Working as an in-house SEO for a large corporate site can be fun. However, if you happen to land such a job I encourage you to focus on the fun, as the non-fun bits could wear you down. I had previously worked on nearly 2,000 small-to-medium websites, each of which was probably small enough to fit on a portable hard drive. Most SEOs would have worked on a similar mix of sites.
Large companies were slow to understand SEO and would send some lucky staffers to lightweight SEO seminars and conferences, then hire some big-name agency that was exhibiting there. I know a company that paid a six-figure sum for an “audit” document that was largely generated with Axandra IBP, printed on thick paper in several binders, and then the client did nothing.
Today I read in a national newspaper about some new site whose spokesperson gushed, “We have been very smart about search engine optimisation.” Sadly, that site shows few, if any signs of SEO. I had earlier watched a self-serving video on YouTube where an SEO mildly critiqued a large corporation for less-than-perfect SEO, then pitched one of his own DVDs. At the end of the day a friend from another large corporation lamented how a brand new site he had specified to the tiniest detail was built in-house and the CMS written from scratch. It is buggy and not search engine friendly. A week ago, another person at a large public company described how their new Sharepoint-based website faces an uphill struggle to attain SEO nirvana.
That does it! I have to get off my chest some tips that might help other corporate SEOs and perhaps agencies that want to sell their services.
The Corporate SEO
SEO is new enough for most practitioners to have come from some other profession. Most seem to have come from an IT background and some from other random professions. I have no idea how many in-house SEOs are experts, but most large companies are listed on the portfolios of large SEO agencies. Not many corporate SEOs show their presence on the speaker circuit or the better forums, so it is safe to assume that large companies are still fertile ground for the SEO agency.
Silos
Large companies like to make large profits. Some are large enough to consist of autonomous subsidiaries or independent business units, each tasked with meeting large revenue targets. This is an important point to remember, because everything else concerning corporate SEO will become crystal clear.
Any silo worth its salt will have its own website and possibly its own nominal SEO.Typically, this SEO has no real authority to effect changes of substance or to engage an external SEO consultant. You will be hard pressed to find any single “owner” of the website. It simply exists. Someone in the IT department keeps it running and different parts of it are fed content by different business units. Often the marketing people don’t get involved beyond paying some consultant to write a branding guide, which is chucked in the general direction of the content authors.
Such silos are the delight of agencies. Marketing conferences are a wonderful place to pick up half a dozen business cards from one company’s delegates and then get a foot in the door.
The Incumbent Ignorant Agency
SEO agencies often find that the corporate giant they have managed to grant their first presentation already has an SEO “expert” on board. This is usually a surprise, because the website shows no SEO fingerprints. What isn’t surprising, after some tactful questioning, is that the incumbent “SEO” is the web design shop that also does their advertising, direct mail, and and any other work they can get. This is the gravy train, after all.
Many A-list advertising agencies consist of a battery of divisions that they have acquired along the way and one of these usually offers “SEO and SEM” services. (The “SEM” label is a clue that they don’t know the difference between PPC and SEM; so it isn’t too much of a stretch that their knowledge of SEO doesn’t extend much beyond some basic on-page stuff.)
The hesitant SEO agency should welcome such situations, as the client company is probably not enjoying any ranking success. Execs get promoted or exit rapidly, so nobody blames them for buying non-existent SEO. Truth be told, it was the junior in-house SEO that approved this half-based SEO work and he’s too scared to own up. After all, it is easy to blame any lack of ranking on the big, bad search engines.
Elephants Move Slowly
Armchair experts love to type their critiques of corporate websites and they usually rattle off the flaws they can see in the code or content. Remember, I said that large websites are amorphous masses with no identifiable owner. Similarly, large websites are not built by one person, one team or one agency. They are built by generations of coders, sometimes a feature at a time. The site was probably built in the mid-1990s when the expression “SEO” was barely a twinkle in Danny Sullivan’s eye, and has been freshened up along the way.
