Is Your Brand Too Big For SEO?

I spent the first couple years of my SEO career in the B2C arena and everybody wanted and needed SEO to establish their presence online. Individuals really understood that they needed SEO to make an impression on the internet. A few years later, I moved into a predominantly B2B market and the love for SEO just wasn’t there as much.

Many of the larger companies that I have worked with tend to think that they are already big enough when it comes to online brand awareness or that their new micro-site is aimed at such a small, focused group of consumers that they don’t need SEO.

Large companies tend to have marketing messages and branded material that they’ve used for years and they’re not very interested in having someone else write the content for their new website. Nine times out of ten they do not even take into consideration that the web is an entirely different medium then what they’re accustomed to writing for.

Granted, most consumers aren’t going to search for “luxury automobile” and then suddenly remember BMW, but what if I asked them to name 10 of the top department stores? Of course they are going to be able to name at least 10, but are they going to name your company?

One of the biggest challenges that I have faced is trying to educate marketing departments on the fact that not everyone thinks the way they do. As SEO’s, keyword research is usually our first indication that the general public thinks and talks about their company in a slightly different way than industry professionals.

Show Them Results

One of the best ways I have found to convince larger corporations that they need SEO is to actually show them with results how much better their pages can perform on the search engines.

1. I usually start off with baby steps: by recommending that I rewrite just one of the website’s existing pages, I can usually avoid major hurdles with corporate approval and extensive edits. Ideally for this experiment, you’ll want to keep that existing page online to show them later how much better your new page is performing.
2. Optimize the page to the best of your ability and send as many links to it as possible. Don’t forget to focus on factors that can help drive conversion to really make the most of your test page.
3. In a few weeks, your new page should be ranking higher than their existing page, and it should be performing better with users as well.
4. Show the results to your client and continue explaining the benefits of SEO as part of a comprehensive online strategy.

In these tough economic times it can be hard getting a client to sign up with SEO when they already have established brand awareness and respectable online exposure. Lure them in with small one or two page additions to pique their interest and you can prove the value of SEO by letting your results speak for themselves. Even though they might be doing well, they can always improve their rankings.

What about you? What are some other ways you have convinced large companies to get into SEO?