Communication Nation: The connected company.

It’s time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems. As they get larger, acquiring smaller companies, entering into joint ventures and partnerships, and expanding overseas, they become “systems of systems” that rival nation-states in scale and reach.

The more you go towards the core – the more long term effect you get, the more mature your SEO efforts are.

Search engine SPAM should act as Level0 – irresponsible and immature. Rest up could be defined in a similar manner:

1. Outbound SEO (external, off-site) – done with minimal or even without any emerging to business and website strategy. It’s basically incoming link building + some basic website meta information tasks (title/meta description/metatags/headings/keywords in content) + sitemaps and other minor information architecture/usability related works.
   It mostly relates on finding holes and faults in existing deployment/code/URL scheme etc. and is normally chaotic, unpredictable and reactive. 
Most, I’d say 90%+ consulting companies/consultants on the market are in this “safe zone” as long as most projects have enough faults to have ranking/traffic jumps just by fixing those + it’s quite effective in the short term. Improve content/meta, build links, get few quick top10s = profit!
2. Technical SEO comes in to change URL scheme, normally changes site information architecture, template code layout, proposes on new pages/sections, comes in with a defined custom SEO process. It’s often much more complicated, relies on a strong support from the development team (often has it’s own dev team) – sometimes pushes for “a lot of work for a very uncertain outcome”. That’s our role sometimes. Doing technical SEO you normally slip into deep involvement with all project activities and eventually into participation in project producing as such.
3. Social / viral is rarely or never done by SEO company alone and works much better with in-house marketing lead or with SEM/PR/SMM/Viral agency in partnership. From SEO perspective it’s all link bait – social media/viral marketing attracts deep incoming links.
4. Local (/ international) is the hardest level to reach – it normally involves a lot of complicated technical problems to solve, a lot of additional pages to build (while escaping duplicated/canned content issue at all costs). It’s barely impossible without huge amounts of user-generated content. Requires resources, ambition, time, effort, etc. – as long as puts every piece of content into a multitude of local contexts.
5. Strategic SEO is a barely impossible – to do post-factum. So the only way to do it is to plan in advance, be 100% proactive, do SEO before launching any new modules, parts of the project. It takes SEO up close to brand management level, sometimes merging with it completely.

So that’s first draft on “strategy maturity” and I guess it needs a “process maturity” to become a 2D evaluation tool. I’ll try to jot down the “process maturity” levels in the near future.

And now we’re re-launching it all with content, updates and all other things that a decent blog should have.

Fingers crossed..