SEO

Enterprise SEO: How to Rank on Search Engines for Large Organizations

February 27, 2024

Enterprise SEO is no walk in the park. When you're dealing with a large website with hundreds or even thousands of pages, ranking well in Google and other search engines requires an immense amount of work and resources. But when done right, enterprise SEO can drive a massive amount of organic traffic and new business to your company.

What Is Enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO is a comprehensive approach to search engine optimization that caters to the needs of large organizations. With enterprise-level businesses, the scale of SEO work is much larger due to the size of the website, the number of products or services offered, and the complexity of the business structure.

The focus of enterprise SEO is not just on keywords and content but also on deep technical SEO, structured data, site hierarchy, and an overarching strategy that often involves coordination across different departments like IT, marketing, sales, and customer service. It's about ensuring that search engines can easily navigate and understand the vast content on the site so that it can be properly indexed and ranked.

Because of the scale, enterprise SEO typically involves more sophisticated tools and analytics, a stronger emphasis on content automation, and a greater need for alignment with the company's strategic goals. It often requires a dedicated team or an agency specializing in handling the nuances of large-scale SEO.

What makes enterprise SEO different from traditional SEO?

  • Scale: Enterprise SEO deals with huge volumes of web pages, domains, and digital assets. Optimizing all of these at scale requires automated solutions and a high degree of technical sophistication.
  • Integration: Enterprise websites are often powered by multiple content management systems, ecommerce platforms, and marketing automation tools. Enterprise SEO requires integrating with all of these systems to optimize content and technical SEO.
  • Teams: Large companies typically have multiple teams involved in SEO, like a central SEO team plus product teams, content teams, and developers. Enterprise SEO governance and collaboration across these groups is key.
  • Competitive landscape: Big brands often compete in highly competitive spaces, so enterprise SEO also focuses on gaining strategic advantages to outrank massive competitors.
  • Compliance: Enterprises must follow guidelines like brand consistency, legal requirements, and accessibility standards. Enterprise SEO works within these constraints to optimize content and user experience.
  • ROI: Given the scale of investment, enterprise SEO is highly focused on driving meaningful business impact and ROI. This means aligning SEO objectives with key performance indicators (KPIs) and business goals.

Enterprise SEO Challenges

Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

Enterprise SEO comes with its own set of challenges. When you're optimizing a large website with potentially thousands of pages, keeping everything in order can feel like an impossible task. Here are some obstacles that enterprise SEOs often face:

1. Poor Site Structure: Enterprise websites often contain a vast amount of content and pages, making it challenging to maintain an organized structure. This can result in poor user experience and hinder search engine visibility.

2. Crawlability Challenges: Crawlability is vital for search engines to discover and index a website's pages. However, complex structures and poor internal linking can pose challenges for search engine crawlers.

3. Lack of Scalability: Enterprise websites face challenges in scaling their SEO efforts due to the large number of pages. As the website grows, it becomes time-consuming and inefficient to manually optimize each page.

4. Lack of Resources: Enterprises may encounter resource constraints that impact their SEO initiatives. Limited budgets, insufficient staffing, and a lack of specialized tools can hinder the effectiveness of SEO strategies.

How will Enterprise SEO Help Your Business?

According to BrightEdge, organic search drives 53% of website traffic, which highlights the importance of a strong SEO strategy for enterprises that aim to capture and convert the majority of this traffic.

By focusing on tailored content, keyword optimization, and a seamless user experience, enterprise SEO helps ensure that when customers are searching for services or products in your industry, your business is not just visible but positioned as the authoritative choice.

In addition, optimized content helps build credibility and trust with customers. By producing pages that provide value and are tailored to answer specific customer questions, enterprise SEO demonstrates your business is a knowledgeable and authoritative source in your industry. This establishes you as the go-to brand for your products or services.

Enterprise SEO strategies

To optimize an enterprise website and gain more organic search traffic, focus on the following enterprise SEO strategies:

Technical SEO

Make sure your site has a fast page load speed, mobile-friendly design, secure HTTPS protocol, and more. These factors impact your search ranking and user experience. Regularly check for broken links or redirects, duplicate content, and proper page titles and metadata.

Content creation

Develop high-quality content that answers questions and provides value for your target audience. Blog posts, videos, case studies, and landing pages are all great options. Use keywords in your content that people actually search for and link internally to other relevant content on your site. Update and republish evergreen content regularly to keep it fresh.

Link building

Earn high-quality backlinks from authoritative industry websites to build your domain authority. Guest blogging, resource link roundups, sponsorships, and media outreach are effective ways to gain more backlinks. Make sure any links you build resonate with their target audience and provide value to readers.

On-page SEO

Optimize your page titles, URLs, headings, and content for important keywords. Place keywords in the first part of page titles and URLs and in headings. Use keywords naturally in your content. Image alt text and internal links also provide additional keyword opportunities.

Competitor analysis

See what's working for your top competitors and look for opportunities to outrank them. Study their content, backlinks, keywords, and more. Then create a strategy focused on surpassing them in search results. Track their ranking movements over time to gain valuable insights.

To maximize results, meet with your SEO and marketing teams regularly. Discuss priorities, challenges, and new strategies to keep improving your enterprise SEO program. With a collaborative effort and consistent focus on optimization, your site can achieve higher rankings and more organic traffic.

