Enterprise websites are tasked with multiple purposes: making sales, generating leads, showcasing products, supporting customers, and providing thought leadership and blog content. You might even have regional and language-specific sites. The problem is, websites made up of thousands of pages have so many places where search engine optimization (SEO) can fall through the cracks.
If your large-scale site isn’t making the impact you want in the search engine results pages (SERPs), use this guide to smooth out some of the obstacles. You’ll learn about common SEO enterprise issues, how to overcome these hurdles, and best practices to put into place. By the end, you’ll understand what you need to get your brand ranking well in the SERPs to support your overall business goals.
Unique Challenges of Enterprise SEO
First, let’s look at the big picture. I’ve summarized some common difficulties with enterprise SEO so you can see where issues are cropping up.
1. Website Scale and Complexity
The larger a website, the more complex it is to organize, especially if there are subdomains and microsites. And that’s where you run into trouble from an SEO perspective.
Enterprise sites get cumbersome, and if you don’t nail your site architecture and navigation, your search visibility will drop. You need to harness your pages into a logical, well-organized structure so they’re easier for search engines to crawl and index. Your pages should be no more than three clicks from your homepage.
2. Stakeholder Buy-in and Collaboration
Multiple layers of decision-making make it harder to secure corporate buy-in for your SEO activities. Executives may struggle to see the long-term benefits of SEO, and you’ll likely compete for resources with channels that deliver more immediate impact.
Also, if IT, marketing, and content teams are managed independently, SEO may not be their priority. It will take time to coordinate efforts to make technical website changes, implement keywords, and optimize content.
3. Inconsistent or Duplicate Content
Enterprise sites are ripe for duplicate content, such as variations of product pages and core messaging repeated on subdomains and microsites. Unless you handle them properly, identical or highly similar pages wreak havoc on SEO. It’s not obvious which pages search engines should display to users, so the pages can compete for keyword ranking.
You may also have different departments rolling out content. Without company-wide standards, you’ll end up with varying levels of content quality, off-brand messaging, and content that’s published before you can optimize it for SEO.
4. Technical SEO at Scale
Your technical SEO efforts must be meticulous for search engines to crawl and understand your content. But as a site grows — especially if it’s haphazardly — there’s much more room for enterprise SEO issues. Your site structure can go out of whack, and pages that aren’t optimized will slow down your site and create a poor mobile experience.
There are also more opportunities for broken links, redirect errors, and schema markup issues to occur. A robust enterprise site demands careful implementation of technical SEO and constant monitoring to ensure every page receives attention and adjustments as needed.
5. Tracking and Measuring ROI
Customers usually interact with large brands through multiple touchpoints, making it challenging to attribute revenue to specific channels. Was that sale the result of ranking at the top of the SERPs or the social media ad that encouraged someone to Google your business? Proving the value of SEO is further complicated by the time it takes for efforts to gain traction.
To demonstrate ROI and justify spending to multiple stakeholders, you need advanced analytics across departments and channels, and collaboration from marketing, sales, product, and customer service teams.
6. Managing Multiple Websites and Domains
You likely oversee more than one domain if your business operates in different countries, owns subsidiaries, or markets separate brands and product lines. The more websites you manage, the greater the scale of your efforts. Each one requires a custom SEO strategy and implementation based on best practices. You also need comprehensive reporting to see how each site contributes to your enterprise’s overall business goals.
7. Balancing Local and Global SEO
One of the biggest challenges of enterprise SEO is improving visibility on an international scale while also targeting audiences in local markets. For example, a global consultant such as Deloitte needs to appear in searches for core keywords to demonstrate authority in its niche while also being discoverable by potential clients seeking a business consultant in “near me” or city-specific searches. These two SEO strategies require different skill sets and expertise and must be combined seamlessly.
Strategies for Overcoming Enterprise SEO Challenges
Now, let’s get your large-scale website into shape so it rises up the SERPs for relevant queries. Below are the key ingredients of enterprise SEO strategy success.
1. Develop a Comprehensive SEO Strategy
Your SEO strategy should have a clear purpose and align with overall business goals. This makes it easier to prioritize your tactics, collaborate across departments, and demonstrate value for your efforts. Determine how to achieve each goal and create a comprehensive strategy that aligns with KPIs to measure your performance.
2. Foster Cross-functional Collaboration
Create an SEO center of excellence at your company that provides the knowledge and resources needed to improve search performance.
This specialized unit promotes the benefits of SEO, collaborates with key stakeholders, develops strategies across departments or regions, creates standardized guidelines, and ensures best practices. As a trusted resource for SEO, this knowledge center stays current on search trends and delivers training and education to improve the company’s overall SEO capabilities. Alternatively, you can partner with an SEO agency to serve as this consultative arm.
3. Implement Scalable Content Processes
Enterprise websites have so. much. content. Make sure the quality remains high by creating standards that all teams must meet before publishing.
Your content governance guidelines should specify individual roles, approval processes, brand voice and tone, style, language choice, and SEO best practices. These guidelines will help maintain uniform standards as you scale output.
