Enterprise SEO Strategies for 2013

Can you believe it’s almost 2013 already?  That means looking at the future of your marketing plan and the new elements at play.  In the world of Online Search, the impact is real and immediate.  A well planned SEO strategy and digital marketing campaign can make sure your organization remains viable against competitors and increases business margins. Investing in advertising with no distinguishable ROI is a thing of the past for most brands.

The problem with Enterprise SEO Strategy is that it can sometimes overwhelm marketing executives. Executives wear multiple hats and don’t have the time or energy to delve into the nuances of technical implementation or stay on the cutting edge of Search Engine algorithm updates and results enhancements.

In order to help large brands and marketing executives make educated decisions in prioritizing search, we have provided a list of the top 3 strategies enterprise SEO campaigns need.

1. Business Unit & Organizational Alignment – Is your marketing team setting one KPI after another?  Do they live in silos that don’t cross promote sales opportunities? Do you have a clear understanding of where you want to send visitors for particular keywords? Stop the madness!  It’s time to take a step back and really start to integrate across your own teams (whether they be internal, agencies, or both).  Set up a keyword governance strategy so that each business unit understands what their targeted keywords are, why they are targeting them, and how those differ from other business units.  The very nature of this priority alignment and the communication of KPIs allows for strategies that will drive visitors to the appropriate web pages and other digital assets. This also allows business groups to promote each other instead of diluting focus by competing for similar or identical goals.
2. Technology Changes & Implementation – For those of you operating internationally, do you struggle to manage site content across multiple country code top-level domains?  Do you know if your Content Management System is creating parameters that are causing duplicate content or auto-generating pages in an attempt to provide scalable development? You must have an understanding of how your enterprise technology systems are going to play into your SEO strategy. SEO implementation has to be prioritized in the enterprise marketing plan.  IT departments are notoriously resistant to change, an increase in workload, and being assigned tasks where they can’t see the direct value. The Search Engines change rapidly and developers need to be willing and able to adapt.  SEOs also need to do a better job at explaining why the work is important and what the outcome of the work will be to improve buy-in.  When considering your enterprise search strategy, ask yourself these questions: (1) Do you have a large e-commerce system that generates dynamic URLs that vary based on the entry path? (2) Do you have a translation management system that translates all of your content to all regions? (3) Have you updated your translation glossaries to reflect your localized keyword priorities? If you haven’t thought of these questions yet, you probably need to revisit your global search strategy.
3. Understanding The Changing Search Landscape – Search changes fast. There were over 20 major updates in 2012 and many minor adjustments. According to Google’s Matt Cutts at SES San Francisco 2012, their engineers are continually working on new updates. Google algorithm updates, like the Panda & Penguin updates, have real search engine impact and have negatively affected the bottom line revenue for many businesses due to lost rankings.  It’s not enough to mitigate risk; brands need to be forward thinking and stretch their boundaries so they aren’t outpaced by competitors.

“You can never avoid people thinking that SEO is an effort to game the system or Google. Many tricks worked in the past, but as Google tries to continuously improve the quality of search results, many tricks do not work anymore. Being successful in SEO these days involves thinking along the lines of great customer service, offering great products and services, being a thought leader, and building brand advocacy online. Eventually this all helps out in building rankings as you gain more natural links that would not be affected by the Panda and Penguin updates.”  – Benj Arriola

Businesses have an opportunity to expand their organic search footprint by getting up to speed with the new enhancements.  Consider the following areas:

• A renewed focus on thought leadership, content marketing, and social media
• Managing your Google+ brand page and Google+ Places pages for multiple locations
• Determine how your organization will use Authorship tags
• Determine how your audience can engage with your brand on a Google Hangout

If you haven’t at least begun to investigate these strategies, you’re falling behind the curve.  Start to embrace the Google+ world. It’s not going anywhere and users are beginning to adopt it.  Even more importantly your search visibility can be enhanced by rolling out a strategy that makes sense for your brand and locations.

Search will continue to drive traffic for enterprise organizations.  How much traffic really depends on the organization’s alignment, grasp of technology, and flexibility to adapt to the changing environment. 2013 is sure to be exciting, are you ready?

Brent Gleeson, Forbes Contributor

I write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and digital marketing.

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Childcare services: daycare and private nursery businesses

Working couples hit by childcare costs

PETALING JAYA: It's a double whammy for working couples with children maids are hard to find while daycare centres have increased their fees in tandem with higher operation costs.

A check with several centres in the Klang Valley showed that they have raised fees by up to 10% over the past two years.

A staff member at a centre in Bukit Damansara, who declined to be named, said that it had to increase its fees by 10% every two to three years.

The centre, which also offers pre-school education inclusive of daycare for children aged three to six years, now charges about RM1,600 per month.

Another centre in Taman Desa, which offers only daycare for children of two years and above without pre-schooling, charges RM500 a month.

“We charged RM450 last year, but had to increase our fees because food prices had gone up,” said the principal who only wanted to be known as Stacey.

A centre in Puchong has maintained its fees at RM500 per month, but expects to raise it soon.

The centre provides lunch and two snacks, a shower in the evening and assistance with school work for the children under its care.

“We will try to hold down our fees for as long as we can, but foresee having to increase it soon as everything else is going up in price,” said its operator.

Demand for childcare centres in the Klang Valley is especially acute as many families have both spouses working while living away from their parents and relatives.

The scarcity of maids has contributed to the increase in demand.

It was reported recently that agencies were asking Malaysians to pay more for maids from Indonesia even as the Philippines was phasing out the sending of its citizens abroad as domestic workers.

