You’re probably thinking that the big corporations have it pretty easy. They have all the resources in the world, experienced individuals in all the important positions, an established brand name and a competitive advantage. Why would the big conglomerates need SEO? The fact of the matter is all companies, regardless of their size and status in the market, should be looking into SEO strategies and how they can enhance their online presence. So, how should the big companies use SEO to their advantage? Is it much different from how smaller or medium sized firms would use SEO to their advantage? And how do they ensure they use effective SEO strategies? Let’s take a look!
Appreciate the value of SEO
Firstly, if you hold a managerial position in a big corporation, you must understand that SEO is incredibly important to your digital operations. There is a view that SEO requires very little effort and resources. However, if you want to see real improvement in your organic search performance, you’ll need to be putting some time into your SEO projects. This could involve establishing a specialist SEO team within your marketing department, ensuring that your SEO projects get the time and focus they deserve to be successful.
Strong, clear goals
Like any type of business, your marketing strategies need to be set in accordance to clear goals. This can be applied to how your company uses SEO. For a large company, setting clear goals is central along with keeping the stakeholders in the loop. Public companies have a significant amount of stakeholders that they must answer to when making business decisions. Ensuring that stakeholders are on board with any prospective SEO projects is critical to its success.
Know the keywords
Knowing which keywords are going to be the most effective is critical. Small businesses benefit from local SEO techniques and the fact that their keywords can be tailored to the geographic area they operate in, ranging from a particular suburb to a city. Small businesses can also adapt their strategies rapidly in accordance to their niche market. So, if you’re operating within a big company, consider how you can tap into the more popular keywords as a way of undercutting the smaller competitors.
Exploit the brand name
One thing that big companies should be using is their brand name and recognition to appeal to customers. As a result, a valuable brand name and its associations should feature in SEO content, like keyword phrases. There is a reason why large companies get where they are, and often times, a strong brand name with a healthy amount of loyalty is one of the key reasons for such success.
Write high-quality content for local markets
This is something the big companies must be doing. If you want your company to succeed at SEO, your content needs to be high quality and engaging. More importantly, the content needs to be relevant with the search query, since this is how Google’s algorithm works; it ranks the most relevant and quality content more highly. This involves including high-domain authority links and relevant keywords that actually resonate with specific markets. Naturally, you can’t use the same back linking articles in a variety of different countries because of cultural and language differences.
So in many respects, the core principles of SEO don’t massively change from a large company to a small to medium enterprise. What you’ll find, however, is that larger companies need to be appealing to their strengths in order to gain a competitive advantage in the arena of SEO. This involves ensuring that a large company’s strong brand name is included in SEO content to build organic traffic and foster consumer trust. Like small enterprises, larger corporations are still governed by those same SEO principles: high quality and relevant content, clear goals and a strong knowledge of the keywords.
Kieran is the Social Media Manager and SEO Expert at SEO Shark. He is an expert in Social Media, link building, PPC and of course SEO. In his time off work Kieran enjoys reading and playing rugby, as well as following all kinds of sports! You can read some more of his articles here.