Enterprise-level businesses are always looking for ways to grow, and as a result, there’s an endless stream of advice on the internet. The problem is that most of this advice isn’t helpful or accurate. In fact, many tried-and-true strategies don’t work in today’s climate. For instance, Google has recently announced algorithm updates that will impact how your site ranks in search engines if you’re not careful with content and link quality as well as page experience.
The SEO approach for a big enterprise or large brand will vary significantly from a small, local company or an individual. Although developing an enterprise SEO strategy has its unique difficulties, the opportunities are enormous.
Throughout our team’s experience and years in the SEO game, we’ve found that technical issues become more advanced as websites grow. In several cases, we’ve also found that minor flaws may lead to big problems, while small strategic solutions can lead to explosive growth.
When we think about designing an enterprise SEO strategy, we need to understand that the size of enterprises and larger brands is 10x that of a small business.
When compared to smaller-scale SEO plans for small-medium sizes businesses, enterprise SEO is more expensive and needs more stakeholders involved. This is why so many large brands turn to agencies to handle their digital marketing strategy.
Here are the main reasons why enterprise SEO requires different approaches from traditional SEOs
Enterprises are often more prominent and aggressive in every aspect, with more significant traffic, staff, content production, and marketing budgets. If your brand isn’t, you need to be!
Enterprises have greater authority and brand awareness from the start, and the competition will be stiff. While not all large brands are created equal, some may be more authoritative and trustworthy than you at the moment.
Enterprises often use larger SEO teams or agencies, with each member having a specific function to perform. Whereas, in smaller companies, a single person can handle SEO with other responsibilities.
Because enterprises typically have a higher volume of visitors, their SEO strategy may create modest percentage gains in traffic, which may add up to a lot of money or a higher volume of business. Smaller businesses with fewer employees will take a different approach.
Unlike regular SEO, enterprise SEO is often location agnostic. These companies have clients all over the globe and want to reach out to as many of them as possible, no matter where they are. Local companies usually lack this capability and concentrate their SEO efforts on prospects in their immediate vicinity.
The major difference comes down to scale. While the 3 pillars of SEO will still be performed (technical, on-site, and off-site), the level of attention the site needs increases with enterprise brands. It makes sense because the size of the website is obviously bigger and the competition is stiffer.
More technical issues pop up as the site has more pages. More meta tags need to be optimized because the site has a lot of pages. More hours need to be spent on keyword research because having more pages gives you the opportunity to rank for a large pool of keywords.
The list can go on and on, but you get the point.
Websites are naturally evolving. Your website will naturally continue to grow and expand over time. However, more technical problems and errors can pop up due to the expansion, and a more considerable amount of errors can impact the site. That’s where technical SEO comes in.
Technical SEO ensures that a website satisfies the technical criteria of modern search engines to boost organic search results. The essential components of technical SEO include rendering, indexing, crawling, website architecture, user experience, and more.
Search engine crawlers might start having difficulties crawling, indexing, and accessing the site’s content or making your efforts void in several other ways. Generally, the more advanced the website, the more issues you’re likely to encounter.
Enterprise websites develop several technical issues, including duplicate content, microsites, multiple languages, subdomains, internal linking, structure, and more. If you don’t address the issues, they may escalate, leading to reduced crawl rates, indexation issues, and sometimes, algorithmic penalties or a loss of rankings.
Technical SEO is a broad SEO field that tries to detect and eliminate issues before they cause any severe damages. So, why is technical SEO essential?
But that’s only on the surface. Even if Google indexes all of your site’s content, your work isn’t over. For your website to be completely technical SEO optimized, its pages must be mobile-friendly, duplicate content-free, secure, and fast-loading. There are a million more factors around technical SEO optimization that can be discussed with an SEO agency or professionals.
Technical SEO doesn’t have to be flawless before your website can rank. However, the simpler you make it for search engines to find your content, the higher your chances of ranking and gaining that extra boost you could be missing. Developing the correct technical SEO can be the tweak that puts you on top of your stiff competition.
Crawl budget is a phrase used by the SEO industry to describe a collection of linked ideas and systems used by search engines to determine how many and which sites to crawl. It’s essentially how much attention search engines will pay to your website.
Because enterprise websites are often on the bigger side, technological problems tend to multiply. Hence, it is essential to optimize your website’s crawl budget continually as you really want the crawlers to pay attention to your most important pages.
It is also necessary to optimize your .htaccess and robots.txt files while examining your response codes and server logs.
You don’t have to fret about duplicate content if you create original, unique content for each page on your site. However, enterprises often have numerous websites, microsites, subdomains, sorting and filtering functions, pagination, and potentially materials in various languages.
A content audit may help you identify duplicate material, which is common on business websites. Duplicate content is risky since it causes search engines to get confused and dilutes link equity.
Duplicate contents disperse backlinks over various websites due to scraped content and URL variations rather than being aggregated to a single URL. In the end, Google indexes the incorrect content and displays the wrong sites in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
As a result, the SEO and user experience are lacking. To prevent duplicating content, use hreflang, canonical tags, and noindex tags appropriately within the relevant sections of the business website(s). It will also help to develop a content strategy that allows your content creation teams to escape duplicate content.
Like regular SEO strategies, strategic keyword selection is the first step in enterprise SEO. Google’s algorithm for understanding search terms has advanced significantly, and the search engine now better comprehends semantic links between words and sentences better than a human can.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has given search engines the ability to decipher the purpose behind a user’s search; this implies that your company should choose keywords related to the user’s intention.
