Setting up the necessary processes and systems to improve your output efficiently is what Enterprise SEO is all about. It's all about creating templates and automating processes. It is about ensuring that key stakeholders and departments are included in your digital marketing strategy.
To efficiently expand SEO at a large firm, you'll need a sufficient budget. That means you'll require executive support.
Key Points
Enterprise SEO is distinct. If your website has more than 6,000 pages, for example, your SEO programme must be scalable in order to be effective.
Consider the return on investment. Getting executive approval for your proposed budget is much easier if you put yourself in the shoes of the C-Suite.
Scale your SEO activity by utilising technology and workflow tools.
Working with an enterprise-level SEO firm will allow you to free up bandwidth and secure advice based on expertise gained through handling a variety of complicated SEO challenges.
Lead cross-departmental collaboration to break down silos.
You'll be able to grow your reporting by relying on dashboards, with separate dashboards servicing different users of your data.
Do you work for a major corporation with a website with thousands of pages? Do you find it difficult to expand your SEO because of the volume of pages and the complexities involved?
The following recommendations will address the special SEO considerations that enterprise businesses encounter. I'll also share the tactics and tools you'll need to efficiently scale SEO across the enterprise, regardless of company size.
You should also be prepared to collaborate with departments other than marketing. To guarantee that everyone is working towards the same goal, it may be required to collaborate with web development, product management, and customer service. If you're having trouble with department integration, check reading our piece on integrated marketing.
Have you ever heard the joke about how to devour an elephant?
One bite at a time is the punchline. Eating the elephant one bite at a time has become a famous business metaphor, implying that you should divide difficult work into digestible parts.
Enterprise SEO, on the other hand, is a little different. You are not attempting to consume the elephant one mouthful at a time. You're planning a feast. It is your responsibility to identify the people, methods, and tactics needed to remove the elephant as swiftly and thoroughly as possible. When it comes to SEO for ecommerce product sites that number in the thousands, one bite at a time simply won't cut it.
Planning is the first step in scaling SEO to match the particular needs of a huge firm. Here's how to get off to a good start.
Conduct a high-level SEO Audit to identify the tools and resources you'll need to meet your specific goals. Then, create an SEO budget that is broad enough to cover everything you could possibly need to boost SEO performance.
Consider the following costs: staff personnel; outsourced experts; SEO tools such as Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, STAT, and DeepCrawl; project management tools; development team costs; and content management platforms such as CoSchedule, NewsCred, and Skyword.
Calculate the SEO ROI you intend to achieve so you can start justifying the SEO spend. Extrapolate how many customers and how much more ecommerce income you'll create based on keyword, traffic, and conversion rate data, as well as average order value and customer lifetime value (CLV).
Determine your costs for acquiring new clients. Using SEMRush, Spyfu, Ahrefs, and other such tools, use real-world data that includes your site's own history as well as competitor landscape data. Then forecast the impact of your SEO approach.
Calculate how much you can cut your traffic acquisition costs using SEO, allowing your company to rely less on sponsored search. When compared to sponsored search, our clients may frequently achieve acquisition costs of 10 to 25 cents on the dollar through SEO. Such accomplishments should be accounted for in your SEO ROI calculations, which can have a significant impact on expenditures.
Through SEO, our clients frequently save between 75 and 90 percent on customer acquisition costs.
Obtaining executive support for your proposed budget is much easier if you put yourself in the shoes of your C-Suite team. They're too busy to be concerned with the minutiae, but they are concerned with the end result. As a result, you'll want to make your marketing ROI as clear as feasible. In other words, prioritise measurable outcomes over intangibles like impressions or brand awareness.
Your executive team will be interested in knowing the key performance indicators (KPIs) on which you will rely. They'll also want to know if there's a method to attain the same ROI at a lower cost.
Your executive team will also want to know when they may expect to see results. When it comes to this question, it's critical to be practical and set the right expectations. When you first develop an SEO Strategy, it is possible that you may see only minor results for several months until it acquires traction.
SEO is a long-term investment. Educate CEOs on the time required to produce results rather than overpromising now and getting into trouble later. Show them projections for the first six months, the first year, the second year, and so on.
