Your Company Website is your MARKETING Department Responsibility
Make the website the responsibility of Marketing. What? Marketing doesn’t understand the Internet? Then fire them and get some real marketers, already. It’s 2010. They need to get a clue.
The IT Department, used to being ignored (except when stuff breaks). From then on, if someone needed to add to, modify or rebuild the web site, they went to IT. Any attempt to change that created a swirling toilet bowl of don’t-rock-the-boat.
Why it’s bad
This is a bad thing, for everyone from the SEO to the marketing department to the IT manager.
First, if the head of IT is sane, he or she does not want control over the public web server. Web servers are a pain in the arse. They’re vulnerable, cranky, open source (if Apache), poorly-supported little pits of despair (if Microsoft).
Second, while websites aren’t naturally annoying, their owners are. Especially when we’re trying to run a SEO campaign. We want things like daily updates, title tag changes, performance improvements, 301 redirects and XML site maps. We need content management systems that don’t vomit 582 lines of junk code per paragraph. It’s a drain on an already overtasked department.
Third, IT knows about as much about SEO as a typical SEO knows about VPNs: just enough to utterly screw up the works.
Fourth, the tactical goals of the corporate website have zero relation to the goals of the IT department.
When IT controls the website, all Internet marketing suffers, and no part of it suffers more than SEO.
The site fails its single biggest goal: attracting the right audience, because it’s hidden from the single biggest source of traffic: Organic search.
How to fix it
The fix is easy:
- Take the website away from IT.
- Take the website offsite. If IT doesn’t control the site, don’t make them responsible for its security, either. Move the site to a third-party hosting company. A good third-party hosting company.
- As I said above Make the website the responsibility of Marketing. What? Marketing doesn’t understand the Internet? Then fire them and get some real marketers, already. It’s 2010. They need to get a clue.
- Assign Marketing an initial task: figure out the SEO opportunity gap. How much more could the website accomplish in sales, leads or other growth if you captured just 1/3 of the available search traffic?
I know what you’re going to say: This sounds expensive. We’ll have to build a new site. Our fulfillment system won’t integrate.
Expensive? Not as expensive as your SEO failures. Unless you’re already top 3 in the organic search results for the best traffic-generating terms in your industry, you stand to realize huge traffic gains through SEO. By ‘huge’, I mean ‘2-10x’.
Building a new site? So what?! Worst-case, your site is such a monstrosity that you can’t move it, and you have to build a whole new one. The most complex website, an online store handling hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, might cost you one quarter’s crappy, SEO-less earnings.
Integration? In 15 years, I’ve never seen a fulfillment or other system that couldn’t integrate.
Organic SEO is critical to your online success. If you’re reading this site, you know that. If your site is controlled by the IT Department, you’re losing the SEO battle every day, and you’re limiting your IT Department’s effectiveness.
JORDAN : make the website an external marketing tool instead of an internal IT function. Get IT out of the SEO business. There’s little risk, and the rewards are huge.
