“Corporate judo is finding ways to leverage your companies bureaucracy and rules to your advantage. “
Bill Hunt
Corporate judo, like the sport of judo, emphasizes techniques that turn an opponent’s force to one’s advantage rather than oppose it directly. This means understanding and finding ways to leverage a company’s bureaucracy and rules to your advantage.
While trying to implement force multipliers, I inadvertently became a black belt in corporate judo by integrating Search requirements into the organization’s myriad guidelines and rules. When I was at IBM, we had binders of guidelines and an intranet site that documented rules for every pixel, element, and HTML code, with examples and various parameters for everything related to IBM.com. The screen capture below is 22 years old and shows the original title tag standards with examples and links to even more refined guidelines.
I learned about these rules when the hundreds of tickets I entered to correct the audit items were all rejected. A few days later, I met the person who rejected them – the Web Compliance Manager, when she came to my desk and introduced the standards. She explained that I needed to review and adjust my tickets within these guidelines. I asked what to do if the policies are too restrictive or negatively impact what is required for me to do my job.
She explained that for anything that I wanted changed, I needed to document the issue. I must provide details of the recommended change, including why we needed it changed, updated language, and get agreement with the change of the key element owner. Once that was ready, I could then present it to the review committee for evaluation.
This was groundbreaking regarding process improvement and potentially eliminating the need for hundreds of routine fixes. The simple fact is that if I could change the rules enabling the problems, it would change not only how things were implemented but also the rules to mandate them. The governance at the ticket and site level meant that I could ensure search compliance.
I spent the next week understanding the rules that rejected my tickets. Then, I methodically read every guideline and requirement, looking for any search implications. In the end, 85 percent of my requests for changes and deviations were accepted because they didn’t negatively impact the current standard in any way. The remaining 15 percent required back-and-forth with the stakeholders to come to a mutual benefit. This game changer was significant, allowing the team to scale web effectiveness with minimal effort.
Integrate with Enforced Rules
Similar to what I did at IBM and the web team, we did this at P&G, getting search requirements integrated into their creative guides.
The best part of integrating with the creative guides was that existing procurement contract requirements forced the creative agencies to comply. As many often sold SEO as an add-on service, they often left out key optimization elements. Enforcing SEO requirements in the creative standards required those agencies to fix the defects without any incremental revenue. This was a key way we could benefit from key SEO best practices at launch.
Avoid creating seperate SEO rules. Integrated them into those that are already enforced!
Bill Hunt
Identify if the company has any automated, review, or validation tools. While working with Hewlett Packard, I had been tasked with creating or sourcing an SEO diagnostic platform. It was far beyond your typical SEO crawling tool but one that would integrate with the CMS via the user’s browser. The goal was to eliminate or reduce SEO issues before the page goes live. I learned we already used Active Standards to validate brand, legal and accessibility requirements. I worked with this team and he vendor to integrate our SEO tests. This was connected to the CMS, so every page was tested before it went live.
The senior VP of digital already strictly enforced compliance rules. She mandated that any issue flagged as Level 1 could not launch until corrected – the CMS would not let you publish until it was correct. Levels 2 to 5 had variable correction windows, ranging from 24 hours to 30 days, depending on the severity. More than half of the SEO elements were level 1, with the remaining in 2 and 3, ensuring they were corrected before search engines had much chance to index them.
I was able to integrate about 70 percent of the scoring criteria of other responsibilities. In the screen capture below, we integrated title tags, headings, and H1 testing into accessibility. Title tag rules were in brand and others in usability. Those that were truly SEO were in the SEO category.
Centers of Excellence
One of the best ways to manage the communication and collaboration necessary for this level of integration into the rules and regulations is to create and actively participate in a Center of Excellence, by getting all of the stakeholders from the various web teams. This includes template teams, server teams, content teams. Again, we’re looking at, going back to Epiphany 1, force multipliers. How can we integrate this into a work stream that’s already doing something that caused the problem, uh, or could fix the issue as part of what they do, and then prevent future reversals by adapting the required standards.
Many companies have adopted centers of excellence, not just for search but for many other things related to web effectiveness. The goal for all is process optimization, if you reframe this problem, you know, we don’t optimize for Google; we optimize for web effectiveness. Yes, doing these things can benefit Google or search, but in many cases, they’re going to improve a process in multiple dimensions.
That’s why if we think about it as optimizing for web effectiveness or changing for web effectiveness, you’re probably going to get better adoption and adoption by people than you would if it was just a pure play thing for Google. Another really big one in this, in theory, should be a separate epiphany.
Why do they do what they do?
We have specific epiphanies for this one, but it is worth referencing here since we are talking about corporate processes. No employee necessarily does things to negatively impact the business, so it is critical to understand why they are doing what they do. I have captured some of the reasons in this post on why SEO is not more integrated.
Recommendations
My recommendation is to try and find your company’s weak spots and where there are rules preventing you from doing what you need to do, and figure out how to change or leverage them. If you don’t have them, create them. Gather a team and explain why they are needed, how to measure them, and what is needed for enforcement. It does not have to be anything fancy, a simple checklist of the requirements for pages given to the developers from a manager may be enough to encourage compliance.