Enterprise SEO: All You Need to Know
Enterprise SEO is an advanced strategy designed for the intricate demands of large websites. It involves scaling every aspect of SEO operations, including advanced technical optimisation, extensive content creation, automation, and cross-departmental collaboration.
Tackling a hefty website with thousands of interlinking pages is by no means easy, which is why handing it over to a specialist is important to success.
When it comes to SEO for enterprises, a one-size-fits-all strategy won’t cut it. With reputation and revenue on the line, it’s crucial that the site is handled by a professional SEO team.
For Large Companies, Enterprise SEO by Embryo is the Way to Go
Our team’s approach to SEO works for small and enterprise businesses and can be scaled up to global businesses with multiple websites. To learn more, get in touch with our team of experts today.
Paid marketing channels are crucial to The Range’s online success so finding an agency that understood that and would have the tools in place to take it to a new level was critical. Not only are Embryo incredibly innovative and knowledgeable, but they used all that to tell a story about how their interpretation of PPC and paid social would be ideal for The Range.
What is an Enterprise Site?
While it might seem like a no-brainer to assume that any hefty brand or a company with over 100 employees could easily be tagged as an Enterprise, the truth is that what really defines an Enterprise site is the sheer size of its digital footprint, often consisting of a huge quantity of web pages – think well over 1000!
Enterprise sites tend to belong to huge corporations, but it’s not the size of the business that defines an Enterprise site. Mid-size e-commerce websites and businesses with several websites or multiple locations can also require this method of SEO.
When tackling a site that meets this criteria, an SEO specialist is likely to curate a strategy around short-tail, high-volume keywords with a high difficulty.
As you may expect, this requires a big investment and advanced tactics to give the site a chance to rank for difficult keywords and maintain its performance.
Why Enterprise SEO Should be a Priority for Large Websites
Any business looking to use their website to generate revenue, increase brand awareness and gain substantial organic traffic needs to consider SEO. When 95% of search traffic goes to the page 1 results, it’s important to get your Enterprise site in a strong position.
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Maintain Brand Authority (Globally)
Enterprise SEO is essential for maintaining a brand’s global authority – particularly for renowned brands.. Ensuring the brand consistently ranks at the top of search results across regions and languages, enhances credibility and trust in the eyes of potential customers. This global presence solidifies the brand’s reputation as a trusted name worldwide.
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Revenue Growth and Traffic Maintenance
For websites with a high domain rating and a strong digital presence, vigilant monitoring is super important. Any significant ranking fluctuations or technical glitches can be detrimental to traffic and conversions. To navigate such volatility and remain at the forefront of Google updates and ever-changing consumer trends, a skilled Enterprise SEO team adopts strategic approaches, proactively mitigating potential issues.
Moreover, sustaining page 1 rankings requires a very close eye, including a well-structured internal linking system, thorough keyword research, and robust content creation. Without this large-scale operation, revenue can take a big hit. It’s all about consistency!
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Preparing for Seasonality
Enterprise SEO ensures e-Commerce sites are not only prepared for seasonality but also offer a proactive, data-driven, and user-centric approach. It leverages analytics and seasonal trends, optimises for mobile shoppers, integrates with other channels, and focuses on creating content at the right time to reach users when peak season hits.
A huge chunk of an Enterprise SEO strategy revolves around prioritising products and categories. The goal is to produce a tailored approach that boosts these areas organically in anticipation of peak demand. Simultaneously, the SEO team gives priority to evergreen content and year-round products to maintain a steady flow of traffic
As you can see from the screenshot below from Google Trends, it’s important to anticipate seasonal fluctuations.
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Improved User Experience
Technical SEO is the backbone of any intricate website. Tasks such as analysing page load speed and optimising a vast number of web pages for a seamless browsing experience contribute to the overall user experience. For Enterprise sites, technical SEO includes rectifying broken pages, enhancing Core Web Vitals, and establishing an SEO-friendly site structure.
Considering that 58.99% of global website traffic originates from mobile users, the role of technical SEO becomes pivotal. Ensuring that a site functions smoothly and efficiently on mobile devices is imperative for reducing bounce rate and helping users navigate from page to page with ease.
Enterprise vs. Traditional SEO Services: What’s the Difference?
At its core, Enterprise SEO holds the same goal to rank for high-value keywords and increase organic traffic. However, this approach is far more advanced than your average SEO campaign.
The most obvious difference between the two types of SEO is the scale of the project in almost all elements. From the team working on the account to the budget and strategy.
It would be insufficient and unsuccessful to apply the same SEO strategy to a local business and a website with multiple international sites and pages of content.
Essentially, the larger and more complex a website becomes the greater the demand for resources, time, and data necessary to effectively optimise and manage its SEO efforts.
