Here’s the thing, even enterprise companies struggle with enterprise SEO.

While there is no set definition, enterprise SEO is usually categorized as managing a website with 1,000 pages or more.

Enterprise sites do not belong solely to enterprise companies either. Publishers and resource heavy sites may be characterized as enterprise.

As your website grows, managing content, thematic continuity, and website architecture can become nearly impossible without the right software solutions and best practices in place.

LSEO has experience consulting for and managing enterprise websites and the websites of publicly traded enterprise clients.

Here, we’d like to discuss what makes enterprise SEO different from traditional SEO and what strategies enterprise websites can take to improve their rankings.

Key Differences in Enterprise SEO

Enterprise SEO is very similar to traditional SEO, only best practices must now be attained at scale. Let’s explore further.

Keyword Selection

Managing your keywords will become harder once you start to run out of ideas for new content. Here, you can run into issues of cannibalization and outranking important product/service pages for informational content that mixes intent.

Enterprise retailers need to micromanage branded keyword terms on product/service pages to ensure consistency. While this sounds relatively straightforward, imagine a realtor like Nike who has thousands of almost identical product pages. Ensuring that exact match keywords and descriptions are employed uniquely to each page can become a headache and lead to significant errors if not done properly.

On the advertising side, using negative keywords and uploading specific PLA information greatly helps with this, but SEO marketers need to do this manually.

Content

Enterprise websites will generally manage their content differently. This is two-fold:

1. Content tends to be longer, richer, and higher quality
2. There’s more content on both the products/services side, as well as blog and resource pages

Big Data

Enterprise websites have to manage the same data that regular websites do, but on a much larger page-by-page basis:

• SERP data and organic keyword rankings for thousands to tens of thousands of keywords and URLs
• Behavioural data (clicks, conversions, sessions, dwell time) for thousands of pages
• Attribution funnels (touchpoints on multiple channels that led to sales or conversions) for thousands of products/services

Competition

Enterprise websites and large brands will have significantly more competition operating in established verticals. Mostly, enterprise clients have to go even further with their content and link building efforts to rank highly for broad tail keywords.

Website Security and Privacy Concerns

Larger websites also have to ensure that each page on their website has proper SSL certification and other security measures in place.

Finally, privacy is a massive concern, especially in the age of GDPR. Ensuring GDPR compliance is a must, especially for enterprise sites that operate in different countries.

Common Problems Enterprise Sites Run Into

With this in mind, there are tons of problems that enterprise websites are more susceptible to run into. On the technical side, the biggest issues will be:

• Preventing duplicate content errors
• Properly managing redirects, especially during a site migration
• Implementing hreflang tags properly
• Deep linking to blog content and smaller resource pages

Redirects and broken links are bound to crop up as you discontinue old products, rebrand your company, and implement a full site migration. Even sub-dominating pages can be a huge headache if your business has multiple, different operations.

Duplicate content can be equally as pesky for enterprise sites, especially from product/service pages. Google Search Console can help you identify and rectify these mistakes, but it doesn’t prevent the same mistakes from occurring regularly.

Even tracking data on multiple platforms that your company engages with and accessing this can be difficult, especially when using multiple tools.

But enterprise companies have advantages in terms of tools and resources, which can significantly scale their organic search presence.

Enterprise Strategies

First off, it’s essential that enterprise companies invest in data management platforms that allow them to connect different apps to fully manage their organic search campaigns. Automation is key in terms of collecting, organizing, and making sense of big data.

There are enterprise platforms available like BrightEdge, but some essential tools all enterprise sites should invest in include:

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Screaming Frog
• Google Marketing Platform

(LSEO has no affiliation with these tools whatsoever)

Enterprise websites tend to have higher quality content and more of it, which they can use to their advantage. The key is to become the authority over any subject they discuss and focusing on original research.

Content Creation Ideas:

• White papers or ebooks on industry trends or theories
• Partnering with research agencies for industry trends and statistical resources
• Roundup posts from top industry thought leaders
• Guest posts from industry thought leaders
• Sponsored content syndication on major publications
• Sponsoring influencers on social media and different blogs
• With brand bias, enterprise companies can also engage in large scale PR campaigns that gather links and buzz around their site.

Just like a traditional SEO campaign, enterprise websites should also focus heavily on link building. Link building is arguably more effective when trying to move the needle on broad tail keyword terms and URLs that operate in highly competitive spaces.

Enterprise companies can use their resources and brand bias to acquire links naturally and engage in large scale manual reachout campaigns.

Link Building Ideas:

• Reclaiming unlinked brand mentions
• Broken link building
• Resource link building
• Large scale manual reach outs on a hyperlocalized or industry level
• Onsite content creation (original research/case studies)
• Creating evergreen guides

How Agencies Can Help Enterprise Sites Scale

Despite having the resources to conduct a digital marketing campaign on their own, many enterprise companies and webmasters contract agencies to accelerate their growth and assist in consultation.

Primarily, agencies can offer the tools and know-how to assist in everything from large scale site migrations to proper hreflang implementation.

Fresh keyword research can even provide new opportunities to rank by targeting long-tail keyword phrases and employing tactics to outrank competitors for pages that are driving them traffic.

Most importantly, agencies can help in fixing any issues regarding internal linking and working with webmasters to come up with a precise hierarchical structure that distributes authority evenly and provides users with options to engage with the site further.

Other options including editorial calendar management, fresh content creation, and full scale link building campaigns.

LSEO is a full service digital marketing agency providing enterprise level content marketing, seo consulting, link building, web design, and paid media services. For more information contact us today and we can get you started on an audit immediately!