Niche Info Online Business

By Craig Macdonald

Leaving organic search results to chance can be costly for your brand. Here's a strategic, scalable system for success.

How much is the word "cheap airfare" worth in the United States? The answer is about $8 million, according to comScore Marketer Search Data, December 2007. A word like "laptop" is worth about $35 to 40 million. "Car insurance" is estimated to be worth more than $50 million per year. And this is just the conversion value of the top organic listings.

Organic listings continue to account for the majority of the clicks, with between 75 and 85 percent of all clicks going to organic results depending on which study you read. Add in the PPC results, and these figures can be adjusted up by another 15 to 25 percent.

The value of search is rarely questioned nowadays. So as more and more consumers go to Google and Yahoo to research everything they do -- from restaurants where they eat to the houses they buy -- the option to invest heavily in search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer a choice; it is a necessity. Not focusing on building processes to dominate organic rankings is a very costly brand management error in every market.

The challenge, particularly for larger brands, is how to build a scalable and predictable approach for managing organic rankings -- how to raise awareness, how to leverage the opportunity, how to instill the key processes and how to execute the work.

The focus of this article is the best practices in building out scalable SEO processes. The information below is based on the experience of some of the largest global brand managers in the market. Also discussed below are results attained by these major brands and how what they learned can be used to predict future outcomes from SEO.

The complexity of building SEO for large brands

Excelling at SEO involves both good news and bad news for a large company with its many brands, websites and locations in multiple countries. The good news is that a large brand site, with its linking and content, has every right to be at the top of the organic listings based on the way the search engine algorithms work.

The bad news is that exposing that content to the engines usually requires close coordination between personnel in the organization's IT and marketing departments as well as the agencies being used. With worldwide offices, this gets complicated.

Also, the engines are increasing the sophistication and complexity of what SEO means. SEO is no longer just based on text analysis. In the age of universal search, SEO-based brand promotion has to include the way images, videos and text are added to the site to ensure visibility and relevance to key search terms used by consumers.

In addition, there are ever increasing ways that the engines are returning relevant information to end users through specialized return results such as News, Travel and Maps. Each category has unique ways to determine which organic ads are shown and therefore command the lion's share of the consumer's attention.

A common response from large organizations is to hire an SEO expert to act as an internal advocate and consultant to the brands on SEO-related issues. Given the size of these organizations, the number of parts of the organization that require communication and the complexity of the problem, this approach is rarely effective or efficient.

SEO requires a holistic approach -- one no different from the management of traditional corporate processes like customer relationship management (CRM). It would be unthinkable in this day and age to "hire someone to do CRM" as organizations have a healthy respect for the fact that CRM is a process and a way of thinking. CRM is a way of life for large enterprises. SEO should be the same.

Here's a way to manage it.