Bonus Chapter: Enterprise SEO

Integrating search engine best practices into every cog of the corporate wheel is at the core of enterprise SEO strategy. “Enterprises,” as we’ll refer to them in this chapter, are large brands with large websites (or multiple sites) and often multiple locations. Not all enterprise brands will have enterprise-sized sites, but these two characteristics often correlate. Think Fortune 1000 corporations like Coca-Cola, big-box retailers like Walmart, or multi-local franchises like GNC. For SEO specifically, there are also some types of merely large companies that tend to have enterprise-scale SEO problems — think travel sites and listings sites — due to the sheer number of pages they might typically have, often well into 6, 7, or even 8 figures.

For enterprises, internal processes and systems can have a heavy influence on SEO performance, so in addition to on- and off-site SEO guidance, this enterprise SEO chapter will also speak to navigating operational challenges.

Breaking silos and creating a culture of SEO

There are many factors that make enterprise SEO unique, but one of the foremost is how much work has to be done before even touching the website. SEO for enterprises is at its best when it is cross-functional, baked into all departments that work on or influence website changes. SEOs working on enterprise campaigns need to know how to navigate these unique challenges so they can create a culture of SEO before they can even execute on initiatives that will move the organic ranking needle.

Getting buy-in

You have this great SEO idea, one that you’re confident will make a huge positive impact. You’ve got it all planned out, so why do you end up unable to execute? The answer, with many enterprise brands, is red tape. Decisions like this require either buy-in from executives, a contribution from other teams, or both. The tape is there for a reason though. Due to the size and public visibility of these brands, they need to shield themselves from mistakes that can cost them in reputation and revenue. So how do you push SEO work through?

• Connect SEO initiatives to revenue: Executives need to know that their investment will be profitable. If you can connect your idea to projected profits - bingo.

• Tie to larger business goals: Show that SEO doesn’t sit in a silo apart from other channels. It comes alongside and bolsters every marketing effort to accomplish larger business goals.

• SEO education: Sometimes people are just afraid of what they don’t know. A little education can go a long way!

• Success metrics: Use past examples of success or third party case studies to show that SEO can be effective.

• Explaining consequences: When showing them what could be gained doesn’t work, it may be helpful to show what could be lost. Focus on the cost of inaction or how poor SEO could negatively impact performance.

• Show how the competition is doing it: Show that your idea will help you keep pace or gain advantage over your competitors.

• Visibility: Celebrate SEO wins and the other stakeholders that contributed to them.

Getting SEO off its island

Another SEO-critical factor enterprises need to consider is integration. In other words, the process of incorporating SEO (its budget, resources, and mindset) into the rest of the organization. When SEO sits on an island, it’s much less effective. Let SEO reach its full potential by bridging gaps and connecting dots between organization departments, channels, and the agency that serves them.

When this kind of investment is missing, the following can happen:

• SEO turns into a checklist: When the SEOs are on an island, they aren’t privy to the initiatives that set the enterprise apart, leaving them little more to do than check title tags and update internal links.

• SEO can conflict with actual business goals: When SEOs aren't part of the larger conversation happening in the marketing department, their work has the potential to conflict with certain business initiatives when they could be supporting them.

• You miss out on collaboration opportunities: Other teams might be running initiatives that could benefit from SEO collaboration, and vice versa.

Working collaboratively with dev teams

So much of optimizing a site for search comes down to technical execution. At the enterprise level, that often means working cross-functionally with dev teams. As the SEO, you may have noticed a critical issue with your site’s canonicalization, but you’ll need the developers, who already have a full plate, to execute the fix. What do you do?

• Learn to speak the developer’s language: They probably have a different taxonomy than you do, so disambiguating can clear up confusions before they begin.

• Communicate frequently and early on: If you need development help, or the dev team is executing something that could impact SEO, both parties would benefit from meeting to plan as soon as possible, and staying in close communication throughout the project.

