When television first became popular, it opened up a whole new medium to advertisers. If you tried to explain the importance of enterprise SEO today to the goliaths of advertising from that era, they wouldn’t understand. Because they’d be like 100 years old.
My point is SEO has become integral to marketing, especially for large corporations. But what’s the best way to approach SEO for enterprise companies?
Why Enterprise Businesses Need a Tailored SEO Strategy
While SEO is valuable to organizations of all sizes, both for-profit and not-for-profit, large enterprises need SEO strategies they can tailor to their size and reach to truly succeed. Enterprise SEO deals with websites that have thousands of pages and requires a broad range of keywords across various segments and products.
The Importance of Content Marketing in Enterprise SEO
SEO strategies are not one-size-fits-all. The same strategy that works for a regional landscaping company won’t provide much value to a multinational enterprise. Enterprise SEO is just in a different league from local SEO.
There are several signs you might need an enterprise SEO strategy. These include:
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A Huge Website
Large commercial enterprises often have enormous websites, sometimes containing thousands of pages. A website of this scale requires a precise organizational structure and SEO process.
Tight Competition
Whereas niche keywords can be quite valuable to small businesses and local organizations, enterprise brands typically need to capitalize on high-volume keywords. This often means they’re fending off fierce competition within their industry, especially for short-tail keywords. A strong enterprise SEO strategy is a must to succeed in such a crowded field.
Multiple Sources for Organic Search Traffic
It’s common for enterprises to receive a sizable amount of traffic from more than one search engine (i.e. more than just Google). A traditional SEO strategy might not consider search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. This can leave out a significant portion of potential customers.
A Complex SEO Approval Process
Enterprises typically have more stakeholders than small- and medium-sized businesses. More stakeholders often means lengthier approval processes for website content. A small company can hire one SEO strategist and one content writer who collaborate on an effective SEO blog. But if that blog goes through a series of approvals, all the relevant keywords might end up deleted from the final draft, rendering the asset useless for SEO purposes.
What Problems Do Businesses Face with Enterprise SEO?
Here are some common enterprise SEO problems:
- Navigating numerous departments: Not only is an enterprise website big, but so too is its corporate structure. An effective enterprise SEO strategy must gain approval from all relevant departments and create content that brings people to the different products or services of a large company.
- A resistance to SEO: As important as SEO is, it’s still relatively new in the world of business. If the board of an enterprise company has been working for decades, then they have a wealth of experience, but most of that experience comes from before SEO services existed. Large enterprises can also rely on their fame, but only to an extent. It’s always valuable to keep popping up on search engines, no matter how established an enterprise is.
- Obsolete technology: Resistance often comes in the form of inertia. Taking on big changes may not be a priority for different departments in an enterprise. With so many people focused on their own responsibilities, an enterprise’s technology can stealthily fall behind. This makes it difficult to keep up in the technological world of enterprise SEO.
- Lacking speed: Even when a department head or board member champions a dedicated SEO effort, these campaigns tend to have to go through layers of approval. Without a dedicated enterprise SEO agency pushing through the necessary changes, progress might be too slow.
- Focusing on the wrong SEO efforts: Not all SEO experts are enterprise SEO experts. SEO on this scale requires experience and know-how — otherwise, a company might invest its resources in a suboptimal SEO strategy.
- Compliance issues: Compliance can be especially tricky for multinational enterprises. Different jurisdictions have different compliance regulations. It’s helpful to have a dedicated enterprise SEO team negotiating these various compliance rules.
- Content creation at scale: Enterprise businesses usually don’t need just one blog a month. They need multiple blogs, new and improved landing pages and a flurry of other content they can sprinkle on their website to suit their many current and potential customers. Only a proper enterprise SEO agency can achieve this level of content creation.
International SEO Considerations
What are the international SEO considerations for enterprise companies with a global presence?
Any organization with multiple locations can benefit from optimizing its content for those different areas.
Different countries speak different languages — and they have different cultures, priorities and interests. A presence in diverse markets requires a specialized SEO campaign. Why? A traditional SEO strategy doesn’t help with different languages and cultural norms.
