How to Rank Your Corporate Website

It never fails – every speaking event that I go to, and every class that I teach – someone comes up to me and says something like

I’d love to use your SEO techniques, but my website is controlled by corporate, there’s nothing I can do on it. I have no control over the site other than putting my name and hours of operation on there.

Yeah, that sucks.

There’s nothing worse than having a boss that breathes down your neck all day, making you feel little.  And that’s what these industries are doing, in my opinion; treating you like a little person that has no idea how to market their own business.

Many times these companies lock down their own employees so much that they’re afraid to even put anything on their website for fear of losing their affiliation with whatever it is.

Let’s take a guy I met recently – Wally Lionberger.  Wally’s website is a perfect example of a corporate website.  He has virtually no leverage when it comes to adding information or making his website stand apart from the next insurance guy.  He’s locked in to this website, and no more.  Or is he?

For sake of setting a foundation, Wally is an insurance agent for American Family.  He has a physical office.  American locks down his abilities to create any page outside of their corporate site.  He is not allowed to have a facebook page or twitter account related to AmFam.  His domain name, in case you didn’t notice, actually forwards to the amfam.com website.  So his domain doesn’t really even exist, according to Google.

So what can Wally, or anyone that has a coporate-type website do to rank locally and increase their online presence? Lots of things.

Dominate Local

Since Wally pretty much sells to the local Saint Louis area, it would make sense that he start locally.  His first step should be to get into Google Places, formerly Google Local Business Center – which he has done.  When adding your business, fill out as much information as you possibly can.  Use keywords related to your industry, list your email, hours, upload pictures and anything else you can cram in there.  Do the same at Yahoo! Local and Bing Local Listing Center.

Now add your information to sites like Yelp!, Mixx, Kudzu and CitySearch.  Always use your URL – not the URL of where your URL actually points to.  (In Wally’s case he should list his URL as http://www.WallyLionberger.com and not the crazy http://apps.amfam/blahblahblah URL that it actually forwards to).  This will give you more control over what you are offering – for instance if you decide to go work for another company, you’ll only have to worry about changing your pointer, not getting an entire new domain name.

Tip: Wondering what all to put on these websites?  Do a search for your industry and see who comes up.  Then see what those folks are doing and imitate that.  If you don’t see any of your local competitors, good for you!  Get your name up there and take that traffic!

Build Keyword Targeted Links

This is a big one.  There’s no rule saying that you can’t build links on other people’s websites that ultimately influence your overall ranking on the search engines.  There’s a saying in my industry- Content is King, Links are Queen. Since you can’t really control the content on your corporate website, you’ve got to come at it from a different angle and differentiate yourself from the other drones out there – and building links is the answer.

I’ve written plenty on how to get links from other sites via articles, directory submissions, etc so I’m not going to rehash that here.  But if there’s nothing else you can do on your website, this is the way to go.

Don’t have time to take on something like this?  You can still dominate the local market for your industry. Talk to me.

Paid Search

While I’m not a huge fan of paid search, it does have it’s place – and this is a great example of that.  Assuming American Family would let him, Wally could start a PPC campaign through Google AdWords or a service like AdzZoo and collect leads.  I don’t think AmFam would have a problem with this – since he’s ultimately sending the traffic to them anyway.

Create a Stealth LeadGen Site

Ok here’s probably the best tip of all – but it’s a little risky.

Since AmFam won’t let Wally have his own website that promotes their products, he needs to think outside the AmFam box and come up with other ways to get leads.

What’s to stop Wally, or you, or anyone, from building a very generic non-branded website that ranks well for insurance?  The site, say something like GetInsuredStLouis.com could, with a nice SEO campaign, rank well for all things Saint Louis and insurance related.  This generic site could then have a form that visitors could fill out for more information.  Those leads would dump to Wally’s InBox, and he could call them back with his insurance info.  He could even add weekly content with great insurance-related articles – thus pulling in those coveted long tail searchers.

Now this may or may not be against your corporation rules – I suggest you do a little investigation prior to setting something like this up – but if you go for it, you could really rake in some nice leads.  Are you ballsy enough to do it?

Locked in a Box

Don’t let your corporation keep you locked in that box.  Thinking that you can’t do anything beyond the few crappy tools that they give you can be a big mistake.  Someone with the guts to push the envelope is going to get rewarded with more customers – is that you?

I’d love to hear your comments about these methods.  Don’t be a chicken and tell me what you think.

Related posts:

1. Rank High SEO Session Contest