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:
To effectively implement enterprise SEO, companies typically employ a combination of strategies, including:
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.
Existing content is a great opportunity to squeeze more revenue by:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Backlinks are links that point to your website from other websites. They signal the search engines that your content is valuable and relevant.
A few key points to keep in mind for backlink strategy:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get feedback on training, progress, or standard procedures to improve them in the next iteration.
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.
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.
There are many enterprise SEO tools, but the following are the most popular.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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