About SEOinsight
Thoughts, analysis and rants on SEO, search and internet marketing from Jaamit Durrani.
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Big Brand & Corporate SEO Strategy – Rishil Drops Some Wisdom
View Comments · Posted by admin in SEO Strategy
This is a pseudo-guest post by Rishi Lakhani (or rishil to his online mates). Why ‘pseudo’? Because essentially I have copied and pasted a series of tweets he posted a couple days back which I thought were worthy of capturing in a blog post that won’t disappear after a couple of months (aka the lazy way to write a blog post!). Although these are just a series of 140-character snippets, they are by no means off the cuff comments. They are the product of years of experience as a top-drawer SEO strategist, and make a very important point about the importance of having patience, the right people and the right tactics and strategy for a large scale search campaign to bear fruit. This really resonated with me at this point in time having recently made the the transition from a small specialist agency focusing on SMEs to a global media agency working on big brands. I’ll leave the rest to Rishi…
“OK Lets get some stuff right. SEO isnt Just for Christmas. nor is it easy to turn it round in large corporate dinosaurs.”
“Big Brands have massive changes to culture, internal buy in, stake holder mentality before a decent SEO strategy can be put into play”
10:01 AM Jun 8th via web
“Anyone who does SME SEO should realise that their approach to SEO isnt the same as approach to Big Business – a lot more strategy needed”
10:02 AM Jun 8th via web
“If you havent dealt with large ancient CMSs you wont know what I am talking about. Some times it’s next to impossible to change culture…”
10:03 AM Jun 8th via web
“So although a Strategist would be politically better in Big Brands, a technically adept SEO may find better solutions.”
10:05 AM Jun 8th via web
“It took me and a team of 20 to shift a complete Search Strategy from £15 million in revenue to £40 Million. Over 2 years.”
10:07 AM Jun 8th via web
“So dear SEOs – when you see a big player responsible for a large brand and then see they have shit SERPs dont delude yourself.”
10:08 AM Jun 8th via web
“There maybe more than meets the eye. A Real strategist wont go for quick wins – I take sustainability over short term success any day.”
10:09 AM Jun 8th via web
“So taking it back to point- know your skills- and know who you work with complements you – dont try and get political if you havent got it.”
10:10 AM Jun 8th via web
“/rant/lecture off 
”
10:11 AM Jun 8th via web
brands · guest-post · seo · SME · strategy
Tola · June 11, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Lol, nice…
I stumbled upon some of the tweets myself and found them quite insightful, even though I didnt understand some of them myself, cos truly, I haven't handled a big CMS before!!
Jaamit · June 11, 2010 at 10:35 pm
cheers Tola – believe me another year or so in this game and you'll see more of that, when direct FTP/server access is impossible and you have to go through three different companies and a lot of red tape just to change a bloody title tag…
Tola · June 12, 2010 at 8:10 am
Please don't scare me…
Robert Nicholson · June 12, 2010 at 9:02 pm
Was interesting seeing Rishi make these comments, and as another corporate SEO I'd agree, often getting the smallest changes is the hugest political and strategic battle!
Nice post
Chris M · June 12, 2010 at 9:31 pm
I avoid the big red tape corporates, working in such a confined space is like sitting in your cubicle at work every day. Although, it obviously adds a nice challenge, but working on solving things so slowly in such a dynamic industry is painful!
David Iwanow · June 12, 2010 at 11:31 pm
haha nice and love the images that accompanied the tweet, good light reading
Goosh · June 14, 2010 at 8:34 am
I remember watching this rant popping up on Echofon and even replied at one point as it hits the nail on the head perfectly.
Great new twist on blogging jaamit
Tad Chef · June 21, 2010 at 8:29 am
That's why I don't work for huge corpoarte dinosaurs. It takes months or even years of frustration until you achieve something.
Jaamit · June 21, 2010 at 11:11 am
Hey Tad – yep I know what you mean. But the flipside is that if/when you do crack the internal politics, and planning required to achieve changes on big brand sites the returns you can get are orders of magnitude higher than an SME. And I'm not talking about title tag changes, I mean when you achieve a considerable shift in paradigm which paves the way for a much more innovative SEO strategy that makes use of the resources and budget they have available. It totally depends on the type of site too of course…
Glenn Friesen · June 24, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Man – some of these big businesses are setting themselves up to fail as they're dependent on outdated systems (like CMS for their site). Often there's just too much buy-in and perceived dependence on these systems to manage change easily. That's especially bad since agility becomes more and more important for marketing efforts.
When in doubt, quote Peter Drucker:
“We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” — Peter Drucker