What Is Enterprise SEO?
The typical website for an enterprise can house around 10,000 pages. Making such a website search engine friendly requires Enterprise SEO. In this article, we’ll look at the essentials you need to know about enterprise SEO.
What is Enterprise SEO?
We are all familiar with search engine optimization: how we optimize the content on a website to rank higher in search engines. In simple terms, enterprise SEO scales the ordinary SEO activities for larger enterprise websites.
As such, it typically uses complex market research, strategies, and auditing processes in order to outrank the competition in search engine results pages (SERPs). Since an overhaul of the pages’ content is often necessary, practices such as collaboration, project management, and competitor analysis are vital to the process.
In essence, enterprise SEO is quite similar to the SEO efforts in a small business or a startup, but due to the sheer size of an enterprise website, there are a few distinctive characteristics of enterprise SEO. These include:
• The use of custom CMS or a commercial grade CMS (content management system).
• A huge number of web pages (usually over 10k)
• Employs a dedicated web-dev and IT teams, with in-house development, web-dev, and production environments
• An already established language/country specific domain policy
• An established SEO and digital marketing strategy
The idea of enhancing the search engine visibility remains the same. The only aspects that change are the approaches and strategies to get there. Now, let’s look at how enterprise SEO can be beneficial to an organization.
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How Enterprise SEO can Help Corporations
1. Highly targeted local marketing
With the recent surge of mobile search (which already overtook desktop search over 2 years ago), local search continues to grow rapidly. As such, focusing on the local markets provides an advantage in the organic search results. For a huge company to compete in the local market, it needs to connect to the preferences, needs, and styles of the local people. Local SEO strategies will help to connect the overall brand goals with the local market needs.
2. Enhancing the Global Brand Message and Reputation
Enterprise SEO provides an opportunity for brands to manage and control the brand and company content published online. This includes all of the brand messaging as well as potential negative information, such as negative product reviews.
3. Building and Maintaining Authority
Links to and from other influential and respected websites add on to the credibility of every business, including enterprises. But while SMBs often look to utilize these links to becomes more widely known and establish themselves as an authority, enterprises are often looking to overcome their sheer size. With SEO, being a big brand isn’t enough to become an authority in your industry, and can actually make some consumers skeptical about the brand’s intent. Interactions and links with independent and influential sites help to counteract the possible downsides of being a big brand.
4. Tuning Social Messaging
SEO metrics are a crucial part of enterprise SEO, and they highlight deep insights about the target market and the wider audience of the brand. Social consultants and social marketers can use this data to streamline their social media campaigns, to craft and deliver desirable, relevant content that nurtures greater interaction and builds lasting relationships with the consumer.
Furthermore, in order to create new opportunities, enterprises have to invest in channels that allow them to connect with the actual humans behind them. The SEO strategies should, therefore, focus on promoting the brand’s message and in building trust and relationship with the consumers.
5. Supporting Marketing Efforts
Since most enterprises are already invested in a huge number of online and offline marketing strategies, SEO can complement these and help to get the most out of them. For example, building links works really well when it comes to connecting content with even more clients. Moreover, social media channels like YouTube can actually draw more life out of a media piece originally done for other marketing channels. The SEO data can be used to showcase user trends and behaviors, which can inform the other marketing channels for better results.
Ultimately, successful SEO campaigns should align with the short-term and long-term goals of the enterprise, and should also contribute to the overall marketing efforts. However, although SEO for the enterprise might seem better suited for large corporations with big budgets that can accommodate in-house SEO and have greater opportunities for building industry related links, there are a few hurdles that it needs to overcome.
Common Challenges with Enterprise SEO
1. Size of the Website
In general, the bigger the company, the larger its website is. So, if a company has many departments, service lines, or products, it will need more website content in order to deliver information for each of them. This could translate into tens of thousands of pages on the site. In general, the bigger the company, the larger its website is. So, if a company has many departments, service lines, or products, it will need more website content in order to deliver information for each of them. This could translate into tens of thousands of pages on the site.
SEO best practice requires keyword research for each and every page, and thereafter optimize each page for the search engines. This means that it could take a lot of time to finish the project. And sometimes, even the large corporation will not have the funds to allocate to hiring an in-house SEO team and usually hand such duties over to the marketing department, which might already be maxed out on time. For such reasons, the process might take even longer to complete.
2. Bureaucracies
Each step of the SEO process depends on the successful completion of the previous one, making the approval process vital for the SEO campaign. in most cases, an outsourced SEO firm doesn’t specialize in each client’s niche, and it’s quite possible that the chosen keywords might not be ideal, or the recommendation might be a bit off or not flow like they should, especially in complicated niches. Putting links on the wrong kinds of sites or targeting the wrong keywords can mess the whole SEO campaign.
With smaller companies, only a few people work with the SEO team on approving the tasks, and this helps to keep the process more streamlined and quicker. However, when it comes to an enterprise, approvals are never easy. Every step will have to be approved by the content team, the marketing team, the PR team, etc. and such bureaucracies typically take a long time. Since SEO as a process already takes time to show results, stalling the process will only make it worse.
3. Difficulties in Integration
With large companies, the marketing department can encompass a number of different departments for every facet of marketing, such as a social media team, a PR team, a content team, etc. for SEO to be effective, it has to be integrated with each of these disciplines. As such, keeping SEO in a silo can result into missed opportunities, and the efforts could suffer.
Enterprise SEO Tools
When dealing with websites of this scale, the local SEO tools just won’t cut it. To measure and monitor the SEO results, the following tools will be vital:
Integrated Google Account
This will provide accurate metrics and data for your SEO tools. It’s actually the only way to get accurate SEO data from Google. Integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console provides you with important data like keyword CTRs, organic ranking, and views. Since you’re actually optimizing the SEO strategies, these metrics will come in handy and show you exactly where you stand.
Industry SEO performance trends
These allow you to gauge how the keywords you targeted are performing with respect to industry trends. When your competitors aren’t targeting the same set of keywords as you, you still need to have a performance benchmark in place. With CTR averages that go search engine wide for important keywords, you will have a rough estimate of your performance. This way, you can identify any underperforming keywords in comparison to the industry averages and streamline your strategy.
SEO competitor analysis to peg Industry performance
Once you are aware of your own SEO performance, you should check how your website ranks in comparison to the closest competitors in your niche. Enterprise level SEO is quite intricate, simply because the competition is always developing new strategies and new content. This tool will come in handy to keep tabs on what the competition is doing.
SEO suggestion capability for easier web team and SEO collaboration
Multiple applications can reduce efficiency and make the SEO process unnecessarily complex and messy, especially if you’re working with large teams. Putting in place SEO suggestion features will not only keep you organized but also keep everyone on the same page.
Potential keyword targeting to highlight new opportunities
Based on already collected data, a suggestion feature makes your work much easier. You won’t have to do the legwork to check hundreds of pages. This tool will essentially do the keyword research for you.
Automated weekly reporting to keep you in the loop
Getting automated reports via email will help keep the whole team on track, and highlight any red flags on the project.
Project segment overviews to enhance the management of your SEO project
For every project, you will probably be dealing with multiple URLs, and it’ll be hard to track them without segmented projects. A project overview gives you a real-time snapshot of the SEO project completion. This will keep your whole team on the same page from the beginning to the end.