Find out the reason why fortune 500 companies struggle with organic SEO.

2. Great SEO Post From Search Engine Watch
―The firm I work with recently issued organic
search rankings for the world’s leading high-tech
marketers using the patented Covario SEO Audit
Score™ system.

3. We took a look at how well Fortune 500 high-tech
companies optimize their landing pages for specific
keywords, so that they play a critical role in giving their
brands optimal search engine visibility for high-traffic terms
and phrases.
Within the overall scoring system, there are sub-scores for
content, technical quality and linking. We found that those
high-tech marketer websites with Content Audit Scores
above 75 (out of 100) also had an average Google organic
rank of 12. That’s page-two results, folks. Naturally the
lower the Content Audit Score, the lower the rankings in
the search engines for the high-tech sector.

4. Needless to say that the high-tech sector is teeming with
marketers who know more than a thing or two about
building lasting brands online. Many global brand marketers
understand that organic search is a powerful branding
channel when people are conducting product research. This
size of enterprise almost always has SEO programs in place
that follow what SEO best practices practitioners preach.
So why is it that the larger the enterprise the greater the
challenges they face when it comes to creating search
engine and people friendly content?

5. It’s because SEO is different for large companies as opposed
to smaller businesses. Yes — similar tactics are used to
optimize websites for small business and big businesses
alike, but on a different scale, of course. Enterprise level
websites create more problems for SEO practitioners not just
because they are bigger, but because they add layers of
complexity into each channel of their online marketing
processes.
For example, larger enterprise-level websites tend to have
some, if not all of the following issues to overcome.

6. SEO implementation hurdles due to:
 Suboptimal content management systems (CMS)
 IT resource challenges
 Untrained and/or third party personnel
 Budgeting limitations
 Millions of pages; much of it duplicate or very similar
content
 Multiple countries and languages with multiple entry pages
 Flawed attribution data and/or limited analytics programs
 Multiple stakeholders with divergent strategies
 Multiple service providers with divergent priorities

7. Most online marketers and/or IT staff members for larger
businesses have also had some history with SEO. That is to
say that most, if not all, Fortune 500 firms have tackled
major or minor SEO initiatives over the past few years.
Consequently, each enterprise’s marketing structures,
technical processes, business priorities, and overall SEO
knowledge can be quite different from one enterprise to
another – even within in the same industry.

8. All of this adds up for making the race toward SEO success
a marathon more so than a sprint for big businesses. But
attaining SEO success doesn’t have to be this challenging,
especially when it comes to creating compelling, search
engine-friendly content. If some measure of accord can be
fostered between key stakeholders around business and
marketing goals, then the path toward winning the first leg
of a SEO race to higher rankings is not far very away. You
just have to be willing to separate the whole from it parts.

9. What the heck does that mean?
Let’s take a look at a ―normal‖ SEO initiative for a large
enterprise. What usually happens is … A senior executive
signs a contract with a SEO agency and hands off steerage
to a VP of marketing or sometimes IT. The VP in turn hands
off the SEO program management to a director, who is also
the up-line for the in-house SEO manager. The SEO in-
house manager will work with the organization’s personnel
and other third-party agencies for tactical implementation of
SEO recommendations as made by the SEO experts at the
agency.

10. This is a recipe for failure, especially when dealing with a
mature enterprise that has implemented multiple layers of
SEO recommendations over the years. Nowhere in the
process does a conversation occur about who controls the
content on the websites, on the microsites or blogs, in its
press releases, in Twitter and on Facebook, or at Flickr
and YouTube — let alone if the enterprise is willing and
able to flex business processes in order to improve
content quality of its individual online entities.

11. Otherwise what usually happens is that the SEO
consultancy invests time and money to produce some great
content that goes through to the online marketing team for
approval and then hits the public relations department’s
filters for branding continuity, and next gets reviewed and
edited by the legal team, only to secure sign-off and some
last-minute tweaks from a middle-manager who sends the
content to an off-shore IT department only to stand in line
for being added to the website during the next round of IT
updates.

12. Three months later the phenomenal SEO content sees the
light of day; however, it’s not what you wrote. It’s been
compartmentalized and broken down into being the same-old
plain vanilla piece of nothing that is now duplicated across
the enterprise’s websites in 22 countries in 18 languages.
This is the problem with enterprise level SEO campaigns
tasked with creating competing, search engine-friendly
content. This is why the real potential for producing SEO
success lies in optimizing the communication of expectations
of SEO goals up and down the different parts of an
enterprise’s online marketing ecosphere.

13. Search engine success for larger enterprises is attained
when SEO goals are wholly aligned with the enterprise’s
business and marketing goals, and then entirely
communicated throughout the many layers of the business
line. All SEO agencies need to do to affect this type of
paradigm shift is to bring the concept of the content
creation processes into the conversation from the get-go,
as opposed to waiting until it’s done-gone.‖
Post produced by P.J. Fusco