the landing pages. Make sure that the team of landing page experts managing your campaign is able to get the visitors to enter the door through captivating landing page designs and effective optimization. Phase 4: Reporting One of the primary requisites of a successful enterprise SEO campaign is that you must be able to measure the results of your efforts. To make sure you are completely aware of how your investment is working for your organization, it is important that your campaign is supported by periodic reports that give you an insight on the activities being carried out. If your campaign is being managed by an in-house team, it is advisable to dedicate a few individuals to reporting. In contrast, if you are procuring the services of a third-party provider, make sure the point of contact assigned to your project delivers periodic reports containing detailed information about the progress of your campaign.

11. The reports must contain –  Detailed, dedicated reports for different campaigns (SEO, Social, PPC, etc.)  Executive summary  Rankings of all targeted keywords  Details of all the backlinks  Recommendations for further improvement (for all campaigns)  SEO audit score  Google analytics report  ROI reports (Tracking/Projection) Phase 5: Analyze To ensure maximum return on investment, it is important that the results being produced are closely analyzed. Though this analysis, the experts managing your campaign are able to segregate the methodologies producing the desired results from the ones that are proving to be rather ineffective. The phase includes analysis of site intricacies such as navigation and content, along with –  Changes in site traffic  Conversion rate  Click through rate  Link performance Based on the results of the analysis, a set of recommendations needs to be created to facilitate further improvement in the performance of your enterprise SEO campaign. The recommendations may include –  Website audit  Budget allocation adjustment  Suggestions for improving visitor flow  Conversion tracking and recommendations  Marketing campaign evaluation (SEO, SMO, PPC, etc.)  Suggestions based on evaluation of industry trends  Brand value assessment and recommendations Need More Info? To learn more about how to integrate enterprise SEO in your existing marketing strategy, feel free to contact our team of support specialists. The number to call is 1-888-512-1890. You can also write to us at sales@resultfirst.com.

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