• Invest in training: Spending a little time to sit with your developers can go a long way. Don’t just tell them what you need fixed. Tell them why it’s important.

• Get integrated into their process: This can involve things like going to sprint meetings, getting on JIRA, or requesting to be looped into dev team emails.

When SEOs and dev teams don’t work together, any number of technical SEO foibles can occur. It’s not that developers don’t care about SEO. More likely is that because of the incredibly taxing job they have to do, they focus on speed and efficiency in execution. Work with your developers. Learn from each other. You’ll both be better off in the long run.

Instilling SEO best practices in content teams

Enterprise brands are often large enough to have their own in-house content teams or possibly even contract with a third party for content. These people could be skilled wordsmiths but lack a basic knowledge of SEO best practices. If you’re an SEO who liaises with content teams at an enterprise level, consider the following:

• Create a checklist of SEO best practice requirements their content has to meet before publishing

• Have an SEO, such as yourself, review the content

• Train writers on SEO best practices

The way you interact with content teams (or don’t) can have tangible effects on website performance, so it’s crucial to foster an environment of collaboration and education. This can help you avoid common on-page SEO mistakes such as:

• Omitting important keywords from headers and body copy

• Forgetting to create internal links

• Creating content that isn’t search engine readable, such as in images

• Changing the location (URL) of your content and forgetting to redirect

• Missing or unoptimized titles and descriptions

But perhaps the biggest risk when SEOs and writers don’t collaborate is that the completely wrong content will be created. When writers lack the knowledge of keyword research, intent, and SERP landscape, content initiatives can miss the mark, resulting in a lost opportunity.

Enterprises that have thousands of pages, locations, or products need to learn how to scale, or their efforts will be an issue of diminishing returns. How can SEOs maximize impact while minimizing inputs, all while maintaining high brand standards?

Prioritization of tasks

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. That’s how it can often feel working in enterprise environments. With so much to be done and limited time in which to do it, how can SEOs ensure that they’re working on projects that make the biggest impact?

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What’s holding us back the most?

2. What are the quick wins?

3. What projects align most with our current objectives?

When looking for direction, start there. Just be careful not to fall into the common trap that your work is a higher priority than someone else’s. Your proposals may be important, but SEO initiatives aren’t the only initiatives. Sometimes you have to compromise and work on something that’s a lesser priority when your top priority requires buy-in or someone else’s time that you can’t get right away.

Managing workflows

When you’re working on large sites, you need minimal inputs and maximum outcomes. In other words, you need standardized tools and processes to avoid repeat work that can waste time and increase mistakes. SEOs in this space benefit from resources such as:

• A CMS that allows for flexibility and customization

• Standardized templates such as page layouts

• Automated reporting

• Performance and site health monitoring software

• SEO research software

Tools like these can increase the accuracy of your work as well as the speed with which you execute it. Tools also need to be accompanied by processes. Think about your workflows and ask yourself what tasks you perform on a regular basis. If the tasks are repeatable, there may be a way to automate. Look into automation software or get with your development team to see if there’s a programmatic way to tackle what you’re spending time manually doing.

Another one of the biggest time-wasters is trying to own everything yourself. In an enterprise SEO setting, sometimes the best way to optimize your workflow is to delegate. Partner with others on your team and divvy up responsibilities. Often SEO work is stronger when done together than when one person tries to own the whole thing. Remember, the work can scale, but you can’t.

Sustaining the health of large sites

One of the biggest risks when dealing with large enterprise sites is that things can fall between the cracks. Virtually every site health issue, from broken internal links to duplicate content, can become an issue when the sheer size of a site obscures its details.

If you’re charged with the organic health of an enterprise site, just remember that if you can measure it, you can manage it. Here are some strategies for doing that:

• Set up various subfolders of your site as individual properties in Google Search Console

• Segment your sitemap into smaller parts that match the logic of your site structure

• Create unique views in Google Analytics to segment out certain sections of your site

Moz Pro also allows you to set up individual tracked sites for the unique subsections of your site; for example, moz.com/blog. By doing this, you get to hold a microscope up to certain sections of your site and diagnose issues with the ease you would have on a much smaller site.

