What Is Enterprise Seo: A Beginner’s Guide to Creating an Effective Strategy

Manoj Palanikumar
|
January 11, 2023
What Is Enterprise Seo: A Beginner’s Guide to Creating an Effective Strategy

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Key Takeaways

Enterprise SEO is the process of implementing search engine optimization for large-scale websites to improve their visibility in search engine results.

Enterprise or large-scale websites like HubSpot have thousands or even millions of web pages. Optimizing these millions of pages for SEO manually is impractical. To do so, you need:

  • A dedicated SEO team to plan the strategy and the implementation
  • Automation tools to scale up the SEO operations
  • An experienced SEO lead to make sure the process is going in the right direction.

To effectively implement enterprise SEO, companies typically employ a combination of strategies, including:

  • Keyword research to identify relevant opportunities
  • On-page optimization to enhance the content and structure of web pages
  • Technical SEO to address the backend factors affecting site performance
  • Link building to strengthen domain authority
  • Content marketing to drive organic traffic
  • Analytics and monitoring to measure progress and refine strategies.

Why is Enterprise SEO Important?

1. Scale organic reach across diverse markets

Enterprise SEO enables large websites to expand their reach across various locations, languages, and market segments. This expansion can introduce your service or product to a wider audience, making it accessible to local demographics while maintaining a consistent global presence.

For instance, Amazon is a worldwide e-commerce platform with a wide range of products available in various countries, supporting different currencies and serving diverse customer needs.

2. Maximize ROI from existing content investments

Existing content is a great opportunity to squeeze more revenue by:

  1. Updating your ever-green content to reflect the latest changes in the industry
  2. Fixing broken links
  3. Repurposing into different formats such as videos, infographics, or podcasts
  4. Translating content into other languages for non-English speakers, etc. 

3. Optimize for a broad and complex website architecture

Enterprise websites have a complex structure with numerous services, pages, products, and services for various customer segments.

This complexity provides an opportunity to streamline website architecture, improving user experience, which helps search engines understand the relationship between various pages, enhancing indexation and ranking potential.

Is Enterprise SEO Different from Normal SEO?

Enterprise SEO and regular SEO may appear similar, but they differ in scale of implementation, resources, and more. Here's how enterprise SEO varies from regular SEO:

1. Scale

One of the main differences between enterprise SEO and normal SEO is scaling it.

While traditional SEO techniques are still relevant to enterprise companies, scaling them requires a massive team with automation tools or partnering with enterprise SEO agencies that handle everything for you.  

Let's take internal linking as an example for a news site.

For small news websites, an SEO specialist or a small team can manually review key articles and create internal links between them within a short period of time.

But, for enterprise news websites like The New York Times, which has millions of articles, manually linking articles is impossible at scale. The process for enterprise websites:

  1. Identify content pillars such as politics, technology, sports, or health.
  2. Use automated internal linking tools to programmatically suggest linking to other pages based on keywords, categories, or specific rules set by the SEO team.
  3. The editorial team will review the suggested links and ensure they follow the best practices for internal linking from the start.
  4. Then, the developers can roll out the changes to a test environment to make sure there are no broken links or overload the content with irrelevant internal links before rolling out site-wide.
  5. Finally, the analytics team can track metrics such as time on site, bounce rate, etc, to estimate how the new internal linking strategy has improved the SEO performance.

2. Competition

For small websites, it's easier to identify low-competition keywords (often long-tail keywords) that offer quicker wins. These keywords might have lower search volume but allow smaller sites to rank higher in search results with minimal SEO investment for those keywords.

Unlike them, enterprise websites compete at a different level. They aim for visibility in highly competitive markets where ranking for these keywords enhances the authority, but it comes with a high keyword difficulty(KD). This demands a major portion of investment in high-quality, authoritative content and a solid backlink profile.

3. Advanced tactics

Automation:

Small businesses do not need automation tools for SEO and related work.

However, for enterprise businesses, automation tools are crucial to scale SEO operations such as keyword research, on- and off-page SEO, technical SEO, etc.

