The importance of SEO training for corporates

corporate-seo-training

SEO training for corporates is often times under-looked by management at most companies. The reason for this is that SEO is viewed as a small function and a check-box at someones skill-set. Usually managers think of SEO as one category – SEO, without being critical about it – off-page, on-page and it’s rare to find a manager that knows what’s a backlink.

How digital is your business model?

All corporate have websites, this is true for every business from big oil companies to startups. It’s important to understand where your organization stands in the digital economy. Is the website there simply for a check-box purpose, does it have a functionality for the operations such as displaying of information, or is it a crucial part of the business model?

A great example of a check-box website is the legendary Berkshire Hathaway website that in the opinion of Mr. Buffet clearly isn’t important to the operations.

Check-Box-website
This is Warren Buffet’s website.

 

On the other side, companies nearly as big as Berkshire Hathaway – Google and Facebook, have gigantic team working for them, developing the website.

The question managers need to understand is where exactly does the organization fit on this scale. This will not only determinate if SEO training is required, but also who in the company needs it.

Modern corporates will fall somewhere in the middle – the website exists to provide information and sometime to acquire clients, not as part of the main business model, therefore only specific departments will have to know about SEO and undergo SEO training.

It’s incredibly important and crucial however that the right people in your company are switched-on about SEO, even if they won’t do any operations and that’s where the SEO training for corporates is an efficient way of achieving this.

To sum it up – it’s unimaginable for someone at the top management of e-commerce section of a physical retailer, to not have medium to in-depth understanding of SEO. Yet it’s also unimaginable for that person to actually do any of the technical tasks – outsourced agencies or employees do that, yet someone has to make decisions on who does it and explain the impact to the senior managers of the company.

What are the returns

SEO training for corporates is like any other purchase – it has to have an alignment with the companies goals and for the right department.

The question is not if you need SEO training for your corporate, but how much training and for which departments. Identifying what operations and departments are digital will help, but you must also look at your overall corporate culture.

If the organizations culture is that of an investing in employees and letting them be a bit more flexible on what departments or project they’d like to work on – SEO training might be interesting to some people. If you already have in-house content producers – training them for SEO will return incredible returns.

People are very likely looking for your products or information online, providing them with information on the website is less expensive compared to the alternative of having customer support line. Even small things like the right department – people are happy to search for the right number to call online. This saves your organization man hours spend on the phone.

Because most corporate sites are what we call authority sites, the SEO required is very little, especially for specific keywords that are being searched for your corporate, such as “closing time for [corporate name] Canary Wharf”. This does require some SEO but it’s relatively simple that the web developers can learn in one or two sessions.

Conclusion

Doing SEO training for your corporate can be incredibly valuable and have a good return on investment. SEO training is for all levels of employees – for some companies even CEO’s.

The training can be used to simply keep people informed about what’s happening and to actually perform the operations within the organization.

 

Author Profile

Fernando BiZ
The Founder & CEO of ClickDo Ltd. Writes about digital marketing and SEO for local businesses in International corporation. You can read more on OM HQ blog for more of my writings.
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