June 22, 2017
A Guide to a Successful Enterprise SEO Strategy
Aaron Levenstadt CEO & Founder
June 22, 2017 | 5 Min Read
Article updated on December 21, 2022
SEO is the largest driver of traffic to websites. For an enterprise business, an SEO program is an absolute necessity. Your competition is doing it, and those that aren’t soon will be.
A search engine optimization strategy is the only way to outperform your competition organically. That means that when people search for your products or services online, they find you first. This guide will help you get started with an enterprise SEO strategy.
How in-house and external SEO consultants Collaborate
Most large businesses have both in-house and external consultants working on their SEO program. The in-house SEO is employed by the company and, generally, works in the office. The external consultant is an individual or SEO agency that works with multiple clients and offers enterprise SEO services. They each play different roles that work towards a common goal.The benefits of external SEO
Hiring enterprise SEO services generally means bringing in a lot more expertise and experience. Additionally, they have more SEO resources and tools available.The benefits of in-house SEO
An in-house SEO manager’s sole responsibility is to your company. They move things along faster since they know the internal workings and regulations.External and internal SEO work towards a common goal
The external enterprise SEO services validate the in-house manager. They also drive strategy and vision. The in-house manager uses their familiarity with the enterprise to navigate the internal organization and publishing process. For large enterprises, this combo helps achieve the best SEO results more efficiently.
Minimize levels of approval – Simplify the process
Any large company has multiple levels of submission and approval. To create an efficient enterprise SEO strategy you should minimize the number of people and levels that SEO content and decisions must go through.Create a decision-maker
Pick one person to be the main point of contact and the decision maker for SEO. This will help to move projects along faster and without too much interference. A common SEO mistake large enterprises experience is having too many levels of approval for content. This results in changes to the content that render it less focused and effective for SEO. It also leads to a much longer publishing process. Having one decision-maker reduces both of these problems.Establish what needs approval
Many large enterprises require approval of SEO content before publishing. This can be an important step in quality assurance and in creating peace of mind for the enterprise. However, it can be overdone. Technical SEO elements, like meta descriptions and URL slugs, may not be necessary to review. If you want to have assurance of URL slugs, you can establish naming conventions for the slugs early in the engagement. For example, a naming convention for blog URL slugs could be “/blog_Topic_month_year”.Establish mandatories
Any mandatories for content should be established early on in the SEO engagement. This will reduce the back and forth between the SEO content team and the decision-maker. This could include specific phrasing required for branding, colors to be used in graphs or charts, and approved image styles.
Managing metrics
Big business generates big data. As valuable as all this data is, it can be a huge burden if it is not properly managed from the get-go. Data management is a major challenge faced by large enterprises. Data management should be put in place before beginning the enteprise SEO strategy. Establishing set goals, analytics tracking, and data collection is essential to manage organized and actionable data. This may take longer to establish, but it’s worthwhile. The organization will save time and prevent confusion in the long run. As well, properly managed data will inform SEO content and strategy, helping to run an effective campaign faster. Once the basics and baseline metrics are established, it’s important to have an ongoing data management plan. This can include site traffic analysis, site audits, paid search reports, keyword reports, or sales numbers. A good practice with this is to have a predetermined touchpoint for these reports, for example, once per month. These reports help both the business and the SEO team. The business gets to see what is being done for them, how the program is progressing, and see the value the program adds. The SEO team uses this information to continually improve the program, based on real, up-to-date, SEO results.
Content organization
The organization of SEO content is a major obstacle for large enterprises. This mostly comes down to the sheer quantity of content that has been or will be, produced. The main struggles from this are the detection of content, developing a strong link profile, and duplicate content and tagging.Detection
Often larger and older sites are difficult for search engines, like Google, to read if they have not been set up with search engines in mind. If the site is not being read properly by search engines it will not get the most out of its SEO, and may even be penalized. One of the most important steps to prevent or rectify this situation is to create and submit XML sitemaps. The sitemap will allow search engines to read your site the way you intend it to be viewed.Link profile
Many large sites struggle to build a strong link profile. It’s common for all interlinking to be going to only one or two pages. Typically, the contact page and home page. While this may be good for directing customers, it does not look good to search engines and can hurt your SEO performance.Duplicate content
Dealing with duplicate content can be a lot more work for a company that’s running a content program or has in the past. If duplicate content has not been addressed throughout the course of these content programs it’s likely that you are receiving a negative SEO score. When beginning a new SEO program, this is one of the elements that should be addressed early on. Cleaning up duplicate content will remove penalties. Doing so is likely to instigate an increase in rank much faster. Enterprise SEO typically takes longer to yield significant results. So this is definitely an important step to help show progress.
