When it comes to SEO, there’s a lot of talk about what’s coming next. And as someone who works in the industry, I’m always curious about the future of enterprise SEO. What is enterprise SEO?
Enterprise-level SEO services are for businesses with very large websites and budgets. These services can include everything from improving the architecture of a website to creating international content and working on your keywords.
While many people think that what’s involved in doing Enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about dealing with larger clients, and more complicated projects and strategies, there’s a lot more to it than that. Working in Enterprise SEO, in many ways, requires its own set of skills, and its own knowledge base.
What Is Enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO is a process that helps large businesses rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
It involves optimizing a website for both on-page and off-page ranking factors, as well as creating and executing a digital marketing strategy that takes into account the unique needs of large businesses.
Because enterprise-level companies require more comprehensive and holistic SEO services, they require different strategies than traditional small businesses.
Larger businesses have more complex websites, and bigger marketing budgets, which give them the ability to do advanced SEO.
These techniques must be scalable so a large enterprise business can keep its search rankings.
Did you know that 89% of marketing professionals believe that search engine optimization is an effective strategy?
50% of all website traffic is from organic search. 93% of all online activity is initiated with a search engine. So, it’s essential that enterprises have an SEO plan in place.
But what do you do if you’re an SEO company that has tens of thousands of pages and is trying to rank for hundreds of thousands of keywords?
Rather than focusing their efforts on small businesses and mid-market companies, they will need to start targeting larger enterprises.
This post will explain what Enterprise Search Engine Optimization is, what tools and strategies you can use, and examples of it in action.
How is Enterprise SEO Difference From Other Strategies?
For enterprise-level SEO, you need a company that can manage a large number of pages. This means that their strategies must be able to scale to hundreds or even thousands of web pages.
While small businesses and mid-market companies may have a few pages of content or a few hundred, large organizations can have thousands.
And it makes sense that the same strategy wouldn’t work for every web page.
The Importance of Enterprise SEO
Large companies need different strategies than smaller ones.
One of the biggest differences between small businesses and enterprises is that the latter tend to focus more on more competitive, short-tail keywords.
SEO is the practice of improving the visibility of a web page or website in search engines. This can be accomplished through a variety of methods, including keyword research, link building, and content creation. In smaller companies, one person may be in charge of both social media and search engine marketing.
When you’re up against huge competition, and you’ve built thousands of pages of unique, high-quality content on your business, you’re much better off outsourcing your SEO to an agency than trying to handle it yourself.
If your SEO company isn’t giving you the results you want, it’s probably because you don’t have an entire team of people working on your strategy.
For larger businesses, enterprise-level SEO services are necessary. This is because these companies tend to have more pages on their website, more links, and more established domains. By improving their enterprise SEO, they can improve their online visibility and reach a larger audience.
As a larger business, your brand name has authority, but you cannot simply remove or redirect pages that have accumulated many backlinks or have a high DA.
It’s tough to keep this up to date, and the larger the company, the harder it is.
Enterprise-level search engine optimization needs to become more intelligent, more adaptable, and more efficient.
Now that we’ve covered why it’s important to have enterprise-level strategies, let’s talk about some of the advanced techniques that you’ll need to employ as a larger company.
Top 10 Enterprise SEO Tips
1. Maintain Page Speed
As sites get bigger, things like page speed, server loads, and load times become more and more complex.
Start by testing the speed of your site with Google’s free Page Speed Insights.
To speed up your pages, you can compress images, reduce the number of redirects, and leverage the browser cache.
2. Group Your Content Into Subdomains
Another way for enterprises to optimize their sites is by grouping their content into separate domains.
A sub-domain is a section of a website that is its own entity. It has its own web page and is not related to any other pages on the website.
This subdomain is often used with the main site, but they usually have its own content management system, template, and analytic tools. This can be great for keeping all of your content in an organized way and making it easily accessible for your readers.
While some experts think that the crawler may mistake a sub-domain for a completely different site, others have said that its crawler can recognize subdomains as extensions of parent domains.
A website’s user experience can be improved by adding a sub-domain. This, in turn, can lead to more visits, more page views, and more time spent on the site.
Ultimately, the choice is up to you, but you may want the help of an Enterprise SEO agency to make the right choice.
3. Refresh Old Content
Keeping your content updated, accurate and relevant can be a major challenge for enterprises.
While you don’t want to get rid of your old, highly authoritative pages, you do want to update them from time to time. At the same time, you’ll want to make sure you’re not removing any important, but less popular, keyword phrases.
