How is Enterprise SEO Different from Other SEO?

Did you know that more than 50% of all website traffic comes from organic search? It’s no wonder that most marketers say that SEO is successful. But not all SEO is the same— there are major differences when doing SEO for a small business and for an enterprise. 

A startup with ten employees, where the CMO does social media, keyword research, and content writing will use tactics that won’t be applicable to companies where the marketing team has 30 members. 

And today’s article will go over the differences between SEO enterprise solutions and SEO for small and medium-size businesses, what the key differentiators are, and what kind of tactics you need to use for enterprise SEO. 

 

How enterprise SEO is different from other SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the process of optimizing your web content so that it can rank high(est) on SERP- Search Engine Results Page. Because the higher the rank on search engines such as Google or Bing, the more visibility your content gets, the more clicks your site receives, the more you will increase the number of customers or users for your products. 

The better your SEO, the more revenue your company will receive in the end. 

Without SEO, it will be quite difficult to gain new customers because as stated above, 50% of all website traffic comes from SEO. So ignoring that part can greatly stifle your growth rate. 

Enterprise SEO is SEO for companies that have thousands of web pages on their website. So the tactics used for smaller sites have to be optimized (adapted) to fit the strategic needs of enterprise-level sites. As a marketeer, you could manually change tags and categories of content for a small business because you would only have 60-80 web pages. But doing the same for an enterprise would require you to do the same for thousands of web pages. 

That’s one of the reasons why we can’t use the same tactics for small businesses and enterprises. 

When it comes to this level, SEO starts including practices and processes such as project management, SEO competitor research analysis, deep market research, templates, training, workflows, and automation. We will talk about all of this further in the article. 

But let’s now see why SEO enterprise matters.

 

Why Enterprise SEO Matters

The results in SEO behind small businesses revolves around the question of “How to get more traffic with our limited budget of X?” When it comes to enterprise-level SEO, it becomes about “How do we present our brand in a positive light to customers during each stage of the buyer’s journey?” So the end results will be different for small businesses and enterprises. 

On top of that, there are multiple benefits an enterprise can get when they do SEO. 

 

The benefits of enterprise SEO

There are five main benefits enterprises can get from SEO: 

• Control Global Brand Messaging and Reputation. An enterprise can control its image online through smart use of SEO. Since most customers check out their products (and product creators) online to make an informed decision, negative reviews can really impact buying decisions. So using SEO to improve your brand image and perception with the public can be a really big benefit. 

• Build (and maintain) Authority. An enterprise-level business needs to build and maintain its authority in its respected space of operations. From backlinks they receive to the external links the website provides, they need to always think about their authority and make sure that they appear like that in the eyes of their audience. Because that will drive more traffic and the customers will trust the brand more if they perceive it as an authority in the field. That’s why you trust IBM when it comes to computers and Nordstrom when it comes to clothing, but not vice-versa. 

• Expand into New Audiences. With enterprise SEO, you could find a new audience that would come on your website and that would interact differently with your products. This could potentially lead to finding out an unfulfilled need in the audience and that could turn into a new product line for your company. 

• Lower CPCs. A 1% difference in cost-per-click doesn’t mean that much when you have ten web pages. But when you have thousands of web pages and millions of website visitors, a 1% lowered cost-per-click makes a massive difference. This creates more revenue and lowers costs for the organization.

• Think global, but act locally. The local search keeps on growing and as an enterprise-level company, you can take advantage of that. If your business focuses on local markets, it can have multiple advantages in organic search results. To do that, it will need to connect its brand goals with local needs and preferences. In turn, that will create multiple opportunities in the market.

 

What are the key differentiators? 

There are five key differentiators between regular SEO and enterprise SEO: 

• Optimizing thousands of web pages
• Enormous amounts of data
• Precise keyword selection process
• Working with freelance teams
• Dealing with competitors
• Scalability and automation

 

Optimizing thousands of web pages

One of the main differentiators of regular SEO and enterprise SEO is the volume of content. And doing optimization for thousands of pages isn’t the same as doing it for 50 or 60 web pages. 

The main concern for marketers should be how to do on page optimization and process optimization. You can’t allow yourself to have web pages that aren’t optimized and if you don’t have a clear system/ process that you follow, you will miss a couple for sure. 

The most important thing is to create a process that you can follow when optimizing your content. This means having a simple, yet effective checklist that will help you remember all the things you have to do when optimizing content. 

Before you optimize all of your web pages, don’t ask how to rank no 1 in Google search because it’s in vain.

When you optimize all of your web pages, you’ll have a bigger chance of ranking them higher in Google and, in turn, having more visitors who can potentially turn into customers. 

 

Enormous amounts of data

As an enterprise, you will have enormous amounts of data to cover, analyze, and find insights for it. On top of that, you will have to look into competitors’ data to see how you can outrank them. To stay on top of it all, you will need to create a process that will help you keep everything organized and systemized in an effective way. 

Data is essential if you want to successfully run enterprise SEO so keep that in mind when moving forward.

 

Precise keyword selection process

There are multiple you will look into when it comes to keywords for enterprise-level SEO: 

• Long-tail vs. short-tail keywords. Small businesses don’t have the budget, staff, or expertise to target short-tail (“fat head”) keywords so they usually target long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords usually have a single word in them, they have a bigger search volume, but they’re harder to rank for. Long-tail keywords usually involve a couple of words, they have a smaller search volume, but they’re easier to rank for. For example, a small business would take a keyword such as “Digital Marketing blog essentials for beginners,” while an enterprise should go for the keyword “marketing” or “digital marketing.” 

