Search Engine Marketing News
Fortune 500 'falling down on SEO'
Thursday, 6 November 2008Companies in the Fortune 500 index are failing to make adequate use of search engine optimisation (SEO), according to a new study.
Carried out by US consultancy Conductor, the research suggested that just 28 per cent of Fortune 500 organisations were visible in natural search results, while only eight per cent had a moderate to strong presence for the keywords they advertised the most.
While certain brands were found to carry out natural SEO, the companies that owned these tended to execute their strategies inconsistently across different brands, Conductor said.
Seth Besmertnik, chief executive of Conductor, commented that large companies tend to experience difficulties in optimising the vast amounts of online information they manage for search engines.
"When you consider the percentage of consumer activity that occurs in the natural search listings, these results should be something of a call to action for the biggest brands to concentrate more on how they structure data externally and SEO efforts," he remarked.
According to search marketing consultant Aaron Shear, some of the most common SEO mistakes among Fortune 500 firms include placing irrelevant keywords in meta tags and leaving the running of a company website to the IT department.