Enterprise Search Marketing programs face a multitude of challenges. Lack of resources, lack of accurate metrics, difficulty getting site changes implemented for organic optimization and so forth. Many of these challenges are more on the organizational side of things than anything else. For those of you in this camp, here’s a challenge that will sound familiar to you: “My business unit should be owning that Keyword instead of Business Unit X”.
Meaning, within the realm of products and solutions that a business offers, at times, there’s only so many keywords to go around for both natural and paid search marketing efforts. Since there’s so much opportunity with non-branded, “generic” keywords (typically those seen at the beginning of the buy cycle), many of these terms are so general that they realistically could be categorized under a variety of your products and solutions. These terms also tend to have huge monthly demand. What this means is that you probably have multiple business units fighting over “ownership” of this keyword.
This is a challenge that affects both Paid and Natural Search. Imagine a scenario where you search on a term and see your brand showing a listing in the Paid results for “Product A”, and a listing in the Organic results for “Product B”. Usually, this scenario arises when keywords are allocated based on data performance and budget rather than business objectives and searcher intent, resulting in multiple versions of the keyword being executed. It can also lead to confusion for searchers when they visit your site and see a word is used in a less than optimal way. And finally, there’s increased work to “explain” duplicate keyword situation to various stakeholders.
Source: webguild.org