• Search intent. One thing that enterprises need to look after is search intent. When creating content, you need to realize where the customer is in their buyer’s journey. If they’re opening your website to find information, they need to read a blog, not a sales later. And if they already have enough information, they don’t want to read an informational post such as a blog, they need to find product information to make a purchase. So you need to align (optimize) your content for the users’ search intent. 

• Ranking difficulty. It’s time to start optimizing and creating content that can rank for more difficult keywords. As an enterprise, you need to be one of the industry leaders that can rank for difficult keywords. That doesn’t mean ignoring the long-tail, easier keywords, but making an effort to rank for more difficult keywords because your website now has the authority to do so.

 

Working with freelance teams

A small business will usually have one or two people working in the digital marketing department. They will cover everything from posting on social media, community management, planning content strategy, doing keyword research, writing and editing content, and backlink outreach. 

As an enterprise, you will have a core marketing team in your company, but you will also start reaching out to experts and specialists in their field so that your content becomes the best possible version. That means starting to work with freelance teams that can bring the required expertise to your content planning, creation, and distribution systems. 

 

Dealing with competitors

One thing that an enterprise will start doing at this point is keeping an eye on your competitors and analyzing their SEO strategy. You will need to concentrate some of your efforts on what your competition is doing and try to do it better. 

They have quite a lot of authority in your field so you will need to take notice of what they’re doing. The most important things to look into are their keywords and rank. These two factors will let you know what you need to start working on to outmatch your competitors. 

 

7 ways how to do enterprise SEO

We’ve talked about many differences between regular SEO and enterprise SEO. Now, here are the seven ways to do enterprise SEO for your organization. 

 

Scalability and automation

Enterprise SEO requires marketing teams to build things that can scale. That means having the architecture that keeps, tracks, and adds millions of keywords, audits the websites, and creates reports that can be used to make data-driven decisions. 

With constant updates in the search algorithms, enterprises need to create frameworks that allow them to quickly change elements in their pages. To do that, the marketing team needs to create scalable systems that can be updated hastily. AI can be really helpful when it comes to updating the system. 

At the enterprise level, you should look into automation to help your marketing team focus on more important tasks. Try finding dashboards and platforms that track changes automatically, monitor your site for alerts, and enable auditing on it. 

 

Dealing with duplicate content

A small business doesn’t have problems with duplicate content since they don’t have that much content in the first place. But when you have thousands of blog posts, you might have a problem with duplicate content. 

To deal with duplicate content, you will first have to do a content audit to help you spot duplicate content. 

There are a couple of things you can do to prevent duplicate content: 

• Use a canonical tag to tell Google which is the master copy 
• Create an iterative content creation process to avoid writing duplicate content
• Apply 301 redirects

 

Thought Leadership

When you reach enterprise-level, then you can start focusing on thought leadership articles to improve your SEO and standings on Google. 

With thought leadership, you provide innovations and new technologies to your industry and create new demand, leading the market in the way you want to. For thought leadership, try finding external contributors as well, create compelling research cases that will give you the data (and insights) to be a thought leader in your industry. 

 

Training programs

Smaller companies might pass by with some of their marketing members “winging it,” but when you do enterprise SEO, you will need to have experts and specialists for every step of the process. 

You will outsource some of the steps, but you will still need valuable inputs from your own marketing team and they might not be skilled enough to do so. That’s why you will need to start investing in training programs for your marketing employees. Your employees will need in-depth knowledge about different facets of marketing and SEO such as conversion rate optimization, ad campaigns, segmentation, ideal customer profiles, A/B testing, and more. 

 

Strategic partnerships

With strategic partnerships, you will acquire a lot of non-paid backlinks from relevant companies. And any enterprise SEO should seek out strategic partnerships that will be a win-win situation for all included parties. 

It’s a cross-promotional opportunity for both brands and it can help you grow your audience. When it comes to strategic partnerships, you might do a joint webinar with a company that’s in a similar space as you, but serving the same audience. 

For example, you’re an exclusively content marketing agency and you’re having a podcast or a webinar with an agency that only does Google AdWords campaigns. You both have the same target audience (but cater to different buying segments from them) so you can do a cross-promotional campaign that would be beneficial for both companies. 

 

Using templates

Using templates is crucial in enterprise SEO. You need to things that scale and templates provide the framework that can be reused by anyone, saving a lot of time. You can use templates for a plethora of things such as : 

• Simple blog posts
• Landing pages
• Email newsletter
• Information pages
• Ebooks 

One way to use templates is to atomize the content you’re making. Let’s say you’re writing an ebook and the content in it can be applied to multiple branches or industries. 

So you create an ebook template and when you write content, around 75-80% of it will apply to all branches and only 20-25% will be a variable. A template can really save you time where you structure your ebook in a way that 80% of the ebook stays the same and you just insert a different variable (the remaining 20%)  to create an ebook that caters to the different branches or industries. 

 

Maintain page speed

And the last thing to remember is to not forget about technical SEO. Since enterprise-level companies have thousands of web pages, that can impact the loading speed of the website. 

So it’s essential to have all of the technical aspects of your website in line, starting with page speed. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights or Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool to test out your website’s page speed. 

 

Conclusion

We discussed how enterprise SEO is different from other SEO and how you need to adapt your tactics and strategies on this level. 

When using enterprise SEO, you will have to create systems, automatizations, and templates that will help you keep everything aligned and optimized with the latest Google algorithms. 

You shouldn’t try to do all of these things by yourself. You should utilize an expert to help you will all of this and move the needle for the organization of your size. Directive Consulting partners with enterprises all across the globe and you should talk with one of our experts to get a proposal.