Strategy for a large website where you only work for one business unit.
-
I have been tasked with improving traffic/leads to www.intertek.com. The problems we face are that I only work for one of the business units. There are many within the company and they all work independantly. The services my division offers range from ISO certification to food safety/testing to oil and gas services.
They want to increase their quality content and traffic.
What is the best strategy to approach working with a company this diverse and the limitation of managing 500 pages of a 15,000 page site? What are the first steps and what actions do you think would give the best results?
-
Hi Laura,
Intertek is a well respected company in several fields (I actually used to work on digital campaigns for one of your larger competitors) and should have a fairly natural advantage in terms of content that exists already and industry recognition.
The onsite SEO for the entire site looks a bit below average (Please correct me if I'm wrong here..) and you could probably show some improvement in the numbers fairly quickly that way.
I found some success in driving quality/relevant traffic with a competitor of yours through community development. Intertek deals with a fairly technical audience and there are a lot of related active discussions happening regularly in different forums including linkedIn groups. Gain some cooperation and buy in from some of your brand managers and have them participate in community discussion and conversation. Use a social media platform to monitor the different groups and apportion responses and questions to the appropriate person. Remember to "brand" them as well otherwise they'll eventually lose interest.
I'm fairly certain that Intertek has a great deal of tools and guides that your technicians and surveyors are using. If they haven't been declared internal-only try to find audiences that could make use of them, even if only for basic reference and publish them on sites that cater to that audience. (Make sure they're copyrighted first).
Get some cross-promotion going with the various associations, professional certification groups and advocacy groups of which I guarantee Intertek has been active with. Find out what content their marketing people would like to have and utilize your internal resources there. This can be challenging because your operations people aren't going to want extra demands on the non-marketing subject matter experts that are probably overworked already, but you should be able to get questions answered or short descriptions written that you can flesh out into longer content pieces.
Focus on your division first and document everything. I mean everything. Show the benefits of your work over time and pitch it to the other business units. Make sure to brand yourself and your team as being the ones responsible. You should be able to show some good improvement in the numbers over time and describe to the powers-that-be how your efforts in your unit can be applied to their area of responsibility.
There is, of course, traditional media buys and search marketing, but that depends on your budget.
Best of luck
-Jason
-
Do you have a CMS system that lets you control those pages independently or everything is handled via IT ? Are there architecture level changes that you can do that will help the entire site if made to the "template" / include files ?
I completely agree with Ben and EGOL.
In my opinion, wear the hat of an SEO Evangelist within your organization and do a great job on educating after you have a success story or before if you need to do it on a larger scale. Try and get executive buy-in on things you are trying to do.
Again, it depends on what the Business Goals and Needs are and what's the short term and long term SEO Strategy. Think of the low hanging fruits as well as long term goals.
-
Determine what management will respect. Will they respect traffic? Sales? Leads?
Then do a kickass job of that in your business area. Be sure that it is impressive. Then say that the same results can probably be achieved in other biz areas. Be specific on what it will take (if you are not specific they might do a halfhearted job and claim that it didn't work.
-
Hi Laura.
Well the obvious thing is to push for organizational change and get the whole company on board with SEO and moving in the same direction. That's the best solution as if you're all working together you can pool resources and work cohesively.
But you probably already know that.
To make the most out of your current situation I'd start by doing some onpage analysis - checking your pages are targeted at the right terms and that everything is set up correctly.
If possible I'd push to improve your page types - making sure that your product pages are as good as they can be and packed full of information. That way you might be able to do some linkbuilding to your pages based on the quality of the content.
If not possible then you've got to figure out how to linkbuild to your pages in their current format.
And that's pretty much it - do as much optimization as you can but if your company really wants to move the needle on SEO then you'll be wanting to work on a sitewide level.
Hope that helps.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Any Tips for Reviving Old Websites?
Hi, I have a series of websites that have been offline for seven years. Do you guys have any tips that might help restore them to their former SERPs glory? Nothing about the sites themselves has changes since they went offline. Same domains, same content, and only a different server. What has changed is the SERPs landscape. I've noticed competitive terms that these sites used to rank on the first page for with far more results now. I have also noticed some terms result in what seems like a thesaurus similar language results from traditionally more authoritative websites instead of the exact phrase searched for. This concerns me because I could see a less relevant page outranking me just because it is on a .gov domain with similar vocabulary even though the result is not what people searching for the term are most likely searching for. The sites have also lost numerous backlinks but still have some really good ones.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CopBlaster.com1 -
Acquired a company, what should be done with their website?