Common automation tools include:

  1. Ahrefs, SEMrush for keyword research and competitor analysis
  2. Surfer SEO, ClearScope for on-page optimization
  3. Screaming Frog, Botify for technical SEO
  4. Link Whisper for internal linking.

A/B testing:

A/B testing is a valuable technique for understanding how different SEO strategies impact website performance. 

This method allows enterprise sites to test various changes to see what drives the best results before rolling out site-wide updates. A/B testing can be helpful to test:

  1. Title tags and meta descriptions
  2. Content layout and length
  3. Technical changes and content updates

How to create an effective enterprise SEO strategy?

1. Set your goals and objectives

Define your SEO goals and ensure they align with your business objectives.

For example, if you want to target specific keywords to rank. In that case, you should focus on creating high-quality content instead of investing your time in the user experience of your website.

But most of your goals fail because they are not SMART.

Make sure your goals follow the SMART framework—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This way, you'll have a clear path to track progress.

For example, if your goal is to increase organic traffic, the SMART version for the goal would be:

Specific: I want to increase organic traffic by 10%

Measurable: This will be measured by traffic to the website and compared to the previous traffic stats

Achievable: Sometimes, we keep targets that are hard to achieve. Ask if this is something you have achieved in the past or if you are capable or have the resources to complete this

Relevant: Is this relevant to the current goals?

Time-bound: Can you achieve this specific goal within a timeframe?

In short, the SMART goal will be that you want to increase organic traffic by 10% within the next six months.

2. Do a complete SEO audit of your website

Start with a quick SEO audit using Google Search Console to spot major issues. These small fixes can make a big difference in your site's performance.

You don't have to fix every SEO issue these tools show you. Instead, prioritize the top 20% of tasks that yield 80% of the results using the 80/20 rule.

For example, slow page load times, broken links, and sitemap errors can be the top 20% of issues and improve your site's performance and user experience.

3. Perform market and competitor research

First, you need to understand who you are targeting with your service, i.e., your target audience.

Analyze their needs and preferences and segment them based on demographics, psychographics, or behavior. Identify ideal customer personas. This will help you write intent-focused content while naturally placing the primary keyword throughout it.

Once you have the market research, it's time to perform competitor research.

The best part? Your competitors have already done a lot of groundwork for you. Just plug their URL into SEMrush or Ahrefs and find the top-ranking keywords, pages, and backlinks. 

This will give you a headstart and a clear direction for your strategy, along with identifying content gaps and competitors at the same time.

4. Create a strong keyword strategy

If you did the market and competitor research, you may already understand what keywords you need to target. Here's a quick overview:

Primary keywords: These are the high-volume, competitive keywords that describe your core services.

Secondary Keywords: Variations or related keywords that complement the primary keywords.

Long-Tail Keywords: These are the keywords with lower search volumes but higher intent, such as the best CRM software for healthcare.

Once you have the list of keywords, categorize them by intent:

Transactional: Keywords where users are ready to buy (e.g., "by enterprise CRM")

Informational: Keywords focused on educating the user (e.g., "how to choose a CRM")."

Navigational: Keywords aimed at finding a specific product or brand (e.g., "Salesforce CRM features")

This helps you structure your content based on the different stages of the buyer's journey.

5. Develop a content strategy based on the keyword strategy

Till now, you have defined clear goals, audited your website, performed market and competitor research, and created a keyword strategy.

By using the information gathered, develop a content strategy. This content strategy involves:

Optimizing existing pages: Update existing content with the latest and relevant information and meta information

Creating new content: Plan a content calendar around the keywords you researched in the previous step. These may include writing how-to blogs, industry-specific case studies, comparison guides, and listicles.

