By now, it’s no secret that a comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is essential if you’re serious about making a success of your business.
After all, it won’t matter how incredible your products are or how addictive your blog is if no one can find them.
However, it’s essential to understand that SEO is far from a one-size-fits-all endeavor.
What works well for a smaller or mid-sized company in terms of SEO likely won’t be as effective should that same company ever grow into a larger corporation with increasingly complicated goals and needs.
That’s where enterprise SEO comes in.
Here’s a closer look at everything you need to know about enterprise SEO to get started with a bang, including what it is and the best practices to make it work for you.
What is Enterprise SEO?
As any digital-age marketer knows, SEO can be complicated even for small businesses.
Even a tiny local startup is still likely to have hundreds of web pages, numerous links, and multiple social media accounts to organize, optimize, and maintain.
Now imagine that little startup eventually succeeds.
Before you know it, you’re looking at a thriving local business with a growing customer base and a robust web presence to match.
If things continue to go that route, it might even become a gigantic, wildly successful enterprise. But should that happen, it would quickly become clear that the SEO strategies that used to work now no longer cut it.
Enterprise SEO is an upgraded scalable form of SEO designed with the needs and goals of larger companies in mind.
Think major companies with thousands (if not millions) of pages and links to manage.
Key Benefits of Enterprise SEO
Although there’s no fixed set of criteria a website needs to meet before it can be considered an enterprise site, you likely already have some idea of whether you’re dealing with one.
It’s less about the number of employees or clients the company has and more about the size of the company website. Think pages numbering 1,000 or more and a high level of brand authority.
All enterprise websites also have certain things in common. For instance, the site’s functionality would have a massive impact on the business’s overall profitability.
Said site also likely requires a high level of automation, collaboration, and labor to keep it running.
Here are some of the benefits enterprise SEO brings to the table for enterprise-level companies.
Better target your chosen keywords
One of the main reasons a larger business can’t effectively use the same SEO strategy a small business would use is a difference in targeted keywords.
Small businesses are less likely to be targeting ultra-competitive keywords and long-tail key phrases, while an enterprise business almost certainly will be.
Enterprise SEO helps big companies do this effectively.
Improve customer reach
An enterprise company isn’t just bigger. It’s managing a more extensive product catalog, a more expansive client base, and more different customers at various positions within the sale funnel.
As a result, marketing content needs to be highly targeted and feel personal to be effective.
Enterprise SEO helps larger companies more easily maintain these standards and get results.
Stay in step with critical changes
As any marketer knows, factors like search engine algorithms and accepted best practices are constantly changing and evolving.
While it’s relatively easy for a small or mid-sized business to adjust its strategies and website to meet new criteria better, it’s more challenging for large companies with many thousands of pages to maintain.
Enterprise SEO helps take some of the hassle out of keeping your SEO strategy up to date.
Enterprise SEO vs Traditional SEO
As far as the key concepts, values, and techniques involved, enterprise SEO has a lot in common with the traditional SEO you’re already familiar with.
However, instead of being subject to the same limitations as small-scale SEO, enterprise SEO is organically scalable at Fortune 500 levels.
Individual differences to remember include:
- Enhanced risk reduction.
- Upgraded infrastructures and approach to team integration.
- Deliverable impact at scale.
- Built-in protection against algorithm fluctuations.
- Ability to completely dominate a niche.
- Holistic on-page optimization.
Best Enterprise SEO Practices for Success
Now that you know a bit about what sets enterprise SEO apart and how to tell whether your company requires a strategy of that scale, it’s time to look at how to implement one.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind.
1. Make speed a priority
Site speed is crucial for achieving and maintaining the high SERP rankings you’re after.
After all, it won’t matter how incredible your website design is or how well your landing page addresses a visitor’s concerns.
People won’t stick around on a website with slow page load speeds.
Speed is also one of the first things to deteriorate as a website grows. Use a tool like Google Page Speed Insights to evaluate your site’s average load speeds for various users.
Then start working on ways to increase them, such as optimizing images, improving server response time, and cutting down on redirects.
2. Strategically refresh high-ranking content
Another challenging but crucial task for your enterprise SEO team to tackle is keeping your content offerings up to date.
Industry standards, best practices, and current statistics are constantly changing, so your core content offerings should, as well.
But take care not to damage your rankings by deleting high-ranking content or removing valuable secondary keywords that add value.
Instead, identify key pages that can be updated to be even more competitive than they already are.
For example, update or add critical information, but be sure to leave valuable backlinks, keywords, and other ranking factors intact.
3. Turn your site into a content production machine
High-quality content and plenty of it is one of the essential components of a solid enterprise SEO strategy.
But you’ll need to establish a complete SEO and content production team to keep your methods scalable.
Have your keyword research team identify new target keywords and work closely with writers on ways to make the content they produce more competitive.
Solid enterprise SEO strategies also call for original content that targets customers at every possible stage of the buyer’s journey, so be sure to cover all your bases.
Your blog, in particular, is an ideal place for top-of-the-funnel and mid-funnel content.
Support your content with current statistics, data, facts, and lists. Use templates to streamline the process of creating new blogs posts, standalone pages, and more.
And keep in mind that content doesn’t have to be limited to written material.
Search engines love big, comprehensive sites that keep things fresh by utilizing video, images, infographics, charts, interactive content, etc.
Aim to cover every possible topic of interest to your customers from unique, refreshing angles.
4. Add a featured snippet strategy to your enterprise SEO campaign
A featured snippet is a short text excerpt that appears in “Position 0” of a given Google SERP — at the very top of the search results page.
The idea is to give searchers a quick but highly relevant solution to the query they just performed.
And as you can imagine, a web page that winds up showcased there sees a lot of traffic, so it pays to have a snippet strategy in mind.
You can raise the chances of your content being chosen for a featured snippet by directly addressing a consumer’s potential topic of interest in 100 words or less.
Do this early on in your piece and prioritize formats that Google favors for its snippets — like numbered lists, bullet lists, or tables.
Always break your content up into snackable sections with headings and subheadings to improve your chances of ranking well even further.
5. Embrace automation
Enterprise SEO isn’t just about implementing appropriate tactics for a larger company’s ongoing goals, content production schedule, and traffic load.
It’s also about successfully doing things to scale, and having your SEO team use automation wherever possible is an ideal way to do this.
Naturally, automation can’t do everything, but it can take the guesswork, tedium, and hassle out of tasks like:
- Keyword research.
- Analyzing title tags or metadata.
- Keeping track of backlink quality.
- Identifying areas of your website that need work or maintenance.
- Managing workflows to keep members of your SEO team in sync.
6. Use the right enterprise SEO tools
Larger companies really need access to complete enterprise SEO tools that make it easy to maintain current SEO and algorithm standards.
The right options can help your team do everything from large-scale audits, to keyword segmentation, to whole-site SEO monitoring, and more.
Here are a few all-in-one tools to check out:
There are also many tools that are terrific for managing specific parts of handling scalable SEO on an enterprise-level site.
For instance, SEMRush and Google Search Console are amazing for keyword research. Meanwhile, Screaming Frog is great for identifying broken links, and WebPage Test is excellent for assessing load speeds.
Wrap Up: Don’t Forget to Localize Your Enterprise SEO Efforts
Although enterprise SEO may seem complicated at first, it’s really all about taking what you already know about traditional SEO, adjusting it to fit the more complex needs of a bigger company, and implementing practical ways to scale up your optimization efforts.
Ready to get your SEO strategy to the next level with professional SEO strategists? Get started today with WriterAccess’ free 14-day trial!
