Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

BUILDING SEARCH INTO THE PROCESS OF THE ORGANIZATION

By now, you know that a successful search acquisition strategy relies on weaving search best practices throughout the organization. This becomes difficult as business activities can be segmented from each other, departments may have political reasons for not collaborating with others, and some organizational processes simply aren’t built for this type of cross-department collaboration.

The key is support from the top down. If upper management provides a central search goal that can be shared by all parts of the organization and provides the resources necessary for search integration, individual departments are motivated and empowered to embrace search best practices.

Following are some best practices to consider weaving into the organization.

Content Architecture

We’ve seen, at a high level, how search engines work and how searchers interact with results. Beyond what topics you choose to include on your site, which clearly have a significant impact on the audience you attract, what should you think about when building content?

• Ensure the site has useful information architecture. Do multiple pages have similar content? Will visitors be confused about which page to access to get the information they want?
• Ensure the content uses the language of the customer. Make sure anyone writing copy understands keyword research (see Chapter 2) and uses it as part of the writing process. And make sure the organization has a process in place ...