SEO for Enterprise

Approach

Enterprise SEO requires a different approach. Due to the scale of enterprise sites you need significanlty differnt tooling to crawl the site, write content briefs and measure success through rankings.

At Type A, we know that the site size is a red herring. It’s unlinkely that we need to crawl millions of pages on a regular basis – instead we need to crawl the templates that power those pages on a regular basis.

Part of the strategy is how to execute

When devising an enterprise SEO strategy it’s less important to look at specific SEO line items to “fix” and more important to look at the full eco-system the cleint is operating under. This goes far beyond the website and reaches to their people, teams and resources, brand, underlying technology, market conditions and more.

The size of enterprise SEO accounts is what gives you leverage to perform well in organic search so you job as an SEO is to devise a strategy that taps into the already exisiting leverage inherint in the business.

RACI matrix and stakeholder meetings are essential

Enterprise SEO success will depend on how effectively you can navigate the corporate structure and get your optimisations implemented. This is not as simple as emailing a developer your technical update requests, it requires input from multiple managers and teams. Sign off for any activity is achieved by aligning with the businesses resources and goals for that quarter. To align with everyone, you need to know who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed on different areas of the business so you can get everyone sining from the same hymn sheet.

Learning how the business works is important

With SEO for SMEs, there is usually no development cadence and little forward planning. Enterprise is planned annually with at least the next quarter of activity decided ahead of time with a high fidelity of planning. To be a successful SEO in this environment, you need to understand the cadence of brand, marketing, sales, product and development and work out how to deliver an SEO strategy that fits into all of these areas.

You need to know what people want outside of SEO and make a strategy that encompasses everything

If you want to change text or add internal links to a website, you can usually just login and make the change. However, if you want to update the copy on a major product landing page, that may require sign off from compliance, brand and a channel manager. If this level of sign off is required, you need to be efficient with your SEO requests and pack as much optimisation upside into every request you make.

You need to work with non-SEOs and make business cases

Enterprise SEO requires that you change your language away from SEO initialisms and jargon, to clear business language. For example, a recommendation to improve Core Web Vital scores by reducing the cumulative layout shift on product pages will fall on deaf ears. However, saying that we are going to speed up the site by reducing the amount of movement on the page after it loads to deliver a better user experience is more likely to get approval.

the KPI isn’t always obvious

KPIs are usually revenue based. But with enterprise SEO it can be about user retention, brand search, share of voice or some other non-standard SEO KPI. The reason for this is that enterprise usually has a level of market saturation. Enterprise SEO is less about explosive growth and more about maintaining steady growth and defending the gains you already have.

You are starting from a higher base so your gains will be slower

In SMEs you can legitimately see 3-5x growth every year. This is impossible with enterprise SEO as they usually have a high market share close to saturation.

Instead, you need to zone in on specific products, service lines and business units and work on 10x ing smaller moving parts in their business that they care about for that quarter.

Brand is more important

In SEO, the goal is typically to rank for a generic term. However, with enterprise SEO, ranking for a brand term, owned product name or trademarked term is equally as important as the enterprise brand usually has multiple vendors and suppliers that re-sell their product and compete for share of voice in search.

Reporting is essential

Building an ontology into the reporting is essential for enterprise SEO. As you will be dealing with lots of different stakeholders you need to be able to pin point the exact data they need up and down the business. This means starting with very granular data and rolling up different reports for different stakeholders and business units.

Technology won’t be simplistic – GA and Custom CMS

it would be lovely if you were optimising WordPress and reporting with Google Analytics but the truth is they are not fit for purpose at an enterprise level. So you need to be comfortable learning new systems so you can confidently make technical SEO optimisations with a development team on bespoke technology stacks.

Programatic solutions not individual solutions

With enterprise SEO, no one with thank you for fixing some broken links or updating some meta data as it’s a drop in the ocean. You need to understand how to use the size of the site to leverage big changes that flow through millions of pages.