Choosing the Right SEO Platforms
Here are some key elements enterprise companies should consider when choosing an SEO platform:
- A customer-first strategy: Many of the qualities of an effective enterprise SEO platform are the same as a platform for any SEO strategy. For example, it must be customer-first. The whole point of SEO is to grab the attention of potential and current customers and reward them with valuable content.
- Scale: Scale affects everything an enterprise does. A large size is what differentiates an enterprise from smaller businesses, so everything they do must work at a large scale. This means having scalable production, logistics, customer service and, of course, SEO.
- Collaboration: Because enterprise content creation often involves several different parties, it’s important that their SEO platform offers easy collaboration.
- Automation: Efficiency is always key and automation can deliver that. A successful enterprise SEO platform can automate tasks such as scheduled content publishing and keyword tracking.
- Integrations: Enterprises often use project management software, content creation platforms and social media tools. If their SEO platform doesn’t integrate with these other solutions very well, this can result in productivity losses.
- Reporting: Reporting is important for tracking and understanding SEO metrics and analytics.
7 SEO Strategies Enterprise Companies Can Follow
Here are 7 SEO strategies enterprise companies can utilize to improve their SEO scores:
1. SEO Audit
An SEO audit checks just how optimized your enterprise website is. It’s crucial to conduct the occasional SEO audit because it enables you to discover issues that might be hurting your site’s rankings. For example, you may discover your website looks bad on a mobile device. Mobile friendliness is a factor in Google rankings, so this could be holding you back.
2. Technical SEO
Technical SEO ensures an enterprise site aligns with search engine algorithms. Achieving this might involve building site architecture, creating SEO-friendly URL structures and configuring 404 pages and 301 redirects.
3. On-Page SEO
Enterprise SEO services must consider on-page SEO, which concerns optimizing the copy and metadata on a web page. Key optimization criteria for on-page enterprise SEO strategy include:
- Alt text.
- CSS.
- HTML.
- Images.
- Internal linking.
- Keywords.
- Meta descriptions
- Title tags.
- URL strings.
4. Off-Page SEO
The natural counterpart of on-page SEO is off-page SEO, which covers all the digital marketing that doesn’t occur on the website but affects its overall SEO. This covers factors such as backlinks, domain authority, reviews, influencer marketing and pay-per-click and brand mentions on social media.
5. Focus on Commercially Relevant Keywords
For enterprise SEO services to work, they must be relevant to what people are searching and what the enterprise does. Many people search for the weather forecast every day, but it makes no sense to have weather-related keywords. (Unless, of course, you happen to be a meteorological enterprise.)
6. Content Marketing
The best enterprise SEO agency will also be an amazing content marketing company. Deft keyword incorporation into title tags and meta descriptions is great, but if people don’t stop to read your content, you won’t rank very high.
7. Updating Content
Updating and optimizing old content is a key digital marketing strategy. Old content loses its SEO value, but making it relevant again is a relatively easy way to boost your SEO score.
4 Technical SEO Best Practices
When it comes to technical SEO, here are 4 best practices enterprise companies can implement to improve their performance:
- Audit Technical SEO: Distinct from a regular SEO audit, an enterprise technical SEO audit evaluates all the technical factors that can affect page ranking such as schema markup, internal links, page speed, duplicate content and redirects.
- Boost page loading speed: Long loading times can hurt a website’s SEO performance. This can be easy to overlook, but an accomplished enterprise SEO company won’t let it slip through the cracks.
- Redirect relevant old content: If you’ve changed the URL of a page or your whole enterprise website, it’s important to redirect visitors, but only if that content is still relevant.
- Organize website structure for search engine crawlers: Search engines use bots called crawlers to index website content. This helps search engines organize and display results. A professional enterprise SEO strategy knows how to structure a website so it’s easy for these crawlers to read and index.
Elevate Your Enterprise SEO Strategy
SEO can seem limiting and a restriction on marketing and content teams. But the truth is, they’re guiding factors that allow enterprises to get the most out of their content and advertising. Once you have an SEO framework, you can unleash your creativity within that framework.
Need a hand with your enterprise SEO strategy? Reach out to us here.
