Integrating an effective SEO strategy into a normal sized website is challenging enough. But when you multiply the number of pages and links that an enterprise level site may have, you also risk multiplying the impact of any issues you may face.

This is before you even consider factors external to SEO, such as the increased amount of internal stakeholders that have to be satisfied.

However, all challenges are scalable, and so are the solutions that can fix them. Enterprise level SEO can help to alleviate many of the challenges large websites can face. The trick is to know how to do it well.

What is an enterprise site?

To answer this question, we have to look at the two main schools of thought behind it.

The first looks purely at the site itself. This would be a site that has a high volume of pages that drive a significant amount of revenue for the business across multiple territories.

An example of an enterprise SEO site would be one that has over 1 million URLs and drives profits in the region of $20 million across multiple territories.

The other school of thought takes a wider view and looks at the organisation that is working on the site. The logic behind this is that, if a site has a large team working on its maintenance, it must be key to driving revenue and brand recognition. This also takes into account the organisation itself, as it’s very common for the business to operate in multiple verticals with a wide range of products or services.

Regardless of the school of thought, all enterprise SEO sites have certain things in common:

  • The website has a significant impact on the overall profits and brand recognition of the business.
  • The size of the team needed to maintain the site is bigger than most due to the sheer amount of project management and collaboration required.
  • Automation is needed in any enterprise SEO strategy due to the number of URLs included in the site and the time it would take to implement recommendations.

Now that we have defined the type of site that concerns the enterprise space, we can now look at the detail involved with enterprise SEO.

Defining enterprise SEO

Enterprise SEO can be defined as a large-scale approach to the strategic planning of search engine optimisation. Crucially, wider company goals and the maximizing of brand reputation have significantly more influence on the SEO strategy than that of smaller-sized businesses.

What makes enterprise SEO important?

Enterprise SEO is important for enterprise organisations as it allows for different business areas to collaborate specifically with the goal of optimising products through technical improvements or content optimisations.

When implemented correctly, enterprise SEO can positively impact a site’s performance.

Enterprise SEO challenges

Issues that enterprise sites encounter can be similar to ones that smaller sites face, with the only difference being that they are at scale.

Implementing the usual fixes at scale is a lot like turning a ship. For example, updating old pages by replacing them with new ones is seen as widespread practice for smaller sites. At an enterprise site level, these URLs will most likely have gained a strong backlink profile, which would be undermined with the usual strategy of simply replacing them.

Unfortunately, the scalability issues don’t stop there. Whatever the size of a site, resources will be needed to implement proposed changes from IT, Marketing, and Product.

Enterprise SEO requires additional resources from other departments across the business. The departments listed above would ordinarily have multiple projects that they need to execute, which makes gaining approval competitive. In some cases, you would need to present a business case to have your required resources approved.

Implementing enterprise SEO strategies can also impact internal collaboration. A larger workforce leads to more departments and stakeholders, which in turn means there are more issues to address and manage.

It’s important to know that, at an enterprise SEO Level, the site doesn’t just affect the profit of the business – it also impacts an employee’s ability to carry out their responsibilities.

A Sales Manager at a large E-commerce company will want their products ranking at the top of search at the same time the PR Director is publishing a press release on the same topic.

The main problem here is that both stakeholders may not understand how their own actions and personal stakes impact the site’s search performance.

This is why promoting Internal collaboration and managing the expectations of stakeholders is critical at an enterprise SEO level.

What makes enterprise SEO different?

There are many ways of defining how enterprise SEO differs from a normal SEO strategy. Scalability has a major impact, with more time and effort required for planning, conducting, and implementing strategies.

Let’s look at some of the main ways enterprise SEO differs from strategies used for smaller websites.

Automating SEO tasks

Many enterprise businesses have grown as a key focus within their business model.

Mergers, acquisitions, and new product launches are all recognised for driving growth, but, from an SEO perspective, they all create additional workload.

Even if the business understands SEO to a good standard and proactively creates a team to work on it, any manual completion of tasks is an inefficient use of resources.

Enterprise SEO has to have a greater focus on automation and provide their team with the right tools to easily scale and automate tasks, such as finding internal linking opportunities.

Developing local pages

The growth of local search and how important it has become to users cannot be understated.

Many large enterprises generate revenue through franchising or having a significant amount of physical stores. Because search engines often look to serve the user location-specific content where appropriate, leveraging local search should be a key focus of an enterprise SEO strategy.

You can optimize your website for enterprise local SEO by creating content templates that can be used across multiple location listings, providing the user with important information such as the address and opening times of the shop closest to them, as well as published customer reviews.

This will allow an enterprise SEO strategy to mass target “near me” searches with the aim of increasing local search visibility.

Managing multiple websites

Often, an enterprise business will have multiple sites. However, this provides its own set of challenges.

These issues include but are not limited to: duplicate content, inconsistent brand messaging, keyword cannibalisation, and how the different website platforms bridge with each other.

An enterprise must maintain individuality across its multiple sites or domains while also providing a level of uniformity that makes the management of them easier.

Enterprise SEO has a comprehensive approach at its core, which helps to mitigate the key issues of multiple sites and subdomains.

Enterprise SEO is here to stay

Effective enterprise SEO strategy can have a significant impact on the performance of a site, pushing a business to a position where it can dominate an entire industry. It isn’t without its challenges, and an enterprise can face more SEO obstacles than smaller sites. But when done right, an effective enterprise SEO strategy can take your website to new performance heights.