What Is Enterprise SEO? The Ultimate Guide to Scaling SEO

Sure, you could stumble upon the perfect purchase with a bit of luck — but modern shoppers are doing their homework. Over half of website traffic comes from organic search, making it more important than ever to reign supreme in search engine results.

If your enterprise business hopes to grow and succeed online, make sure your infrastructure can keep up by investing in enterprise SEO solutions.

But what is enterprise SEO exactly, and how can it help your business? Keep reading to learn more.

Key Takeaways

• Enterprise SEO is the practice of using SEO strategies to optimize enterprise websites in order to rank higher on search engines, get more visibility, and increase leads, conversions, and revenue.
• The main difference between enterprise SEO and traditional SEO is the scale of the project. Enterprise businesses can have multiple businesses or multiple locations, e-commerce sites with over 10,000 pages, etc.
• Enterprise SEO practices include creating high-quality content, targeting high-traffic keywords, protecting brand reputation, transitioning to automation, and optimizing templates.
• Keyword research tools, content audits, and site performance monitoring tools are essential in helping an enterprise site stay competitive and successful in search engine rankings.

What Does Enterprise SEO Mean? 

Enterprise SEO is the practice of using SEO strategies to optimize the web content of a large organization. This way, an enterprise company can rank higher on search engines (like Google), get more visibility, and increase leads, conversions, and revenue.

However, these enterprise SEO strategies must be applied in a strategic and highly scalable way since these businesses have thousands of pages. 

Enterprise SEO vs. Traditional SEO

The main difference between enterprise SEO and traditional SEO is the scale of the project.

Enterprise SEO

As mentioned, enterprise SEO concerns large organizations. And we’re talking about the number of web pages (not the number of employees). So, that can be enterprise businesses with multiple businesses or multiple locations, e-commerce sites with over 10,000 pages, and so on.

The large scale of enterprise SEO practices makes other elements necessary, such as deep market research, competitor analysis, project management, and more.

In turn, they require a large SEO team, including marketers, legal consultants, developers, IT administrators, and compliance teams.

Traditional SEO

Also known as small business SEO, traditional SEO is used on small- to midsize websites that have anything from a few pages to hundreds of pages.

With traditional SEO, you might do things manually and have limited access to tools, software, and templates. You may also focus on a particular geographical area and have a limited budget.

What Are Enterprise SEO Practices?

When you implement an enterprise SEO solution, you can expect the following basic SEO practices to come into play:

Publishing High-Quality SEO Content

The main component of the SEO process is content creation. Although common for small- and large-scale SEO projects, it’s more difficult to maintain quality when you have many writers and produce tons of content, with some pages slipping under your radar.

You want your content to have updated and accurate information, cover the topics in-depth and be SEO-friendly. This way, you can convince search engines like Google that you’re an expert on the topic, so they’ll push it up in search engine results.

But how do you ensure your content meets standards with so many writers on your enterprise SEO team?

Create a Seamless Process

Your hiring, training, and editing system should be strategically thought out and documented. 

Providing writers with detailed content briefs is crucial, as well as having dedicated editors, SEO specialists, and in-house writers or freelance writers to keep things running smoothly, depending on your budget. 

Optimize Content

Optimized content is more likely to rank than others, so make sure your content has the following:

• Target keywords and keyword variations
• Catchy meta description
• Suitable meta tags
• High keyword relevancy score
• Relevant internal links

Watch Out for Duplicate Content

Enterprise sites will inevitably cover similar topics; however, make sure no two pages are the same. You can use a content audit to identify duplicate content.

You’ll want to avoid duplicate content because it’s confusing for search engines. Google may not know which page to show users in the SERPs and will push up the wrong piece of content.

Targeting High-Traffic Keywords

Enterprise companies can go after high-traffic keywords and handle the vicious competition with solid enterprise SEO teams.

By high-traffic keywords, we mean short-tail keywords that are typically a word or two and make up general phrases that people use when searching. These keywords get tons of monthly searches and are more international.

Examples of high-volume keywords include “best laptop” and “artificial intelligence.” You’ll want to use the relevant ones in the body of your content, meta title, meta description, and image alt tags.

An enterprise company has the resources to produce content built around these keywords and can target prospects in a long-term approach. Such investment can be a game-changer, giving companies the brand awareness and reputation they aspire to have.

Protecting Brand Reputation

Bad PR affects authority websites more than niche ones. So, an integral aspect of an enterprise SEO strategy is reputation management.

This requires a mix of SEO and public relations management measures. It’s especially important for B2B SEO, as reputation plays into business partnerships.

Branded searches happen at different stages of the customer journey, although they’re more common at the end. At that point, consumers are aware of the solution to their problem, and they’re looking at different brands.

In their branded search, they’ll come across your brand website, social media platforms, and microsites. They’ll also see news articles, Wikipedia pages, and customer reviews.

The search results on page one of Google are effective in shaping your brand perception, which includes clicks and non-click impressions.

Although you can’t stop people from posting negative reviews, you can dominate the search landscape with owned properties and positive content from other sites, pushing negative content to the side.

Also, posting high-quality content on your enterprise website helps improve its image and demote bad press, inspiring trust in your brand. Additionally, you can respond to false claims in community forums.

Transitioning to Automation

A company using enterprise SEO may have thousands of pages and multiple enterprise sites. Scalability becomes even more prominent after a product launch, acquisition, or merger.

