A How-To Guide for Enterprise SEO

Search engine optimization continues to be one of the most important strategies a brand can use to grow their business. Regardless of what business you’re in, the higher you rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs) the better, especially for small businesses. But if you’re a larger organization, is SEO still relevant? The answer is a resounding “yes!”

Let’s start with some facts*.

• Nearly 70% of online engagement begins with a click on a search engine result
• More than 50% of all website traffic is initiated from an organic search
• Less than 1% of second page results get clicks

*BrightEdge Channel Report

Another recent report of data from HubSpot, Ahrefs, Semrush and more found that:

• The first organic result in a Google search has an average CTR of 27.6%
• 49% of marketers say that organic search has the best ROI of any other marketing channel
• 61% of marketers say SEO organic traffic generates more leads than any other marketing channel.

Properly done, an enterprise SEO strategy can generate more quality leads than any other marketing strategy, not to mention reducing cost-per-acquisition, improving click-through rates, and increasing engagement.

The challenge for enterprise SEO is the complexity of managing, analyzing, optimizing, and maintaining a massive website ecosystem. It’s up to you to ensure you have the right team, tools, and strategy in place to get your organic search ranking high and keep it there for the long term.

What’s the difference between traditional SEO and enterprise SEO?

It’s a matter of scope and scale. Enterprise SEO is a more robust, sophisticated approach to traditional SEO that provides scalable strategies for larger companies that may have hundreds or thousands of website pages. To improve search engine rankings among their competition, an enterprise level SEO strategy must:

– Manage highly competitive (and expensive) keywords (often per page)
– Maintain existing brand and domain authority
– Develop and publish quality, relevant content consistently
–  Manage and optimize backlinks
– Integrate fluidly with the company’s everchanging digital ecosystem
– Constantly analyze, track, and adjust tactics

This is just the tip of the SEO iceberg, but the fact is that the complexity and scope of a well-run enterprise SEO strategy often requires a team of experts in a variety of disciplines, whether or not they are in-house or an outside SEO partner.

How do you know if you’re ready for an enterprise SEO strategy?

There is no set threshold or rules that mitigate an enterprise SEO strategy, such as page count of your website. But if your organic rankings, inbound leads, and website traffic are dropping despite the best efforts of your team, it’s time to take a pulse check. If your SEO team consists of one or two people who have multiple tasks outside of their SEO responsibilities, it may be time to consider a broader enterprise SEO plan to manage the sheer volume of your organization’s SEO needs.

What are the key factors to consider in an enterprise SEO strategy?

While all the following may apply to any SEO strategy, they carry more significance for a larger website and more comprehensive digital footprint. Here are some things to keep in mind:

Leverage your purchase funnel: However your company makes money, you have a purchase funnel that your enterprise SEO strategy can map to, especially with content. Identify keywords that intersect with different touchpoints in the funnel. New or refreshed content can take advantage of these for awareness, consideration, and other decision points.

Publish Quality Content: Enterprise SEO content is most effective when the SEO team works together with the content creation team to provide the requirements of the content, such as headlines, keywords, and image alt-text. This also includes newly discovered keywords and snippets for potential new content.

Use old content properly: While keeping new content is paramount, your old content still has value. If you simply delete old content, it also eliminates high page authority and backlinks the page may have. The role of an enterprise SEO strategy is to be able to identify these pages and effectively refresh the content.

Keep looking in the mirror: Enterprise SEO demands self-reflection. Audit your website, analyze your competition, automate/streamline your processes, and make sure your staff or agency partner has the chops to properly engage and evaluate analytics and put the results into practice. You can’t control what your competitors do, but you can control what you do. Even a massive enterprise site can nimbly implement changes with the right people and processes in place.

Have a backlink strategy: Link building is one of the OG’s of SEO and still plays a fundamentally important role in organic traffic. For enterprise sites with strong legacy brand authority, leverage what you have to acquire more backlinks with a broad outreach plan.

Use the right tools for the job: “Work smarter, not harder” as they say. With so many software tools available, find the right one(s) that suit your needs to help in research, tracking, automation, and everything else that goes into your SEO toolkit. This is essential for scalability.

Templatize: Your website should employ templates that can be easily replicated for new landing pages, blogs, product pages, and other content types. A template-based website makes applying SEO tactics to these pages more efficient and effective.

Social is still relevant: Google does not count a social share as an inbound link to your website and will not improve your ranking. But a share is a share. Obviously, the more your content is shared, the more likely it is that someone will link to it.

Use schema markup: Search crawlers “read” your website. Schema markup helps crawlers better analyze your website for content people search for and improve your SERP ranking.

Page Speed: Larger websites are constantly adding, editing, and/or deleting pages. Test page speeds regularly and have the resources in place to address issues that are slowing you down, like redirects, image size, code issues, and more. If your engagement rate is low because of a slow load times, it can hurt rankings.

Make sure it’s mobile first: Even enterprise websites with templatized pages, well-organized subdomains, and great content can neglect mobile users. Make sure your site is optimized for a responsive mobile experience.

Expose yourself: A relatively easy and often overlooked tactic to increase exposure and rankings is to optimize technical aspects of your website and content using structured data markups, canonical URLs, robots.txt files, and XML sitemaps. This will also help search engines index your content.

Why Quality Content is a Game-Changer

High quality, relevant content provides your customers with value that can build an audience over time and establish you as a trusted information source. The long-term benefit to SEO is ensuring your ranking remains strong. With Google RankBrain, content can be recognized as relevant to your particular audience. Better content that consumers engage with will rise above the rest in organic searches and garner more organic backlinks. Here are some tips to improve your content strategy.

• Smarter Content for Smarter Customers: Content that exists solely for the purpose of SEO is easy to spot and even easier to click away from. Make sure your content is professionally created and crafted. With the influx of AI, you run the risk of redundancy or even plagiarism, especially if your subject material is commonplace. There’s only so much to write about the “best for 2024!”
• Content for non-humans: Guess what? It’s not only humans reading your content. Google and other search engines are becoming increasingly adept at spotting keyword stuffing. So, it’s worth noting that how you use keywords can be just as important as the words you use.
• Customize your content for higher conversion: Whatever your metric is for measuring success – conversions, sales, lead generation, etc., it can be accelerated by the right content at the right point in your sales lifecycle. Customers researching a product or service are at a different point than customers who are investigating an in-depth review with the intent of purchasing it.

If now is the time for you to upgrade to enterprise SEO…

Tackle the low hanging fruit first, like optimizing your website, creating new content, acquiring the right software tools, and expanding your team to accommodate the new workflow. And consider consulting an agency equipped to handle your growing enterprise SEO needs. An agency like Xivic can help recommend scalable, cost-effective strategies to help ensure the long-term success of your organization.

If you’re ready for enterprise SEO and you wait, you are leaving revenue on the table in the form of qualified leads, sales, site traffic, and more. And even worse is that your competition will gain ground in organic rankings, which can be more costly and time consuming to overcome.

Are you ready to talk about enterprise SEO? We are here to help!