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How to Convince Execs that Investing in SEO Really Matters

You know that SEO can drive highly-targeted traffic with a great ROI. But how do you convince everyone else in your organization to invest in search engine optimization?

Find out how a marketer persuaded a multinational firm to invest in SEO.  Natural search traffic and revenue for each of the past two years has doubled. Includes tips for convincing execs, teaching IT, and getting others to commit to SEO.

Emily Gudeman, Search Program Manager, Dell, joined the multinational computer company about two years ago as part of the Global Search department. The department manages Dell’s natural search program for about 260 websites worldwide.

Gudeman’s team is responsible for natural search strategy. Before Gudeman came on board, Dell didn’t have much of an SEO strategy, she says.
"There wasn’t a natural search program here at all….All of natural search was an automated program and almost every page had the same description and meta-keywords and browser title and page title."

Rather than seeing this as a problem, Gudeman saw it as a golden opportunity. Dell’s search efforts had focused primarily on on-site search, and now it was time to invest in SEO. Two years later, Dell’s natural search traffic and revenue have doubled year-over-year, Gudeman says, and some target keywords are getting 10 times their prior traffic.

These results didn’t just happen. Gudeman’s team had to convince executives and team directors that SEO was worth the investment. Then they had to teach the entire company about SEO best practices.

Here are the key strategies Gudeman used to methodically bring the computer giant up to speed in natural search.

5 Tactics to Turn the Battleship

To have a cohesive and effective SEO strategy, Gudeman had to educate hundreds, if not thousands, of employees and convince executives that it was worth the trouble.

"This is not a quick process, by any means. Dell is a battleship, and we were talking about turning around the battleship. Clearly from the amount of people that we’re working with on a global level, there were many, many steps along the way."

She started by proving the value of natural search for Dell.

Tactic #1: Run a sample campaign

Gudeman’s team selected 10 of Dell’s pages to optimize with a few best practices. Gudeman did not control the pages and needed to get a buy-in from the directors who did. Most of the proposed changes were in the page’s source code, she says, so the directors did not mind. Enough industry data was available to convince the directors that a small test would be worthwhile, she says.

The team selected 10 general, highly-competitive keywords to target -- one for each page. "On almost all the keywords we ranked below page three. Some of them weren’t really ranking at all."

The team made the following changes to the pages:

• Targeted one keyword per page
• "Peppered" the keywords on the pages
• Included the keyword in the page title
• Created a compelling meta description
• Organized inbound and outbound links
• Monitored their rank, conversions, and revenue generated from natural search traffic
• Ran the campaign for one month

Gudeman made the test a priority within her team and ensured that everyone understood its importance.  After a month the team reported:

• Pages’ rankings for target keywords
• Traffic and revenue
• Amount of time her team invested in the project
• Approximate ROI

Gudeman would not comment on the exact increase in conversions on the 10 pages.  But she noted that "we were able to double our traffic on those pages, on average…which of course led to an increase in conversion."

"We were on the first page or the top of the second page for really broad terms like ‘laptop’ and ‘desktop’ without any branding, which is a really competitive space."

Tactic #2: Get executive support

Getting executive support was vital. A solid SEO strategy spans several departments and many roles. You need a business leader at the top to ensure that everyone cares. If you only get support from a few of the necessary teams, your SEO will not be as effective.

• Early start

Gudeman got executive support early on from at least three new leaders who recognized the value of natural search shortly after she joined the company. But she still had to prove that SEO was worth the investment.

"The nice part was that I had gotten here about a month before them. We already had the ball rolling."

Gudeman’s test was under way and they had been educating other teams about natural search when the new management arrived.

• "Data talks"

After compiling the test results, Gudeman’s team crafted a plan to change Dell’s websites and to integrate its other marketing plans into the SEO efforts. They showed the tests results and plan to management.

"Showing up with facts, [such as] external best practices and supporting that with internal data, is really the best way that I’ve seen across the board – and in talking with other companies also – to be able to get things pushed quickly."

"One of the things that we came to them and said was: ‘Here are 10 pages. If we do this for 200 pages or 2,000 pages globally, here’s what we can expect to see as an increase’."

The executives were sold. They gave Gudeman the approval to:

• Move forward with the SEO plan
• Continue to expand target keywords and the number of pages optimized
• Expand internal SEO education workshops and presentations
• Ask members of other teams to be responsible for their SEO efforts

Tactic #3: Identify key roles

Gudeman had to change hundreds of jobs to make natural search work for Dell. "The approach we were taking here at Dell was that everyone who contributes to the website owns SEO."

