Enterprise SEO is crucial for digital marketing success. However, it can seem overwhelming for marketers new to optimizing large, complex websites. But by focusing on a few key strategies, you can start moving the needle and improving your enterprise-level search visibility.
What Is Enterprise SEO?
Before diving into strategies, it’s important to understand what exactly enterprise SEO entails. Enterprise SEO refers to optimizing search visibility for large organizations with complex websites, multiple brands, international domains, and thousands of pages. It differs from standard SEO for small businesses in a few key ways:
- Large scale – Enterprise SEO must be scalable across significantly more pages and keywords.
- Multiple stakeholders – There are often multiple departments involved, like IT, marketing, product managers, etc.
- Higher complexity – Enterprise sites have larger technical considerations with more legacy systems, platforms, and integrations.
- Higher risk – Given greater revenue dependence on search traffic, underperformance poses a bigger financial risk.
- More resources – Enterprises can justify dedicating more budget, staff, and tools to SEO efforts.
Conduct Technical SEO Audits
A strong technical SEO foundation is crucial before tackling other areas. Run regular technical audits to identify any issues impacting site crawl ability, indexation, and performance. Check elements like site architecture, URL structure, page speed, mobile responsiveness, structured data markup, and more. Fix any errors like broken links or duplicate content. Use tools like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl to thoroughly audit at scale. Robust technical SEO makes content optimization and link-building more effective.
Build An Optimisation Roadmap
Don’t optimize pages randomly—take a strategic approach. Develop a priority roadmap for optimizing pages, categorizing them by urgency. Focus first on high-traffic entry pages like the homepage, blog, and product category pages. Then, tackle important middle-funnel content like product description pages, service pages, and thought leadership articles. Moving down the funnel, optimize conversion-focused pages like contact, pricing, and appointment booking pages. An optimization roadmap helps focus your efforts on the pages that matter most.
Centralise Governance
With multiple departments involved, enterprise SEO needs centralized governance to align efforts and is often advised by every digital marketing agency and expert. Create an SEO steering committee with stakeholders from IT, marketing, product, legal, and other groups. Define standards for optimization, set targets, and determine ownership for core SEO tasks. Schedule regular meetings to discuss roadblocks and wins. Central governance gets everyone on the same page, provides accountability, and facilitates collaboration on optimization projects.
Prioritise Mobile-First Indexing
With mobile representing over 50% of traffic, enabling mobile-first indexing is essential for enterprise SEO. It involves making sure pages meet Google’s mobile-friendliness criteria. Confirm your mobile and desktop pages are equivalent, there are no issues like incorrect redirect chains, and structured data is consistent across both versions. Use Google’s mobile-friendliness test to detect any problems. Then, request mobile-first indexing in Google Search Console. Embracing mobile-first improves the mobile user experience and search visibility.
Create Comprehensive Link Building Strategies
Link building is make-or-break for enterprise SEO success. But don’t just chase low-quality links – take a comprehensive approach. Combine high-authority site-wide links like press mentions with deeper, topically relevant links from industry resources. Pursue links from related sites through guest posting, sponsorships, and influencer marketing. Engage employees as brand advocates to get links from their social profiles and personal websites. A diverse, multi-channel link-building strategy helps improve domain authority and rankings.
Debunking Common Enterprise SEO Misconceptions
While enterprise SEO is indeed a powerful tool for digital marketing success, several misconceptions often cloud the understanding of how it works and what it can achieve. Let’s demystify some of the most common misconceptions associated with enterprise SEO:
It’s Only About Keywords
The main myth, in this case, is the assumption that every aspect of SEO relies on having pages stuffed with keywords. Indeed, modern SEO involves various tactics such as technical optimization, quality of content, user experience, and so on. It simply involves building a user-friendly site that is optimized for search engines and also loved by the users.
SEO Is A One-Time Effort
Some people believe that after optimizing the website, there is nothing further to do. However, this could not be more true in the highly competitive digital environment. Search engine optimization is a continuous process that entails constant tracking, adjusting to algorithm updates, and remaining one step ahead of the competitors. It’s not a “quick fix’ but a journey.
Content Quantity Trumps Quality
In fact, some suggest that the high volume of generated content is the secret of efficient SEO. However, quality is essential (than quantity) where content is concerned. Good content is highly valued, especially by search engines and sites like Google, apart from readers themselves. Develop content that is useful, interesting, and resonates with what your users need and want to answer user questions and solve their concerns.
Links Are No Longer Relevant
Some believe that with Google’s constantly changing algorithms, backlinks are not crucial in SEO anymore. In reality, backlinks still play an integral role in ranking algorithms. It is not about quantity but quality. Having good, high-quality, relevant backlinks from authoritative sources is very helpful for SEO.
SEO Is All About Ranking #1
Although reaching the first page of search results is always an objective for many, it is important to note that SEO success goes beyond getting the number one spot. This refers to the generation of organic traffic, lead conversion, and user experience improvement. Do not become obsessed with rankings but rather concentrate on concrete business results.
Leverage Rank Tracking and SEO Analytics
Monitoring is crucial for ongoing optimization. Use rank tracking to detect ranking gains and losses for target keywords. Dive into Google Search Console and Google Analytics data to identify opportunities – find underperforming pages that need work, analyze clicks and traffic by keyword, uncover landing pages with high bounce rates, etc. Automate reporting to always have a pulse on key SEO metrics. Hence, robust analytics help focus efforts and demonstrate ROI to leadership.
With a sound technical base, targeted content and link building, and insights from analytics, enterprises can transform their search visibility and fuel sustainable growth. SEO for enterprises may seem complex, but following fundamental best practices makes boosting enterprise-level search performance very achievable.
Implementing these core strategies builds a solid enterprise SEO foundation. However, optimizing at scale also requires the right tools and expertise. Partnering with an experienced digital marketing agency like OOm can provide the technical SEO audits, optimization roadmaps, governance models, and analytics capabilities needed to take enterprise SEO programs to the next level. Contact us to learn more about our SEO solutions.
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