James Pate On Enterprise SEO Adoption & SEO Driven Taxonomy

In part one with James Pate, we spoke about doing SEO at IBM and using Airtable for managing enterprise SEO data. In part two, we talk about enterprise SEO adoption and SEO driven taxonomy. James explained that when he first joined IBM, the team has grown, they are now ingrained into many departments in IBM and so on.

He spoke about installing governance around SEO, like URL structures and other SEO rules that these departments need to think about when making new pages and creating new content. Creating standards is a huge thing for IBM. James said IBM is unifying everything into one CMS, but that is a process. Step one was to make the governance but then step two is to get the various teams to adopt it. So you need leadership help to encourage adoption of those SEO governance.

We then spoke about taxonomy topics in SEO and how you can leverage that in your CMS platforms. He explained how this can help you automatically interlink these sections and remove a ton of manual work. We discussed some ways how this is used and how it can be used in the future. He then integrated this into his rank checker tool so it really drives back reporting to what matters in each business group.

We also spoke a bit more about the structure of the IBM SEO team and how it is integrated within IBM. We spoke a bit more about the IBM team, where people are based, who is on the team and so forth. I probed him for more details on how the team works and so forth.

If you want help with this, reach out to James Pete on Twitter @jamesfpate.

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Forum discussion at YouTube.