9 replies to this topic

[PatrickGer]

I came across a few mentions lately, that big brands were basically behind on SEO.

Is there any truth to that? It doesn't seem to make sense, as they seem to have a big enough budget to hire someone who "gets it", but then again a lot of stuff in this world doesn't make sense! lol

[Jill]

You can't really say that all big brands are behind, as many are not. But traditionally big brands haven't needed to do SEO so they don't bother.

It really depends on the industry.

[Michael Martinez]

A lot of big brands outsource their Web marketing. I've worked with several PR agencies that handle huge Internet marketing budgets for big brands.

[qwerty]

Big brands absolutely do lots of online marketing, but if by "SEO" you're referring to the process of making a website easy to index by search engines and easy to find for targeted keyword phrases, really big brands don't need to worry so much about that. They're more concerned with branding and reaching out to customers via social media.

Think about a really big brand, and then think about what they have to gain by investing in making their site search engine friendly. If someone's looking for Pepsi, they're not going to have any trouble finding pepsi.com in a search engine, despite the fact that Google's cached text from their home page is

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DCSIMG

That's at least partly because, if you couldn't find Pepsi by searching on pepsi, that would say a lot more about the search engine than it would about Pepsi.

On top of that, they're not too worried about being found by people who are running searches for cola, soda, soda pop, pop, carbonated beverages, etc. That's not how they need to market themselves, because that much is already known by everyone.

[Jill]

You may be interested in my take on this from a couple of years ago over at Search Engine Land:

Historically, big brands have not put much thought into SEO, as it never seemed necessary. Typically, as long they were found in Google for their brand names, they (and their C-level execs) were happy. However, the level-playing field of the Internet and seeing what smaller companies are able to do with SEO have caused many big brands to start taking notice. The problem is that SEOing a big brand site is not the same thing as optimizing an ecommerce site.

SEO for Big Brands

[PatrickGer]

thanks @everyone!

I realize that SEO'ing (or internet marketing) for a big brand is probably an alomst completely different ball game than SEO'ing your average website. Anyway, thanks for all the input on this!

[MauriceWalshe]

thanks @everyone!

I realize that SEO'ing (or internet marketing) for a big brand is probably an alomst completely different ball game than SEO'ing your average website. Anyway, thanks for all the input on this!

yep going from considering a big site being one with 3k products to ones with "we think around 5M pages" is quite a different challenge.

[qwerty]

True, but big brands and big sites don't always go together. It's pretty common for a big brand to build many microsites, each involved with a different element of their overall online marketing strategy.

[thehitcher]

As someone who does SEO consulting for large brands, the biggest challenge is pushing through all of the hurdles that are in place to get updates made to the structure of their sites. Obvious changes can require multiple business units' signatures and have to go into quarterly builds.

[biggig]

The reason behind that is either they are not aware of it..

SEM is their priority as their offline Promotions tend to be more Helpful to build themselves as brand people will trust

Usually they are More concerned with The Looks of the Page (On page factors are usually over looked)

New Online Trends Suggest that Searchers are more aware of the brands instead of looking for the services they would Generally search for the Brand names.

I hope These views will help!