Making changes in global industrial manufacturing companies is sometimes very tough. I experienced that when I was trying to drive unique visitors to the Russian webpage in an effort to increase awareness among the end-users.

The website for Russia was only a part of larger website which was managed from the company headquarters. The countries got absolutely the same pages but translated to the local language. No need to describe how inflexible the website was for the particular country.

The number of Russian website visitors was very low especially for the company with market leader position; the largest share of this small number came from the search engines (Google and Yandex).

I hired a SEO firm, who completed website audit and prepared the long list of recommendations of changes on the programming level of the website. Excited about upcoming progress I sent the request to the IT Department at my company headquarters. Surprisingly (or not?) the headquarters were reluctant to make any changes as they would impacted every country where the company had website. And those recommendations according to them were not necessarily good for others.

Besides, the new web platform was to be launched within year or two (this reasoning of the (sales) supporting departments always amazed me : they are always given years to implement ; whereas, implementation of the sales plans are never allowed to postpone by a few years :)).

With no flexibility to make website attractive for search engines on the programming level we in team with the SEO firm and a few company product managers focused on the following activities:

–  Improving the language of the website texts to appeal more to the end user in Russia;

–   Writing or simply putting the existing company product application notes on the forums and informational portals which our target users visit and read;

–   Registering the webpages (key words = product categories) on the internal catalogues of the search engines (applicable for Russian Yandex.ru);

–   Advertising upcoming exhibitions and seminars on google and yandex

Within 5 months we have been able to increase the number of website visitors by 4 times. That was quiet a success taking into account the fact that no page indexing, changes on the programming level were done.

But one of our distributors (who sells electrical equipment and tools) had a much more impressive success. They pretty much woke up famous next day after implementing just one thing.

Someone in their company came up with the idea  of creating short training videos that would give advice and tips of how to use smartly of fully utilize the benefits of a particular tool. Each 2-4 minute videos were devoted to a particular product.

The scenario of the video was always the same: a company sales person or technical support would sit at the table with the tool on the table and talk about it.

These training video was just perfect for the customer. The budget for such videos was small. And it drove the number of visitors by 10 times during that summer when this idea was implemented.

Today this website is a top website in all ratings in the Electrical category.

 No doubt, it’s really great when you have the power to make every change required for SEO and enjoy the growing number of unique visitors. But that is not always the case, especially in the large organizations. The good thing is there are always the solutions to overcome the limitations.