Enterprise
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White Papers: Key To B2B Enterprise SEO Power
Enterprise marketers, particularly in the B-to-B space, often find content development a difficult proposition. The company's thought leaders, although happy to pontificate, are often afraid of committing to a writing schedule - and the marketer, admittedly, is trying to get others to "squeeze in" content, essentially "off the books". With no reward, why should anyone help with the difficult, thankless work of writing articles? The trick is for the marketer to take advantage of three key tactics...
Building An Enterprise-Level Search Marketing Team: Part 2
In July, I began my two-part series on building an enterprise-level search marketing team. We left off with a review of the essentials for SEO, including all the technical and editorial factors that can hinder your website’s rankings in the search engines. If you’ve followed my recommendations thus far, you’ll have hired a reputable search guru, […]
Building An Enterprise-Level Search Marketing Team: Part 1
Several years ago, I was tasked with building an enterprise-level search marketing team for a top online retailer. Because of the lessons learned and results achieved, I want to pass this intel on to those tasked with creating a search marketing team from scratch. Your Foundation: The Search Guru My first recommendation is to start […]
Enterprise SEO Interview With ABC’s John Shehata
I spoke recently with John Shehata, the director of search for ABC News. Since he owns the SEO responsibility for a number of large media properties, I leapt at the chance to explore some of the things he has learned along the way. We dug in and explored the challenges of educating a large media […]
The Keyword Discovery Process For Enterprise Sites
The keyword discovery process is critical for managing enterprise projects, as it forms the bedrock of brand messaging in search and social for large-scale websites or multiple brand sites under one corporate umbrella. This process is similar to keyword discovery for smaller sites; however, the difference in scale makes the process more complex. There are […]
Top 10 Tool Features For Successful Enterprise SEO
In 2007, I had the unique opportunity of building an in-house SEO team for an enterprise-level e-commerce retailer. From an SEO perspective, the website had been the accouterment of hacks, built over a six-year period with absolutely no consideration for search engines. The founder CEO was persuaded by a very bright 26-year-old VP to rebuild […]
How To Build Your Own Enterprise SEO Datastore
I hereby swear to not use the phrase “big data” again in this post. Enterprise SEO is all about the data. More accurately, it’s all about data storage. If you can look back over a year, pull out different metrics and see which ones correlate to success, you’re one step closer to repeating that success. […]
Why Enterprises Cannot Ignore Deep Link Building
Many enterprise websites, particularly those associated with good brands, obtain lots of links to their home page without any focused link building effort. In some sense, you could say that they get these links “for free.” Since this is the case, do these sites really need to have a dedicated link building effort in place? […]
The Importance Of Big Data, Integrity & Security In Enterprise SEO
The phrase Big Data is everywhere. Not a day passes without the release of another report that describes the extent to which Big Data is influencing how we do business. But, what exactly is Big Data? What does Big Data mean in the context of digital marketing? How can we be more effective search marketers […]
Required Reading For Enterprise SEOs: The Top 25 Posts Of The Year
The Enterprise SEO column made its debut on Search Engine Land midway through 2011, as large companies and big brands were faced with new challenges and massive opportunities in the search world. In 2012, we saw mega-sized content sites lose visibility in search results due to Panda, while the Penguin updates squashed those who gambled […]
A Year-End Checklist For Evaluating Your Enterprise SEO Program
As the year comes to a close it is a good time to evaluate your enterprise SEO program and ensure that needed adjustments are made. The best time to do this is actually during budget season so you are able to make a case for additional resources as necessary. But, since budget timing varies from […]
10 Reasons Enterprise SEO Is Trouble, Plus 4 Ways To Make It Work
It sounds really attractive: 9-5 hours. You get to focus on a single product. You can win over a single IT department. The grass is way greener over there. But the truth is, in the SEO world, the large enterprise is in trouble. I know about brand favoritism. And I know large enterprises have massive […]
6 Ways To Shatter The Ceiling With An Enterprise Site Quality Audit
Enterprise SEO has always emphasized visibility, authority and relevance. If you’re optimizing a site with more than 10,000 pages, you now need a streamlined way to audit site quality. Quality matters, and it matters even more on large sites, because you can repeat the same issues so many times. That drags down your entire site. […]