6. Improve on-page SEO

Keyword placement: Place the keyword(s) throughout the content naturally without trying to stuff the keywords as many as possible, which defeats the purpose of writing it with user intent

Hierarchy: Maintain a hierarchy starting with the H1, H2, etc. This makes it easy for the reader to follow the structure and get the information quickly

Image optimization: For each image, provide an alt text that describes it in a meaningful way. This helps the crawlers and the visually impaired users understand what the image is about clearly. Lazy load the images or optimize the images for fast load speeds to improve the site performance.

Try to include images, infographics, tables, and videos to break up the text visually and provide a good reading experience. 

7. Improve technical SEO

HTTPS Security

Make sure your site is secure by switching to HTTPS; this not only builds user trust but keeps Google happy, too. And don't forget to redirect all traffic from HTTP to HTTPS to avoid any technical hiccups.

Create XML sitemap and robots.txt:

Create an XML sitemap to help search engines understand the structure of your website and discover new pages.

Use a robots.txt file to instruct search engines which pages to crawl and which to avoid. It can prevent search engines from accessing duplicate content, private sections, or areas of your site that are under development, thereby optimizing the crawling resources and ensuring that only relevant content is indexed.

Mobile-friendliness:

Responsive design: Ensure your website is responsive and adapts to different screen sizes and devices

Google mobile-first indexing: Google primarily indexes websites based on their mobile version. Make sure your mobile site is optimized for search engines.

8. Internal linking and backlink strategy

Internal Linking:

Linking pages within your website does two things for you. First, it hints to the search engines that there are more pages to crawl and index. Second, it keeps the reader on your website longer to explore similar resources, such as related blogs, where to learn more, etc. It reduces the bounce rate and establishes your blog as a go-to authority in your niche.  

Backlink strategy:

Backlinks are links that point to your website from other websites. They signal the search engines that your content is valuable and relevant. 

Link building tactics:

  • Guest posting: Write guest posts on high-quality blogs in your niche and include links to your website
  • Broken link building: Find broken links on other websites related to your services or products and offer to replace them with links to your relevant content
  • Directory submissions: Submit your website to relevant online directories  
  • Outreach: Reach out to other websites in your industry to build relationships and potentially secure backlinks.

A few key points to keep in mind for backlink strategy:

  1. Make sure your backlinks are niche-related and from high-domain authority websites
  2. Avoid spammy link-building techniques, as this will harm your website’s ranking.

9. User experience (UX) optimization

Clear structure:

The structure of your website should be logical and easy for a visitor to follow.

When visitors cannot find what they are looking for quickly, the site is hard to navigate. 

Test your website with various users to find out where they are having trouble finding the information. For example, ask them to sign up for your service and see whether this task is easy.

A clear navigation and site structure makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index your pages.

Visual design:

Maintain consistent style throughout your website, including typography, colors, and images. Ensure your text is easily read by choosing appropriate font sizes, line spacing, and contrast. Guide the user to the most important sections or information using size and color to your advantage. 

Accessibility: 

Adhere to accessibility guidelines like WCAG to make your website usable by people with disabilities.

Ensure your website can be navigated using a keyboard, not just a mouse.

Enterprise SEO Challenges and How to overcome them

Even though enterprise SEO has many benefits, it is not without challenges. Here are a few challenges of implementing enterprise SEO and how to overcome them.

1. Cross-team alignment:

One of the biggest challenges in implementing enterprise SEO is getting various teams(marketing, sales, product development, IT) to work together for a common goal.

Teams can clash over priorities, miscommunication happens, and sometimes people just don't get the nitty-gritty of SEO.

To overcome them:

1. Set clear goals:

From the start, clearly define (as discussed earlier) and communicate your goals. By sharing these goals with the teams involved, they can understand the significance of improving our SEO efforts.

2. Use communication channels:

Use communication tools like Slack to discuss, develop, and inform about the project status or any issues.

Consider project management tools to keep track of progress and who is responsible for which tasks.

3. Appoint an SEO lead:

Without proper management guidance and overall domain knowledge, your SEO initiatives might get lost and create chaos in the project.

Having an experienced leader to review the entire project can positively impact and lead to smooth operations.