The table below illustrates some key differences between traditional and enterprise SEO:
| TRADITIONAL SEO | ENTERPRISE SEO |
| Long-tail, low-difficulty keywords | Short-tail, highly competitive keywords |
| Smaller budget | High budget |
| Local and small businesses | Large brands and international businesses |
| Limited web pages | Extensive volume of pages |
| Small technical fixes | Handling global website performance and site migrations |
| Small team of SEO experts | Cross-channel collaboration |
| Basic analytics | Advanced tracking |
What Does a Typical Enterprise Strategy Include?
Following the general consensus of the rest of this guide, there are no Enterprise-exclusive tactics. Enterprise SEO strategies are magnified versions of standard strategies. However, there are a few different directions that an SEO professional will generally follow to manage a site so big.
“Enterprise SEO is not about broad brush strokes; it’s about being specific and pinpointing areas for growth. By working closely with our clients to understand commercial priorities, we adopt a forensic approach. With time and budget easily spread thin, it’s essential to be strategic and commercially-minded, using time wisely. Unlike strategies for smaller sites which can accommodate wider-scale recommendations, here, every move is made with brand reputation in mind, urging us to pay meticulous attention to everything we do.” – Dan McCartney, Head of Organic at Embryo.
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1. Internal collaboration
It would be impossible for any SEO team to bear the weight of the entire site alone. For consistency, growth and robustness, collaboration is key. The entire company should be perfectly aligned with SEO, understanding the goals and KPIs whilst also looping the team into any new site changes, new products, changes in stock, upcoming marketing campaigns etc.
Large corporations and global brands typically operate with numerous departments. Leveraging SEO to its fullest potential involves:
- Engaging digital PR teams for backlinks
- Working closely with a content marketing department for high-quality content creation
- Collaborating with organic social experts for promoting new content and products/services.
- Tracking high-value keyword growth and conversion rate with PPC account managers.
The most important thing to remember about Enterprise SEO is that cross-channel collaboration and wider team understanding is paramount to success.
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2. Focussed topic and keyword research
Keyword research for an Enterprise site is, as you’d expect, a big job. There are various stages that an SEO must take in order to effectively map out keywords and identify opportunities for growth.
Here’s just a few things that an SEO professional might do when it comes to keyword research:
- Identify competitors using crawler tools to gain insights into how the website ranks against other big players in the industry.
- Use tools such as SEMrush and AHRefs to spot keywords gaps that could be leveraged.
- Figure out which high-value keywords the website already ranks for and which areas require more work.
- Gather insights from the target audience to understand what pain points they face – this could inform content strategy.
Once the website has been through a thorough audit, a comprehensive plan of action can be put in place to improve keyword rankings.
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3. Developing site architecture
Website architecture refers to your site’s layout and how each page connects hierarchically. A well-planned structure not only retains users but guides them seamlessly to conversion or purchase. For expansive Enterprise websites, interlinking the thousands of pages is essential for showing Google the relationship between URLs. Here’s why a robust site structure is necessary for your online success:
- Effective distribution of page authority.
- Highlighting your core category or service pages.
- Boosting both user experience and SEO.
- Helping users find the content they need.
During the early phases of an Enterprise SEO project, audits are the first step to ensure that key elements like the top-level navigation menu, breadcrumbs, internal linking structure, HTML, and XML sitemap are all functioning correctly.
6 Most Important SEO Tips for Large Websites
1 Automation
Utilise SEO tools and software to automate repetitive tasks such as keyword tracking, backlink monitoring, and performance reporting. Automation helps save time and ensures consistency, whilst also providing effective insights so that the business can take appropriate action.
2 Audit
Regularly conduct website audits to check everything is ticking away nicely. This will involve checking technical aspects, on-page SEO, and content quality. This process should identify potential issues like broken links, slow-loading pages, broken lead forms or duplicate content that may affect performance.
3 Content Strategy
Develop a well-defined content strategy that focuses on creating high-quality, relevant, and valuable content for audiences in every stage of the buyer’s journey. This includes multimedia content for all online platforms. Use unique and data-backed content to truly stand out from the competition!
4 Reoptimising
Not all content efforts need to go into new pieces. Don’t forget about your existing content. Periodically review and update older blog posts and pages to keep them up to date with SEO best practices. Never underestimate the power of quick content refreshments for improving rankings.
5 Reactiveness
A good SEO will be well ‘in-the-know’ when it comes to algorithm changes and Google updates.Stay ahead of trends and be ready to adapt your SEO strategies and tactics to avoid any dips in traffic or rankings.
6 Evolution
Recognise, first and foremost, that SEO is an ongoing process. Whilst an Enterprise site shouldn’t take many risks or experiments, it’s still good to be aware of changing demands of consumers and create a robust plan to implement changes or new technologies. Keep a close eye on competition and strive to be better!
Scale Your Business With Enterprise SEO
Our team can ensure your business dominates the online space. All you need to do is get in touch with us today!
Paid marketing channels are crucial to The Range’s online success so finding an agency that understood that and would have the tools in place to take it to a new level was critical. Not only are Embryo incredibly innovative and knowledgeable, but they used all that to tell a story about how their interpretation of PPC and paid social would be ideal for The Range.