16 Enterprise SEO Best Practices Your Company Should Have
Enterprise SEO companies have to do SEO at scale to optimise hundreds or even thousands of pages. Plus, you’re competing against sites with large budgets and established teams.
Understanding enterprise SEO best practices will give your website the best possible foundation to grow. With our decade of enterprise SEO agency experience managing enterprise clients, we know what a good foundation looks like.
Comprehensive Keyword Research and Targeting
Knowing how to find keywords and what ones to target are two of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation. Without this, you’re going to struggle to drive meaningful traffic to your website.
It’s considered best practice to divide keywords into different groups:
- Informational
- Commercial
- Transactional
This will give you a clear strategy to map keywords to revenue increase. Most sites will want to create topical maps that aim to boost the ranking of transactional pages with supporting informational content
On-Page Optimisation (Titles, Meta Descriptions, Headers)
Titles should include primary keywords and be short (less than 60 characters) to avoid shortening their appearance in search results. Also, your title should be compelling to a reader, utilising intrigue to improve your CTR.
Meta descriptions provide a content summary and offer a call to action (CTA), encouraging viewers to buy a product or service. These descriptions should be unique for each webpage, which can be time-consuming.
Lastly, headers (H1, H2, and H3) should naturally integrate keywords and their variations. All of the information on the site should fit together for an enterprise brand.
Technical SEO Audits and Fixes
Website crawlers can help identify crawl issues, such as broken links, 301 chains, and pages with no index tags. Spend time inspecting the URL structure, making sure that the URLs are clean and descriptive enough for the site.
Another important aspect of technical SEO is optimising site speed. Users will not want to stay on a site that is slow, so compressing images and leveraging caching are two ways to accomplish this.
High-Quality, Relevant Content Creation
The quality and relevancy of your content will improve your search rankings, as Google prioritises content that will serve searchers in the most efficient and impactful way.
Make sure the content you post is highly relevant to the search query. Also, take older content and revamp it every few months to ensure search engines see it as fresh and you’re not providing out-of-date information.
Mobile Optimisation
Over 50% of searches are done on mobile and Google now indexes everything mobile-first. If your site doesn’t perform well on mobile you’ll lose rankings and customers.
You may have to rework the site design to be suitable for mobile. This includes UI fixes as well as technical SEO fixes. Having a technical SEO expert work with your designer is necessary to have both departments working well.
Structured Data and Schema Markup Implementation
As SEO professionals, search engines must understand and categorise the content on your enterprise site appropriately. Structured data provides a blueprint for information, classifying the content on that page into categories like products, bios, reviews, and more.
Implementing structured data will allow your content to receive rich results which can be helpful for CTR and to push your competitors further down in the SERPs.
Backlink Building and Outreach
Backlink building involves thorough research of competitors and their backlink strategies, which can be done with tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs. Performing a link intersect can allow your website to capture the links that your competitors have.
A good outreach strategy also helps to build connections as well as boost your organic rankings. Build links to your transactional pages. Ranking these pages higher is the best way to increase revenue with SEO.
Local SEO Strategies
If your enterprise business targets specific regions, you want a strategy to reflect that. Geo-targeted landing pages will help you capture location-specific keywords. These keywords tend to convert better as they better suit searchers intent.
Regular SEO Performance Monitoring and Reporting
Take time to plan quarterly and annual SEO goals. These could be increasing registration through SEO or increasing overall traffic by X%. Whatever it is, having a way to track and report goals improves the chances of achieving them.
Enterprise sites usually have multiple strategies going at once, so using a dashboard system can be really helpful for seeing all of the data in one place.
Internal Linking Strategy
Websites can use internal linking to rank higher in search engines. This is because enterprise SEO benefits from strategically linking to high-authority pages to improve site navigation.
This approach doesn’t just help search engines – it also improves user experience, as it guides visitors to various pages on a site. This encourages them to stay for longer than they would have without the links.
SEO-Friendly URL Structures
Every SEO professional should create URLs to be clear, short, and descriptive. Care should also be taken to avoid 301 redirect loops when URLs need to be changed. Track URL statuses in a spreadsheet to ensure that URLs are healthy.
Consistent Content Updates and Refreshes
Content updates and refreshes keep an enterprise site relevant. Rewriting blog posts and updating product pages all tie into a successful SEO strategy. Ultimately, if a user does not feel that a site matches what they are looking for, they will search for one that does. This signals to Google that your page isn’t useful which can lower its ranking.
Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking
Competitor analysis and benchmarking is how you beat your competitors. Performing a SWOT analysis is a good place to start.
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
This will show you what you need to be doing. Maybe there’s a content gap you’re missing or perhaps their backlink profile is stronger. This information is invaluable when looking to climb rankings and improve your SEO ROI. If you see that your site is falling behind, you may need to rework your SEO strategy to make it more effective and results-oriented.
Implementation of SEO Best Practices for E-commerce (if applicable)
If your SEO team works on enterprise e-commerce sites, the implementation of SEO matters. All of the above content is particularly relevant, but you will also want to include a site structure with clear categories and fast page loading times. With this, you’ll rank up toward the top of the search engine list in no time.
Compliance with Search Engine Guidelines
Search engine guidelines are essential to follow for SEO professionals and enterprise sites. Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (Google Search Essentials) for specific information. Black hat SEO or even misinformed mistakes are even more costly for enterprise businesses.
Regular Training for the SEO Team
A good practice to get into is regularly encourage collaboration and training within your team. What works for SEO today may not work next week or next month. Staying up-to-date on the latest algorithm updates and practices will only advance your business in the long run.
Want an Enterprise SEO Partner?
Setting up all of the enterprise SEO best practices in-house just isn’t time or cost-effective for many companies. The Prosperity Media team has performed successful SEO strategies for many businesses just like yours. Reach out to our team today and we can share case studies and more detailed information about your business.
Matthew Barby, Senior Director of Acquisition at HubSpot
"Whenever I have companies ask me if there are any great agencies in Australia, I always point them to Prosperity Media. James and team are always pushing out incredibly impactful work, and their depth of knowledge around SEO and content marketing is up there with the best in the world."