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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Penalty for duplicate content on the same website?
Is it possible to get a penalty for duplicate content on the same website? I have a old custom-built site with a large number of filters that are pre-generated for speed. Basically the only difference is the meta title and H1 tag, with a few text differences here and there. Obviously I could no-follow all the filter links but it would take an enormous amount of work. The site is performing well in the search. I'm trying to decide whether if there is a risk of a penalty, if not I'm loath to do anything in case it causes other issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
International website. Di I need a new website
i am looking to expand from the UK and open a location in the US. i curretly have a .co.uk domain. what would you recommend I do with th website, create a new one wth a .com domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
One domain or two for one company with two lines of business?
Let's say you are building a new company that is involved in two lines of business. Let's for example say one line of business is handling logistics for large conventions where the customer(s) are large corporation and the other line is for wedding planning. Let's say that for certain reasons the owner wants to operate under one brand name, say "PROEVENT" So they will market themselves as PROEVENT Convention Logistics and PROEVENT Wedding Planners. From an SEO perspective, if you have one side of the business doing B-to-B corporate business and the other doing B-to-C do you create two different websites on different domains (proeventconventions.com and proeventweddings.com) with unique design and content, or, do you just use provent.com in order to build better domain authority and on your marketing you use conventions.provent.com that takes you to the convention section of the website and weddings.provent.com takes you to the weddings section?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee0 -
Reviews not pulling through to Google My Business page
OK, a local SEO question! We are working with a plumbing company. A search for (Google UK) shows the knowledge panel with 20+ reviews. This is good! However, if you search for "plumbers norwich" and look at the map, thecompany is on the third page and has no reviews. I've logged into Google My Business, and it says the profile is not up to date and only 70% complete with no reviews. This is odd, as there was a fully complete profile recently. Any ideas on how best to reconcile the two? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ad-Rank1 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
Website Suddenly dropping rank
Morning Moz Fans: My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one. Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running. We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | popcreativeltd0 -
Multiple distinct businesses owned by Group
I work for a company which owns 14 different brands, all of which have their own domain, website, sales teams, management teams etc. 10 of the websites sit on the same IP address and have the same (or very similar) WHOIS records. The group website links to all the other sites on an 'Our Companies' page, using the anchor text 'visit site' underneath a brief about that company. My question is what are the ramifications of having those 10 sites sitting on the same servers? They are distinct companies but they mostly have a similar theme. They don't really link to each other unless it's a genuine reason for a cross-over. My CEO has asked me to arrange to move some to other servers but I'm not 100% convinced it's necessary - and wouldn't moving over at this stage look like we're trying to hide something? (Most of the sites have been going for 5 years +). Looking at the WHOIS, or the address in each site's footer makes it clear that they're all part of the same umbrella group. And should I nofollow any links between all the sites? There's not many, it's mainly just the ones on the main group website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Betfred_James0