SEO is one of the most effective long-term marketing strategies for any company, regardless of size. A site’s organic traffic can account for up to 94% of click-through rates for online browsers. Therefore, enterprises have much to gain or lose based on their SEO strategies.
This article will help you maximize your SEO strategy for enterprise-level success by introducing key concepts, establishing the difference between Enterprise SEO and traditional SEO, key components, and some of the best practices you can use. So read on and begin your journey toward boosting organic traffic for your enterprise website.
Understanding Enterprise SEO
Before diving into ways to maximize your SEO strategy for enterprise-level success, let us first understand what enterprise SEO is. Below we define the term and discuss the importance of this type of SEO, as well as why it is necessary to have enterprise SEO strategies for some particular businesses.
Why is enterprise SEO important?
At its core, enterprise SEO is no different from any other type of SEO. Your goal when implementing any SEO strategy is the same—to help your content rank higher on SERPs and attract organic traffic. However, one thing to remember is that the big difference between large enterprise websites and typical sites for smaller companies is usually the number of pages needing search engine optimization.
Therefore, enterprise SEO is crucial to some websites because the rules and strategies that apply to search engine optimization for smaller businesses, mainly how they are utilized, only sometimes work for larger enterprises.
When a website is on an enterprise level, the SEO strategy must target more competitive keywords, keep track and maintain organic ranking for several areas of their business and site, and upgrade the content to stay competitive.
That is why there is a need for a different kind of SEO and a team of skilled professionals that understand how to maximize an enterprise’s online presence in various areas instead of having one person deal with it all and not reach the site’s full potential.
Who needs enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO will make a massive difference to the websites of large corporations. These enterprises need this specific type of SEO since they encompass thousands and thousands of pages displaying a myriad of products, services, and other content.
Realistically, their SEO issues will be more complex due to the number of pages, starting from the number of backlinks acquired to the domain authority and more. However, you can solve all these issues with the help of specialized tools and enterprise SEO experts skilled in handling large brands online.
Key Components of Enterprise SEO
It is worth mentioning that enterprise SEO encompasses all components commonly found in any SEO. Just like how small sites optimize their content through keyword research and link building, so do large enterprises. However, it is the way these same strategies are utilized that creates this division.
Below, we review some key components of enterprise SEO strategies and discuss ways to incorporate them for large company settings.
Technical SEO
No surprise here—technical SEO is one of the crucial aspects of a website that you must optimize in order to increase its ranking. Some of the pillars of technical SEO include page speed, ease of navigation for site visitors, the ability of search engines to access your site and crawl its content, sitemaps, and more.
For Google and other search engines to rank your content, they must be able to find it first. Therefore, your enterprise SEO strategies must enable search engines to access, render, crawl, and then index all the pages within your site. To achieve this goal, you must improve your website’s architecture.
Consider your site’s hierarchical structure and aim to create a clear site architecture that is easy to navigate for visitors and crawlable for search engines. Some other tasks you should add to your technical SEO checklist include:
- Improving your site’s page loading speed
- Finding and fixing crawl errors
- Eliminating duplicate content
- Ensuring the site is mobile-friendly
- Eliminating technical issues
- Using redirects
- Analyzing title tags and meta descriptions
Content marketing
Large enterprises must produce high-quality content and market it well to increase the brand’s visibility and credibility. Enterprises must begin their content marketing strategy by creating a content plan since they have to deal with a set of challenges smaller businesses do not due to their size.
Research shows that content marketers struggle with the following difficulties of enterprise SEO:
- Coordinating content marketing efforts among multiple departments and brands (74%)
- Working across too many departmental silos (60%)
- Integrating content technology effectively across the enterprise (50%)
- Having the ability to be agile when change is needed (49%)
- Maintaining message consistency (45%)
Creating a strong and thorough content plan before implementing any content marketing tactics can go a long way in minimizing some of the mentioned challenges of enterprise SEO.
The benefits of content marketing are as influential and necessary for enterprise SEO as they are for any other site. Link-building and keywords are still among the most important Google rankings factors, so you should pay close attention to them when producing content. Creating consistent, relevant, and valuable content incorporating the right keywords is a sure way to gain external links.
There are many types of content you can create, as well as ways to incorporate them into your enterprise SEO strategies. Statistics show that the top two types of content forms that enterprise marketers use are blog posts or short articles and pre-produced videos, operated by 89% and 81% of enterprises, respectively.
Furthermore, reports show that virtual events, webinars, online courses, blog posts, and short articles generally produced the best content marketing results for their enterprises.
Social media integration
Although social media does not directly contribute to SEO ranking, it is still a key component of enterprise SEO for several reasons. Firstly, sharing your posts across various social media platforms helps guarantee extensive content distribution. Then it also helps increase brand exposure, recognition, and reputation.
Additionally, social media helps generate social signals to indicate your content is helpful to your target audience through shares from people. Although social signals are not a ranking factor, research shows an equivocal link between SEO and social shares. The likes, comments, and shares that your posts receive do not have a direct influence on SEO, but they indirectly have a positive effect on search ranking.
Best Practices for Enterprise SEO
To identify problems that your enterprise website is having and find ways to fix these issues, you must conduct a comprehensive SEO audit, develop SEO strategies based on data, and invest in the right SEO tools and technology to help you along the way. Let’s go through each of these practices in more detail to understand better how to maximize your SEO strategy.
Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit
Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit is your first action to developing a successful enterprise SEO strategy. Through this audit, you can evaluate your website by identifying issues preventing it from ranking highly in search engine result pages. Only by understanding your site’s strengths and weaknesses can you tailor your SEO campaigns accordingly and benefit from them. In addition, regular SEO audits also help your team direct time, resources and budget accordingly to ensure the most significant impact.
Because Google uses over 200 ranking factors, auditing an enterprise’s website can be pretty demanding. To ensure a successful audit, we would advise you to separate your audit into these five areas:
- Content
- Technical SEO
- Page experience
- Industry-specific standards
- Backlinks
As mentioned in the previous paragraphs, each of these components has a significant influence on your website’s ranking. Thus, they should be a crucial part of your SEO audit checklist.
Developing a data-driven SEO strategy
As with most disciplines nowadays, SEO must also develop strategies through the accumulation and analysis of data. You can achieve lucrative search traffic by examining the existing data of your website, determining what it represents, and how to move forward. To make informed and perceptive judgments about your SEO strategy, closely analyze data about user behavior.
Keywords are one of the most common ways enterprises can use data in their SEO. You can generate content that benefits your site by conducting an in-depth analysis of the most common search queries related to your business, determining which keywords would be most effective, and analyzing your target audience’s browsing trends and behaviors. Then, you can also benefit significantly by gathering and analyzing data about how visitors interact with your site, such as the:
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Bounce rate
- Pages per visit
- Time spent browsing the site
- Repeated visits
Investing in the right SEO tools and technology
The challenges of optimizing an enterprise website for search engines require some technical assistance. There are many SEO tools on the market that vary in price and functionality. Some tools and technology worth investing in include:
Measuring and Reporting on Enterprise SEO
To improve your site’s performance and content production, you must stay on top of your SEO strategies by constantly measuring them. To track, measure, and report on your SEO activities, you need to organize your metrics, identify and measure key performance indicators, create reports, and communicate them to the rest of your team.
Identifying the right KPIs for enterprise SEO
KPIs are key performance indicators, representing a control system that allows you to identify your strategies’ strengths and weaknesses. Some of the key indicators you should pay close attention to include the following:
- Organic traffic
- Conversions
- User engagement
- Cost per acquisition
- Keyword rankings
- Backlinks
- Organic click-through rate
- Return on investment
By identifying the right KPIs for enterprise SEO and analyzing the results, you can avoid spending your resources on strategies that are not effective or beneficial for your enterprise.
Building effective SEO dashboards and reports
Dashboards and reports are a great way to present the success or failure of your enterprise SEO campaign in accomplishing a set of goals. To build an effective SEO dashboard or report, you must include information about metrics such as the ones mentioned above.
Communicating SEO results to stakeholders
Once you have measured all that needs to be measured, analyzed the results, and created dashboards and reports to present to your team and stakeholders, it is time to communicate all your findings.
When communicating SEO results to stakeholders, remember that they might not necessarily be SEO experts; therefore, you must introduce the information clearly and concisely by using understandable language and providing answers or clarifications to any questions or confusion they might have.
Conclusion
Enterprise SEO is the backbone of your website’s digital marketing. You need to modify your SEO strategy to fit the scale of your enterprise to enhance its authority, gain an advantage over your competitors, boost conversion, and succeed in the digital landscape.
To maximize the positive effect of your enterprise SEO, you should:
- Enhance the technical side of your search engine optimization strategies, content marketing, and social media integration.
- Stay on top of your competition by continuously conducting audits and measuring key performance indicators.
- After designing dashboards and reports showcasing the results of your efforts, use the data gathered to update your strategy as well as utilize various tools and technology available for a more effortless procedure.
Questions Commonly Asked About Enterprise SEO
Below we’ll go through some of the most commonly asked questions about enterprise SEO with the intention of removing any doubts you might have about implementing enterprise SEO on your website.
What is enterprise SEO, and how is it different from regular SEO?
Enterprise SEO refers to the strategic execution of search engine optimization for sites of enterprise-level organizations. It differs from regular SEO because it requires a higher level of orchestration due to the thousands of pages typically found in them.
What are the key challenges in implementing an enterprise SEO strategy?
Some of the key challenges in implementing an enterprise SEO strategy include but are not limited to complex technical issues, the number of pages that require maintenance, indexability, crawlability, lack of automation, content quality, and more.
What are the best practices for managing SEO across multiple websites and platforms?
Some of the best practices for managing SEO across multiple websites and platforms include conducting regular audits for all areas of your website, identifying key metrics and utilizing the data gathered when developing strategies and making decisions, investing in practical tools and technologies, and other similar practices.
How can data be used to measure the success of an enterprise SEO campaign?
Success is related to achieving your objectives, and the primary goals of SEO are to increase organic traffic and improve ranking. Therefore, by analyzing the data gathered from KPIs related to traffic, visibility, and ranking, you can measure the success of your enterprise SEO campaign.
What are the emerging trends in enterprise SEO and how can businesses stay ahead of the curve?
Some emerging trends in enterprise SEO that businesses can implement in their campaigns and use to stay ahead of the curve include:
- Voice and visual search
- Mobile-first indexing
- Structured data
- Implementation of AI
