Strategy for a large website where you only work for one business unit.

[laura-intertek]

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?

[BenFox]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[NakulGoyal]

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.

[JFritton]

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