SEO Corporate Structure

By Eric Maas on 18 July, 2020

A challenge that many companies face with implementing effective SEO is finding the right spot within their corporate structure. The big uphill battle for any corporate structure to take on when adopting an SEO an effective strategy is giving the latitude to execute on it. Experience One of the barriers to proper corporate adoption is that experience amongst SEOs is limited and it makes it difficult to place them at the appropriate level on the corporate ladder. Experience in general is an issue with SEO as the practice has been going on since the late 90s, with it being considered a “black art” until 2011/2012. Post 2011/2012 the practice has become more mainstream. Yet the claims of sorcery and mysticism still persist. The issue is that while there are many SEO professionals, very few have the experience dating back more than 8 years. Even fewer have experience that spans over a decade. Because of this, it can be difficult for companies to find worthy candidates to fill positions where SEO strategies can be properly and timely executed. Perception of SEO For years SEO has been the faith healer for online businesses. A secret sauce of strategies with bizarre terminology to describe things in a way that may or may not drive the point across of what search engine optimization may or may not be. The industry was poorly defined by those who early on figured out how to manipulate flaws in search algorithms and at the same time the industry was being sold to the masses as a self help program. SEO requires a working knowledge of the parts of maintaining an online business. This includes everything from design, to content, calls to action, to coding/development, to product and project management. The issue with this is a two part one, few SEOs actually have a working understanding of all these moving parts. Part two is that in most corporate structures these are handled by separate departments that often have their own sets of competing priorities and communications problems. This is most commonly shown with the issue of marketing department’s struggle to communicate pains to development and technical departments and vise versa. “Bolt on SEO” is not SEO SEO is more than writing content Corporate integration We often refer to SEO as the tools to help bridge the gap between marketing and technical departments. However, this is often over simplifying a much larger issue. The biggest issue with a strong SEO plan is that it requires a wide executive latitude. This means that SEO needs to be implemented from a C level in most corporate structures.