It is vital that leaders recognise SEO's long-term potential. It is also critical that they comprehend the impact on lowering paid search acquisition expenses. You'll need their patience to allow your SEO approach to establish traction before reaping the benefits of compounded results over time.
The more intuitively your executive staff understands SEO, the more likely they are to be on board. And, as a result, they are less inclined to make unreasonable requests.
Once you've gotten everyone on board, undertake a thorough SEO audit. An audit of this magnitude necessitates a broader set of techniques and greater thoroughness than an audit of a website with 100 or 200 pages. Enterprise websites can have tens of thousands of pages. That doesn't even take into account the subdomains where blogs, knowledge bases, and other resources may exist.
Perform a full crawl using a desktop crawling programme such as ScreamingFrog or a server-based crawling tool such as DeepCrawl. Make a note of any problems and schedule the programme to run on a weekly or monthly basis to track changes.
Your content audit, on the other hand, will go much beyond a crawl. You'll also do the following:
Check your XML sitemaps.
Examine for duplicate content.
Make certain that the appropriate tags are used on each type of page.
Troubleshoot technological difficulties
Examine page load times
Ensure mobile compatibility.
Confirm that the site is indexed.
Examine the website's architecture.
Perform competitor research, and so on.
Of course, you don't have to accomplish this alone. Audits are a simple deliverable that may be readily outsourced to an SEO company with enterprise SEO experience. Use the audit to determine the baseline against which you will measure performance and to develop the SEO strategy. Save the audit as a template for future usage, assisting your organisation in becoming more efficient.
our SEO audit will reveal numerous takeaways for various departments, ranging from web development to public relations. Nobody will prioritise your requests unless proper interdepartmental planning is in place. Coordination among departments in large corporations must take place on a large enough scale to cut through as much bureaucracy as feasible.
To do this, it is critical to include other departments in your planning as early as feasible. Include them in the auditing and strategy building processes so that they are active participants in the process.
When you receive requests, educate them as needed to help them understand why they are making the request. Even the most ingenious strategy will fail if other departments do not dedicate funding or resources to SEO.
It is critical in enterprise firms to develop ways to interact that do not require gathering everyone in the same room. Project management and workflow software is the finest approach to manage communication and projects throughout the entire company.
Whether the personnel you require are on the other side of the building or on the other side of the world, make sure everyone follows the same system and processes. When everyone chooses their preferred system, project management breaks apart. Things also break down every six months when you discover a bright new tool. As a result, it's ideal to conduct discussions about consolidation and standardisation at the highest level possible.
You should also decide which software is essential to your business. When non-critical elements are reduced, more teams will use the same software, resulting in cost savings.
In most cases, SEO services subcontract work to other suppliers. That means material may originate from a mill, and off-page SEO may be tacked on as an afterthought. Some agencies may outsource technical SEO, but larger companies may have a single in-house SEO expert.
All of these dynamic aspects make scaling SEO through an agency tough. Worse, the content feels slapped together and is frequently misaligned with your brand voice.
Scaling SEO, on the other hand, is a lot easier if you work with an SEO company like Stridec. We develop and implement our enterprise SEO strategies all under one roof. This means that our entire team is thoroughly acquainted with your brand and marketing plan.
Stridec assists firms in reaching new heights as well as turning around tailspin organisations caught in the aftermath of a Google algorithm update or mired in negative online reviews.
What would you do if you had a limitless supply of SEO resources? Learn more about SEO outsourcing.
Leading cross-departmental teamwork and removing departmental silos will boost the overall health of the SEO operation. There are three teams with which you will most likely be collaborating:
If the web development and SEO teams do not communicate well, your organic traffic will suffer. What will happen if they aren't on board when they install an inflexible URL structure? What if you can't change title tags, meta data, or add extra material to pages? What happens if the content is coded in a way that search engines cannot understand?
Numerous things happen behind the scenes that affect a search engine's capacity to crawl and effectively index a website.
The construction of a core site is frequently planned years in advance. As a result, SEO must integrate itself into the discourse as early as possible and on a continuous basis. It's not the end of the world if you come in late and inherit a site full of legacy code. Simply address any issues that arise, and then ensure that future growth is based on an awareness of best practises.
