**by Eric Enge**
Today I will make a case that nearly every organization should offer
SEO training to anyone who even remotely touches the companys web
site, and why every senior manager should also be encouraged to
attend. Failure to train people can lead to serious problems, with a
frightful waste of time, blown schedules, wasted expenditure and
ultimately a failure to effectively capture search traffic. You may
think I am fear-mongering here, but to head that off, let me provide
some real world examples:
One company had an existing site that they wanted to migrate to a new
domain. A key goal was to preserve the legacy search traffic as much
as possible. They selected a CMS for the project and built the site.
Then they brought in the SEO firm to begin working on the site. The
trouble was that the CMS was an SEO disaster, and did not allow unique
title tags on each page. The cost of fixing this problem: a six month
launch delay at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Another company was rebranding their site. They were going for a
major upgrade in look and feel, and they had made a corporate level
decision to target all their messaging at the C-Suite (CEOs, CFOs,
CIOS, etc.). Based on this they made a decision to implement an
all-Flash site (see this article by Vanessa Fox on why that is a bad
idea <http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/search-friendly-flash/>
). They created a site with a beautiful user experience, but that was
virtually impenetrable to search engines. The in-house SEO that was
trying to work on the site did not have the pull to get people to
understand the consequences of this decision, and search traffic
plummeted.
**The source of the problem**
In large enterprises one of the big challenges is that there are many
different groups that are involved in decisions. You have marketing,
sales, development and the executive staff. Anyone of these groups can
make decisions that are basically fatal to SEO. Successful SEO efforts
require that all these groups are working in unison. Yet coordinating
all these groups of people can be very difficult to do.
There are two ways that the problem gets worse, both of which are
examples of bad decisions being made about SEO. These are:
In some organizations SEO is thought of as something you do after the
site is built. This is just too late. At this point the damage has
already been done.
The organization hires someone to do SEO work for them, and they are
knowledgeable about SEO, but they are relatively junior and do not
have the confidence or presence to sway the C-Suite or other decision
makers.
To summarize, either bringing in an SEO resource too late, or making
use of one that is too junior to have sufficient influence in the
organization is a mistake you do not want to make.
How do you solve this problem? You put key people in all constituent
groups in your organization (including the C-Suite) through basic SEO
training. Knowledge can be a very powerful thing. Once people get it
they are in a position to make much better decisions. Sometimes there
is a tension between corporate objectives and the requirements of SEO,
but these can nearly always be handled elegantly if the issues are
confronted up front.
In one training session I did, I had the senior management team of a
good sized company for 4 hours. The group was comprised of really
smart people, but with no background in SEO. During the course of that
meeting we kept everything at a high level, and we covered a lot of
ground. There were tons of questions and dialogue, and by the end of
it all the team had gotten the basics down.
The outcome of the meeting was amazing. Historically, they had a
great focus on on-site SEO (or technical SEO) but the focus on link
building and web site promotion was not high enough. After the meeting
decisions started to get made a bit differently. The focus on link
building went way up, and the improved results on new business
obtained from search engine referrals has been impressive.
*The key to success*
Large organizations are complex beasts, and a lot of different people
have the opportunity to provide input (or directives) about the web
site. Everyone is usually well-intentioned, but what you dont know
can hurt you. Training people is the key. Its not necessary for most
people to spend years learning all the ins-and-outs of SEO, but they
do need to know the basics.
The best time to do this is as soon as possible. Decisions about the
web site are made on a regular basis. Of course, there are other
priorities in the organization, and those need to be taken into
account. Sometimes a good time to fit this training in is in
conjunction with planning meetings for site redesigns or updates.
These meetings usually bring the various constituent groups together
to make decisions anyway, so its an ideal time to provide them with
the knowledge they need to make better decisions.
Training can help prevent disastrous decisions, and can also enable
great decisions. Knowledge is indeed power, so make sure that those
with power over your web site have the knowledge they need to be
successful.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Eric Enge <http://searchengineland.com/author/eric-enge/>
is the president of Stone Temple Consulting
<http://www.stonetemple.com>
, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of
Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of Custom Search Guide
<http://www.customsearchguide.com>
.
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