For large enterprises, the process of updating website content is delicate. But it can also be challenging to scale, as it requires your SEO experts to audit which pages are underperforming and which ones should be improved.
4. Create Quality Content at Scale
Content creation is a huge part of getting good search engine rankings.
On a large enterprise scale, this has to be done by your company’s marketing department to find new keywords and for your content team to create new content and publish it.
Your SEO agency will usually choose the main target keywords and give your copywriter guidelines for the blog article, such as including related terms and phrases, using images in the content, and adding a meta description.
To implement a successful enterprise SEO campaign, you will need to hire a team of content creators and experts to conduct thorough keyword research.
5. Strategic Keyword Selection
Keyword research can be especially difficult when you’ve written a lot about a subject. It can seem like you’ve covered it all.
This is why you need to hire an SEO agency to conduct regular keyword research to find topics for you to write about.
6. Automate Everything
If you’re an enterprise, one of the best strategies to scale your process is to automatize as much as you can.
Use marketing automation for SEO-related tasks such as monitoring your link quality, analyzing your title tags, and more.
With a large company, you might have several sites, each with its own purpose. With marketing automation, you can ensure each site is performing well.
Your SEO and marketing teams should be using the same workflows so the entire process can be streamlined.
7. Technical SEO
In addition to improving your site’s loading time, there are also other elements of enterprise-level search engine optimization that your team will need to consider.
Your technical team will need to use a process that can scale 301 redirects, solve any technical issues that impede the site’s crawl, and more.
8. Link Building
Link building is a critical component of successful search engine optimization. On a larger, enterprise-scale, this can become much more complex.
The more backlinks a page has, the more it will be ranked by Google. Reach out to other sites with broken or dead links and suggest that they link to the page on your site.
Another way to find prospects for a cold outreach campaign is to reach out to any site that you think would be a good fit for your business. Since you’re a well-known company, you’ll have the benefit of having brand awareness and recognition.
9. Internal Pillar Content Linking
Scaling your SEO efforts will require internal linking of your pillar and cluster content to relevant pages.
Your in-house team can identify these link opportunities in the planning stage or can direct your writers to link back to these pillars of content and any supporting articles that tie in.
10. Create Templates for Your Pages
When building out a website, it’s important to maintain the same consistent level of quality. You can do so by setting up templates that your team can copy and use for pages.
So, what does this look like in action? Let’s look at some examples below.
1. HubSpot
While Hubspot doesn’t have nearly as many people working for it as other big tech companies, it does have over 35,000 pages on its website.
It’s ranked #1 for over 30,000 different keywords and is on the front page of Google for hundreds of thousands more.
Because of the large number of links it targets, HubSpot needs a team of specialized, dedicated, and in-house and outsourced employees who focus entirely on link building, co-marketing, and other technical tasks to protect its domain name.
With enterprise-level SEO, be mindful of the keyword density on pages with high domain authority while still keeping the copy fresh and up-to-date.
2. GitHub
With over 81 billion web pages, it’s quite an achievement for Github to rank #1 for 80,000+ search terms.
By focusing on its oldest pages, the company can rank for hundreds of thousands of keywords, while earning links for all of its new content.
3. Microsoft
Microsoft has over 8 million pages on its website and ranks for over 1 million keywords.
In addition, it’s ranked in the 1st position for 450,000+ different keyword searches.
One major difficulty with Microsoft’s Enterprise Search Engine Optimization is that they have to target very different types of keywords because of the wide range of different services and products.
And they have to protect their many domain names from everything from business suites to video games.
What is The Future of Enterprise SEO?
For larger companies, enterprise SEO is the way to go. This service protects your current domain authority and your backlinks while making sure that the content on your site is fresh and up to date.
The focus of enterprise SEO is to produce more quality content and work on more collaborative marketing strategies. They are also more invested in link building and protecting those links and other aspects of optimization.
The more web pages you have, the more difficult it will be to maintain good search engine optimization.
Conclusion
As the world of SEO evolves, so too does the role of enterprise SEO. But what is enterprise SEO? Simply put, enterprise SEO is a branch of search engine optimization that focuses on optimizing websites for large businesses. It involves many unique skills and techniques. In addition to traditional on-page and off-page optimization, you’ll also need a deep understanding of how search engines work, how to develop effective strategies for international websites, and how to work with stakeholders and executives.