Where SEO meets brand

Being a large enterprise brand is a double-edged sword. These companies enjoy high brand awareness and the SEO benefits that often follow that, but their high visibility also maximizes the implications of missteps.

Avoiding an over-reliance on brand familiarity

Google may or may not have a “brand bias,” depending on who you ask, and depending on how you define bias. On the brand biased end of the spectrum, we have a Google that favors large, well-established sites, giving them preference in search engine rankings. On the brand agnostic end of the spectrum, you have a Google that ranks websites solely due to their SEO merit. The answer, as with most things, is probably somewhere in between.

It seems that large brands enjoy some of the indirect benefits their popularity has on organic rankings and traffic, and less likely that Google inflates the ranking of certain brand websites just because of their popularity.

Below are some examples of benefits large brands might enjoy, but how they fall short of organic success.

Large, well-known enterprise brands do often enjoy some search result benefits due to familiarity, but they cannot rest on this alone.

Using SEO to bolster brand

For large brands that already have a lot of awareness, SEO still has a lot to offer in the realm of a business’ branding initiatives. Beyond awareness, SEO can foster:

• Brand loyalty, by ensuring the website is helpful and informative. If it’s not, customers will go elsewhere.

• Brand trust, by ensuring nothing is broken or misrepresented on the website.

• Brand affinity, by creating content that solves pain points, inspires, and entertains.

• Customer retention, by embarking on strategies like loyalty programs

Well-known enterprise brands may often rank well despite bad SEO practices, but why settle for that when you can leverage SEO to make your recognizable brand a loved brand?

Targeting the “brand undecided” customers

A trap that enterprise brands can fall into is the thinking that when people begin searching for a solution, they already have a brand (or a few) in mind. But today’s customer is much more brand agnostic than those in previous generations, meaning large brands cannot forget the non-branded approach many searchers take to find what they’re looking for.

Focus on branding and awareness, but not exclusively. Use SEO to capture searchers who:

• Are seeking information related to your solution (“how much does custom framing cost?”)

• Are comparing solutions related to their need (“custom framing vs. DIY”)

• Are ready to buy but do not yet know from whom (“custom framing near me”)

Enterprise content development

The behemoths that are enterprise sites are typically rife with content. SEOs need to ensure that content is created at scale without sacrificing quality and is compelling without sacrificing optimization.

Localizing content

If the enterprise brand you work on operates out of local storefronts or performs some kind of service at the local level, localizing your web content could be a good step in the direction of reaching your local audiences through organic search.

Is your brand reaching customers who are looking for products and services near them? It can, when brands prioritize local content. These local landing pages should offer a customized and valuable experience to individuals in specific locations, including:

• Local testimonials

• Local work (ex: projects done in that area)

• Local contact information (if no storefront, list a local customer support line)

• Local business schema markup

• Using regionally appropriate terminology

• Exclusively listing products/services the brand offers in that locale

You may be a large brand, but to connect with local audiences, you’re going to need content that speaks to them and their unique needs. The more locations you serve, the harder this will be, so be strategic and prioritize your local content around what makes sense for your brand. Avoid creating volumes of thin or duplicative “geo-pages” just to capture local rankings.

Shipping content

Without content, there’s nothing to rank, but despite the critical importance of content to any SEO effort, enterprises often have difficulty shipping it (AKA launching/publishing/getting eyeballs on it!). This can happen for a few different reasons:

• Too many cooks in the kitchen - too many stakeholders weighing in, making feedback a cycle with no end in sight.

• A legal department that must heavily scrutinize all content before it’s published

• Content must be reviewed by a party or multiple parties who have limited time to do so

Content is a very visible way a brand represents itself online, and as such, is often heavily scrutinized. This extra layer of review can cause bottlenecks that prevent shipping the content that can help capture organic wins.