So, how can you create content and monitor quality effectively?

Automation allows you to skip the time-consuming manual labor, especially when it comes to technical SEO audits. 

Your enterprise SEO platform might include a mix of the following: 

• Google Search Console
• Surfer SEO
• Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
• KWFinder
• SEMRush
• Google Trends
• Jaaxy
• DeepCrawl
• Woorank
• BuzzSumo
• CoSchedule
• Google Pagespeed Insights

Enterprise SEO tools can do many things at scale, including alerting you to duplicate content. By running a technical SEO analysis, you can also get alerts about broken links, missing alt tags or meta descriptions, slow pages, 404 errors, incorrect schema coding, weak backlinks, and more.

Running a speed audit with an SEO tool is also crucial, as it will cover all of your site’s pages, detect issues that affect your page performance in the SERPs, and offer fast solutions.

Optimizing Templates

An important part of enterprise SEO is using templates because it allows you to maintain your scaling goals. Your team can create web development templates that can be used anytime a new page is needed for your enterprise site. Simply create unique content, customize as needed, and publish!

Integrating With Data Sources

You want to analyze thousands of pages on your enterprise sites, outrank concentrated competitors, conduct keyword research, and more at scale, which is a lofty task. But this data can help generate insights about the industry and market and inform your social media strategy.

But it’s a lot of data, so how do you collect it regularly?

Luckily, enterprise SEO platforms can have integrations with data and analytics providers, thanks to their solid APIs, such as:

• Google Analytics
• Adobe SiteCatalyst
• Adobe Experience Manager
• Google Search Console
• Majestic SEO
• Coremetrics
• Facebook
• WebTrends

These integrations supply you with updated data regularly.

Capitalizing on Backlink Opportunities

Backlinks are an essential part of any strong SEO strategy. But a backlink here and there can’t sustain a large organization. 

After all, the number of backlinks a page gets can greatly impact the amount of organic traffic it gets from Google. For that reason, you need to be proactive and strategic by approaching partners, publishers, and influencers.

For instance, you can partner with publishers to publish content about your brand and link to your website. This way, they get quality content, and you get exposure. Another example is a strategic partnership, which provides you with non-paid backlinks (like a link on a “Partners” page). Also, affiliate programs are helpful when it comes to social proof.

Additionally, use outreach strategies to detect unlinked brand mentions. Ask creators to turn them into backlinks or cold outreach if you come across articles that can easily fit your site.

This effective enterprise SEO strategy is a perk that’s unique to enterprises with brand authority. After all, your large company might be getting over 500 mentions a month (compared to five to 10 for a small business)!

As you magnify your enterprise SEO efforts, you’ll refresh old content. But don’t delete it if it has high domain authority or backlinks. Instead, tweak it by adding new information.

Matching Search Intent

Google has improved in understanding search intent by analyzing the semantic relationships between words and phrases, thanks to natural language processing (NLP). So, your word choice informs Google which stage of the customer’s journey it targets and will push it to those users.

Accordingly, not picking the relevant keywords can cause a misalignment between your content and search intent, a vastly common issue in enterprise SEO.

Let’s look at the different conversion funnel stages and how you can match search intent in them:

Research Searches

This stage is for awareness building, as customers need educational content, such as videos, blog posts, and resources. They aren’t sure what they want; they have a problem and no exact solution. So, they’ll make general, non-branded queries.

To target them, you should create informational content with generic keywords (like laptops or bags). With enterprise SEO, you have the resources to achieve domain authority for such competitive keywords and get outstanding visibility for your enterprise site.

Product/Solution Searches

The consideration phase is when users search for solution products and features. To illustrate, they’re aware of the problem and solution but haven’t landed on a brand. Attract them by providing product guides and descriptions and using non-branded category keywords.

These head or long-tail keywords get high organic searches. Your enterprise sites have the opportunity to dominate organic search results.

Branded Searches

This phase is when potential customers may turn into actual customers, so your content marketing should give them that final push. Select branded keywords to accommodate that search intent and get the attention of your target audience. After all, these users are making queries about your brand.

Managing Workflows

Workflow management is an enterprise SEO solution that can simplify project management and facilitate scaling, but it’s tricky on an enterprise-level site.

A workflow entails that everyone on your enterprise SEO team adheres to your SEO platforms, system, and practices. That’s because small content tweaks won’t be effective on an enterprise level.

Instead, you want a structured system with a repeatable process for your SEO program activities. Find a platform that can help you assign SEO tasks, manage them, add notes, record events, and analyze pages.

Business process management software (BPM) examples include:

• Pipefy
• Kissflow
• Process Street

Training an SEO Team

An enterprise SEO team needs a comprehensive training process because mistakes can cost you leads and conversions.

You’ll want to hire an SEO company or in-house SEO experts to conduct training and hand out certificates. They should inform everyone about the industry and products.

Additionally, assign every task to a particular team or team member. This way, you can create a sense of accountability and pinpoint the exact issue in your enterprise sites for fast recovery.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, an enterprise SEO solution differs from a regular SEO solution in its scale. You’re optimizing web content over thousands of pages to appease search engines. 

So, SEO practices need to be easy to implement and effective on such a large scale. This way, you can get a higher reach and more leads, conversions, and revenue!