Why big brands need SEO

It’s true: A lot of big brands think that they don’t need SEO.

Now, before you go off giggling into the wilderness, it isn’t that big brands don’t know that SEO exists. In fact, they have what *seems* to be a valid logical reason for thinking they don’t need it. Their reasoning goes like this:

If we aren’t monetizing search traffic to our site through eCommerce or banner ads, then it doesn’t make any sense to pay someone to help bring traffic to the site. And in any event, everybody already knows our site exists — even if they’ve never been to it. They’ll find us if they’re looking for us.

It sounds solid on the surface, right? I mean, you can see how some people would be persuaded by such an argument. And in many cases, yes, everybody *does* know your site exists, even if they’ve never been to it (for instance, I’m absolutely certain that Wawa has a site, though I have never been there).

What’s wrong with their logic?

What these guys don’t understand is that SEO is not just about traffic numbers, and in some instances, it has almost nothing at all to do with traffic at all.

So what I’m going to do for the remainder of this post is take a look at one big brand’s web presence and explain how SEO would seriously help their marketing efforts.

Serial SEO Neglecter: McDonald’s

I’m going to use McDonald’s as an example here, because I don’t think there’s a more perfect brand in the world I could use to illustrate my point. This is why:

1. Everybody is familiar with the McDonald’s brand. You know they have a website, even if you’ve never been there.

2. Their website is about as optimized for SEO as a koala’s fart.

3. ROI on SEO efforts would be difficult to measure, as McDonald’s isn’t directly monetizing their traffic in any way at all. And they shouldn’t, of course, as that isn’t the function of their site. But any decently good marketer knows that not everything worth doing has an easily measurable ROI.

by Poonam Bhatt on April 6, 2010