SEO for Enterprise Level

Search engine optimisation. It is a digital marketing technique that has brought organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page., conversions, and success for many businesses. However, SEO strategies come in many different shapes and sizes. What works for one company might not work for another.

This is the case for a business that is currently scaling up. While certain SEO tactics work for small and mid-size businesses, adjustment needs to be made when it comes to enterprise SEO.

What counts as an enterprise business and website? How does it differ from other SEO strategies? What are the enterprise business SEO solutions that require your attention most?

This guide will provide the answers!

What is an enterprise website?

It is true: there is no definitive consensus about what constitutes an enterprise website.

One line of thought is that it’s defined by the site’s number of pages – and not the organisation’s structure. In this case, a company with a large number of employees doesn’t necessarily have an enterprise site. Although if that company features a high volume of pages on their site, this tends to be the determining factor for enterprise SEO.

You can have a business with less than 10 employees but 1,000’s of webpages, and logic dictates it is an enterprise site.

Another school of thought, however, places the organisation’s size as the determining factor. The reasoning for this is that if a company requires a large team to maintain its online presence, their website must be essential for brand recognition and generating revenue.

Either way, every enterprise site has the following in common:

• Automation is required to complete tasks across thousands (and potentially millions) of website pages.
• Considerable project management and collaboration levels are needed to maintain the website.
• The website has a significant impact on the organisation’s reputation, visibility, and bottom line.

Why is enterprise SEO different?

The biggest difference enterprise SEO has over small/mid-market SEO is scale.

A small business website might only contain a few pages overall. For instance, a restaurant’s site may only contain the basics such as the homepage, about us, contact us, menu, etc. Even a mid-size business, one that has a regularly updated blog, with typically only feature a couple hundred pages.

In comparison, larger organisations will be home to thousands of web pages. Due to this, strategies that work for a relatively small number of pages are not necessarily working for enterprise sites. Large scale SEO operations have unique Enterprise business SEO solutions, and these include:

• Targeting highly competitive keywords.
• A dedicated SEO team to maintain and keep track of campaigns.
• Maintaining brand authority by updating legacy content rather than redirecting or creating new pages.
• Competing against – and surpassing – the best in your industry.

Ultimately, an enterprise SEO campaign has to be more sophisticated, ambitious, scalable, and smarter.

To make that a reality, below are the main areas to target.

1. A logical website structure

Admittedly, this point is applicable for any SEO campaign, big or small. Yet a logical, sound website structure is essential for an enterprise website.

Think about it for a second. You are dealing with thousands of pages on the same site. If these pages are not organised into specific categories and areas of your site, you have a big problem on your hands. A big, messy problem.

One tactic is to utilise subdomains to group your content. Rather than organising a website’s content into, say, folders, a subdomainA subdomain is a secondary website that is rooted within the parent domain. – which sits under a root directory as part of the website hierarchy – effectively provides specific content with its own site.

A subdomain structure could look something like this:

www.yourwebsite.com

• blog.yourwebsite.com
• deals.yourwebsite.com
• school.yourwebsite.com

For enterprise sites, subdomains can be especially helpful for those that struggle to manage all of their content on a single website.

In some circles, there’s the theory Google’s crawlers can confuse subdomains, viewing them as an entirely different entity to their parent domain. While this is a concern, the ability to group content and the improved user experience – which leads to greater engagement rates – are benefits that are hard to ignore.

2. Optimum user experience

Speaking of improving the user experience, this is another essential component of enterprise SEO. The longer you can keep people on your website and come back for more, the lower the bounce rate and better your SEO campaign.

As far as optimising the user experience goes, one of the biggest challenges is to maintain a fast page speed. As your site becomes more complex and substantial with content, it is harder for it to load at an optimum speed.

If you feel your site has become sluggish and bloated, there are ways to bring the speed back, and that’s through focusing on your Core Web Vitals.

First start by running a performance analysis with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. You will be supplied info on your Core Web Vital metrics and with a list of suggestions to improve page speed. Common solutions include reducing redirectsA redirect is a web page that loads in place of another web page., caching your web pages, and compressing images.

3. Update content the right way

Keeping your content fresh and up-to-date is imperative for an enterprise SEO campaign.

You could, for example, have an authority piece about the best website design techniques, and this currently sits among the top results in relevant Google search results. Yet there’s a problem: the page was created over four years ago, and it hasn’t been updated. With each passing day, your content is losing relevance by not discussing the latest design techniques – and it will quickly tumble down the Google rankings as a result.

When updating, it’s important to do so without deleting your old content with backlinks and high page authority. If you update the content by starting a new page, you’re effectively starting back at square one. Instead, refresh your current content’s page with care.

By care, this means not taking away from what made the content rank highly in the first place – such as the keywords present within said content. You also want to add new information seamlessly, ensuring it supports the old content and doesn’t contradict the points mentioned.

