websense

In my exploration of some of the Fortune 500s that aren’t doing as well as they would like, I have another minor recommendation for them: Copy! Many of the homepages of these companies are completely devoid of any copy! All the Big Three auto makers have corporate sites with homepages that would benefit from some, or a little more content.

Just one or two well written paragraphs that get quickly to the point, encompassing what the site is about, would do the trick. Even a bulleted list is better than nothing (some cases, just better), and users enjoy the ability to scan a page quickly to figure out what the page is all about. Copy should be for the user, but you have to remember that it impacts the SE’s as well. Some good copy with your key phrases can help boost rankings, visibility.

A few companies that could use a little verbiage on the homepage:
Berkshire Hathaway
Exxon Mobile
Goldman Sachs
Boeing
James Richardson has some good points about copy writing for the homepage. Worth checking out.

It is frustrating to look at these huge companies throwing money at PPC, TV and other methods of advertising, when a small step in the SEO direction could be garnering the consumer response they are after.
What say you? Do you have copy on your homepage? Is it working for you, or do you need to juice it up?

Wow…Check this out.

Companies choose to do it anyways.

Check out this post about SEO vs PPC on seomoz.org.

We see it all the time. Big companies will take the easiest approach, even though it costs far more money to get the same, or likely less results.

The highlights from Rand’s post:

# From the numbers above, we can see that the opportunity from organic search is 5.66X that of paid search
# Across the board ad spending (via SEMPO):

* 2004 was 85% PPC vs. 12% Organic
* 2005 was 87% PPC vs. 11% Organic
* 2006 was 87% PPC vs. 12% Organic
* 2007 was 88% PPC vs. 10% Organic

# Spend on SEO is 1/8th of PPC

This dovetails nicely with the comments we’ve been making regarding the Automakers and Fortune 500s ignoring SEO. Hopefully the availability of this kind of data will cause marketers, especially those at big organizations, to take a second look at SEO.

Jim Kukral made a great point about a branding opportunity the big 3 missed the first time they went to beg Congress for money. To sum it up, he said that if the 3 CEOs would have driven to DC and appeared tired and worn out upon arrival, Congress and the Country may have been more receptive to them. If nothing else, they would have gotten some good press coverage out of it. Rather than taking their private jets and just look like elitists.

I totally agree with Jim.

Apparently so do the CEOs of the big 3. They are driving hybrids on their second trip. It’s probably too little too late, but maybe they took Jim’s branding advice.