The Publisher’s Guide To Enterprise News SEO
At Define Media Group, we jokingly say that we are unafraid to be the best in the world at an industry that is imploding faster than Amanda Bynes’s career. With many major media conglomerates as bedrock clients and hundreds of news and magazine titles under our watchful eye, the following thoughts represent our attempt at saving […]
What The Convergence Of Publishing & Ecommerce Means For Enterprise SEO
The convergence of publishing and ecommerce has been evolving for some time and is picking up steam. On the one side, publishers who are facing declining advertising revenue are branching out and looking for new income streams. For many, ecommerce is the best opportunity at the moment. Recent articles from The New York Times and […]
Nuance’s Nina Is Siri For Enterprise Customer Service
Although there were so-called “virtual assistants” before Siri, consumers had only limited experience with them and may not have even realized what they were dealing with at the time. United Airlines’ “virtual agent” Alex is one such automated assistant, though it doesn’t use speech and currently doesn’t work on mobile devices. At least a dozen […]
Don’t Forget The Other Type Of Enterprise Search
As SEOs, we focus on external customers: Getting more people outside an organization to sign up, buy, read, follow and otherwise participate. We don’t invest a lot of effort at helping internal customers: Colleagues at our own company who need help finding critical information, but end up grinding their teeth after 10 minutes lost in […]
3 Ways Enterprises Cripple Their Online Marketing Efforts
An increasing number of enterprises are engaging in PR, SEO, social media, and content marketing. Having these four areas covered is great, but many companies are not getting anywhere near the full ROI from their investment in them. In today’s column, I am going to explore the reasons why that is the case, and outline […]
The Ultimate Guide To Enterprise SEO: 25 Things To Know Before You Take The Plunge
Enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not rocket science. In fact, it is not even as faceted as many other sectors of SEO in which practitioners have to perform many more nuanced SEO tasks (and often by themselves). So why is Enterprise SEO so underserved and why do so few large organizations embrace it properly? […]
The Enterprise SEO Guide To Response Codes
Response codes impact every page, image and file on your website. A visiting search engine bot figures out what to do based on those codes. Incorrect response codes can cause: Indexation problems; Duplicate content; Site performance problems; All manner of other site higgledy-piggledy. Enterprise SEO is all about big, site-wide wins. Response codes are just […]
Large-Scale Content Optimization Tactics For Enterprise Sites
For large organizations, keeping a close watch on keyword targeting and on-page optimization across an entire site or network of sites is not an easy task. At the enterprise level, a single site can have millions or tens of millions of pages, and larger organizations such as news publishers may have 20-30 different sites or […]
How To Build & Manage Enterprise Search Marketing Teams
On a panel at a recent conference, I had the pleasure of moderating a great discussion on building and managing in-house SEO teams. What made this panel superb was that it wasn’t just about in-house SEO teams.There was quite a bit of content around hiring, working with third parties, and the interaction between marketing and […]
The Relationship Between Enterprise SEO & PPC: SMX East Recap
During a whirlwind stay at SMX East, I had the enviable opportunity to speak at length about two of my all-time favorite topics: Enterprise PPC, and the relationship between paid and organic search. Enterprise PPC It was interesting to get some very different takes on Industrial Strength SEM from the seasoned pros seated next to […]
SS Enterprise: Venturing Into SEO And Social Media Strategies
Internet Marketing is in a state of constant change. This places major stresses on organizations that try to keep up and are not quite sure what initiatives they should invest in and which ones are a waste of time. For many companies, one of the biggest current challenges is to decide how much energy to […]
Get These Three Things Right In Enterprise SEO
The other day in URLs café at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, I had a great conversation with our head of SEO. He was telling me about significant recent success SEO has been enjoying at Yahoo! At many large companies, SEO is an uphill battle, so any victory should be fully celebrated. I asked what happened […]
Weighing In-House vs Agency SEO For Enterprise Search Strategies
Working on the agency side of search for many years has taught me some valuable lessons. I’ve been privileged to work with the best and brightest, and by turns, saddled to work with the worst and dullest. I’ve seen a little bit of everything: those that get it, those that don’t, and those that don’t […]
PPC Tactics For Large Enterprises: Search Network Targeting
