Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 by Frank Reed

12

Fortune 500 Cos. Fall Flat with SEO Efforts

A study published recently by Conductor, Inc. and reported in MediaPost today gives some interesting insights into the world of big business and organic search. It seemsfortune-500 as if they either haven’t been introduced completely or they simply don’t get along.

The report can be highlighted by this finding alone: Fortune 500 companies spend $51 million per day in aggregate on 88,792 keywords–yet only 20.82% rank in the top 100 of natural search results.

The company did a similar study in November of 2008 but looked at a much smaller subset of keywords. The findings were broken out based on company sector using the NAICS (North American Industry Classification System). While the findings of the report spoke to the overall lack of real success for these biggest of the big firms there were some winners including MGM Mirage (accommodations & food services); Whirlpool (manufacturing); Viacom (information); Amazon (retail trade) and IBM (professional, scientific & technical services).

Seth Besmertnik, Conductor CEO said,

“It remains alarming that although we included branded keywords in the study for the Fortune 500, more than the lion’s share are not showing up anywhere in search results for their most important keywords, including their own names.”

Some other highlights (or low lights depending on your point of view)

  • Only 1.41% of the domains surveyed show significant number of their terms in the top results
  • 10.14% of Fortune 500 companies studied showed mid-to-strong presence for their most advertised keywords, and 41.69% of Fortune 500 companies have low to mid presence. Visibility decreased as search queries grew in length
  • Fortune 500 companies did worse as keyword searches became more complex and longer.

So what’s the takeaway here? If you have ever worked on one of these campaigns from the agency side you are probably all too well aware that the pace of change and implementation for big companies is often slow or non-existent. In addition, there are so many people / departments that have some ownership stake in the company site that it can take a committee meeting to decide the next time the committee meets to set a committee meeting. These big companies are still not moving at Internet speed and getting hurt in the process.

Also, with a significant push toward developing in house teams at many companies, not just the Fortune 500’s, the question begs if this is working?  It’s not fair at all to make any blanket statements based on this study but it is interesting to consider the implications for those more nimble and flexible than the big boys. What better place than the search engines can a smaller player both look bigger and, in essence, clean the clock of the industry behemoths? Goliath meet David and look out for that slingshot!


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12 comments on “Fortune 500 Cos. Fall Flat with SEO Efforts”

  1. Jaan Kanellis Says:

    March 11th, 2009 at 6:28 pm

    SEO is dead or dying? Hardly just look above.

    Jaan Kanellis’s last blog post..Information Doesn’t Need Devices?

  2. Big Businesses Coming Up Short In SEO - News: Everything-e Says:

    March 12th, 2009 at 8:17 am

    [...] Comments [...]

  3. Toronto SEO Says:

    March 12th, 2009 at 11:42 am

    Big business is just starting to realize the big potential and long-term value of SEO. I say, two more years till it really starts to become a ‘must have’. Another 3 or 4 years till it trickles down to med. sized business though.

  4. Jason of Internet Business Plan Says:

    March 12th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

    This is a good sign. I think pretty soon the playing field will level off, and huge companies will be down sized to give way to all the other entrepreneurs out there .

  5. Paul R Says:

    March 14th, 2009 at 4:47 pm

    This is an amazing article and good news for potential in-house SEO specialists like myself. I bet a few of these companies spent a lot of money outsourcing their SEO and just got taken for a ride.

  6. Janice Says:

    March 17th, 2009 at 4:00 am

    Its not dying, but some faulty methods only just put short term achievements.. so we really need to target long term goals..

  7. SEO Sapien Says:

    March 23rd, 2009 at 8:29 pm

    It’s scary to see how many of this companies do not even have a clue of what search engine optimization is. I can’t understand how their marketing teams do not pay attention to the search engines importance now days. All big companies should at least care about having their brand in the first positions.

  8. seo web design colorado Says:

    March 24th, 2009 at 5:50 pm

    Leaves room at the top for all of us little guys. It is encouraging that we can make a difference.

    seo web design colorado’s last blog post..Web Development in a Web Standards Compliant Sort of Way

  9. Waukesha Web Designer Says:

    March 27th, 2009 at 4:38 pm

    I recently conducted SEO research for a local manufacturer and asked them to name their top 10 competitors ranked by company size as well as the keywords relevant to their industry. In all but a hanful of cases, the larger companies didn’t rank on the first page for specific geographic phrases for which they should have ranked. The sites that did rank best were from companies of the same size or smaller than our client. Indeed, the larger organizations are lagging behinf in SEO.

  10. Waukesha Web Designer Says:

    March 27th, 2009 at 4:40 pm

    Large companies consistently fall short compared to smaller companies in terms of their SEO efforts. Smaller companies beat the pants off the big guys because they can be so much more agile.

  11. Offshore Outsourcing Website seo Says:

    March 29th, 2009 at 3:37 am

    Paramnetwork, an offshore Website design and Development IT outsourcing company that provides high quality Ecommerce Software Solution, Search engine Marketing, Web application development, .Net development, PHP development, Web Marketing, Web site Design and Maintenance at affordable cost

  12. Slingshot Says:

    May 30th, 2009 at 7:46 pm

    To sum it up, it takes courage to reach the top. It takes courage to be the topnotcher.

 
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