4. Provide training:

Not everyone is SEO-savvy. Provide training or clarification sessions to ensure everyone is on the same page regarding the importance and fundamentals of SEO.

5. Feedback:

Get feedback on training, progress, or standard procedures to improve them in the next iteration.

2. Slow approval rates (lack of speed)

Enterprise companies often have a hierarchy and standard procedures to approve anything, which can take ages.

This delay can impact your website's ranking and revenue. For example, you want to fix broken links. But if you approach your management with a pitch like, “we can improve our SEO game by fixing the websites,” they will sideline your proposal.

Instead, try to quantify the outcome. For example, “By fixing the broken links, we can expect to get more organic traffic by 7% and reduce the bounce rate by 9%, which can result in a revenue increase of approximately 5% over the next quarter.

This approach motivates the management to take action quickly. But remember, this is just an example, and you may have to use a presentation to prove your point to the management.

3. Content creation at scale

Businesses face a common dilemma when it comes to content creation at scale: should they outsource the content creation process, or is it better to produce content in-house? Each option comes with its own set of advantages and challenges.

If you have the team, resources, and human resources and want greater control over each aspect of your content, then going this route might benefit you. However, this approach requires a huge investment in recruitment, training, and more, which may not be feasible for all businesses.

A better option is to partner with an enterprise SEO agency that understands your unique challenges and can create tailored strategies. This approach leverages the pool of talent that agencies have without the hassle of managing and maintaining a bunch of teams to increase content production quickly. 

Top Enterprise SEO Tools

There are many  enterprise SEO tools, but the following are the most popular. 

1. Google Search Console

A free tool by Google for monitoring your website's performance in search results.

Why Use It: Provides insights into how Google sees your site and helps identify technical issues.

Purpose: Monitor performance, fix crawl errors, submit sitemaps, and analyze keyword performance.

2. Ahrefs

A comprehensive SEO toolset focused on backlink analysis and keyword research.

Why Use It: It is known for its extensive backlink database and is ideal for link-building strategies.

Purpose: Conduct keyword and competitor research, audit SEO issues, and discover content ideas.

3. SEMrush

An all-in-one marketing toolkit for SEO, PPC, and content marketing.

Why Use It: Offers powerful analytics for tracking SEO performance across various channels.

Purpose: Perform keyword research, analyze competitors, conduct site audits, and generate content ideas.

4. Screaming Frog

A website crawler for on-page SEO audits.

Why Use It: Quickly identifies and fixes technical SEO issues.

Purpose: Find broken links, duplicate content, analyze metadata, and evaluate page load times.

Hire an Agency for Your Enterprise SEO Goals

While the tools we listed above are powerful and essential for enterprise SEO, managing SEO efforts across thousands of pages can still be overwhelming. Often, enterprise businesses face resource constraints, a lack of in-house SEO expertise, or simply the need for a more focused strategy to drive organic growth.

Why Hire an SEO Agency?

  • Expertise and experience: Agencies specialize in SEO and have years of experience dealing with complex enterprise SEO challenges, such as scaling content, managing technical SEO for large websites, and building effective backlink strategies
  • Efficiency: Hiring an agency allows your in-house teams to focus on core business activities while the SEO experts handle the intricacies of optimization
  • Custom strategies: Agencies can develop and execute tailor-made SEO strategies that align with your business objectives and market needs

Enterprise SEO is a complex and time-consuming challenge for large-scale websites. If you want a strategic partner offering a tailored approach to scale your SEO operations, book a call with us.

Manoj Palanikumar
Manoj Palanikumar
Manoj, with over 9 years of experience, has had the privilege of working with and advising more than 50 B2B SaaS brands. Specializing in organic growth strategies, Manoj has consistently driven predictable pipelines and revenue for his clients. As a growth advisor, he has helped B2B brands achieve sustainable, long-term growth through SEO, content, and organic strategies. His expertise has been sought by renowned brands such as Zoho, Glean, Helpshift, Monograph, HowNow, and many others, enhancing their organic acquisition and revenue.

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