For instance, if you’re developing content for your company’s awareness stage (which covers the issue your product addresses), you should avoid commercial terms like “download,” “buy,” etc.
Enterprise SEO strategies can go after more difficult keywords as enterprise websites have more authority and can compete for higher search volume, seed keywords. In other words, your keyword target list can be much more extensive and aggressive than a small to medium type business.
Here’s how you should choose keywords at each step of the customer’s journey.
At the first stage of the customer’s journey, they’re generally unsure what they want. They use generic, non-branded searches to find the best solution to their needs. At this point, being in front of your audience improves your chances of getting maximum brand visibility.
For instance, we always recommend that larger brands concentrate on generic keywords like shirts, watches, shoes, phones, or TVs to gain exposure for your brand at the initial first stage (or TOFU) of the customer’s journey if you operate an e-commerce website.
Non-branded keywords may assist in driving a lot of organic traffic to your site. These keywords have many searches and indicate people who are moving down the sales funnel but haven’t decided which brand to buy from yet.
Examples of non-branded keywords include men’s wristwatches, women’s shoes, and CRMs for startups. This stage is the ideal time to engage potential customers by dominating category-level search results.
At this stage, tailor your SEO to medium-tail keywords and develop content that educates and informs prospective clients about your product.
People who search for branded keywords are likely familiar with your company and are searching for additional details about your products. For branded keywords, the search results contain both your assets, such as your social media accounts and website and third-party information, such as Wikipedia and reviews articles.
You may boost the amount of helpful info about your business in the search engines by implementing a professionally executed enterprise SEO plan; this involves optimizing current web pages and creating new articles centered on branded keywords that emphasize your product’s strengths.
Remember that the more good content you have for your company online, the better your internet visibility. For branded searches, enterprise SEO guarantees that there is enough good content about your brand.
Transactional keywords are the ones that bring clients who are ready to buy. Typically, transactional keywords include the more specific long-tail keywords, such as best HD monitor for programmers or best mobile phones under $50.
When you look up a term like “men’s running shoes to buy,” most of the results included similar phrases, and several others contain LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords, which are similar or synonyms of the main keyword.
For instance, when you search for “running shoes,” the search results contain LSI keywords like “sport shoes” or “training sneakers.”
Another advantage of enterprise SEO is that it guarantees that your site appears at the top of the list for transactional keywords and all related words. Hence, if the user searches for a different term, this improves the odds of conversion.
The bulk of SEO methods rely heavily on content. Much of your job, at the very least, have something to do with the process of developing an enterprise SEO-focused content marketing plan that may result in better ranks and traffic.
Writing SEO content entails developing content assets that emphasize a search user’s experience. Such material is related to the keywords consumers use to find that information, corresponding to their search intent. Oftentimes these are long-tail keywords.
However, writing SEO-friendly content is more than just adding keyword phrases on a page and in meta tags. You must evaluate the requirements of individuals looking for this information while creating well-optimized content and use that knowledge to produce an asset that meets, and preferably surpasses, their expectations. Google wants to show the best result in terms of the content, not the result that has the best meta title.
To match the user’s intentions, you must also arrange the article to contain what Google deems to be the essential information.
There are several avoidable reasons why your content marketing strategy isn’t doing well in search engines. The most common is the mismatch between search intent and content and failure to target relevant keywords. Even the most well-known companies, who invest significant resources in content creation, make these errors.
Content marketing can take an enterprise-level site to the next level. Enterprise sites have a national reach. Articles make the most sense for these websites compared to a small mom-and-pop shop with limited space due to geo-targeting.
By becoming a resource for your niche, users can find you through longer-tail keywords that can directly impact business as long as your content is set up for conversion optimization – CTA’s within content.
We get it. A lot of people including enterprise-level brands believe that they don’t need an off-site SEO strategy. Most think backlinks will come naturally.
That is true. A lot of backlinks will come naturally barring the content on your website, but that doesn’t mean supplemental link building leveraging advanced tactics doesn’t need to be done. It comes back to competition investing in technical SEO while you may not be. The same holds true for on-site and off-site investments.
If competition is investing in a full-service SEO strategy, you are falling farther and farther behind.
Another knock is that a lot of companies believe that it’s not something they should be doing because there is a ton of information out there from Google saying that you can be penalized for doing spammy link building. That is why this needs to be performed by SEO experts and done the right way.
There are still tactics to leverage to gain authority through an off-site backlink strategy.
When creating an enterprise SEO strategy, there are a few things to bear in mind:
When creating an enterprise SEO strategy, there are a few things to bear in mind:
To strategize and execute the best enterprise SEO strategy, you’ll need a team of experts comprising an SEO specialist, project manager, content writer, and developer.
This involves constant suggestions of SEO improvements due to the need to satisfy competing internal departmental perspectives and needs.
Long and complex internal procedures with multiple decision-makers often delay approvals for necessary modifications.
Having a decision structure in place allows you to identify and prioritize jobs without the dilemma of SEO fixes.
While developing an enterprise SEO strategy, it is critical to study the 80/20 rule and adopt an iterative and agile approach to help you navigate the politics and red tape.
Enterprise SEO strategy differs from small businesses’ SEO strategies since it involves proprietary procedures and tools to evaluate the market situation. It also focuses more and dedicates more hours to technical SEO, choosing the right keywords, and adopting the right on-site and off-site strategies.
It would be best to keep all these factors in mind while navigating the enterprise field, including delays, executive buy-ins, red tape, and approvals.
If your enterprise brand can use some SEO assistance, we should chat today!
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