The Ultimate Enterprise SEO Strategy For Explosive Growth

Developing & executing an Enterprise SEO strategy present unique challenges, as well as massive opportunities.

Technical issues are magnified with the size of the website; small issues cause huge problems, and on the flip side, small strategic fixes result in explosive growth.

When creating an enterprise SEO strategy it’s important to analyze the 80/20 and to take an agile and iterative approach while navigating the red tape and politics of the enterprise environment.

How is an Enterprise SEO Strategy Different?

Enterprise SEO strategies are inherently unique for two reasons:

1. Authority – enterprises have a large amount of brand recognition and authority in their space stemming from quality content and backlinks.
2. Technical SEO – enterprise websites have an array of technical issues from subdomains, microsites, duplicate content, multiple languages, website architecture, internal linking, and various other technical issues.If these issues are not addressed they tend to balloon out of control, causing indexation issues, drops in crawl rates, and even algorithmic penalties.

Unlike regular SEO strategies that focus on building authority and content, enterprise SEO strategies tend to work backward.

Proprietary tools and processes are used to run comprehensive audits, and from there the 80/20 rule is used to identify strategic fixes that will result in the biggest wins.

“Enterprise SEO often presents many advantages over SEO for SMB firms. Typically there is a lot more innate potential to drive high ROI due to the existing authority of the brand and domain. Additionally, the volume of existing content also presents a lot of opportunity.” – Zamir Javer

Further, there are larger differences between b2b and b2c enterprise seo.  Typically b2b tends to be more complex in nature due to the heavier need to a wider net of niche specific content. This is often best handled by a b2b seo company specialized with deep industry domain knowledge.

Here are areas that I find the most critical to address in the beginning:

Technical SEO & Website Architecture

As I mentioned before, enterprise websites often struggle with indexation issues, poor crawl rates, and algorithmic penalties.

These issues are often a result of a poor website architecture and an array of technical issues.

Technical SEO

• Duplicate Content – Often times enterprises have multiple websites, subdomains, microsites, and content in multiple languages.To avoid duplicate content the proper implementation of canonical, hreflang, and noindex tags within the appropriate areas of enterprise website(s).
• Crawl Budget – Due to the size of enterprise websites, the technical issues tend to scale and the more important it becomes to optimize your website’s crawl budget.Optimizing your robots.txt, and .htaccess files while analyzing your server logs, and response codes are imperative.

Professional seo services should always involve ongoing audits to identify any major technical weaknesses immediately so that you can generate quick wins and also avoid hitting any walls that will stop you from seeing ROI.

Website Architecture

The architecture of a website includes the organization of your website’s content as well as the internal linking between the content.

Contrary to what many people believe, in a case study from Moz they found that Google (almost definitely) has an organic quality score similar to that of Google’s Adwords quality score.

A major factor in the quality of a website is having an architecture that is friendly for both website visitors and search engine crawlers.

Not only will an optimal architecture help search engines better understand pages that are organized together, but the internal linking within the architecture will also transfer backlink equity to important pages that are harder to build backlinks to (product & service pages).

Keyword Selection

• High search volume keywords – This is where enterprise SEO becomes fun, when it comes to trophy keywords with large search volumes there are no holds barred.The large amount of authority that enterprise websites have make competitive keywords within reach, with the right strategy.
• Low Hanging Fruit – Most enterprise website’s will already be ranking for a wide range of keywords at the bottom of page 1 and 2.There is a large opportunity here for a handful of quick wins.

A handful of high search volume keywords that will directly impact the leads & sales, along with low hanging fruit and quick win opportunities is a solid keyword strategy for immediate growth of an enterprise website.

Content Marketing

• Authoritative Content – Technical white papers and case studies are great pieces of content to showcase authority and thought leadership while attracting backlinks.
• Pillar pages & Topic Clusters – An emerging content marketing strategy is the use of pillar pages and topic clusters. A pillar page is a very large and very informative piece of content that covers all aspects of a specific topic.A topic cluster is a subset of smaller content pieces that make up a particular content. Pillar pages and topic clusters are a good content marketing strategy for targeting high traffic keywords & topics as well as hitting long tail variations.

Historical Optimizations & Content Augmentations

A lot of opportunity lies within the content that already exists on an enterprise website; this content can be quickly and easily re-optimized, expanded upon, combined together or refocused to target new (or more) keywords.

Auditing your website’s content for SEO is one of the most strategic approaches an enterprise can take towards exploding growth without having to get approvals, wait on developers or hire additional staff, it is truly a quick win.

Steal Our SEO Processes

• How to do an SEO Content Audit
• What You Need to Execute Effective B2B Keyword Research
• How to Optimize New & Old Blog Posts for SEO

Enterprise Considerations

There are considerations to keep in mind when preparing an enterprise SEO strategy such as:

• The team required – Strategizing and implementing the right enterprise SEO strategy requires a team of specialists including an SEO analyst, developer, content writer and a project manager.
• Executive buy-ins – Continuous compromises of recommended SEO optimizations caused by the need to satiate conflicting internal departmental views and requirements.
• Approvals and time delays – Approvals to make the required changes are often delayed by lengthy and complicated internal processes with multiple decisions makers.
• Decision framework – Having a framework in place to identify & prioritize tasks without going down the rabbit hole of SEO fixes.

Conclusion

Creating an enterprise SEO strategy is different than regular SEO strategies in that it requires:

• proprietary tools & processes to evaluate the situation
• a heavy focus on technical SEO and content marketing
• the right keyword selection
• an agile and iterative approach of completing the tasks

All of which is to be completed while maneuvering the enterprise landscape of executive buy-ins, approvals, delays and red tape.

Are you looking for the most optimal SEO strategy for your enterprise? Schedule a free 30-minute consultation.

What challenges has your enterprise faced?