Startup or Corporation? The Life Changing Decision

A few months ago, I made the dreaded transition from working for a small startup which composed of roughly 7 people to a major corporation which employs over 20,000 people nationwide. This particular corporation had absolutely 0 SEO or SEM initiatives set in place and were looking to get a good jump start on boosting up their online presence. I found that there are many pros and cons to working for a big corporation. My goal is not to convince SEO’s to make the same transitions that I have, nor tell SEO’s how they should operate in a corporate setting, but I’ve written this article to address the issues that I’ve faced and hopefully fellow SEO’ers can use this as sort of a baseline guide for what they can expect when or if they make their own transition. Do note that these issues are often common for all SEO’s who are working in startups and working as consultants so it may not seem new to many of you.

PROS: as a general note, I will say that working for a corporation has many perks. Being that a corporation has hundreds, if not thousands of employees who are not familiar with your work, it is often easy to impress the higher-ups with even the smallest advancements.

1. First and foremost, like stated above, having more people to work with means a lot of your work is already cut out for you. To be more specific, I work within the Marketing department. One of the things I’ve always hated was writing sales copy and general content for the website. After all, I’m a SEO, not a salesman! Being that a big corporation already has this part in place, as a SEO, it is often easy to simply review the copy and generally insert your input on which keywords you can use as well as the general structure of the content. This in itself was a huge load off my back! More people in the company means the more you can often rely on their work to accomplish what you need to do. Sure, you don’t want to piggy back off someone else’s work but truth be told, it is preferred in a corporate setting. They are, more often than not, not looking for some revolutionary marketing initiative. They know what they know and they feel more comfortable working within their realms of things. Working off what is already built is beneficial for both parties.
2. Similarly, most corporations already have a website in place. Since a big corporation has already been working on the branding aspect of it, a good portion of your job is to really leverage what they already have to boost up their online presence. You will find that their website, despite the on-site optimization being a complete mess, has already acquired thousands and thousands of very valuable in-bound links. Your job is really to optimize the on-site aspect of the website to obtain and maximize the value of the pre-existing links. Again, your job is already half done for you!
3. Furthermore, you have a back bone in place to work off of. Big corporations have a system already in place and your job is to adapt to their project management system and routine. Sure this can be extremely stressful (which I will address later) but there is a key benefit to this that you will eventually adopt. Shortly after starting at my current company, I found that there are aspects to a corporation’s methods of project management that is much more organized than what I was used to. Sure, communication is always an issue being that there are more people you need to speak with, but overall, I found that simply following their methods of communication and management will make things much easier for you and the company.
4. The opportunity is grand! This point is more directed towards corporations that have very minimal SEO/SEM work already done. I’ve made it sound like your work will be much easier in the previous points but do note that the fact the company has had no SEO/SEM previously set in place, it will seem daunting to see that you are now managing a multi-million dollar corporation website and there is absolutely no room for mess ups. Sound scary? Well here’s the bright side of it. Do your job the way you are supposed to and the results are very rewarding. No previous SEO/SEM means more room for you to prove value. Imagine the response the corporation will give you when you’ve worked hard to boost their traffic 10x and increased their conversion rate at the same time. Sounds great right? Get your website to #1 for multiple, highly competitive major keywords and you will look like a gift from Jesus Christ himself.

CONS: I said a lot of your work is cut out for you! I never said it was easy.

