Enterprise SEO is the process of improving search engine rankings for large organizations or websites, which often have thousands or even millions of web pages.
Enterprise SEO, done well, requires scaling traditional SEO practices to manage vast amounts of content, technical SEO issues, and coordination across departments within an organization (that often lack SEO buy-in or may even have competing goals!). For instance, enterprise SEO might include:
- Automating content production—or, at least elements of it (think thousands of meta or product descriptions)
- Managing internal linking at scale
- Solving complex information architecture problems while pleasing all stakeholders
- Strategizing for and deploying templates for various page types
- Auditing technical issues like site speed across hundreds of page types and thousands of URLs
- Real-world Enterprise SEO Example
- Imagine a company like Nike (based in Oregon like us at RicketyRoo!). There’s an overwhelming amount of content to manage but also an incredible amount of opportunities.
According to Semrush, they have nearly half a million keywords ranking in the top three positions in Google Search:
Nike also has more than 370,000 pages available to search engines:
For Nike, the right SEO strategy not only involves SEO best practices but also aligning with stakeholders in departments across the company and overall business trends and goals. Surely the SEOs at Nike had to speak in terms of market share and profitability before deploying their strategies.
What Makes Enterprise SEO Different from Other Types of SEO?
When you think of corporations like Nike, it becomes easier to visualize just how messy—yet full of opportunity!—enterprise SEO can be.
At the end of the day, it’s the sheer massive scale that makes enterprise SEO enterprise. Managing and optimizing hundreds of pages so that they maximize organic traffic potential while remaining on brand and satisfying users (and the C-suite!) can prove challenging enough. Scale that to hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, and it quickly becomes an unwieldy behemoth.
In enterprise SEO, manually updating a few pages here and there (except, perhaps for a few key pages) won’t move the needle enough and takes more time than is reasonable. Creating a streamlined process that can be replicated across thousands of pages, without losing effectiveness, is key for enterprise SEO.
Common Challenges with Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO can trip up even the most seasoned SEO professionals. From technical hurdles to organizational obstacles, enterprise SEO can be like navigating a maze with moving walls—or maybe one that fights back as in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire…
Page Speed
Managing page speed across a massive site is like a mob scene, but slow load times will sink your search engine rankings and disrupt UX. Best practices apply just as on smaller websites, but figuring out how to scale minifying CSS, HTML, and Javascript and compressing images across countless page types in a way that works with your enterprise CMS can be a conundrum.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is harder to defeat at scale. Page bloat is a real problem with enterprise websites, where dated web pages aren’t dealt with in due time, and newer pages end up with similar content. A plan to deal with updating and adding new content while simultaneously dealing with dated content is absolutely crucial in enterprise SEO.
Internal Linking
Internal linking can offer pages a nice boost while improving UX. But if it’s left to falter, it can be a nightmare to deploy properly. Thankfully, tools or a Python script can help relieve some of the manual labor of internal linking. But unless your enterprise site has a solid plan in place, lacking internal links can inhibit ranking potential and overlook easy UX wins.
SEO Buy-In
At the enterprise level, getting buy-in from stakeholders can feel like a slow, uphill battle. Saying, “We need this for SEO,” simply won’t cut it. SEOs in an enterprise context need to align their goals with the company’s broader goals and “translate” their needs and recommendations accordingly. Learning how to frame SEO opportunities in terms of revenue growth, market share, and customer acquisition can go a long way in navigating the long road to SEO change for large-scale websites.
Unique Enterprise SEO Opportunities
With unique challenges come some special opportunities that smaller sites can only dream of. Done right, enterprise SEO can absolutely blow the doors off the competition.
Higher Domain Authority
Quality enterprise websites often have the exceptional advantage of higher domain authority. They can target highly competitive keywords that smaller sites can only drool over. Unlike smaller sites that need to build their authority from the ground up before ranking well, enterprise sites can pursue a breadth of topics and keywords that will ride the wave of the site’s overall authority.
In an ideal world, enterprise sites would still focus on delivering quality content regardless of their automatic ranking potential upon hitting publish. Still, higher authority affords an opportunity to draw more and more impressions and clicks, accelerating brand awareness and continuing to pick up authoritative steam.
Maximum Topical Authority
By nature of their size, enterprise sites have a head start with topical authority—and the resources they need should they choose to cover topics beyond their primary niche. With domain authority and highly relevant topical authority already on their side, publishing content in the enterprise site’s niche will inevitably rank well, even without outreach.
As enterprise sites begin to branch out to cover more topics, they’re already leaps and bounds ahead of smaller sites attempting to cover the same topics.
Brand Awareness for Link Building
Unlinked brand mentions are a goldmine for SEO—assuming that your brand has mentions. For smaller sites, brand mentions can get tapped out quickly. But for bigger brands, the brand mentions might even number too many to manage. While smaller sites are eager to snatch up any links possible, enterprise sites may already have domain authority such that they don’t even prioritize branded mentions.
Better Operations for Improved Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO can seem daunting, but with the right strategy, SEO can unite teams across departments for exceptional growth. Following a documented process with key stakeholders, all looped in can turn a disjointed, lackluster approach into a streamlined marketing weapon that maximizes marketing channels across the organization.
Scaling up SEO performance takes skill, grit, and determination. At RicketyRoo, we’ve managed SEO for businesses with hundreds of locations and thousands and thousands of pages. Between franchisees and international locations, there’s always an entire constellation of pieces to hold together.
We know you’re after ROI with enterprise SEO. So are we. It’s time to consider all the angles and send results to the stratosphere.
Need help with enterprise SEO? We can help your organization identify gaps and opportunities. Book a discovery call to learn valuable insights for your enterprise SEO strategy.