Pointers for an Interview with a Large (3000+ employee) Company?

[KenjiCrosland]

Hi All,

I'm interviewing with the director of SEO of a large enterprise company tomorrow afternoon and would love some pointers.

It's a relatively large company with about 3,000+ employees. There are currently 2 people doing SEO exclusively in the company and they are looking to expand the team significantly.

As I understand it, my role will be to help out with link building initiatives. I currently work freelance as a content marketer for startups. While I do some onsite optimization and some keyword research, I consider building domain authority by creating quality content that gets links to be my main focus.

But link building for a large enterprise may be a little less hands-on than I'm used to. I imagine I'll be working with different departments, namely these ones:

Biz Dev Team

PR Team

SEM Team

I imagine there will be some questions about how I would work with these departments to help build links. Any suggestions for working with these other teams? What other questions should I be prepared for?

Oh, and here's my resume for those interested...I imagine there will be some questions about my background too: http://bit.ly/KenjisResume

Thanks,

Kenji

[danatanseo]

Hi Kenji, First and foremost, congrats on getting the interview!

As far as link building for a larger company, the first thing I would tell them is that you want to do a complete audit of existing inbound links, you versus competitors. From this, you will be able to identify some missed opportunities (i.e. low-hanging fruit that you could immediately harvest). You'll also be able to identify opportunities based on who's linking to competitors. For example, we had a competitor who had an inbound link from Columbia University. When I researched the link I found out it was from a professor who linked to our competitor (and several others) as a resource for his students. My company really belonged on that list. I wrote to the professor and told him that I thought we would make a good addition to his resource list and, simple as that, he added us and we got and inbound link from Columbia University.

In your interview, I would say that you will make an organized effort to be connected to the activities being performed by other departments that might result in linking opportunities. An example might be, if a department is reaching out into the community and mentoring a group of students, reaching out to them and asking when and where their work might be published online and just politely request an link back as a courtesy...They will say yes.  The same goes for charity involvement. A company of 5,000 employees without question probably does a whole lot of #RCS. Find out where they are involved in the community and look for possible linking opportunities (i.e. donor pages on charity websites).

I bet you will cover so many existing "missed" opportunities that you'll be busy for a long time chasing them all down.

I hope this helps and GOOD LUCK!

Dana

[KenjiCrosland]

Thanks for the pointers Dana! I think it went really well!

[fatetmpwcosl]

Are you talking about SEO interview? I'm also looking for some tips to do some interviews for a blog job. I have read some good points on this blog.