Enterprise SEO is the very process of emphasising SEO strategies that will improve organic presence and revenue for larger organisations—usually defined by the number of pages the site has rather than the number of employees the organisation has. These strategies need to be scalable and strategic enough for an enterprise company to maintain its rankings on search engines.
Why Is Enterprise SEO Different?
The most prominent difference between regular SEO (for small and medium businesses) and enterprise SEO lies in the tactics used, they have to be scalable for thousands over web pages.
While small and medium businesses might have only a few pages, or a couple hundreds, larger organisations have up to thousands of web pages on their site. This also means that the strategies that work for a small number of pages might not necessarily work for larger sites.
Why Is Enterprise SEO So Important?
Enterprise SEO has a huge role to play because strategies that work for smaller businesses won’t work for larger ones.
Amongst the major strategic differences between the two is that the former usually aren’t targeting highly competitive, short tail keywords, while the latter are.
On top of that, larger organisations require a specialised enterprise SEO team to keep track of and maintain their organic rankings. At smaller companies however, the person in charge of SEO is often also the content marketer who might even be in charge of social media management.
When you are targeting more competitive keywords while having thousands of pages on your site, it is important to establish a dedicated SEO team.
Suppose you’ve worked at companies and felt like SEO just wasn’t working for you, chances are you didn’t get to work with a team of experts when your company needed it.
Enterprise SEO benefits larger organisations particularly because their SEO endeavours will be more complex due to the number of web pages on their site, the number of backlinks and domain authority they’ve already acquired, etc.
Enterprise companies with a larger site typically have great brand authority, but that doesn’t mean they should delete or redirect pages that have garnered quality backlinks and high page authority. You should keep any existing content up to date and fresh. With that in mind, it’s fair to say that the larger the company, the harder it is to finesse SEO. However, it isn’t at all impossible.
In fact, enterprise SEO needs to be smart, scalable and more sophisticated.
Now that you understand its importance, let’s delve deeper into some of the strategies you’ll need to implement as a larger organisation.
How to Do Enterprise SEO: Seize These 10 Enterprise SEO Tips!
1. Maintain Page Speed
Amongst the technical SEO elements to look into when you have a larger site is to maintain the page speed.
First, test your website speed using a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to see how quickly it’s performing for users.
Then, proceed to improve the page speed of individual pages by compressing images, reducing redirects, and caching your web pages.
2. Put Content Into Subdomains
The next strategy for enterprise SEO is to put your content into subdomains.
A subdomain is a type of website hierarchy that falls under a root directory, but rather than using folders to organise website content, it sort of gets its own website.
The subdomain is still closely associated with the root directory, but with a whole separate content management system, template, analytics tools, and so on.
This is especially helpful for enterprise SEO because subdomains often house a wealth of content that would be difficult to manage all on one website alone.
While some SEO experts believe that Google’s crawlers could confuse a subdomain for an entirely different website from the main domain, others say the crawlers can recognise subdomains as extensions of their parent domains.
Once and for all, subdomains offer a better user experience which could contribute to higher engagement rates, hence improving your SEO.
3. Re-optimise Existing Content But Protect Domain Authority and Backlinks
One of the many challenges for doing enterprise SEO is to keep old content up to date, accurate and aligned with current industry standards.
With that being said, you mustn’t delete old content that has a high page authority and backlinks. Instead, you’ll want to re-optimise or refresh it, while balancing the line of adding new information without taking away secondary keywords the content is ranking for.
Refreshing an old content is of paramount importance for enterprise companies. However, it also needs to be scalable enough for your SEO team to identify which content needs to be updated and what would increase their competitiveness. The motive of enterprise SEO is to have a process that’s scalable.
4. Produce Quality Content at Scale
Without a doubt, creating quality content is one of your top priorities.
On an enterprise level, this needs to be scalable for your SEO team to discover new keywords to rank for and pass it over to a content creation team.
Generally speaking, your enterprise SEO team will identify target keywords and provide writers with a guideline on how to increase the post’s competitiveness, whether that’s incorporating secondary keywords, image alt-text, snippets, or others.
To implement a well-thought-out enterprise SEO, you’ll need a team that is in charge of creating content guidelines and performing keyword research at scale.
5. Perform a Keyword Research Strategically
Keyword selection becomes tougher the more and deeper you’ve written about a topic. At times, it can feel like you’ve said everything there is to say.
That’s when a dedicated enterprise SEO team comes in handy—they are responsible for conducting regular keyword research and identifying content gaps to churn out new topics to write about.
6. Automate
We’ve been talking about doing things “at scale”, but how exactly can you do that? One of the best ways for an enterprise SEO team to scale its processes is to use automation.
Automation helps with SEO tasks such as performing keyword research, identifying problematic areas on your site, monitoring the quality of backlinks, analysing title tags and meta descriptions and many more.
Aside from that, you can use workflows to simplify project management. With a larger organisation, you might have several locations with different websites that call for different SEO needs. This indicates that your team should be using the same workflows to ensure a scalable process.
7.Take Into Account Your Technical SEO
Page speed aside, there are multiple other technical SEO elements your enterprise SEO team needs to manage.
This means that your SEO team will require a scalable process to use 301 redirects, eliminate technical issues that hinder crawlability, etc.
8. Build Quality Links
Link building on an enterprise level can be rather complex.
The more backlinks a page house, the more organic traffic it drives from Google. You can utilise outreach strategies to find unlinked mentions and request to turn the mention into a backlink.
In addition to that, you can always rely on cold outreach if you find articles that naturally fit your site. As a larger organisation, you’ve already outgrown newer, younger domains in terms of brand authority and recognisability.
9. Internal-Linking
Another SEO task to venture into at scale is internal pillar and cluster content clinking. Have your writers link to the pillar and any necessary internal content after the keyword research process done by your enterprise SEO team.
10. Create Templates for Your Pages
When creating new content or pages for your site, have your team come up with templates that your developers can replicate over and over again, and especially in line with your enterprise SEO needs.
Enterprise Considerations
When working on an enterprise SEO strategy, bear in mind the following elements:
- The team required—Implementing the right enterprise SEO strategy requires a dedicated team of experts including an SEO analyst, developer, content writer and a project manager.
- Executive buy-ins—Constant compromises of recommended SEO optimisations caused by the need to fulfil conflicting internal departmental views and requirements.
- Approvals and time delays—Expect approvals for changes to be delayed by lengthy and complicated internal processes with multiple decision makers.
- Decision framework—Having a framework helps identify and prioritise tasks without going down the rabbit hole of SEO fixes.
Bottom Line
For large organisations, enterprise SEO is the way to go. To maintain current domain authority and backlinks, while keeping your content up to date on thousands of pages, you’ll need a dedicated, skillful team of experts.
All in all, your enterprise SEO team will be responsible for coming up with strategies to enhance your content, co-marketing, acquiring backlinks and protecting those backlinks, and so many more. The more pages your site has, the tougher and more complex it is to maintain your SEO.
Are you looking for the most optimal SEO strategy for your enterprise? Schedule a free SEO consultation with us today!
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