Hi, I work for a furniture company that essentially purchased another furniture store some time back a few years ago. However, this furniture store that was acquired had a website. The website has no existing pages anymore, only the homepage. The homepage has a message on it describing how it's been taken over and then links to our website. The spam score for the website is 8. I was wondering if there was something else we should do instead of the link, whether that be a straight 301 redirect or if we should have the link at all considering its score. I can provide more information and links if needed. Thanks in advance, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamEgarr0 -
Could i add my website in Google News
Hi , I am looking to add article news section of my website http://goo.gl/De5MKo in google news. We'll remove all content from this news section http://www.99acres.com/articles/real-estate-news and upload unique news, might be possible we use graph/chart and images from some other news site and other sources but the content will be unique and fresh. Any specific guidelines for URL structure for this news section? We are thinking about to create URL like xyz.com/news/ <title>. Is it okay and will not harm our site? Google News can consider my section as a news?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
Strategy After Switching To HTTPS
So we made a big mistake with our website last month. Without thinking things through, our entire website was switched to using a SSL certificate and https urls on all pages of the site. I know it is recommended that SSL is only used on sensitive pages, but we have a lead form on all pages. Of course Google is taking some time to adjust to all of our urls changing. A week later we lost all of our Google search rankings. It has now been about 3 weeks and our site is showing some signs of recovery, but obviously we'd like a quicker recovery. We have done proper 301 redirects throughout the site, but unfortunately our CMS has been a little buggy creating some other problems to fix along the way. So my main question is, how can we speed up the process? I do understand that we stand to lose 5-10% value of our old links due to the redirects. Is there anything else we should be doing to recover quicker though? Also, at this point, would it make any sense to switch back to http urls? Or would that just delay things further? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BorisD0 -
Right SEO strategy for Wordpress
Hello all, I am working on my SEO strategy for a WordPress site. I am trying to cover all my keywords in: 1.a) Page title trying to have a length <70 1.b) Page url trying to have a length<115 My question is: should i try to focus all my keywords in both name and url page path? or only in the Page title as the SEOMOZ's guide suggest? I would go for a mix strategy with my keywords in both page title and url path name, but I do not know if the search engines PAY MORE ATTENTION TO THE PAGE TITLE, so mixing 1.a) and 1.b) would mean I am loosing keywords. I am using the WordPress All in ONE SEO Plugin. Do you recommend me this or any other plugin? This plugin has 3 input fields: a) Title tag b) Description tag c) Keywords My questions here are: a) If these tags replace the standard settings of WP as described in point 1.a) b) If the description and title tags are META TAGS that are not taken into account in terms of SEO but in terms of customer description of the contento of the page. c) Where are the keywords listed inserted in the page? In H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags? My feeling after reading the SEOMOZ guide is that this plugin is not providing any added value for SEO any more??' Thank you very much, Best regards, Antonio Alcocer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalcocer20030 -
Multiple sitemaps for one site?
Excuse my sitemap ignorance here. I've got a site and it's got a blog in a sub-folder. The blog gets updated frequently, the main site does not. Is it best to; a) Have 2 sitemaps.. one in the root and one in the /blog folder. b) Have 1 sitemap that is regularly updated The reason being, I know there's various plugins that create blog sitemaps on the fly, so that would be much easier than updating the main sitemap every time a change was made. If the answer is 2 sitemaps; Would you stop the root sitemap from detailing the contents of the blog folder or just update it every so often with the contents of the blog folder?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Redirecting multiple websites to a single website
I've been trying to run several truck accessory affiliate websites for a quite a while now. I've recently decided to combine all of my affiliate websites into a single community website. This way I'll be able to focus all my energy and link building into a single place and build up a single brand. My question is, how many websites do I try to redirect to the new website at a time? Do I need to spread this out? Or is it ok if I move all of my content and websites at a single time? I have around 30 websites that I could move to this new domain. Thanks! Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daenterpri0