4. Create new content wisely

An enterprise website isn’t one that simply sticks with the content it has already created. It continually churns out quality articles and pages for its audience to consume. Yet when you factor in scalability, you have to be wise when producing new content on a regular basis.

One effective way of doing so is by creating templates for your pages. Rather than going through the trouble of setting up the page design time and time again, you can save a lot of time and effort by selecting a pre-made template designed by your developers. You can also produce multiple templates to match certain themes and SEO requirements.

Regarding the latter, you’ll want it to be easy for meta descriptions and titles to be added for each page. As you will know, these can play a big role in turning casual observers into clickers – so you want to ensure content creators can add and edit these without issue. This is key, as your audiences’ searches are likely to change overtime, meaning your keywords may need rethinking. That said, it’s important to pay close attention to your industry when churning out new content.

5. SEO and development alignment

Having your website development align perfectly with your SEO is crucial. To make this possible, you have to successfully incorporate the other points mentioned in this guide. You need to produce a site that features enticing content and design for both search engines and visitors.

With more people visiting, engaging, and remaining on your site, it tells the likes of Google your enterprise site is worthy of its position as an authority in your chosen industry. The result: the chances of your site ranking well drastically goes up, bringing in more organic traffic.

Ultimately, when both the development and SEO sides are correctly aligned, they create a positive feedback loop for your target audiences – aka your customers and search engines. As time goes on, it will lead to a steady stream of new prospects, opportunities, and sales for your organisation.

6. Strategic keyword implementation

Keyword researchKeyword research helps websites unearth the best keywords to drive traffic and visibility. This research is supported by a number of powerful web-based tools, the best of which we’ve listed here. is always an essential part of digital marketing – and that doesn’t stop with enterprise SEO.

When you have seemingly covered every angle of a topic, it can be difficult to come up with different keywords. After all, you are likely to feel as if there is nothing else to say. However, there are always new topics to write about… If you know how to find them.

This is why your SEO team has to conduct regular keyword research. By doing so, you can help to uncover new trending keywords to target. Other research can also be done as part of your content gap analysis, supplying you with a steady stream of new subjects to write about on your site.

7. Link building

Alongside keywords, Link Building is another element that ranks as the most important for SEO. Building linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. effectively is also a serious challenge for any business type, size or industry. Although once you hit that enterprise level, the complexity becomes even more drastic – as you would expect at this point!

The good news is that, as an established brand with recognisability in your industry, there’s no awkwardness in reaching out to other publishers. See an article online where your site can be naturally added to the content? Do a cold outreach to the site owner, (kindly) let them know why they should add your site, and it’s possible they will include a valuable backlink due to your brand’s reputation and the value provided.

As a prominent fixture in your industry, it also makes sense to search for unlinked mentions of your business. Once you find these unlinked mentions, simply send a request for these to be turned into a backlink. It only takes a couple of minutes to do for both sides, so there’s a high probability any request will be successful.

8. Building with reports and data

With the added content, complexity, and importance of your enterprise SEO campaign, it has never been more imperative to utilise relevant data and reports.

These reports, and the data they contain, allow your organisation to make better, more informed marketing decisions. Even just a small improvement can make a huge difference to your overall performance with an enterprise site.

Of course, there are many types of SEO data available, including:

• Organic traffic
• Organic impressions
• KeywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. monthly search volume
• Number of backlinks
• Page speed

For example, organic traffic is a simple way to monitor if your hard work is paying off, allowing you to measure if you’re getting more visitors as time goes on. Data for the number of backlinks functions in much the same way, presenting the opportunity to check if your efforts to gain links is working or not – and if any links have disappeared for whatever reason.

With reports, you can save considerable time in analysing the data, put together more effective SEO strategies, and ultimately bring in more visitors.

9. A focus on scalability

Scaling up successfully is key to enterprise SEO. You cannot simply do the same marketing tactics that produced results for your site back in the day. Changing up your strategy isn’t the only bad news. Your workload grows exponentially when doing SEO on an enterprise site.

Even if you have a team working specifically on the SEO side of things, trying to complete every task manually is not a good use of time. Because of this, one of the best ways to scale up your processes is by using automation.

Automation is able to help in various ways. This includes keyword research, analysing meta descriptions and title tags, monitoring backlink quality, identifying SEO issues with your site, and more.

10. Consider the competition

You might be one of the top dogs in your industry, but this doesn’t mean you should neglect the competition. In fact, you should be paying closer attention to your competitors more than ever before.

On the first page of Google, trying to rise just a couple of results up the rankings requires considerable effort. Competition is stiff, and the other top operators in your sector will be using the same SEO tactics as your company. However, by paying attention to their marketing moves, you can spot new opportunities and ensure you don’t fall behind the competition.