SEO maybe cheaper than PPC? Oh really? ROI is higher on PPC, you can measure it easier.
PPC is a science, and not a long-term investment.

-AS

It is sad that most of these major companies have no SEO whatsoever and complain that no one uses their site or knows who they are. My small start up probably has more SEO than most of these major companies, and we work hard at it. I think that is one of the many advantage start-ups have over these massive companies.

We deal with Fortune 1000 companies and the search agencies that serve them – and often see that the senior level execs have a great desire to invest in SEO, but get caught up on two main issues: scale and ROI.

We recently did a study on just how closely these companies tie their natural and paid search strategies – this might be useful for anyone out there banging the drum internally about the importance of investing in search.

Here’s the link:
http://www.conductor.com/research/q32008/natural-search-trends-of-fortune-500

Seth Dotterer
Conductor, Inc.

http://www.youtechno.info/2009/01/service-upgrade-better-seo-for-your.html

1) If it’s consulting we’re doing for them, we’re usually helping create or strengthen an in-house team of SEO experts. Our philosophy is to teach our clients how to fish rather than do all the fishing for them. That way they can stand on their own two feet after our engagement is over. If it’s GravityStream we’re doing for them, the client controls the URLs because they are on their own site (on the www subdomain of their domain). Which means they have the ability to set up permanent 301 redirects on all the GravityStream URLs to the corresponding native-site product and category URLs (as defined by their CMS). They would need to “bake in” the SEO improvements into their CMS (the URLs, internal linking structure etc.) if they don’t want to maintain rankings – no small task if it’s an unwieldy CMS. We are quite open; we don’t hide anything in terms of what improvements we’ve made through the GravityStream proxy. You can simply compare the two HTML documents to see all the improvements.

2) GravityStream does build lasting SEO success in two ways. One way is that it helps guide your own CMS improvements, since clients are free to replicate our SEO infrastructure improvements and bake them into their CMS. Indeed we’ve had clients use GravityStream just a “bridge” solution until their major site redesign project was complete (which, shockingly, can take 2 years for some companies!). Second way is to look at GravityStream as your outsourced natural search marketing channel, ongoing. We, as their SEO agency, provide SEO guidance but with a big difference: we can actually affect change, even if it’s a terribly complex and convoluted CMS. Where other agencies deliver documents and spreadsheets, we can go beyond that (still providing these sorts of deliverables), but with the ability to implement the advice. We conduct tests, measure the results, and iterate over and over again – thus continually optimizing their SEO performance. Having a nimble enough CMS and sufficient amount of expert internal resource to pull this off is usually a tall order for an enterprise.

3) Head keywords are best addressed at the secondary level in your site tree (or on the home page of course). If the page is one click away from your home page, it has the best chance of ranking from a PageRank importance standpoint. By optimizing secondary level pages (through GravityStream, or through native site changes) to “sing” to the search engines for these various head terms, you improve your chances of ranking for these terms. That said, I’m a huge fan of the Long Tail of natural search. There is an incredible amount of opportunity/revenue that can be mined from a Long Tail SEO strategy, rivaling the value derived from the head terms. We wrote a research report on the topic: http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/ChasingTheLongTail.pdf

My company hired me on because of my SEO and SEM experience and expertise, and it still is a constant fight getting the IT department to implement my recommendations.

A few of your statements really hit home – “There’s also an internal disconnect because SEO crosses IT and marketing. Example: changing from horrible URL’s–super long, no keywords in the URL–to cleaner, shorter URLs….”

“Part of the problem lies in that the Fortune 500 enterprises rely on their ad agencies for the “interactive” stuff but the agencies don’t know how to integrate SEO requirements with branding”

“websites are seldom built with SEO in mind; developers/programmers didn’t know what they didn’t know…”

Regarding ad agencies, my experience is that for the most part they are clueless about SEO, paid search advertising, and SEM. They may attempt to hire talent for these, but they have no idea how to measure the candidates credibility since they don’t know what it is they are actually talking about.

And regarding Milo’s comment – “SEO on the other hand, doesn’t look to have a direct impact on their revenue and it requires a whole lot of planning, expenses, etc.” The reason for this is that they (the fortune 500) do not have a clue as to SEO and its potential. It once again goes back to who they are dealing with regarding SEO. Anyone experienced in the field could and would give them an ROI analysis.

aldigital

They created a video about some of the site’s features here: http://www.digitalforumtv.com/Nav_Community_840.aspx

A lot of SEO is essentially VooDoo. It will always continue to be that way, but to ignore it is foolish. I think that PPC marketing combined with a good SEO strategy is the best course of action.

Simply because they have other priorities at hand. At this economic crisis, they would rather spend that money on business process consultants who can give them a 2 – 5 % savings on operations translating to hundreds of millions of dollars. Their primary concern is to put their focus on where it directly hits their bottomline.

SEO on the other hand, doesn’t look to have a direct impact on their revenue and it requires a whole lot of planning, expenses, etc. If an SEO company goes to an enterprise and tells them you spend 2 millions dollars money back guarantee in SEO and get an ROI within the next two months, then that would be a different story.