SEO experts and site designers frequently but heads. This is because web developers frequently believe they understand SEO, while SEO specialists believe they understand programming. However, there is far less knowledge overlap than each highly specialised sector may believe. This can result in both departments underestimating project scope and, as a result, making prioritising mistakes.
Assist your web developers in comprehending the commercial implications of SEO requirements. Having one team educate the other as much as feasible will result in greater respect and more fluid teamwork.
A well-known worldwide shoe store designed its website without the ability to upload fresh content to optimise SEO for ecommerce category sites. Obviously, this entailed organising a major development effort to incorporate vital SEO copy required to outrank competitors.
SEO scalability concerns with your own website may not be as clear. Perhaps you have a problem with picture compression that is slowing down your site. Alternatively, the site might rely on faceted search without rel canonicals. Crawls and audits on a regular basis will help you detect vulnerabilities like these as early as feasible.
The incorporation of scalability into a website makes it simple for many departments to achieve their on-site objectives. Because of this:
It's simple to add and remove products, as well as set up the necessary 301 redirects.
When there is a sale, it is quick and simple to generate promo codes across the site.
A tag manager can be used by an SEO strategist to add an analytics tag or alter the information.
When there is content that needs to be updated, an intern might come in and take care of it.
You won't be able to construct a scalable website without a scalable content management system. Be careful of out-of-the-box platforms aimed at small and medium-sized organisations. Enterprise versions of SMB platforms are typically simply the existing platforms with a few more bells and whistles. On one of these platforms, it's difficult to have the degree of control you'll need to effectively scale your ecommerce SEO.
While your organisation is most likely reliant on bespoke development, there are ecommerce platforms available that are well-suited for enterprise businesses. Many businesses, for example, do well with Magento and Drupal. However, these platforms have many advantages and disadvantages that may effect organic search. Check out our Magento SEO guide for some best practises and things to think about.
Make a list of your preferred ecommerce sites if you decide to look for new possibilities. Then, use builtwith.com to check what they're working with. But there's a catch. Do not replatform unless there is a compelling need to do so. Even with a well-executed migration strategy, site migrations can have a significant negative impact on your organic search results.
When dealing with huge, complex websites, design everything with the intention of converting your current work into future efficiency. Instead of hard coding a page, have developers create reusable templates. You may also work with blocks, which allow users to generate new content with minimal developer assistance.
Then, ensure that everyone on the team understands which templates to utilise for lead generating landing pages, product pages, category pages, blog articles, sales pages, and everything else that will be often used on the site.
When developers are under time constraints, it is generally easier for them to hard code the website. However, whatever you create should be designed for a single usage. Instead, figure out how to utilise or reproduce each page or piece of content in order to properly grow your SEO.
Do you want your team getting up at 2 a.m. on the morning of your major annual sale to change out merchandising slots and turn on the discounts? Obviously not. So, why do we hear so much about corporations working around the clock before a big launch? It is usually due to necessity rather than the corporation building a superhuman crew. In other words, the team's beleaguered, overcaffeinated members have no option.
Build automation into your SEO strategy to allow you to scale without risking a heart attack.
Automate the following processes on-site:
Content staging
It's now live.
Various messages or discounts are triggered.
Performing A/B tests
Participating in chatbot discussions
Product information is being updated.
Automate workflows in support of content creation as well as tasks such as backlink research off-site.
Coordination with the product marketing team is as important as coordination with the development team. Here are some of the touchpoints that will be overlapping with SEO:
SEO, unlike PPC, does not happen with the flick of a switch (More on SEO vs PPC here). As a result, any products that rely on an organic push must be on your radar months in advance. To be effective, you must grasp the product plan for the entire year, including expected release dates, promotions or sales, and additional platforms where the product will be available. You'll also need a detailed understanding of each product's major value propositions. What client pain point would the new product address? Knowing this information like the back of your hand is critical to your organic keyword rankings.
When other people hear the phrase Christmas in July, they immediately think of mattress deals and cartoons of Santa wearing sunglasses. Christmas in July, on the other hand, is extremely literal for anyone working in ecommerce. That's when marketing teams start sketching up Christmas promotions, from Black Friday through New Year's. Your seasonal planning should be so far ahead of schedule that you occasionally forget what season it is.
