Mediaboss Marketing

The challenges big businesses face in delivering results in organic search are becoming pretty consistent. Companies like Airbnb are disrupting their industries by being more agile than their more established counterparts and the need to be reactive is more important in search than any other discipline.

Thats not to suggest smaller operations are immune from the same issues, but enterprise-level companies can (or believe they can) coast on brand equity and above-the-line advertising, while SMBs that become mired in the same white tape arent likely to survive in search much less thrive.

Below are the three key issues that SEO departments working in and with big organizations will have to overcome if they are going to stay relevant in 2015.

Development queues are not new, but they are more of a stumbling block than ever before because links are getting harder to come by, and in the past businesses that couldnt make changes to their websites could overcompensate by acquiring more links. It just isnt possible to acquire the same number of links in 2015 without a huge budget, and even then, the return (in number of links) on investment is usually significantly smaller than can be driven through outreach to on-site content and creative.

This is part of the reason that big businesses have been so reliant on press releasesto gain backlinks to their websites they do not require anyone elses input to implement.

Unfortunately its not possible to avoid making changes to a website forever if a business wants to remain relevant. Mobile-friendly design and architecture will become a prerequisite for search this year, with a migration to https:// not far behind. For many companies it will fall squarely on the shoulders of the SEO department to make the business case for these changes.

More importantly, on-site engagement is the single most important factor in how a website is ranked, according to Searchmetrics 2014 Ranking Factors Study, and something that absolutely requires input from designers, developers, information architects, content writers, et al to implement.

The fact that we cant drive the same number of links anymore is not the issue here number of links acquired just doesnt correlate with strong returns from SEO.

Im predicting technical SEO will make a comeback in 2015 as more and more businesses move away from link acquisition as a default strategy. Investment in content marketing will increase, but technical architecture will have to take its seat at the table if enterprise-level businesses want to compete with increasingly dominant websites such as Amazon who will always have more backlinks than anyone else.

Original post:
3 Challenges Faced by Enterprise SEOs in 2015