Association of Registered Child-care Providers P.H. Wong said the centres had been affected by the increase in living costs as the price of goods had gone up along with public expectation of the quality of service.

“Parents who want quality service must be ready to pay more. Centres have no choice but to increase their fees to survive,” she said.

She urged the Government to introduce a subsidy for parents who need to care for their children while they were at work.

The Health Ministry had announced stricter control of daycare centres, with regular inspection of nurseries to ensure that they are fit to take care of babies in the wake of deaths from choking on milk and other incidents at these establishments.

Social Welfare Department statistics this year showed that 52% of the 3,238 nurseries nationwide were unlicensed.

However, there is no record of the number of children who died while under their care.

According to news reports, at least 22 children under the age of four were believed to have died while in nursery care between 2009 and this year.

By YVONNE LIM yvonnelim@thestar.com.my

Private nurseries struggle to stay in business

PETALING JAYA: About three million children aged four and below need daycare services in this country but many private nurseries are struggling to keep their doors open.

Association of Registered Child Care Providers Malaysia vice-president P.H. Wong said the Government should extend support to private childcare centres because of high operating costs.

As of May this year, 1,086 childcare centres had been registered with the Welfare Department: 989 were privately run, 16 set up by companies at work places, 67 in government offices and 14 were community-based.

Even for community-based childcare centres, there were few takers despite the RM50,000 set-up grant and annual RM64,000 subsidy given by the Government, Wong said.

This was because the subsidy barely covered operating costs since lower income parents could only afford to pay RM200 to RM350 for each child, she added.

A former childcare centre owner, who wanted to be known only as Cheong, said she closed her centre in Sri Petaling last month after operating for more than two years because the RM600 to RM800 monthly fees she collected from 14 parents could not cover the monthly expenses.

“It was really heartbreaking. I don't want to do it (run a centre) again,” said the 36-year-old.

She could not continue paying the RM3,000 rental for a corner unit house, pay providers' salaries, food, beverage and toys for the children, and utility bills, said Chong who spent RM25,000 to set up the centre.

She also had difficulty looking for care providers because the heavy workload made people reluctant to take the job even if she offered more than the RM1,000 to RM1,600 salaries.

Social Welfare Department legal and advocacy division director Dr Zaitol Salleh said that two nurseries had surrendered their licences from January to May, and on average five cease to operate each year.

Another childcare centre operator, who only wanted to be known as Ooi, said she had to close her nursery in a condominium after operating it for seven years because she could not get baby sitters.

“Most baby sitters prefer to work on their own at home while the young people prefer other jobs,” said Ooi, who is in her 50s.

By LOH FOON FONG  foonfong@thestar.com.my

Google hit with $AUD200k defamation damages

Ad giant's own witness confessed removing dodgy search results is easy

An Australian man defamed by links on Google that associated his name with images of and articles about a criminal has been awarded $AUD200,000 damages.

Melbourne man Michael Trkulja argued that searches on his name, which brought up references to criminal Tony Mokbel, constituted defamation.

Trkulja asked for those references to be altered. Part of Google's defence suggested he had not properly completed forms that would have seen the ad giant alter its search results, but the end result was that Trkulja's name continued to appear alongside references to a nasty gangster called Tony Mokbel. A jury agreed that those results equated to defamation, and Supreme Court Justice David Beach today decided it was $AUD200,000 worth of defamation.

The judgment paints a fascinating picture of Google's response to the complaint, noting that a Google US employee, a 'Mr Madden-Woods', appeared on the stand but that the ad giant did not call anyone to the witness stand involved in handling the original complaint from Mr. Trkulja.

That became important because one piece of evidence offered by Mr. Trkulja was an email from help@google.com stating:

“At this time, Google has decided not to take action based on our policies concerning content removal. Please contact the webmaster of the page in question to have your client’s name removed from the page.”

But the existence of the mail from help@google.com, Justice Beach writes, means the jury could easily “... infer that … Google Inc was well aware of what was being requested of it” and that a more nuanced response was almost certainly a sensible option.

Making matters worse, Justice Beach writes that Madden-Woods “ … conceded the obvious (perhaps somewhat begrudgingly) that it would not take very much effort to work out, from the page of photographs supplied to Google Inc, the identity of the website that linked the plaintiff’s name to Mr Mokbel and Mr Tanner. All one had to do was click on one of the images (the text beneath each image showing that the one web page was involved). At that point it would have been open to Google Inc to block the URL of that page from Google Inc’s searches, in compliance with the plaintiff’s former solicitors’ request.”

The amount of damages awarded seems to have been calculated in two ways.

Trkulja had already succesfully sued Yahoo! over the same matter and been awarded $AUD225,000, but that search engine had published nasty links for longer and that those links stated he was “so involved with crime in Melbourne that his rivals had hired a hit man to murder him”. Google's results stated only that Trkulja “was such a significant figure in the Melbourne criminal underworld that events involving him were recorded on a website that chronicled crime in Melbourne”.

Justice Beach declares that a lesser imputation, but then tried to weigh the number of times each statement would have been read given the respective user bases of the two search engines.
His argument makes for interesting reading:

"While there was debate before me as to the relative popularity of Google and Yahoo search engines, neither side made any attempt to lead evidence of the precise number of publications brought about by a Yahoo search engine as compared to a Google search engine. That said, as was noted by counsel for the plaintiff, in support of a submission that I should find that there were more Google publications than Yahoo publications, while the word 'Googling' has entered the vernacular, there is no corresponding word in respect of Yahoo’s products.”

By Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor
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