Enterprise SEO strategy: 5 best practices for 2024
If your business is growing at pace, it can be a tricky thing for entrepreneurs to keep with – both on and offline.
Enterprise SEO can help you adjust your existing website strategy to accommodate this growth, so you can anticipate big changes and reach new customers.
So if you’re struggling to scale – or simply feel like your SEO can’t keep up with new developments – enterprise SEO should be on your radar. But before you enlist help from our specialists, we’ve got some top tips and best practises to take you through 2024.
Why does an enterprise SEO strategy need a different approach?
An enterprise site needs SEO but on a much bigger scale. The usual SEO techniques that you may use for smaller sites just won’t cut it. And there’s a few reasons why:
- Enterprise sites carry extra levels of complexity
- Different approaches to keyword research
- Website maintenance
- More pages to deal with
Complexity
With great scale comes great complexity. It’s only inevitable that an enterprise site will have further considerations due to the number of pages it holds in comparison to smaller sites. The approach would work a lot differently to smaller business utilising a local SEO strategy. Even though it shares the important basics (content creation, keyword research, technical SEO), the way these basics are implemented differs due to scale.
Keyword research
A big enterprise business will want to compete for the highest-value keywords with higher competition in order to establish their expertise on the web. The research may venture into being globally focused as opposed to locally specific. More on keyword research later…
Web maintenance
A bigger site means a lot more that could possibly go wrong, especially technically. Bigger audits need to be conducted to review every component of the site, so you need a dedicated team to handle the upkeep of technical SEO maintenance. There’s potentially more competitors in the industry that the enterprise site operates under, so an abundance of competitor analysis needs to be maintained.
Page volume
As we mentioned, the page volume of enterprise sites affects the approach. There’s a lot more content to produce for each page and a lot more subtopics to address. It can take a lot longer to implement changes to each page, and therefore take longer to see the results of your efforts. More pages also equate to more data to be analysed.
Use specialist tools to gain competitor insights
At a smaller business level, competition may have been tough. But as you grow into enterprise trading, using SEO techniques beyond boosting traffic and sales is crucial.
That means you must gain as much information about your competitors as possible, using that knowledge to stand out and gain a real industry edge. You can do this with the help of some stand-out SEO tools, that enable you to see what keywords your competitors use and how they are ranking for them.
Some tools we use on a regular basis include:
- Ahrefs
- SERanking
- Writerzen
- Keyword Planner
- Moz
- SEMrush
This knowledge gives you plenty of insights into how you can adapt your SEO strategy, potential keywords and utilise methods that your competitors are ignoring.
Prioritise high-ranking keywords to generate more traffic
Even if you have sound SEO strategies in place, as you grow to take on new markets, you’ll still be ranking for smaller-scale keywords that are likely to not have much competition. When it comes to raking in bigger rankings, this approach probably won’t draw the traffic and sales that you need to sustain a growing enterprise.
With that in mind, improve your strategy with higher-ranking keywords that possess a bigger search volume. Although these will be harder to rank because of more competition, if you want to continue expanding your enterprises, then fresh, user-led content and smart linking will be seen as more ‘valuable’ in the eyes of search engines.
Our Senior Organic SEO Account Manager, Jamie Beatty, has these words of wisdom:
“In my opinion, every site should prioritise high-ranking keywords.
However, if you’re such a big business, you’ll want those higher rankings more than anything and you’ll want to protect them too.
If you’re a big enterprise site and lose a ranking for a high-ranking keyword, it can have detrimental effects even overnight.”
Create SEO campaigns for previously untapped markets
Your SEO strategies probably focus on your local area, local terms or a local demographic. This targeted marketing is great for small businesses that have a concentrated regional customer base – but to help you reach new audiences and meet bigger demands, that will need expanding.
Now, turn your attention to new campaigns that target global markets – or the areas that your business is hoping to expand into.
However, that doesn’t mean that you should completely bin your localised keywords. Instead, expand on your existing SEO strategy, tailoring it to cover more markets and regions.
Expand strategies to cover multiple branches or sales locations
In a similar vein, if you’ve recently experienced growth across the business, you’ve likely expanded your team, or perhaps opened a few new brick and mortar shop locations. Each of these new locations needs a complimentary SEO strategy to make sure they continue your success – using dedicated keyword campaigns for each one.
Used as part of an overarching global campaign that brings everything together, you can expect consistent branding and marketing across the board.
Turning your business into an enterprise-level operation isn’t easy. But SEO, from technical foundations to general keyword research can certainly help, providing a number of different ways for you to grow your strategies and tailor them for specific audiences or products.
Outsource your SEO to an agency
As a busy business owner, you’ll probably find that trying to manage all these new aspects of SEO just isn’t the best use of your time. To keep things effective, make sure your SEO keeps up with your growth – and to avoid making any costly mistakes – it could be time to enlist the use of an agency’s enterprise SEO services or hire a dedicated SEO specialist.
Luckily, that’s where Embryo can help. Get in touch with our team of experts today.
Frequently asked questions
Answered by Amy Leach
Is enterprise SEO only for pre-existing enterprise companies?
Anything which is large budget/large scale is suitable for enterprise SEO. This doesn’t always mean that you are already well-established.
Is a strategy for high-ranking keywords always high risk?
For enterprise sites, it is more likely to be high risk to go after competitive keywords. However, if you are already ranking highly, then protecting this spot becomes less of a risk.
Why could I be ranking in countries that my SEO doesn’t target?
This could be because you are providing relevant content that applies across a range of countries. This could also be because you are acquiring links naturally from other countries which causes you to rank in the SERPs there too.
How can I prioritise both enterprise and local SEO?
This is especially important for e-commerce enterprise business. This is because physical presence in local stores requires a local SEO strategy.
Does enterprise SEO require more advanced technical SEO?
Naturally larger scale sites will come with more complexities. However, the basics of the techniques remain no matter how big the website is.