Your product staff is frequently the first to learn about your company's seasonal sales. This is because they are frequently the ones that run the figures and decide on discounts and inventory. If you work in retail, your seasonal and holiday planning starts and finishes with this group.
Your product teams will also be aware of promotions, particularly last-minute campaigns aimed to shift inventory. As soon as these decisions are made, there should be a smooth, automatic process in place to notify everyone who needs to know. You'll need to communicate with your SEO team, as well as the teams in charge of public relations, paid advertising, social media, email marketing, and affiliate marketing.
What do customers think of the item? What messages are they resonating with? Your staff should not have to guess; instead, they should be aware.
Voice of the Consumer initiatives aid in the development of a framework for collecting, managing, and analysing customer input.
Coordinate with your product, customer support, and sales teams to gain real-time insight about customer sentiment. To automate the process of receiving, logging, and tracking feedback, use customer support tools like Zendesk or CRM software like Salesforce. You'll be able to discover this information as soon as there's a centralised source for it.
The SEO strategist at a small business will have a direct hand in developing the content, which is a significant difference between SEO at large organisations and SEO at SMBs. At a large corporation, content creation will be delegated to a specific team or distributed among numerous teams. The SEO team, on the other hand, must continue to actively plan and optimise content around the most lucrative search queries.
Create a more effective, data-driven content strategy with the Content Strategy Playbook.
Content teams typically meet on a regular basis to discuss and update the content strategy. Make certain that SEO is represented at these sessions. More importantly, have your SEO manager start preparing for the meeting as soon as possible. Because you can't generate data-driven recommendations on the go, conducting keyword research early on is a good place to start. After that, the entire team can brainstorm content ideas based on high-opportunity category phrases and long-tail keyword variations.
To manage content calendars and processes, use a platform such as CoSchedule, DivvyHQ, or Skyword. When it comes to automating the content generation process, this is only half of the battle; the other half is ensuring consistency. Every time, the same people should be held accountable for the same things. They should also know exactly who the content should be sent on to after their duty is over. The procedure should resemble an assembly line.
Style guides eliminate the need for unnecessary editing and boost team confidence by ensuring that everyone understands how to use the brand voice. If you have excellent creatives who are continually failing to reach your expectations, there is a communication breakdown. A detailed style guide with examples can go a long way toward establishing clear expectations.
There should also be a section dedicated to SEO best practises, as well as rigorous rounds of training for the content crew. It will not be difficult for them to learn SEO fundamentals such as writing relevant title tags and meta descriptions. They should also be instructed on basic content optimization techniques. If your content team is in charge of micro-optimization, your SEO team will not have to optimise every single blog post or article.
It's hard to be an expert in all 20 industries if you're scaling SEO across them. Instead, you'll scale faster by enlisting the assistance of subject matter experts from across the company.
You can even use a tool like DragonorRev to record these interviews and have them auto-transcribed.
Create a database of in-house specialists that is organised by area of expertise. Then trust them. Really. When well-intentioned executives assume a large part in the feedback process, it is a major source of unneeded obstacles and bureaucracy. They may provide comments that aren't quite right, or they may provide criticism based on a minor misunderstanding of the notion.
There are almost limitless anecdotes about satisfied clients at large corporations. They also have customers that use their products in interesting and inspiring ways, whether they're selling marathon runners sports shoes or automation technologies to NASA. The difficulty comes in organising these stories so that you can use them in your digital content marketing.
A story database allows everyone on your team to quickly identify the correct story for any digital marketing purpose. Allow it to exist in a shared online database. If necessary, integrate it with your customer support or sales tools to capture those stories as well.
Then check to see if people are actually using the stories. Create a mechanism that allows people to know what to do when they come upon a wonderful story. This is a fantastic approach to scale digital content marketing, especially if you manage hundreds or thousands of tales.
Content atomization means that you get a lot more mileage out of every piece of content you create. Repurpose material for videos, emails, podcasts, and social media postings that all contribute to your SEO blog strategy. Assume you create a white paper that is data-backed and includes fascinating internal and industry research. You can not only build 20 separate versions of this white paper to address 20 different verticals, but you can also atomize the information into video, infographics, blog articles, presentations, reports, PR-related editorial pitches, and more.
Oh, and did I mention the fascinating statistics you discovered? Put them in a distinct portion of your narrative database so that they can be used across departments for as long as they are relevant.
