What is Enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO is the large-scale improvement of enterprise sites through search engine optimisation. SEO for enterprise websites can be the most competitive and complex. This is why it’s important to get it right as it is the difference between your business and your competitors.
Having a decade of experience as an enterprise SEO agency, we’re here to provide the details on what is enterprise SEO.
What Makes a Website an Enterprise Site?
An enterprise website is determined by a few factors such as
- Size
- Revenue
- Brand authority
To begin, the size of a website can be determined by the number of pages or complexity of its structure which can make it more difficult to perform SEO at scale. Enterprise sites drive revenue for large companies so small changes can have big implications. Well-known brands are typically enterprise sites and need a high domain authority and extensive backlink profiles.
What are the Differences Between Enterprise and Traditional SEO?
Enterprise SEO differs from traditional SEO based on scale and level of complexity. While traditional SEO features smaller websites (including fewer pages), enterprise SEO best represents websites with thousands of pages.
Many professionals who work on enterprise websites have incorporated automation tools to handle the sheer size of these sites.
Key Components of Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO can be broken down into six categories:
- Technical SEO
- Content marketing and on-page SEO
- Internal collaboration
- Automation/tools
- International SEO
- Link building
Technical SEO
Technical SEO will take a close look at the internal parts of the website addressing any functional issues. When we work with enterprise clients we have a 100-point technical SEO checklist. This shows how detailed the technical side should be.
One of the most important aspects of technical SEO is page speed optimisation. This involves improving the load times to better the user experience as well as being a search engine ranking factor. Techniques for optimising page speed include leveraging browser caching, minimising files, and compressing images.
Many technical SEO steps involve ensuring search engine bots categorise content appropriately. Large sites will also need to manage their crawl budget. Every website has a crawl budget so you should ensure that you’re only keeping important pages live on your site.
Content Marketing and On-Page SEO
Creating high-quality content at scale involves producing a large quantity of SEO-optimised content that answers search queries directly. A content strategy for the brand must be established to ensure alignment with brand goals and work towards keyword targets.
Marketing and SEO professionals must work together in order to avoid bottlenecks and avoid missing deadlines. Many enterprise companies want our SEOs to work with their in-house marketing team to streamline operations.
To perform effective content marketing, old content (or legacy content) must be continually updated to reflect current research, trends, and overall reliability. Also, many brands syndicate content, or republish it on third-party sites to reach a wider audience.
Internal Collaboration
Internal collaboration starts with building an SEO-friendly organisational structure. When departments work together to improve a site it allows results to be achieved quicker. It’s essential to establish clear roles and responsibilities for SEO tasks.
Also, based on our experience, all team members should attend specialised SEO meetings. These meetings can help team members to understand what’s going on as well as upskilling.
Automation and Tools
Many enterprise SEO tasks involve processing large amounts of website data. This can only be done so fast manually. We automate the process as much as possible so that the role of the SEO is to oversee and make decisions.
Multiple tools are available for SEO optimisation such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, and Google Analytics. These tools level up an SEO professional’s ability to identify and fix issues for enterprise sites.
International SEO
International SEO is important for websites that attract customers from different countries. Multinational websites have different optimisation strategies to effectively target and rank in multiple languages and countries.
Companies can use country-specific domains and geo-targeting to put search engines on the right path. Also, they may opt to host sites on local servers to improve load times and search engine rankings.
Localisation and hreflang implementation are needed for international SEO. Localization involves changing website content to cater to the cultural norms of each target country, such as through translation and local SEO. Hreflang tags assist search engines in understanding which language and regional version of a page should be displayed to users based on their location. These attributes can be added to the HTML head of each page.
Link Building
The final aspect of enterprise SEO is link building. It provides domain authority to websites, improving their trust in search engines and organic rankings. If you consistently produce linkable assets, backlinks will be attracted to your page. Also, if your brand guest posts for known authorities within the same industry, that further adds to your credibility and backlink profile.
What to Look For in an Enterprise SEO Partner?
If you’re looking for an enterprise SEO partner, you will want to review their experience and expertise. Identify which aspect of enterprise SEO that you want to focus on, and see if their background matches your expectations.
For example, if you’re looking to advance your technical SEO output, look for individuals with a proven track record of improving web page speed and accessibility.
In our experience, it’s a good idea to ask for a free audit. This way you can test the expertise of the agency and see that their skills match what you’re looking for.
Challenges in Enterprise SEO
The biggest challenge in enterprise SEO is the sheer size of the website. Many have hundreds or thousands of pages, which are nearly impossible to measure individually for value. This can be troublesome because, if there are 50 pages on a website that are contributing negatively to SEO, it can be difficult to identify them amid the hundreds of successful pages.
Metrics and KPIs for Measuring Success
Measuring success involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure SEO strategies are improving your site’s search rankings and contributing to your business objectives.
Examples of KPIs:
- Revenue
- Registrations
- Conversions
- Keyword rankings
- Organic traffic
- Domain authority
Looking for Experienced SEO Services?
The team at Prosperity Media has been working with enterprise businesses and has the results to show for it. We’d be happy to take a look at your website and provide you with some feedback. Reach out to our team here.
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."