Corporate SEO

Understanding Enterprise SEO

As an enterprise, the importance of winning on the SERPs, and being ahead of the competition can not be understated. When you consider that, would it not be silly to associate the generic small business SEO strategies with large enterprises?

That is the reason you need to understand more about enterprise SEO and the services offered by some of the best enterprise SEO agency. With that in mind, let us go ahead and define enterprise SEO first.

Enterprise SEO is the process of creating and implementing SEO strategies that will help you improve the organic presence, and SEO performance of your large enterprise. Remember that  when we say “large enterprise”, we don’t necessarily mean the number of members in your team, but the number of pages on your website.

The most distinctive feature of enterprise SEO strategies is that they need to be scalable and strategic. At this point, it is important to draw a line between enterprise SEO solutions and the ones for small businesses. While a small business strategy might cater to websites with limited pages, enterprise SEO strategies target larger websites with thousands of pages.

For this very reason, even the kind of enterprise SEO tools you will use will be different from the ones you use for traditional SEO strategies. You will also see a lot of differences in the way keywords will be selected and placed in your content as well.

Challenges and Opportunities in Enterprise SEO

Let’s start with the most major enterprise SEO challenges that you should know about. There are not many, but you need to diligently create strategies and find your way around the ones that create hurdles to your execution of a successful enterprise SEO strategy.

• Scale: The scale of your website pertains to the number of pages you have on it, and how you will ensure their SEO performance. This means when you have a large website and a lot of pages on it, you will end up spending a lot of resources and time on creating and executing your enterprise SEO strategy.
• Coordination: When you are dealing with SEO for a website associated with a large organisation, you will need to coordinate with multiple departments and resources to come up with the right strategy.
• Technical Complexity: There are multiple systems in place in large enterprises, such as content management systems, multiple subdomains, and international website versions. To optimise all these parts of your website, and align them to work for your SEO strategy, you will need expertise dealing with technical complexities.
• Governance and Approval Process: Large organisations generally have a detailed set of guidelines and policies governing over website processes and approvals for changes. All this structure and processes can slow down your SEO strategy and implementation.

Now that you know about the challenges you are likely to face in implementing enterprise SEO services, we should discuss a bit about the benefits of enterprise SEO as well. Let us discuss some of the opportunities you should be looking forward to leveraging.

• Competitive Advantage: By helping you bring more targeted traffic to your website, and boosting your search engine rankings, leveraging enterprise SEO firms can help you gain a significant competitive advantage.
• Increased Visibility: Enterprise SEO can help you increase your organic visibility, and reach a wider audience. This will help you increase your brand exposure, and boost your website traffic.
• Data-driven Insights: Having an enterprise SEO strategy will help you collect and analyse an extensive dataset, as well as provide useful insights into user behaviour, keyword trends, and content performance. The insights that you will derive from this data can fuel your marketing strategies as well as initiatives.
• Localisation and International Expansion: By leveraging enterprise SEO management, you can help your business expand its reach into new markets, target very specific geographical locations, as well as optimise for international SEO.

Implementing Enterprise SEO Best Practices

Now that you know more about enterprise SEO, and the role it plays in defining a great performance for your enterprise-level website, it is time to delve a little bit into the actionable stuff.

Let us discuss some of the enterprise SEO best practices that you should keep in mind while creating and implementing your enterprise SEO strategy.

Developing a Scalable SEO Infrastructure

As a large organisation or enterprise, it is absolutely necessary for you to pay attention to your SEO infrastructure, and all the actions you are taking towards strengthening it. The first step of having a great and scalable SEO infrastructure is to establish clear roles and responsibilities within the organisation to manage and implement SEO effectively.

It is also important to invest in appropriate SEO tools and technology so that the crucial and time-consuming processes can be streamlined, and automated. Using these tools and automated processes, you can then create standardised templates and guidelines that will guide your on-page SEO optimisation, content creation and reporting processes.

Lastly, to ensure that all your data can be accessed seamlessly at any time, implement a centralised system for tracking and monitoring the SEO performance across your enterprise-level website. This is one of the most crucial enterprise SEO tips you could leverage.

Coordinating SEO Efforts Across Multiple Departments

In small businesses, SEO might be a one-department job, but that is not the case in large enterprises. Unless you deploy an enterprise SEO agency, it is important to establish clear roles and responsibilities of the people that can help you implement and manage your SEO strategy effectively.

At the same time, you will need to align your SEO goals and strategies with other aspects of your business to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration and communication. You will need to ensure that your team is educated and trained to carry out SEO tasks and implement strategies, and are aware of the best practices to be followed.

To ensure a seamless flow of team communication and collaboration, it is a good idea to encourage regular meetings, and knowledge sharing sessions so that the implementation of SEO can consistently take place. Establish a feedback loop so that you can share insights and feedback between SEO and other departments.

Creating a Governance Model for SEO Implementation

In a large enterprise, where a single update or change can entail multiple resources at various levels, it is important to establish a clear structure. Say, your large enterprise deals with manufacturing of plumbing materials, with headquarters in Brisbane and multiple offices in various other locations in Australia, utilising a common Magento-powered website.

Can you imagine the scale of impact a single change on your website may have for teams across various locations?

This is why it is important to set down clear protocols, and processes to implement any kind of SEO changes and updates. What’s more, it is also equally important to establish approval workflows and guidelines that need to be followed for any kind of website changes so that any major issues can be prevented.

Additionally, it is also important to implement quality assurance measures to ensure that SEO best practices are followed. Do not forget that once you do have a governance model in place, you will need to consistently review and update it in order to adapt to SEO trends as well as the standards set in your industry.

Integrating SEO with Other Marketing Channels

As much as we would like to believe otherwise, directing your efforts just on strengthening your SEO performance alone may not be as effective. To get the best out of your SEO strategy and performance, you will need to complement it with other marketing activities and channels.

While your SEO team might be working extensively and exclusively on boosting your SERP performance and achieving goals using SEO techniques, the rest of your marketing team may be working on multiple aspects. An enterprise level SEO strategy takes into consideration all these activities, and lists tasks and activities that may complement the results you generate using SEO.

To generate consistent results, you should leverage data and insights from various digital marketing channels, to inform your SEO strategy and position it for better success, and vice versa. This means you should be incorporating SEO considerations into your social media strategies, paid advertising campaigns, as well as your content marketing plans.

To keep track of the kind of contribution that your SEO strategy has on your overall marketing channels, you will need to leverage cross-attribution marketing models and measure the impact over time.

Measuring and Tracking SEO Performance at an Enterprise Level

Once you have worked extensively on developing an effective SEO strategy and have implemented it to attain success, the next crucial step is to measure and track your SEO performance over time.

You should start this process by defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that you will use to measure your SEO success. Use a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics to track the organic search traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates over time.

Generate comprehensive SEO reports and dashboards so that you can communicate the SEO performance of your enterprise to the various stakeholders. You can also conduct in-depth analysis of the data to derive detailed insights, identify trends, opportunities, and improvement areas.

Remember, that the web analytics tools or any other SEO tools that you leverage for measuring and tracking the SEO performance of your enterprise website should be scalable and cater to the complexities associated with marketing such a website.