Inhouse SEO Tips

Your SEO team is to do in-house SEO for a large organization’s website. Often the major obstacles are not the technical issues, but the company’s culture and bureaucracy. Successful SEO requires buy-in at the corporate level where your SEO team will influence and educate the people and together you will have to find the mutual business goals.

Buy-in from Executives

Before In-house SEO can be started, the entire management team (of executives) must be convinced, involved and in agreement. The corporate executives are the people who make strategic decisions on company directions and can authorize your SEO team the use of company resources.

  • Analyze the SEO performance of the major competitor websites via Hitwise or ComScore
  • Present the data to the management team and explain how the SEO work will benefit the company’s long term growth
  • Work out the return on investment (ROI) of your SEO proposal
  • Define the workload and the roadmap for achieving your goals
  • Track your progress, measure the SEO results (via web analytics tool such as Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics or Omniture) and report regularly to the executives

Site Ownerships

The corporate web site may be divided into multiple sections in which each team has ownership and management responsibility of a particular section. For example, each team probably manages the daily operations of one of the following sections:

  • Homepage
  • Product categories and sub-categories
  • New product section
  • Product pages
  • Purchase / conversion Flow
  • Community, forum and customer-review sections
  • Site navigation

The operational managers of the different website sections are the decision makers who ensure the work gets done across the resources they have on hand. These teams decide what content goes on to their own sections and they may have their own content creators and copy writers.

At this level, your SEO team’s job is not only to implement the SEO strategies you have set out, but is to also influence and educate the “site owners”. You will have to find the common goals among your team and each site owner team, and start working towards the goals with the support and resources of the site owner teams.

SEO is not all about ranking in the SERP, so along the line you will have to optimize your conversion flow via web page A/B testing tools such as Google Website Optimizer.

Web Development and Design Resources

The IT department often is where the design and web development resources are, and can be one of the opponents to the SEO team. Even though you may already have executives’ permissions in using resources, you will still have to reserve your web development and design resources in advance.

SEO Best Practices

As Google’s search market share has grown rapidly in the last couple of years, it would make sense to optimize your web site for Google’s ranking algorithm (refer to increase Google PageRank). For the good SEO performance to last, everyone will need to follow a set of search engine optimization standards. Your SEO team must create a best practice guide such as Google SEO for Beginners in which people within the corporation will refer to and follow.

Comments

One Response to “Inhouse SEO Tips”

  1. SEO on July 7th, 2009 3:17 am

    “Before In-house SEO can be started, the entire management team (of executives) must be convinced, involved and in agreement”

    Nicely stated, I have had this issue in the past. The CEO of the company was for SEO/PPC, the web marketing team, the vice president of marketing, all except the vice president of Sales, who I am still working on to this day.

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