Topic clusters are an excellent approach to reduce your content workload while increasing traffic by allowing your content to leverage itself. There's no need to introduce a new topic with each piece of content. Instead, think about the primary issues on which your organisation wishes to be an expert.
First, decide on your topics. Then, on cluster pages, write in-depth, relevant material that zooms in on each subtopic. Then, create pillar pages that provide a high-level summary of these subjects. Finally, both pillar and cluster pages should be strategically interlinked.
The association between the material and the topic gets so strong over time that you dominate the search results for that topic.
Using content optimization tools, you may make on-page optimization of your material as simple as possible. You can provide back-end users with a simple way to edit the metadata of each page or post using custom coding or a paid plug-in. These tools will also alert you if you go over the character limit for the title tag and meta description, ensuring that important information isn't chopped off in theSERP. You should also have tools for quickly entering alt text, canonicalization, and even H1 tags.
You may also use a variety of tools to automate the optimization process once the content has been written. These can range from basic browser plug-ins such as Grammarly to comprehensive page optimization graders such as Moz On-Page Optimization. You can also use programmes such as Yoast to grade the page based on keyword optimization, content length, and readability. Clearscope can help you understand the ecology of keywords your content should utilise to rank higher in Google by combining real-time search data with contemporary language processing.
These tools are not a replacement for human eyes, but they can become necessary steps in a regulated quality-control process.
Never rely on human memory when it comes to institutional knowledge. When someone quits the organisation, they take with them the significant experience they gained while in that position.
When expanding SEO, make sure that no single piece of marketing collateral, research, or content is stored on a single user's computer. Systematize the process of uploading all work to a perfectly maintained shared drive, internal Wiki, or database. Every stage of the process, from promotions to adding material to the site, should be documented. And keep adding takeaways as the team encounters them.
Second, whenever possible, implement uniform workflows. Every large promotional effort, for example, should adhere to the same 100-point checklist. Don't have people reinvent the wheel every time. The workflow for content development will be a multi-layered process that will benefit immensely from systemization as well. Include in your process who and when interacts with an idea.
For example, when does the product team contribute to an idea in the cycle? SEO? Is there going to be a video component? Will it be included in an email, posted on social media, or utilised in public relations?
Each decision maker should have access to the content at the appropriate moment to ensure that everyone is working toward a common goal. Many project management software platforms, as well as process management tools such as Process Street, Pipefy, and Kissflow, can be used to formally define and standardise processes.
Off-site SEO is frequently overlooked by large industrial companies. Many huge corporations feel that because they have been in the industry for so long, they will organically accumulate a significant number of connections from third-party websites and rank high for their desired keyword phrases. They believe that, as compared to new or smaller organisations in the market, a proactive attempt to develop relevant, high-quality organic backlinks is not as important.
This is incorrect for various reasons:
The number of websites connecting links at one large corporation to the next is frequently vast.
There are numerous examples of huge corporations that were able to generate a large number of organic backlinks through deliberate, creative initiatives.
Disruptive startups are increasingly outpacing prior generations in terms of market traction. They are able to develop organic backlinks at scale using an intelligent marketing strategy.
The following are efficient techniques for increasing the number of websites linking to your site and your off-page SEO production:
Whether you're giving products for review or sharing a company-produced infographic that bloggers and news outlets might wish to utilise, enterprise-scale outreach looks different. Consider how long it takes to manually screen influencers, discover target websites, and do outreach.
There are numerous reasons to combine PR and SEO. You've already compiled a list of journalists and publishers with whom you share your news. What's important is that you don't simply look at this as a database, but that you start forming relationships with many of them. Discover what they each cover and assist them in satisfying and thrilling their audience. A pitch to a CNBC reporter, for example, would focus on an innovative technology you've invented to disrupt the industry, whereas a pitch to NPR might focus on the technology's societal impact.
One of the advantages of public relations is that if the New York Times covers your company's initiative, the word can spread throughout the internet. As a result, it may appear on other news sites, blogs, trade journals, and social networking websites.
Furthermore, you may want to explore creating tailored newsjacking efforts depending on what's trending in the news. This gives you with new options for PR outreach on a consistent, ongoing basis, in concert with themes witnessing an increase in web searches. At the same time, it is supplying your firm with high-value backlinks.
