You might be a good candidate for enterprise SEO if:
- Your site has a large number of pages (over 1,000)
- You are an enterprise or large organization covering a national market
- Your company markets internationally and needs to be visible online in different countries
- Your company has multiple layers or departments that need to be consulted regarding website changes (c-suite, marketing, PR, sales, IT etc.)
Enterprise SEO requires a deep level of SEO experience, the ability to process and leverage large data sets, and the ability and access to advanced SEO technology platforms. In today’s world of digital marketing the quality of your data and the experience of your team makes all the difference, it’s critical to have a good balance of SEO technology and talent for your enterprise SEO solution.
Leveraging an enterprise SEO platform can be powerful, but your agency or in-house SEO team needs to have the experience and expertise to execute, manage, and report on an enterprise SEO strategy.
Unique Challenges of Enterprise SEO
Enterprise websites have some unique challenges, and a strong enterprise SEO campaign strategy will need to address these.
Multiple Stakeholders. Many enterprise companies have multiple levels of stakeholders, which means that changes to the website need to go through multiple layers of approval—and need to work from a branding, legal, and public relations standpoint.
Indexation. Indexation can be a challenge with enterprise sites. Your website may have so many pages that ensuring they are all properly crawled and indexed can be challenging, and requires a specific implementation and testing solution.
Automation. Because of the size of enterprise sites and the frequent use of legacy systems, manual SEO is impractical. You shouldn’t hire a team to manually write titles for each of 10,000 pages. Instead, your enterprise SEO strategy will need to take advantage of flexible automation to create an approach that’s unique for each page but follows a scalable template.
Complex Website Technology. Many large organizations leverage custom website technologies and complex IT infrastructure. This will require advanced planning and consideration within your enterprise SEO strategy. SEO fixes will need to be scheduled ahead of time and take longer to go live.
Unique Advantages of Enterprise SEO
Enterprise websites tend to have some built-in advantages that the SEO strategy should capitalize on.
Content. Enterprise websites often have a lot of high-quality content. Press releases, sales training manuals, whitepapers, and product guides can all be valuable to the end user. Because SEO increasingly relies on having a large amount of high-quality content, enterprise websites have a substantial advantage over traditional sites. This content can be leveraged into higher rankings and a large number of backlinks.
Authority. Most enterprise websites (excluding some eCommerce sites) already have substantial name recognition and authority in their industry. This can be leveraged into high rankings. For these sites, ranking for extremely competitive terms is a real opportunity.
Opportunities. Because these sites have so many pages, boosting overall site rankings can translate into substantial traffic. If even a fraction of the total pages start to acquire top rankings, they can drive a large amount of organic traffic to the site.
Enterprise On-Page SEO Strategy
A strong enterprise SEO strategy will involve creating a macro-level on-page strategy that properly leverages current web assets (case studies, videos, white papers, product/services pages) in a way that supports the top-level visibility and specific KPI’s of the SEO strategy. This includes creating and applying specific meta-data to every page, and restructuring page content to align with SEO recommendations. This part of the plan can take substantial time to handle, and can require a lot of automation to properly execute.
SEO Technical Crawl Health for Enterprise Sites
The other critical area for enterprise SEO is technical crawl health. The site should be free from technical errors like 404s, broken links, and duplicate content and meta-data. This stage of enterprise SEO is critical to ensure that pages on the site are properly crawled and indexed by search-engines so they can appear in search results and produce relevant traffic.
After this, enterprise SEO can take a broader role such as working with the PR department to secure valuable links, providing content/keyword recommendations for new pages, and overseeing an ongoing on-page strategy that aligns website content planning with SEO campaign objectives.
Off-Page Enterprise SEO
Off-page SEO has a different place within enterprise SEO. A well-crafted off-page enterprise SEO strategy will hyper-focus on specific pages, keywords, and thought leadership opportunities related to larger enterprise objectives. A good enterprise SEO strategy will also work in conjunction with other departmental objectives to leverage efforts on both sides. So the media coverage your PR department creates will also gain valuable back-links, and the custom video created by your marketing team can be used to increase engagement on top priority SEO pages.
Other Important Elements of Enterprise SEO Strategy
Monitoring Google’s Algorithm Updates
Because many enterprise brands derive so much traffic from organic search, any change to Google’s algorithm can have a substantial effect. For instance, Overstock.com credibly blamed Google’s 2015 “Quality Update” for the significant earnings drop they suffered in Q3 2015. They didn’t prepare well enough for the update, and their rankings dropped as a result. It’s crucial that your enterprise have someone with experience monitoring Google’s algorithm updates so that you can prepare for them and minimize brand damage. With the right preparation, it’s possible to optimize for an upcoming algorithm update and come out ahead in search, growing market share at the expense of competitors who didn’t take action.
Toxic Link Management
Acquiring links using methods that conflict with Google guidelines can lead to a penalty and substantial drops in ranking and traffic. JC Penny, for instance, was penalized in 2011 after buying links. Many of the company’s pages fell off the first page for common searches, reducing their traffic. Overstock was also penalized because Google found that many of its links had the same anchor text, which is an outdated and black-hat practice to boost rankings.
Your brand could also be penalized because it accidentally acquired spammy backlinks, which enterprise brands are at risk of because they naturally acquire so many links. It’s important to have someone with SEO experience monitoring your backlink profile so that you can take action if your profile becomes a risk factor.
In any of these cases, having guidance from a white-hat based SEO agency could potentially have prevented the penalty, preventing millions of dollars in lost sales.
Request an Enterprise Toxic Link Analysis.
Brand SEO for Enterprises
One key element of enterprise SEO is to effectively cultivate online search for the enterprise’s brand. This means identifying the main terms which searchers use to find your brand, and making sure that your brand shows up in top positions on Google for those searches. It’s also important to make sure that the right pages are ranking highest, in order to satisfy existing customers while effectively converting potential new customers. A search for “Microsoft Excel,” for instance, should turn up a landing page dedicated to selling Excel to potential users. By optimizing key pages for brand searches, your enterprise SEO agency can help your brand drive more conversions and grow market share.
Succeeding with Enterprise SEO
Colorado SEO Pros has a proven track record of success working with enterprise clients to deliver targeted traffic and boost their bottom line. We helped fortune 100 cable and internet provider Spectrum build SEO into company processes. We helped Ciber Inc, a global IT consulting company grow organic traffic to key pages by triple digits and secure important multi-million dollar contracts. Working with K2, a digital process automation company, we grew important rankings and traffic. We also created an enterprise micro-site strategy for GJG Gardner that resulted in an 80% national organic traffic increase.
If you’re looking for an enterprise SEO strategy and platform to drive organic traffic and boost revenue get in touch today.