Time: enterprise SEO takes longer
You’ll need to be patient. Creating an effective enterprise SEO strategy isn’t just a time-consuming process. It also takes longer to produce SEO results. For SMB and SME SEO programs, it often takes at least three months to start showing the effects. A large enterprise may take six months, or even a year to really take off. Part of the reason for the amount of time it takes to start showing results is a longer technical SEO website audit process. Having large volumes of content and pages often means having a lot of technical errors to fix. This can be time-consuming for a large enterprise. But it’s a very important process to ensure the success of the SEO campaign. Fixing errors found in the SEO site audit will correct existing penalties from search engines and will help to prevent future ones. Resolving these penalties will allow you to compete effectively in the search market. Having to go through multiple levels of approval is another reason that enterprise SEO programs can take longer to get off the ground. The multiple levels, slow down the process of getting content published. Once again, we stress the importance of assigning one decision-maker to help speed up the process.
Focus enterprise SEO on user experience
The trend going forward with how search engines rank content is user-centric. As a general rule, t’s better to focus on writing content with a bigger focus on user experience than on keywords. There are two main reasons for this.- Search engines are getting better at deriving meaning from content. They are able to identify the topics and pull keywords and synonyms to better sync the user’s search query to the results shown. Overuse of keywords, or poor keyword insertion, can end up getting a spammy appearance.
- Search engines are putting a greater emphasis on user engagement metrics. Search ranking is affected by how many users view a page, as well as how they interact with it. Spending more time on a page, clicking through to read more pages, and sharing the page, are all positive forms of engagement that improve search performance. These are all indicators of a good user experience.
Creating content for enterprise SEO
Creating high-performance enterprise SEO content requires a solid understanding of existing content, site structure, and the audience.Maintain existing SEO content
A knowledge of site content and site structure will help to keep past articles alive. Two of the major forces to draw SEO juice from past content are content optimization and interlinking.Content optimization
Content optimization is returning to old content and improving or updating the content. Oftentimes it is more beneficial to go back and add to a past post rather than create a new post altogether. This allows you to leverage existing content as well as page age and authority. The best enteprise SEO services offer programs that contain a split of optimization and new content creation.Interlinking
This is defined as putting links into posts that lead to other pages or areas on your site. There are three advantages to this.- Improved navigation, directing users where you want them to go next.
- Improved SEO score of linked pages.
- Gaining SEO value from link anchor text.
Create unique content
As a rule, unique content performs better. Smaller companies often put a large focus on scraping content for their SEO strategies. This is because they do not have the same advantages as large enterprises. Firstly, they often have much tighter time constraints for writing their content. Creating new, unique content is much more time-consuming than scraping content. As well, they do not enjoy the same level of authority as a large company. People put more trust into a company with a brand they recognize, and are far more likely to share content. The most likely content to be shared is unique and useful. Unique content provides better engagement, draws new readers, and performs better overall. This content doesn’t have to be limited to standard blog posts. Enterprises usually have the budget to create video content, and this should be taken advantage of. Video gets preferential treatment from search engines and gets more engagement from viewers. Consider how your enterprise might best represent itself through video content.Getting content out there
With the content created, all that’s left is getting it out there. Share links to your content in your newsletters, emails, and social media feeds. Create a link-building campaign. A good link-building campaign drives more readers as well as improves s site’s overall SEO performance.Get an enterprise SEO strategy started today
Creating an enterprise-level SEO strategy is a big, but worthwhile task. SEO is the largest driver of traffic to websites, the biggest generator of engagement, and builds consumer trust. With almost all readers visiting only the first three organic search results, it’s an absolute must to be ranking on important keywords and phrases. The effects of SEO are long-lasting and compounding. Contact Pedestal to start your enterprise SEO program today. We will develop a plan specific to your enterprise’s needs.Categories:
Aaron Levenstadt
CEO & Founder
Aaron Levenstadt completed his degree in Statistical & Data Science at Stanford University. That focus has given him an unparalleled data-driven approach to search engine digital marketing. Prior to founding Pedestal Search, Aaron worked at Google at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View California. At Google he worked on the Organic Search, Paid Search and Google Analytics products, which equipped him with extensive knowledge of the mechanisms driving Google’s algorithm and other internet search engines.