Once you've established contacts with members of the media, they'll be more willing to feature your stories, especially if they've previously performed well.
All of this can assist you in generating more natural, high-quality backlinks. This is when the SEO team might come in handy. Educate the PR team as much as possible on best practises for blogger outreach and show them how to discover and analyse high-authority targets.
When creating content, aim to create 10X material for your most critical themes. 10X content is ten times better than the best results for the query in Google SERPs. With 10X content, you will not only rise in Google ranks, but you will also be more likely to obtain backlinks from third-party websites.
Furthermore, by focusing on incredibly good content, you will delight your target audience, which is the objective of your marketing in the first place!
Audience or industry-wide surveys, as well as in-house research, are not just important for tailoring your products and marketing to client needs. It also offers fantastic potential for link-building.
Consider this: by giving knowledge that no one else has, your organisation can contribute to dialogues about your industry and audience in a genuinely meaningful way. That's a strong statement!
Depending on your perspective, this might range from extremely serious to completely ludicrous. A financial institution can discover links between early earnings and retirement savings. Nordstrom, a consumer-friendly but smart company, may be on the cutting edge of trend tracking and forecasting. And a firm that can get away with more outlandish marketing, such as Target, can find the overlap between those who frequently buy chocolate and people who regard themselves as extraordinarily happy. The people you contact will depend on the purpose and seriousness of your investigation.
Customer surveys and industry data can also be used to create helpful and highly shareable viral content. Collect the data so that your design team may create visual material such as infographics, data visualisations, and reports. Make infographics embeddable for convenience of usage and give a citation to your website beneath the infographic. Remember that any information you want search engines to read should be written in html rather than being added to the image itself.
It's very likely that your company collaborates with a number of partners. Integrate these strategic alliances into your public relations and link-building efforts to create a win-win situation that improves the collaboration.
If you're a software firm that partners with a platform like PayPal, for example, you and PayPal could do a combined webinar and cross-promote it. If you work for a home improvement retailer like Lowe's and know that your next content push will focus on deck and backyard upgrades, collaborate with one of your brands, such as Black Decker, to create a detailed guide to building your own deck.
The business development team is normally in charge of forming these alliances. Coordination with them is required to suggest collaborative PR chances, co-marketing options, and contributed material. You may also walk each partner through SEO best practises to maximise the effectiveness of each campaign.
Events are a natural source of buzz and industry cred, and your participation in a well-known event will provide you with access to an interested audience as well as some great backlink prospects. Make a list of conferences that your target audience will attend and keep track of the deadlines for sponsorship and speaking opportunities. The more innovative your sponsorship, the more attention you'll get.
And, if you truly want to wield power in the space, organise your own events. You may start small and yet receive a return on investment. It's not uncommon for local roadshow events with only 50 attendees to generate a large number of qualified leads. At your events, make a noteworthy announcement and encourage the press to cover it. Bring up outside specialists to speak as well, and have them advertise the event with pertinent connections.
Salesforce has long promoted events, including early local roadshow campaigns with only a few attendees. This has evolved over time into their yearly event, Dreamforce, which has over 170,000 people and 13.5 million online spectators. The most recent Dreamforce had two governors and three mayors as speakers! As a result, there are currently over 4,000 external websites referring to the Salesforce Dreamforce website.
Keeping executives and other departments informed about progress toward stated goals is vital in a large organisation, but it is sometimes missed at first. Dashboards enable you to scale your SEO reporting to the number of people who need to be kept up to date.
Online dashboards that can be customised allow you to meet the needs of each target consumer within your organisation. It is simple to obtain data from any solution that provides an API connection, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and so on.
Depending on whether you need to integrate your data with other functions within the company, you can use powerful enterprise dashboard solutions like Domo, which are used by multi-billion dollar enterprises like National Geographic, Univision, and eBay.
Within your own SEO team, you'll be looking at a much more granular set of data on a much more frequent basis. SEO strategists must identify and resolve issues as soon as possible. For this information, you should use SEO-specific tools such as STAT, DeepCrawl, Ahrefs, and SEMRush. Each of these tools allows you to generate reports, allowing your team to work with more detailed data.