In terms of execution, a powerful content management system speeds up the production process by allowing teams to create, edit, and publish content from one place. Templates are especially helpful, standardizing the structure of blog posts or product descriptions and ensuring consistency across pages and regions.
4. Prioritize Technical SEO Foundations
It’s difficult to rank well if your site isn’t technically sound. Once you have a logical site architecture and navigation in place, implement site-wide improvements to ensure your site is secure, fast, and mobile friendly. Schedule regular technical audits to monitor issues such as broken links, redirect errors, and other issues that may impact indexing and crawling.
5. Leverage Enterprise SEO Tools and Platforms
When you’re optimizing a large-scale website, technology is your best friend. Many enterprise-level SEO tools automate tasks and streamline data collection and analysis. These tools are usually faster and more accurate than manual methods, especially for massive sites. Integrate these platforms with your content management system and existing marketing tech stack to further streamline your workflow.
6. Implement a Robust Keyword Research and Mapping Process
Perform in-depth keyword research to identify the most promising keywords for your niche, focusing on your core business, audience segments, and geographic markets. You should have a comprehensive list of keywords for different business units, such as sales, marketing, and customer support, as well as stages of the buyer journey.
Take a strategic approach to implementation and map each keyword to a specific piece of content, such as a blog post, white paper, or case study. This ensures you support each keyword with an asset that’s relevant and interesting to your audience.
7. Optimize for Voice Search and Featured Snippets
Structure your content to land the featured snippet in the SERPs, which is the most prominent position on the page and drives the most clicks. To target position zero, which displays above organic search results, you need to understand what information the user is looking for and include a precise, short answer early in your content.
Voice search is also on the rise, so optimizing for these queries can expand your audience reach. Use natural, conversational language that’s similar to how people speak, and answer the search query as directly as possible.
Best Practices for Successful Enterprise SEO
As you implement your SEO strategies, maximize your workflow and improve overall performance by following the best practices listed below.
1. Establish Clear KPIs and Reporting
Define your SEO goals, making each one as specific as possible. Then, choose relevant KPIs to measure your progress. Monitor these regularly, as they will signal when your tactics may need adjusting. Translate your data into an executive-level dashboard that gives key stakeholders a quick visual summary of critical SEO enterprise metrics. These dashboards often feature pie charts and graphs to make it easy to interpret data and trends and demonstrate the impact of your SEO efforts.
2. Invest in Ongoing Training and Education
Your content strategists, writers, developers, and data analysts all play a key role in your success and should have a deep understanding of SEO principles and search trends. Provide ongoing training on best practices to help avoid enterprise SEO issues. It’s also useful to educate product, marketing, sales, and leadership teams to ensure a company-wide understanding of the role of SEO in achieving your organization’s business goals.
3. Prioritize User Experience (UX)
SEO helps search engines interpret and rank your web pages, but your site should offer a superior user experience above all else. Site visitors should be able to navigate it effortlessly and hone in on the information they need. Your site should be fast loading, mobile friendly, and guide users seamlessly through your content. This creates positive associations with your brand, builds loyalty, and supports conversions. And since Google rewards sites that deliver great user experiences with higher rankings, you’re accomplishing two things at once.
4. Implement Structured Data
Structured data helps search engines understand key pieces of content, such as your business name, industry, founders, head office location, operating hours, product names, and prices. When you confirm which bits of content correlate to different types of structured data, Google can display these details in rich snippets and knowledge panels. This provides users with more information and boosts the visibility of your business in the SERPs.
5. Engage in Strategic Link Building
Demonstrate to Google that your content is credible and valuable by building links to your web pages from authoritative websites across various markets. Focus on acquiring a variety of quality links from trusted sources in your industry, ensuring they’re relevant to the site.
Referring domains are more likely to link to helpful content or insightful thought leadership, such as articles, white papers, case studies, and original research. You can also publish guest posts on external sites and link back to yours.
6. Integrate SEO with Content Marketing and PR
Synchronize your SEO strategies with other business units to streamline your efforts. Identify promising keywords that your content marketing team can use, and then keep tabs on their editorial calendar so you can build quality backlinks to the brand assets they create. Similarly, collaborate with your digital PR team to amplify content and earn brand mentions and backlinks.
7. Foster a Culture of Continuous Optimization
Inspire your team to aim high, finding ways to adapt to challenges and achieve better outcomes. Use performance analytics to guide your strategies with data and refine your processes to make improvements as needed.
Encourage teams to collaborate and share insights, and embrace creativity and new ideas. Perform A/B testing and experiment with new ideas to see what approaches generate the best results. This type of agility helps your enterprise to stay competitive and innovate, responding to current audience behaviors.
Achieving Enterprise SEO Success with the Right Partner
Enterprise SEO requires a deliberate approach that takes into account the complexities of your business model and website. Victorious’ team of seasoned strategists can identify the enterprise SEO issues that stand in the way of your growth, providing effective solutions and improving your ROI. Schedule a free consultation and learn how our enterprise SEO services will set the foundation for improved visibility, traffic, and conversions in your key markets.