That pointed mainly to three groups of people:

1. Website content creators - This group needed to learn concepts such as targeting keywords, keyword density, contextual linking, and optimizing images and video.
2. Website infrastructure creators - This group needed to learn about the SEO best practices for meta-data, tags, no-index, no-follow, optimized URLs, and other back-end issues.
3. Product managers - Gudeman needed Dell’s product managers to use more "customer language" in their product descriptions so they could be more easily found through a search.

"They love to give their features a flashy name with a trademark beside it. And that was really challenging from a natural search perspective because natural search is all about customer language."

To maintain the branding strategy and to improve Dell’s SEO strategy, product managers were encouraged to provide the generic industry terms for features along with the branded terms. Gudeman’s team would also suggest the best "customer language" to describe a product on request.

• Designate a "search champion"

Gudeman’s team also asked specific people to take on the responsibility of their team’s natural search progress. Designating coworkers outside of Gudeman’s team to be accountable was necessary to ensure that work would be done.

Tactic #4: Educate the masses

Gudeman’s team had to teach the best practices of SEO to hundreds of people across the globe and, almost as importantly, that SEO was important to the company. Here are four tools that her team used to teach others:

• Presentations

Gudeman’s team used a series of presentations to introduce SEO to coworkers and to give them hands-on experience in workshop sessions. The presentations were customized for the teams and their SEO responsibilities. On average, one team saw about three different presentations, Gudeman says.

"I would say that there was a quarter where I did at least 100 presentations. I would say that I talked to at least 20 teams about various things. I attended staff meetings. I did a presentation this morning, and I still do a quarterly road show."

For the first six months, she says, it was really about topics like: How does a spider work? What kinds of information are they looking at? When they’re optimizing their pages, what are the elements they should be focused on?
The presentations were often customized using "very specific examples" of best practices in place on other websites or websites within Dell.

• Videos

Gudeman’s team also recorded some of the presentations and posted them to Dell’s internal website. It made them accessible to anyone in the company at any time.

"We have a library of presentations that we’re pulling from at all times. We try to customize the presentations as much as we need to, mainly through our examples."

• Toolkits

Search toolkits were passed out and added to the internal website. The kits included information on SEO, checklists, and the steps needed to optimize a page, Gudeman says.

Making these materials available online and making sure those other departments knew about them, helped get teams to optimize their pages on their own.

• Internal search summit

Dell also held a ‘fun’ search summit in late January 2008 for its marketing employees. Industry leaders and marketers from other companies came in and discussed the importance of search and the impact it had on their companies. Tip sheets were handed out, Gudeman says.

"As ironic as it may be, having other people come into your company to say ‘search is important’ was really impactful…Instead of little me and my team running around and saying ‘this is important, this is important!’ we had other people coming in."

This summit further emphasized Del management’s support for search efforts. Gudeman says it was the equivalent of having upper management say: "Search is important. We’re going to dedicate a day to this. We’re going to take you away from your desks where you make us money to be in this conference because this is important."

Tactic #5: Start small and recognize progress

Applying basic SEO best practices where there was no previous strategy will have results. Start with the basics, such as selecting a target keyword for a page, including it in the page’s title and copy, and having a good meta-description.

Save major projects such as integrating social media and offline properties for later. This will help you avoid biting off more than you can chew, and will avoid discouraging coworkers who are learning about SEO for the first time.

• Changing the language

Gudeman knew she was making real progress when Dell as a company changed how it talked about its products.

"A turning point came in January of this year where we changed the names of our products. We stopped calling them notebooks and started calling them laptops, because that’s what everybody else calls them," Gudeman says. "About a month and a half later we saw 10 times the traffic coming through on the word ‘laptop,’ while still retaining our presence on the word ‘notebooks.’…That was a real game changer for us."

• Changing the culture

SEO requires continuous effort, she says. Gudeman’s team alone can’t ensure that a company as large as Dell is going to maintain its SEO strategy in all facets. It is necessary for a fundamental change to where people cared about natural search enough to keep the strategy working. One sign that they cared is that they were talking about it.

"I’ve also seen a real shift in the culture within Dell, because once you start to give the same presentations over and over again, you start to hear people use the phrases that you use, like ‘link love,’ and little things like that. And when you start to hear that and you hear a conversation about natural search that doesn’t include me, I’m thrilled."

Emily Gudeman spoke in August at eTail 2008 in Washington DC. (Quelle: dell.com, etail2009.com)