Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

Challenge: Brand Maintenance

Another “too much” challenge for you lies in the need

to keep your brand current. You have probably already witnessed several major

changes to your site, steered either by real market forces or by the perceptions of your

marketing department. Maybe you have a redesign every six months, frequent new

products or product updates, or new branding guidelines to implement. Structurally,

you may also have multiple subdomains, more than one URL leading to your home

page, and lots of fragmented bits of old versions of your site floating around out there.

(Think you don’t? Check again. We can honestly say we haven’t met one large website

that didn’t have something old and out-of-date live and available on the search

engines.) Maybe you have all of the above, multiple times over, because you have dif-

ferent teams responsible for different portions of your website. Because of all these fac-

tors, the large organization has a special need to keep its “calling cards” on the Web

consistent with the current state of its site. Cleaning up old and dead links and making

sure your listings talk about your current products and services should be two of your

highest priorities.

Advantage: Budget and Existing Infrastructure

Of course, “too much” works to your

advantage too. You may have a larger budget, which means that you can probably

afford to buy some of the many helpful tracking and keyword tools that we will sug-

gest in this book. And your company probably has existing marketing data about your

customers, their behaviors and habits, and their budgets, which your SEO campaign

can tap into.

Advantage: Lots of Landing Pages

Large sites often have a wealth of opportunities for

landing pages. Go deep, or more appropriately, go

shallow-wide

: think beyond your

home page and main section pages when determining which pages to optimize. This

shallow-wide approach—driving site visitors to a large number of unique pages on

your site—can help you compensate for some of the other challenges we’ve discussed.

Challenge: Pay-per-Click Pitfalls Pay-per-click (PPC)

campaigns can help you accomplish

your shallow-wide goals, and your average PPC campaign is much cheaper on a per-visit

basis than any form of offline marketing. But PPC campaigns for large organizations have

the potential to be large and unwieldy. Even with the built-in management tools that make

your PPC campaign a fairly user-friendly experience, the sheer magnitude of a hundred-

plus or thousand-plus keyword campaign can be very time-consuming. PPC campaigns are

an unlikely mix of the creative (word choice, campaign strategy) and the tedious (daily

budget caps, maximum click price). The danger for the large company is that it’s very easy

to shift your attention away from the important details such as clarity of message and

appropriateness of keyword choice and get distracted by the data.

Advantage: PPC Assistance

Luckily, your larger budget may qualify you for helpful

hand-holding services directly from the PPC engines—services where actual humans

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