Small, medium, and large businesses can almost all benefit from improving their site’s search engine optimization. Even so, working on SEO for companies of various sizes will offer varied experiences, advantages, and challenges. Thus, effective SEO strategies for your large enterprise won’t have the same requirements and tactics as plans for startups or small businesses.
At first glance, working with a large company appears to offer more pros than cons. After all, a huge company has an established name and more resources. Still, developing and implementing an effective enterprise SEO strategy comes with unique challenges.
Find out what makes enterprise SEO unique, the critical components of an enterprise SEO strategy, how to overcome its specific challenges, and why you can benefit from the services of an SEO consulting firm with experience working with large companies.
How Does SEO for Large Businesses Differ From Small Business SEO?
Enterprise-level SEO generally focuses on different aspects of search engine optimization than SEO for smaller companies. For instance:
- Large companies typically already enjoy excellent name recognition. These regional, national, or global businesses may need less effort to get people to remember their brand or attract website visitors.
- Enterprise digital platforms have usually grown so complex and extensive that they require teams of people to maintain them. Different managers may maintain control over various aspects of the site, but everybody must work together to achieve common goals.
- The complexity and the size of a large-scale digital platform make it easier to make visible mistakes or stray from brand guidelines. At the same time, customers often hold large, established businesses to higher standards than small mom-and-pop operations, magnifying problems.
Critical Components of a Successful Enterprise SEO Strategy
Before you start planning your SEO project, you should ask yourself a few questions:
- How can you deliver an effective enterprise SEO strategy?
- Even more, how can you sell your strategy to your boss and multiple stakeholders?
- How will you convince everybody to work together, even though people from various groups may have different goals and expectations?
- Perhaps most challenging of all, how will you gather the expertise, staff, and other resources to get the job done?
You must begin by demonstrating a deep understanding of your company’s current digital assets, its audience, and growth opportunities.
How to Get Others Onboard With Your SEO Strategy
Before you make plans, you need to understand the current state of your company’s SEO, what needs improvement, and, most of all, how your business will benefit from the investment. Begin by gathering this information:
- Base your strategy on data: Gather information about competitors’ platforms, insights into your market, and feedback about the website from customers and employees.
- Uncover problems and opportunities: Conduct a preliminary website audit to determine which issues most impact your website’s performance, including off-page, on-page, and technical SEO.
- Estimate your budget: Assess budget constraints to ensure you prioritize activities that can deliver the best returns. Once you can demonstrate success, you should find it easier to encourage more funding later.
- Determine goals and metrics: Set goals for the project, select measurable KPIs to demonstrate progress, and consider SEO tools to help provide analytics.
Teams of people from multiple departments may have a stake in the website. Thus, a successful executive SEO strategy starts with obtaining approval and cooperation from coworkers and executives, including your boss. The necessity of working together explains why it’s best to start asking for feedback from involved departments early in the planning phase.
If these tasks already appear daunting, perhaps it’s time to consider working with an SEO consulting firm. Experienced SEO strategists know which kind of data they need, how to gather it, and which auditing software will produce the best results for your type of business.
The presentation needs to demonstrate overall business benefits using gathered information. It also helps to show benefits for individual departments and teams, presented clearly, without using a lot of SEO lingo. For instance, sales managers won’t care so much about technical SEO details. They will feel enthusiastic about an increase in leads and having to make fewer cold calls.
How Can You Build an Effective Executive SEO Team?
Stakeholders may include people from sales, marketing, customer service, and IT. Naturally, you’ll need to maintain enthusiasm for your project long after your initial presentation. Some suggestions to keep stakeholders involved and cooperative include assigning tasks and inviting them to planning and status meetings.
Again, many large businesses rely on professional SEO firms with experience and a proven track record in enterprise SEO. An experienced SEO company will know how to do everything from site audits and developing KPIs to testing and tuning. Hiring a professional SEO firm also relieves your company from hiring more salaried employees or distracting and training current workers.
