By now, companies are getting used to sharing search results data across the marketing, social media, communications and, in some cases, customer service departments. But, according to Lee Odden, CEO of Minnesota-based digital marketing agency TopRank Online Marketing, the more practical approach is to get this insight into the hands of any department in the organization that influences and/or posts online content on behalf of the company and its products.
Odden points out three departments that a company often forgets can help elevate its overall search returns:
1. Public relations. Not only are these individuals placing significant volumes of content about your company into online newswires and content aggregation services, but they also interact with the reporters and editors covering your industry. While they can't guarantee that any coverage of your company will leverage your keywords, they can improve the odds by building these words and phrases into your releases, company backgrounders, author biographies on submitted articles, etc.
2. Human resources. Job listings are some of the most regularly posted and updated content assets at any organization, so why not make sure they're optimized—either to not compete with your other content or to leverage your overall exposure.
3. Web development. In some organizations, the Web developers are unofficial copywriters for the website; they develop messaging for confirmation, sign-up, opt-out, FAQ and other Web pages. They also might write page titles and other structural information that indicates to search engine crawlers what the website owner considers important about its site. Even if the Web development team does none of this work, a company still wants these colleagues to understand its search results plan and goals so that their website work supports the mission.
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