At SMX West last month, I spoke at length about what it means to manage PPC programs at large companies. One of the topics I covered at some depth was using the various search engines’ targeting options to break keywords down into smaller bits of data to optimize them individually. This type of tactic can […]
Forrester Research Publishes 1st Report On Enterprise SEO Automation Tools
Today, Forrester Research unveiled a 6- page report on the utility of SEO automation tools for use in larger enterprises. Six vendors were covered in the landscape report, including Altruik, BrightEdge, Conductor, Covario, SEOmoz PRO, and Yield Software. The report mainly covers key issues in scaling automation across larger enterprises, integration of IT services and […]
Enterprise SEO: 5 Tips To Create A Governance System
The SEO landscape is competitive enough for B2B organizations. The last thing they need is internal competition from other business units. But many marketers face this hurdle when implementing an effective enterprise search solution. But to be successful, enterprise level SEO needs to be supported by a governance system based on effective communication. Why Governance […]
What Google’s Preferred AdWords API Pricing Change Means For Enterprise Search Marketers
Back in late April, Google announced that it was changing the way AdWords would work for agencies and application providers managing paid search via the AdWords API. This seemingly simple change from Google levels the playing field between in-house and externally developed search engine marketing tool providers.
Enterprise SEO Tools, Part 2: The Cloud
Get ready for Part 2 in our series on enterprise SEO tools! Next up: web-based (or cloud hosted) tool sets for link research, SEO diagnostics, and competitive research.
Enterprise SEO Tools, Part 1: The Browser
Everybody loves tools! For search marketers working on any level—a 10 page site or a 10 million page site—tools are essential. They save us time, they help us diagnose issues, and they give us a peek into what our competitors are doing. They can even give us a peek into what the search engines are […]
Getting Top Management Buy-In For Enterprise SEO
My last post focused on selling the benefits of SEO in a large enterprise. Once you have done that you will already have made great progress, but now you need to take the next step: getting your management team to understand what is means to pursue SEO, and how it affects the business at an […]
Selling The Benefits Of SEO In A Large Enterprise
This is the first of a two part series on selling SEO in a large enterprise. Part 2 will be published as my next Industrial Strength column. In Part 1, the focus will be on why getting search traffic is important to an organization. Part 2 will explore some of the consequences of that realization. […]
Practical Long Tail Strategies For Enterprise-Class Paid Search Campaigns
The “long tail” is a source of much debate within the paid search marketing community. The concept, popularized by Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, is used to describe the large number of keywords available for purchase that individually deliver little traffic, but in aggregate have the potential to be an important source of clicks and conversions […]
Enterprise SEM: Q&A With Zappos’ Darrin Shamo
Zappos.com, the online retailer with legendary customer service, has been on a meteoric rise during the last few years. After achieving revenues of over $1 billion in 2008, Zappos was acquired by one of the biggest players on the web in late 2009: Amazon.com. Behind Zappos’s amazing customer service and great brand, lies a sophisticated […]
Enterprise SEO: A “Plumbing” Problem
A few years ago, I was attending a training session on brand guidelines for a large technology company. The products and services they provided were described by the presenter as the “plumbing” in the wall – something you don’t see, but it allows things to work properly, which makes your life easier. It’s tough to […]
Enterprise Search: Keyword Arbitration Between Organic & Paid
Enterprise Search Marketing programs face a multitude of challenges. Lack of resources, lack of accurate metrics, difficulty getting site changes implemented for organic optimization and so forth. Many of these challenges are more on the organizational side of things than anything else. For those of you in this camp, here’s a challenge that will sound […]
Enterprise Search: Focus On The Business Goals
Implementing a successful search program at the Enterprise level has some unique challenges. Often, web marketing staff and content creators become very concerned with making everything “SEO Friendly”. There is almost a sense of paranoia when creating web content, that every web page must be found in Google, which tends to be a major concern […]
Google’s CIO On The “Consumerization” Of The Enterprise
The Wall Street Journal has an interview this morning with Google’s Chief Information Officer Douglas Merrill. He discusses the company’s attitude toward security and the freedom that Google permits its employees in terms of choosing software applications, phones, computer operating systems, and so on.