Microsoft SEO Strategy Brief
Strategy briefs are bite-sized examples of how to apply my organic growth strategy approach to large enterprises. While they are inherently limited by being developed only with external insights, there are still great learnings to derive from the exercise. In this post, we’ll be focusing on Microsoft.
Microsoft is a Fortune 50 brand, and since the 1970’s has been a dominant force in tech. Today, Microsoft drives nearly ~$200B in annual revenue through a diverse array of products and services – though revenue from Microsoft Cloud services represents over 50% of quarterly revenue, as of their latest earning report.
This strategy brief will outline a potential organic growth strategy for Microsoft.
Defining Microsoft’s SEO Strategy
Microsoft’s Business Strategy
Microsoft’s stated mission is to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” This is facilitated through their three major busines s units:
- Productivity and Business Processes
- Intelligent Cloud
- More Personal Computing
While each of these business segments (and indeed, each product within the segment) have their own strategy, I posit that their overall business strategy is to develop and integrate technology at a massive scale across business and consumer products – making it so that the Microsoft ecosystem is an integral part of everyday life.
Their newest strategic initiative at the moment is AI. Microsoft announced a $10B investment in OpenAI, the company behind GPT-3, DALL-E, and ChatGPT, becoming their exclusive Cloud provider and incorporating OpenAI models across Microsoft’s product portfolio. Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said in the Q2 ’23 investor Q&A that “we fundamentally believe that the next big platform wave…is going to be AI.” Additionally, in 2022 they released Github Copilot, which turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions. Microsoft 365 and Teams has also begun incorporating AI, such as by improving video and audio quality in realtime.
Azure and Cloud computing continues to of major importance. Azure trails AWS in total market share, but still claims 22% of the market (per Statista) – including 95% of the Fortune 500. Azure ML has grown more than 100% for 5 quarters in a row.
Lastly – their gaming division, Xbox, continues to be their top consumer priority, mostly clearly displayed by their (ongoing) acquisition of Activision-Blizzard for $68.7B. Growing Xbox’s catalog of first-party content with Activision-Blizzard properties (such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft) positions them to better compete against PlayStation and Nintendo – particularly when factoring Microsoft’s subscription push with Game Pass that, according to Sony, has over 29 million members (Microsoft’s last official subscriber number was 25 million). It also enables them, through King, to break into the mobile gaming market, estimated to be worth nearly $100B in 2021 and expected to grow significantly.
Current state of Microsoft’s SEO
Per SEMrush data, Microsoft has 354(!) subdomains built off of microsoft.com, collectively driving 55.6 million organic site visits per month.
Of course, most of those subdomains have a niche focus; support.microsoft.com, learn.microsoft.com, and the root domain bring in 83% of overall traffic – meaning the other 351 domains are responsible for the remaining 17% of organic traffic.
About half of their organic traffic comes from branded terms, and their subdomain approach works well for securing top rankings for those keywords. While subdomains are often a bad idea for SEO (they typically split up site authority – see case study after case study on the matter), Microsoft’s root domain is so authoritative, and their interlinking strategy so robust, that they can make it work to great effect.
Like with most companies, their greatest opportunity is on the non-branded side. Of particular note – since 2022, they’ve lost 35.3% of their organic traffic for non-branded terms, per SEMrush. That is a steep drop that is worth a comprehensive deep dive. From a high-level review, it appears that the much of the drop is coming from the retiring of the Hotmail brand – but they also lost nearly ~40k Featured Snippet results too. While some of this traffic loss may be acceptable, it should be investigated – particularly for key products like Azure, which has lost ~31% of it’s non-branded traffic since August 2022.
One of Microsoft’s major non-branded opportunities is around the topic of AI. Excluding branded terms, their websites only rank for 326 AI-related keywords in a top 3 position. Openai.com – a much smaller, less authoritative website – ranks for nearly 3x AI related keywords.