Quality is always more important than quantity, but enterprises that can streamline this process and close the gaps on wasted time will have a leg up on their competition.

Watching out for non-unique content

The experts we spoke with when putting together this piece said that non-unique content is “somewhat common” or “very common” on enterprise sites. The reasons for that include:

• Content sharing between the brand’s multiple domains

• Canonicalization issues

• Boilerplate product descriptions

• Thin/doorway local pages

Shared or duplicate content isn’t unique to enterprise sites, but their size compounds the issue.

If your duplicate content is a canonicalization issue, fixing it could direct more crawler resources to your important pages. There is no penalty for duplicate content, but duplicate versions of a page will likely be filtered out of search results.

It’s also important to note how Google views copied content. Consider what they say in their Quality Rater Guidelines:

The Lowest rating is appropriate if all or almost all of the MC (main content) on the page is copied with little or no time, effort, expertise, manual curation, or added value for users. Such pages should be rated Lowest, even if the page assigns credit for the content to another source.

Enterprise sites need to manage the duplicate content on their site to keep crawlers focused on their most important pages and avoid sending signals to Google that their content is low quality.

Don’t neglect the middle-of-the-funnel

Enterprise brands have a tendency to gravitate toward polar opposite ends of the marketing funnel. They’re focused on branding and awareness initiatives and they’re focused on conversions and sales, but they tend to miss the entire middle of a customer’s journey. In the middle of the funnel, there’s research, interactivity, and uncertainty — all of which could be addressed by content that’s informative, engaging, and persuasive.

This is one area that tends to hold enterprise brands back from performing well organically. Create mid-funnel content not just for the sake of creating content, but create it to move your customers through the funnel from awareness to sale.

Enterprise link acquisition

Enterprise teams can sometimes see link building as a transaction - put in $X and receive X links. In reality, it’s not that simple. Enterprise SEOs could benefit by educating key stakeholders on the realities of link building. Namely, that it’s a game of earning not buying (unless you want a penalty for buying follow links, of course).

The following are some of the most common ways enterprise companies earn links.

Building links through content creation

Build it and they will come - links, that is. But content is so much more than an asset that can earn you a link. Enterprise SEOs need to work with content creators to ideate and execute content that their target audiences will find interesting - that they can’t help but share and link to.

• Conduct original research

• Organize existing research in new and creative ways

• Visualize data in uniquely engaging ways

• Create content that encourages participation and engagement (ex: a tool or widget)

Building links through PR

Large enterprise brands are no stranger to attention in the media. SEOs can work together with PR teams to harness the power of press to aid in links and traffic. While most links from press releases are nofollow, this type of content often has a cascading effect and gets picked up by other sources that do link editorially.

Using social to create awareness amongst link creators

Social, like PR, can be another way to promote content initiatives. It can also be used to build the audience that will link to you in the future. Keep in mind that all social platforms aren’t equal. Know where your audience is - are they primarily on Facebook? Or are they on Twitter? How does your audience consume content differently on Snapchat than they do on Instagram? Knowing who you want to reach and what message will resonate with them will help your social promotion be more relevant, and therefore more link-worthy.

Do you actually need to build links?

Do large enterprises have to place a large priority on link building just like any other site? Or is it that, due to brand recognition, people are paying attention to them and linking to them on their own? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

Yes, more people may link to you without prompting than would link to a smaller brand, but enterprises are also competing against other huge sites, which requires some focus on link building efforts.

Level up your enterprise SEO

Managing the on- and off-page optimization tasks for a large business's website (or websites) is only part of the battle for enterprise-level SEOs. In order for your SEO tactics to be successful, you also need to consider the bigger operational and interdepartmental workflows and priorities that will come into play.

Use the tips in this chapter as a guideline when you need to scale up your efforts, and be sure to check out the rest of the Professional's Guide to SEO for more expert SEO advice!