Two years ago, my team started on a journey to setup a global SEO program in our company. Until then, SEO was something that marketing managers in local markets did if they had time and expertise – and usually one or the other was lacking.

Setting up a program of global reach with shoestring resources was a challenge too. One that we are glad we picked up. The journey so far has been quite rewarding.

Here are a few things we discovered as we traversed this treacherous path.

Not all markets are created equal: One thing you learn quickly when you have limited resources is that prioritization is key. We couldn’t be everything for everyone, so we had to  build a model that explained clearly what we would do for each market. The first step in it was to create a tiered service model. We used a Platinum – Gold- Silver – Bronze model to classify our services. Each tier got a specific set of services in addition to everything in the lower tier. eg. Bronze got only the technical fixes – an xml sitemap, robots.txt etc. Silver got a review of all the tags and recommendations. Higher tiers got keyword tracking, regular reporting, content recommendations and educational sessions on how to write SEO friendly content.

It takes a village (or in this case, the whole world) : There is no way a central team can address the SEO needs of 90+ sites in 21 languages across 36 countries. You need to find emissaries and champions. Sometimes it was other people within our department, sometimes it would be a marketing partner who is passionate about SEO. Interesting nuggets pulled from your dashboards always help when you are trying to recruit someone to be your SEO champion in a geography. “Did you know that organic search is the #1 driver of traffic to your site, but you are only ranking for branded keywords?” is a good conversation starter :).

Invest in education: We spent a good chunk of time educating marketers across the globe on SEO best practices. Identifying a few good wins early on and then using those as case studies really helped people be more receptive to what we were asking them to do. Our lead analyst used to be a content writer in his past life, so he offered SEO reviews of new content being created and also coached the content creators on how to keep their SEO hat on when they were creating new content.

Automate reports, but call out insights: Leveraging automated reports is a great time saver. However, for teams that are only starting to adopt good SEO practices,  a report in the mail is not really helpful. You have to call out the insights from the numbers. We also used these insights in broader executive communications to get more visibility and acceptance for the SEO program.

Patience is a virtue: Good things come to those who wait. SEO is not for those who crave instant gratification. Sometimes, you have to do keyword research, put together a content roadmap, publish content and watch your equity grow over a period of time. It is possible that people would get disheartened or impatient. You have to coach and support them through the journey and in the end, page 1 rankings will be yours!

Are you thinking of setting up an SEO program at your company? Do you have stories to share of how you have done something similar in the past? Let me know here.