From a technical SEO perspective, one potential issue is the lack of hreflang tags across their websites. While it’s out of the scope of this brief to do a full analysis, as of January 2023 I’m not seeing hreflang tags either in their XML sitemaps on azure.microsoft.com and microsoft.com, nor am I seeing page-level tags in their rendered HTML. This could explain why a subdomain like azure.microsoft.com ranks comparatively poorly outside of the U.S (16k top 3 rankings in the US vs 2k top 3 rankings in the UK). This hreflang problem may not be persistent across properties; xbox.com, for example, uses page-level hreflang tags to great effect, and ranks well for terms in all markets (though admittedly still best in the U.S).
On the gaming front, one major SEO opportunity is to own the SERPs for the ‘is X on gamepass’ keyword group. Over the past 3 years, Google Trends data shows clear, growing search demand for these types of searches.
To better rank for these searches, I would recommend modifying the title tags of the Game product pages. Currently, the product titles follow this format:
Buy ‘Game X’ | Xbox
But, if the game is also on Game Pass, the title could be:
Buy ‘Game X’ or Play on Game Pass | Xbox
This represents only an additional 20 characters, making it unlikely to cause truncation for more SERP titles. And this would serve as a clear signal to search engines and users that a game is available on Game Pass.
Lastly – no Product structured data on the Game product listing pages is a missed opportunity. Particularly when competitors like Sony are using it to great effect to take up more SERP real estate.
Bringing it together
Based on a brief look at Microsoft’s business strategy and the current state of their SEO, I would likely recommend the following strategy summary:
Goal – Reverse the downward trend in non-branded traffic on core product websites and gain X% share of voice for AI and Game Pass-related search demand.
Core Insights – Microsoft is going all in on AI and subscription services, as evidenced by the success of Azure and Game Pass. Any organic growth strategy should support building awareness of AI capabilities for business use, and promoting the value of their various subscription services.
Specific Deployment of Actions – Conduct a content audit to determine the cause of the non-branded traffic decline for key sites, including azure.microsoft.com. Develop a content strategy targeting AI-related searches that tie back to Microsoft products and tout their benefits. Implement hreflang tags across priority websites to improve visibility in non-US markets. Adjust title tag format for Game Pass game product pages, and implement Product structured data.
In a single sentence, Microsoft’s SEO strategy should be:
Our strategy is to grow organic visibility and revenue by X% for AI-based products and key subscriptions through a non-branded content strategy and technical enhancements to core web properties.
Making Microsoft’s SEO Strategy Better
How could we make this first draft of a strategy stronger? Beyond the obvious answer (getting information from various experts within the company), the strategy should be
- Aligned with the broader business strategy
- Compelling to key decision-makers
- Credible and well-supported
- Easily understood and memorable
I’ve made some reasonable guesses of what Microsoft’s strategic focuses are, but this would definitely need to be validated; for example, More Personal Computing is the smallest business segment by revenue, and focusing significant time and energy on Game Pass at a time where AI is trending may be a strategic misstep.
The strategy does have some data supporting it, which adds to its credibility, but more is certainly needed. For example, I might find that Microsoft’s international versions of websites are in fact ranking well and driving appropriate traffic when controlled for the total addressable markets (TAM) of those regions.
To make the strategy more credible, I would do more research into the specific keyword and traffic opportunity being missed out on currently, to quantify why some of the proposed tactics, like developing content on AI use-cases, would drive meaningful results.
I also don’t have a sense as an outsider of how to make the ultimate strategy presentation compelling to key decision-makers, so I would need to first figure out who the key decision-makers are that I need to convince to execute my strategy, and then determine what they respond best to. For example, Product leaders in charge of the Azure’s website might be motivated by competition, so I could AWS’s organic dominance as a compelling reason why we need to expand our content strategy.
Conclusion
While this is a very high-level approach to determining a potential strategy for Microsoft, using a clear framework helps to focus and speed up progress, and gets you to a first draft of your strategy sooner.
For a deeper dive into my organic growth strategy framework, I recommend reviewing my guide for more details. If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to contact me here.