Niche Info Online Business

Building a Center of Excellence

A successful approach is the concept of driving SEO-best practices around technical construction, content management and link strategy into the brand management function itself at both the product and geo-marketing levels in large companies. Essentially, this requires anyone who touches the site -- marketing and web management -- to be held accountable for SEO-related results. This is very similar to the "Center of Excellence" concept used to drive CRM best practices.

What is involved? Most Center of Excellence initiatives start with a preliminary 90- to 180-day project. With respect to SEO, the purpose of this is to:

• Select a section of the website and execute the initial optimization of that site section.
  
• Document the process from keyword research, keyword selection, site design, etc., and make the information on the implemented processes available to others in the organization through a knowledge-sharing system like a wiki.
  
• Develop a certification program for those who go through the process that can be used to certify other knowledge workers for future projects.
  
• Identify key metrics of success and document achievement toward those metrics for the initial project (basic improvements to "crawl-ability," content, link strategy on the site, rank changes on the engines, increase in traffic, increase in conversions, etc.).
  
• Pinpoint the technologies necessary to deploy the program at scale across the organization, and identify changes that need to be made to existing technologies (usually the web analytics systems) to track results from organic in the context of the program.
  

Once the initial project is completed, two important outcomes have to occur. First, the program has to be sanctified by the senior marketing leadership as a priority and as something other brands need to embrace. The metrics from the initial project (e.g., indicators of SEO-health for the site, rank analysis and conversion analysis) need to be benchmarked for other sites and goals for improvement set systematically. Brand and geo-marketing managers need to be held accountable for improvements once the initial benchmarking is completed and for getting their groups certified on best practices.

Second, the work on the initial site needs to be expanded to continue improvements. Most organizations experience degradation in SEO performance after about 90 to 120 days. This is why SEO is most effective as an ongoing process. Degradation is usually the result of competitive action. Search marketing is a zero sum game: There is a finite amount of inventory available and being successful at SEO comes at the expense of a less able competitor. Competitors will notice improvements and respond.

The Center of Excellence concept is designed to be scalable as it is viral. It builds the best practices into the daily processes of the employees working on the site and ensures they are educated, motivated and measured to excel at SEO.

Let's see how it works.