Enterprise SEO Tools

As an enterprise, you likely have a large website with many pages and sections to optimize. Doing SEO for a site of this scale requires some heavy-duty tools to help analyze, track, and improve rankings and traffic. Here are some of the tools you can use:

Google Search Console

This free tool from Google provides insights into how your site is performing in Google search results. You'll get reports on indexed pages, click-through rates, impressions, and potential issues affecting your rankings like 404 errors or mobile usability problems. By connecting Search Console to your Google Analytics 4 account, you can see how people are finding your site from search and how that traffic translates to key conversions and business goals.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs serves as an invaluable SEO tool for marketers and SEO. Ahrefs offers a suite of tools for keyword research, content analysis, and rank tracking, making it an all-encompassing platform for anyone looking to boost their online visibility and track the success of their SEO efforts.

Screaming Frog

This desktop crawler tool can crawl up to 500 URLs at a time, extracting on-page issues, redirects, page titles, meta descriptions, and more. The data it gathers helps you optimize pages for search and fix technical problems.

SEMrush

Another leader in the SEO tools space, SEMrush users can perform keyword research, track the keyword strategies of your competition, conduct SEO audits, and look for backlinking opportunities. It also provides a wealth of data, including search volume, trends, and difficulty level for ranking certain keywords.

Hypotenuse AI

Hypotenuse AI is an AI content writing tool for SEO, helping you create SEO-optimized content at scale. Hypotenuse AI streamlines the content optimization process for enterprises. From researching SERP/PAAs to uncovering topic and keyword opportunities to inserting links—you can do all of this without leaving the platform.

With the right tools supporting your SEO strategies, you can gain valuable data-driven insights to optimize your enterprise website and achieve higher search rankings and more organic traffic.

But never forget that behind every tool is a skilled SEO specialist applying their expertise and experience to drive real results. Technology and human insights paired together are key to success.

Measuring Success in Enterprise SEO

Enterprise SEO requires diligent tracking and analysis to measure success and optimization opportunities. Some key metrics to monitor include:

Organic traffic

Analyze your website's organic traffic over time to see if you're gaining more visibility and rankings in search engines. Are more people finding your site through Google, Bing, and other search engines? Organic traffic is a key indicator of how well your enterprise SEO efforts are paying off.

Keyword rankings

Track where your targeted keywords rank in Google and other search engines. Are they moving up over time? Improved rankings, especially for primary keywords and other high-value keywords, show your SEO initiatives are taking effect.

Conversion rate

Monitor how many visitors complete your desired action like filling out a contact form or making a purchase. Improved rankings and more traffic don't mean much without a good conversion rate. Analyze where people are dropping off and make changes to optimize the user experience.

Backlinks

The quality and quantity of backlinks to your site impact search rankings. Are authoritative websites linking to yours? Track new links as well as their domain authority and page authority to make sure you're gaining powerful, relevant backlinks over time.

On-page optimization

Review your on-page SEO to ensure all elements like page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and internal linking are optimized for your keywords. On-page SEO is the foundation of any enterprise SEO strategy, so continuously improve and strengthen it.

Competitor rankings

See how your rankings compare to competitors for shared keywords. Gaining ground on competitors is a sign your SEO efforts are winning. But if competitors have a sudden jump in ranking, investigate why and make necessary adjustments to your strategy.

Continually measuring and analyzing these key metrics will help you gauge the success and effectiveness of your enterprise SEO program so you can build on what’s working and change what’s not. Successful enterprise SEO is an ongoing process of optimizing, measuring, and improving.

Enterprise SEO FAQs

Here are some common questions about enterprise SEO:

What is the difference between enterprise SEO and traditional SEO?

Enterprise SEO focuses on the search visibility of an entire organization, including multiple websites, social media profiles, and more. Traditional SEO typically focuses on optimizing a limited number of web pages.

What is the difference between enterprise SEO and local SEO?

Enterprise SEO aims to increase the search ranking of a company and its brands on a national or global scale. Local SEO focuses on optimizing for searches within a specific geographic area, targeting customers who are physically near a business location. Large companies may combine enterprise SEO and local SEO strategies.

Why is technical SEO especially important for large enterprises?

Given the complex website structures and the vast amount of content, technical SEO is critical to ensure search engines can efficiently crawl, index, and rank the site's many pages.

Can you automate parts of enterprise SEO?

Yes, automation is a critical component of enterprise SEO due to the volume of tasks. Automation can be applied to keyword research, reporting, monitoring website health, and even aspects of content creation and optimization.

How do you handle SEO for multiple product lines and services?

SEO for multiple products and services involves segmenting and targeting keywords specific to each product or service line, creating dedicated content, and ensuring that each section of the website is optimized for search engines and user experience.

What to Look for in an Enterprise SEO Solution?

When scouting for an Enterprise SEO solution, it's crucial to find a platform that not only scales with your business but also integrates seamlessly with your existing systems.

Hypotenuse AI stands out as a custom solution tailored for Enterprise teams. It offers a suite of advanced features such as SEO mode and bespoke AI models trained on your brand voice, company knowledge, and more. With the ability to personalize strategies for different teams, Hypotenuse ensures that your content resonates with the target audience while maintaining strong brand consistency.

Hazel
SEO Specialist
Hazel has over 3 years of experience in SEO. She has helped multiple clients in different industries grow their online presence through SEO, content creation and other marketing strategies.

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