Gradually, the website resembles the equivalent of spaghetti code and some pages are over 5,000 lines long, if not more. You might notice numerous blank lines, bad indentations, appalling comments that were never meant to be seen by the public. The coders were given free rein, so URLs can run over three lines and a dozen parameters. If the company is lucky, it spent $20M on a new website a year ago, but of course it isn’t search engine friendly.
Along comes the in-house SEO, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, who wants to fix the website. He is soon put in his place when he discovers that modifying the CMS requires a Business Case. This is not some brief Word document that he can edit and copy/paste from a previous project. It requires a Program Manager, a Project Manager and at least two Business Analysts before anything happens.
To reach that point, he has to discover all the silos who have a say in the matter and attend numerous meetings and sign-offs. Even worse, he discovers that small, secretive groups are holding their own meetings to discuss this project.
He also discovers that changes cost money, even if the transaction is between two silos of the same company. What seems to be a “simple” job is actually a long process because people need to justify their jobs and demonstrate that they are protecting the company’s assets by following procedures.
It is very important to know that most of the people who influence the website have no revenue targets to meet. If there is no organic search traffic, their jobs are not on the line. After all, PPC, er “SEM” will bring in the visitors. Their role is to be, say, security experts, so they can make authoritative statements such as “PHP is insecure.”
Every year the silos have to go, cap in hand, to the board and ask for budgets. They usually get half of what is requested, so long-serving departmental experts ensure that they ask for twice as much as they need. As luck will have it, the board gives a quarter of what was requested!
Therefore, the SEO’s carefully (and painfully) documented change requests suddenly drop from a 4-month project to four weeks and he is asked which features he can “postpone.” How about the sitemap? Can we keep the old CMS, since it does work, after all? The SEO now waits for the armchair experts to emerge in the forums and cast their stones.
Where’s the Server?
Don’t expect to be told where the corporate website is hosted. It’s probably a secret, so don’t even think of asking for root access, particularly if you are a lowly in-house SEO and have your own affiliate sites hosted on some VPS or dedicated server. Just because you know some task takes 10 seconds to accomplish, that isn’t how we do things here. You are now noted as a troublemaker, to be watched closely.
Usually, there isn’t just one “web server.” The website might include an Apache server, possibly a load balancer, and often an application server or three behind the scenes. These machines are managed by the Facilities or Infrastructure group, who know nothing about writing code.
Oh, the domain name? That’s managed by the parent company, which is half a continent away if you are lucky.
So you, the in-house SEO, want a play machine on which to test some new theory that is exciting your fellow SEOs in the forums. You decide to use your own GoDaddy hosting account. You discover very quickly that the corporate LAN doesn’t allow FTP access and you’ve probably tripped an alarm that shows up as an SMS to the security duty member.
Build, Don’t Buy
If you were Corporate IT, would you have career satisfaction if you merely installed some open source software? Wouldn’t your resume look better if you built a CMS from the ground up? You have seen a forum on the web, so you want to build that too. There is no mileage in buying vBulletin for $160. It can’t be any good at that price – and is probably written in PHP. You are looking for a cool project to write in Ruby and here’s your chance.
Buy, Don’t Build
If you are Marketing, your job is to manage relationships with numerous external agencies. Perhaps one of the smarter (but ignorant) “SEO” tips you accepted was to add textual content to the website. Say your corporation is a major airline and you need content describing international destinations. You discover that a well-known travel book company licenses its content for re-use and they know their stuff, so you buy a few thousand pages and pictures for your site. Never mind if the ranking tanks – you’ve never heard of Google’s duplicate content penalty.
Survive and Enjoy the Ride
If you want to see your stock options mature, you will learn to play the game. Go to every SEO conference you can and get friendly with the big-name SEO firms. You may find that you can achieve your SEO goals (better call it meeting the silo’s revenue targets) by getting the boss to hire an external “expert,” but be sure to tell them what needs to be fixed. If the agency does a good job, you’ll get a raise. If they don’t, you’ll probably get a raise anyway, as you can blame the low traffic on Google’s new algo! Enjoy the job and watch the stock ticker.
