It's natural to want the best return on an investment and website owners are no different. Irrespective of sums invested and business case identified, you've probably paid a significant amount of money to establish a credible web presence. Even in the best of times you want to be sure that your website is pulling its weight and can be found by all comers.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a well-established technique to ensure a website is as visible as possible, but is it for everyone? A recent discussion I had threw some interesting light on whether large, high profile professional services providers need to worry about a proactive SEO campaign. If a firm has a sufficiently high profile already - both on and offline - surely it can sit back and let the traffic flow?

The discussion threw up three reasons for not adopting a laissez-faire attitude to search engines: general visibility, new initiatives and geographical penetration.

• General visibility may be a matter of just maintaining a watching brief on search engine listings, but for credibility reasons it is imperative that your website is listed on the first page of results when the firm's name is searched. Not always as easily done as said, especially if the firm has a relatively common name - or has to share space with a higher profile namesake. We had an incident recently where a client reference on our own website had a higher profile than the client’s website itself. Up to that point we hadn’t offered them any SEO help…

• New initiatives could be a new service area, the arrival of a new team or perhaps a recruitment initiative that needs publicising. Whatever it may be, tailored SEO – which could be extended to paid advertising on search engines – can help build the web profile of the initiative. We took advantage of a new directive from the London Stock Exchange last year about online reporting (Rule 26) and attached a pleasing number of enquiries through an SEO and pay-per-click campaign.

• Geographical penetration: a large number of firms are keen to develop new business in new territories. A classic example is the push into the Middle East and China by law firms. There’s a high chance that these firms will not be particularly well known in these regions, so SEO can be used to help build profile. China can be a real challenge for Western firms: search engines that dominate the West (Google et al) aren’t necessarily the right ones to use in China. And then there’s the issue over whether to translate web content.

SEO is a huge subject, but this conversation made me realise that there’s a case for all firms to establish an effective SEO strategy. Given enough time, anyone who has a reasonable understanding of web technology can crack SEO, but of course time is not always available when you need it. We argue that it is worth the time as just one enquiry could pay huge dividends. Not everyone relies on word of mouth to choose their advisors…

If you would like to know more about search engine optimisation please get in touch with me at james.tuke@intendance.com. You may also be interested to read a longer piece about SEO at: Best Online Practice.

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