Which Software and Tools Work Most Effectively on Enterprise SEO Projects?
Many large and established businesses have grown their websites for years if not decades. Working with large and established websites can offer advantages. Still, these companies have had plenty of time to introduce errors, and the website’s size and complexity will make them hard to spot. Older and larger companies also had time to attract enough attention to acquire links from news, business, and financial sites. However, these external links may now point to dead, obsolete, or orphan pages.
Despite the advantages, SEO for large businesses still offers plenty of challenges. For example:
- Even large enterprises have limited resources and plenty of competition. Also, these established companies typically control an immense digital presence, making manual site audits impractical.
- Besides, monitoring performance must do more than simply check for site errors and search ranks. The project also needs to attribute these gains to positive financial benefits for the company.
Thus, tracking performance often presents a challenge that needs access to and experience with enterprise-scale SEO tools to overcome. Enterprise SEO tools can make it possible to master the details of massive and complex websites, uncover weaknesses, identify opportunities, and narrow down revenue sources. Naturally, these tools also provide dashboards that make it simpler to gather information for monitoring results to present at status meetings.
Is there one best enterprise SEO tool? Every company will set priorities according to its individual goals. Similarly, even the best enterprise SEO tools offer different features and strengths. To choose the best SEO platform for your large business, you must compare the top tools against your requirements. Some top choices include seoClarity, Ahrefs, and BrightEdge.
Challenges of an Effective Enterprise SEO Strategy
In some ways, the most prominent companies possess a huge SEO advantage over smaller businesses. Enterprise businesses generally come to the table with name recognition and a significant online presence. At the same time, size and complexity introduce new challenges.
Technical Obstacles
Big company websites usually possess a complex site architecture. Over the years, many different changes may have introduced site issues, like 404s and duplicate pages. Technical SEO has emerged as a critical part of optimization, and finding and fixing these problems in a reasonable time will take access to and training for enterprise-level software, plus the technical expertise to resolve issues.
Encouraging Buy-In and Cooperation
Every large company will employ some teams and individuals who feel a sense of ownership over the status quo. In addition, gaining budget and resources from multiple department heads usually presents a unique challenge. Successful enterprise SEO projects must begin by clearly documenting the project’s benefits to overcome objections to changes that may appear disruptive to some stakeholders.
Tracking Progress
Typical SEOs may attempt to prove their effectiveness with reports demonstrating that keywords and pages have earned increased search rankings. Indeed, high rankings for search queries could contribute to increased traffic. In turn, that extra traffic may translate into more revenue and profit.
However, more visitors will only sometimes generate additional profits. Irrelevant search terms, page errors, low CTRs, poor user experience, or dozens of other factors may impact conversion rates. Meanwhile, large company executives may have little interest in discussing SEO jargon like keyword authority, relevance, or page speed.
High-level managers judge wins by increases in leads, sales, customers, and profits because that’s what they include in reports to shareholders and other executive team members. Thus, SEOs should find such metrics as increased page rankings and faster page speeds encouraging. Even so, enterprise-level SEOs must also develop KPIs to attribute to financial benefits.
How to Find the Best Enterprise SEO Partner
Optimizing a large company’s digital platform for search engines presents a unique set of obstacles, including complexity, size, competition for resources, and the need to cooperate with multiple teams and departments. Enterprise companies will also have stricter and more complicated reporting requirements.
These factors explain why many of the largest and most well-known companies rely on professional SEO consultants with enterprise experience. These big companies have many people and departments but may still lack time, expertise, and experience for enterprise-scale SEO.
At Lemon Pulse, our passionate and experienced enterprise SEO teams have helped some of the most renowned brands grow for over a decade. We can help with any stage, from performing site audits and developing metrics to implementing SEO strategies and making periodic reports. Contact us today to discuss your enterprise SEO strategy, and we’ll explain how we can help.
