In House SEO tips and advice part 2

Continuing from my last post about In House SEO advice. Read on to find out how to deal with SEO issues in a corporate environment.

Repeat problems
Certain problems can continue to appear because staff are uninformed or looking for a quick fix. I spotted repeated use of “meta refresh” on a site and this looked like an automated script that needed removing, such was the consistency of the code and placement. Instead I found there to be a step by step redirect process that developers would follow, so I had to change this process and educate staff so they knew what they were doing wrong and the correct way to solve the problem.

Search Engine Optimisation champions
Select staff to be SEO champions. These would be trained to spot basic SEO issues and be assigned the task of notifying me when they came across a problem. The problem could be solved by me with the member of staff there so they could understand the process. This helped to spread my influence better than being the sole person to deal with SEO. It’s a bit like being in charge of an army… One general needs lieutenants and sergeants to help communicate the strategy… even with mobiles/blackberry phones and email, communication in these large companies is best done face to face. Emails are just too easy to ignore! Having these other members of staff on your side makes your job easier to do well. As SEO touches on and is affected by so many different areas, this is key.
The following areas affect SEO: Programming/development, design, content. The other Internet marketing channels like affiliates, display, PPC can all have an affect on SEO too.

Projects
You cannot micro manage everything on a site, instead use automated scripts to assign a process for a title tag/meta description. Where dynamic optimisation is not possible, train up an SEO champion for that part of the business. If this is possible, write up a step by step guide to the basics… Writing good titles, good descriptions and good content etc. While the work they do might not be perfect, it might just win a bit more revenue than without this help.

Automate
Establish a link policy, big companies usually work with 3rd parties so look for an opportunity to include a return link to a suitable page as part of the agreement or contract with these 3rd parties. Making this part of an agreement or contract keeps internal people from ignoring it.

Focus on the big picture
It gets annoying seeing broken links and duplicated title tags but working on huge sites will always throw up problems and errors. Do work that will improve the bottom line rather than focus on making 5000 perfect title tags (do that if you can though!). Big companies listen where money is concerned, if you double revenue on natural search, they will listen when you say you need development time to fix the broken title tags. Always remember that you are measured on cash and not quality! Once you prove your worth you will earn respect and that much needed development time that is key to getting SEO working.

A narrow focus doesn’t work is a corporate environment. I am responsible for natural search and I often find broken links on the sites I manage. I could fix them myself, but even with a 10 strong team of copyrighters, it will be a full time job. Instead, write a best practice document that needs checking against before go live. SEO on this scale makes it impossible for you to be involved on every individual project so you must look to extend your influence as wide as possible. This is no role for a shy retiring type. Your ideas will conflict with others and compromise is often the result. This will annoy some SEOs used to working agency side because they more or less have their clients over a barrel (either do as I say or risk inferior results!). Being a client side SEO is not the same and requires internal support.

Some internal people will never understand SEO properly because they focus on “Why are we only #2 for Insert search term? Keep looking at the big picture. If you have reduced duplicate content across the site and increased ranking pages by 20% you know you are doing a good job. You need to be a bit bloody minded, you don’t get anywhere by trying to please everyone, you’ll only realise that trying to please everyone disappoints everyone! Stick to your own instincts and the improvement in revenue will allow you to continue working to your own goals rather than working under the guidance of someone that knows nothing about SEO.

Once you are a proven at generating revenue, you can recommend improvements without having to make massive business cases. This is how to succeed as an in house SEO. Focus on project work, by this I mean, establish what problems you want to solve (meta description and title tags on the entire site) and get together a team to do this. Contact your SEO agency if you have one and get them started on Keyword research. Once you have completed this task, you can cross it off the list.

The advantage of working in this way is that you become less narrow minded in your approach (the 1 bit of missing description on the “contact us” page) and more focused on fixing links on the whole site. If you didn’t work in this structured way, you’d be forever working on the CMS fixing links, correcting misspellings and html code. When you deal with sites with over 10,000 URLs this is impossible!

Good luck!

Read part 1 In house SEO advice