I remember when I started my journey into the world of search engine optimization. I was a few years younger (not giving up my age that easilyJ) and probably naïve a little bit. I had read a few SEO books, and I felt quite confident about my ability to concoct and implement SEO strategies for my clients. My background was in computer science, and I used to be hardcore programmer before moving to the business side of things. So I felt confident coding and recoding pages in order to optimize them for search engines. Let’s say things were “simple” then.

One I got my first opportunity in the corporate world, I was excited and willing to make something happen as soon as possible. But that’s when things started to look not so “simple” after all. There were many issues that I had to face in order to implement the simplest SEO strategy. It wasn’t the matter of writing the code and putting it on our corporate page any more. That’s what you learn from the books. But the real world experience is much different. Not only you need to know your SEO stuff, you need to find a way to get others units within your organization involved in your SEO “movement.” You are more than likely to face some resistance at first. Your IT team might not necessarily be willing to put time into something that doesn’t show some tangible results immediately. In addition, the IT team is often bombarded with a bunch of projects, and they may not like you to have more work for them to do. Besides, with all the work on their plate, your IT professionals may not be willing to give your SEO plan a high priority. That’s when you get into a FIFO or LILO situation (first in first out).   But having said all that, you can get your IT on board pretty quickly once you educate them on why SEO matters. IT professionals are smart people and would like to have some input in what you do, but they will not resist your plan once they know why you are doing what you are doing. Of course having a “process” would be helpful.

The most challenging part of corporate SEO is dealing with executives who know next to nothing about search engines and talk only in numbers and future strategies. If your company is on the acquisitions side of things, then the only thing that would matter is how you can get more customers and generate more sales. The fact that your SEO plan takes a few weeks or months to show full results would not make executives happy. At the same time, executives would be interested to know how much budget they need to allocate for your SEO plan, and who needs to do what. In essence, you should be able to come out and say that your SEO plan takes this many hours, this many people will be involved, and this will be our ROI if things go according to plan. Of course, with SEO, it’s hard to quantify your ROI upfront, but that’s part of the game when you are a corporate SEO. You probably will face the same questions as an SEO consultant, but being a consultant is much different than being a full time employee and having executives micromanaging what you do and breathing down your neck. So it turns out, search engine optimization is not all that rosy in the real world. But who said you should believe what you read in books.