1. Entering into a corporation, you are entering into a whole new realm of bureaucratic mind-f***ing (excuse my language but I couldn’t think of another word) tangle of having to convince everyone that your job is worth every single penny. Being that SEO/SEM is new to these people, they will be very suspicious of what you do. This means conversing with every single person who wants to see some results! I spent the first two weeks of my employment meeting with the different department VP’s, Director’s, CEO, CFO, you name it, I met with them and explained to them what it is that I do. So this is where the bureaucratic craziness comes in. Any SEO initiative you present, you WILL step on someone else’s toes. Going back to my previous statement of working within the system, there are some things I had a hard time understanding and vice versa. You will need to get the approval of several people before you can even think about a new idea. It is nearly impossible to make changes on the website to do any kind of testing as now you have to deal with VP’s, the investors, board of directors and many more. It truly is a maze as to who you need to talk to.
2. Similarly, let’s readdress the “back-bone” that I stated earlier. This is really a matter of how you adapt to your new settings. You can be stubborn and do things your way, or you can adapt. Believe me, you will not win. It is you against thousands of employees who have been doing things their own way. More specifically, my problems came when working with the IT department. They’ve worked hard to get a website up and running that they truly feel accomplished by. Who is this guy, supposed SEO, to come and say we need to change the structure of the website? Who is this guy stating that we need to insert even the basics such as Google Analytics? This is where the back bone can get quite stressful.
3. Your maintenance routine will change. Before coming to this company, I had my routine of when to check traffic, rankings, links, etc. I never made it a priority to religiously check Google Analytics as I felt more comfortable by going by a general picture, instead of nit-picking every single visit. More often than not, if you have been SEO’ing for quite some time, you will have a routine of checking such things. Well, guess what? Now you have thousands of people asking for a write-up or report on how many visits we are getting, almost on a daily basis. If I counted the number of emails in my Outlook asking for an update, my mind would explode. Again, adapt to what they request and you will find it much easier.
4. Being the specialist of the company, you will get asked MANY ridiculous questions and suggestions. I have several VP’s who listen to webinars and conference calls and they will gather random bits and pieces of ideas on SEO and SEM. Unfortunately, a lot of these suggestions are borderline ludicrous when speaking in reference to SEO. Furthermore, the people who make these suggestions have been working in the specific industry for many years. They are very resilient to any suggestions that they may not completely agree with. While some things are extremely important to SEO’s, to the people who have been working in the industry for years, your suggestion is about as valuable as nothing. It makes you wonder “Why the hell did these people hire?” Well, this is where you really have to do what you can and tell them good news and they’ll quickly forget the suggestions they even made.
5. You will see a lot of money being wasted. This might not be so much a con as it is an annoyance but in the short period that I’ve been working at my company, I’ve seen thousands and thousands of dollars being wasted on things that you’ve specifically suggested against. For example: after doing a close in-depth conversion analysis, I gave them a list of keywords we should specifically target for SEM. Being new to the industry myself, I wanted to be very cautious of what keywords we target for paid search. I’ve made the mistake of spending a lot of money on many keywords, to realize that only a few have any converting value. Well, long story short, against my suggestion, they ended up spending too much money for very minimal results. You then realize that this is a multi-million dollar corporation and they aren’t scared to spend money to get some ROI. You can actually take advantage of this eventually and apply it properly and show them that targeting specific keywords will give them much better ROI. But I can’t help wonder sometimes, “Why aren’t you paying me more money (that you’ve wasted) and let me manage things properly?”
6. One last thing which is more specific to my current situation. Just because you want to work hard does not mean you always can. Well, truth is, SEO/SEM will never be the top priority for big corporations. I would often email out some proposals which are quick and easy to do, but it would take weeks before I got any response. What did I end up doing in between those weeks? Not a lot unfortunately… Don’t exert too much energy; things will roll into place as time goes by.

Well, I’ve said a lot. It really is hard to compare my experiences with a small startup and a major corporation. There are some great benefits to one, while some of the negatives really make you wonder otherwise. While you can expect to see some direct results in a small startup, a corporation may take weeks, if not months, to get anything in place. That is the nature of how a corporation works. Adapt to it and you’ll find it pleasantly easy to achieve what you need to.

I get this question a lot from fellow SEO’s and friends in general who have a hard time understanding why I quit my dream of a successful startup company for a salary: “Do you regret making the transition?”

Absolutely not. Despite the obstacles I’ve faced early on in a corporation, there is much you can learn from both realms of startups and corporations. One of the main reasons for my decision was that I felt that there was an opportunity to learn more than just SEO in a big corporation. All the obstacles such as the bureaucratic nonsense are all valuable in that in a professional setting, there are always bureaucratic obstacles you need to overcome and adapt to. 

There is always money to be made. Sure, the startup I was with had great potential and was already starting to see some great gains when I left and there is no doubt in my mind that I would’ve financially benefitted from this on great levels. Truth is, there are millions of ways to make money (short of me trying to sound cocky) but learning the whole experience has a certain value that you really cannot put a price to.

So with that said, what are your thoughts, having dealt with corporations as clients or having worked for a corporation itself?