Study: Fortune 500 Doesn’t Get SEO

The Fortune 500 are “woefully unrepresented in natural search,” according to a new report out this week. Conductor, a New York-based search/analytics agency, studied the natural search visibility of Fortune magazine’s 2008 Fortune 500 — a list of America’s biggest companies.

“The Fortune 500 as a whole,” the report says, “had extremely limited natural search visibility for the terms in which they have the greatest investment in paid search.”

Some findings from the study:

• 72% of Fortune 500 companies have very low or non-existent visibility for their most advertised keywords
• 20% of Fortune 500 companies have low to mid presence
• 8% of Fortune 500 companies studied showed mid to strong presence for their most advertised keywords

The Conductor study gave its highest grades to Fortune 500 companies in the Accommodations, Health Care, Real Estate, and Finance industries, as shown on the chart below.

But the overall grade for the nation’s largest businesses isn’t good.

“With very few exceptions,” the report says, “our research found that Fortune 500 companies are doing an extraordinarily poor job of ensuring that their ‘money’ keywords are even moderately well represented in natural search.”

You can download “Natural Search Trends of the Fortune 500 Q3-2008” on Conductor’s web site.