Enterprise SEO Success: Building Strategy on a Grand Scale

Search engine optimization (SEO) is challenging because of its many elements, even more so if your business has hundreds to thousands of pages? A poorly executed plan quickly drains valuable resources and easily destroys your competitive advantage.

This article explains why enterprise SEO is the most cost-effective solution for growing and established brands:

• Explaining its benefits for complex, large businesses.
• How it differs from regular SEO.
• Solid strategies for enterprise SEO.
• Common pitfalls that traditional optimization often misses.

High-growth companies need hands-on digital marketing skills to stay ahead of competitors. Learn how enterprise SEO prepares you for search success. Let’s go!

Want to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to SEO? Watch this video!

What Is Enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO optimizes search visibility and performance for large corporate websites. What qualifies as an enterprise-level site? How does scaling it up affect the SEO strategy?

Typically, an enterprise site has the following features:

• Hundreds or thousands of pages. 
• Large volumes of traffic and leads.
• Multiple products or complex services. 
• Numerous topic areas and keywords.
• 200+ employees across the organization.
• $1 billion or more in annual revenue,

Essentially, enterprise sites belong to major established corporations and brands. As organizations grow over time, their web presence naturally expands as well. What began as a smaller website ballooned into a vast digital ecosystem.

The business now creates more content types. For example, it publishes company news and different product lines. It also targets many buyer personas, local markets, and more.  

As it continues to expand, it adds more sites and landing pages. These cover specific brands, initiatives, or countries. Growth also often means integrating more technologies and innovations to streamline certain business tasks. 

     Enterprise SEO: Core Differences from Regular SEO

The foundations of keyword research, technical SEO, content creation, and optimization best practices remain the same. However, the scale and complexity of enterprise sites require a strategic upgrade.

Some of the key differences include these:

• Coordinating SEO efforts across multiple internal teams and external vendors.
• Developing site architecture and information hierarchies to handle large volumes of content. 
• Cohesively interlinking cross-domain properties and global sites.
• Optimizing technical SEO across a dynamic, rapidly evolving landscape.
• Creating aligned content strategies across diverse products, services, and buyer journeys.
• Selecting target keywords and pages that have the highest conversions.
• Measuring success using the right key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Aligning SEO strategies with broader company goals.
• Managing a larger financial investment intended for technology, content, tools, and labor.

In addition to scale, enterprise SEO must align with corporate structures and objectives. For all these reasons, many companies hire outside support that offers:

• An external perspective to avoid SEO blind spots and see new opportunities.
• Additional workforce to accelerate the execution of audits, content creation, link building, and optimization.
• Niche experience.
• Knowledge of the latest trends, algorithm changes, and best practices.
• Established workflow and project management processes to efficiently handle enterprise-sized workloads.  
• Guidance from an authoritative third party.

Having a knowledgeable in-house SEO team is important for managing day-to-day optimization and owning institutional knowledge. However, combining these advantages with an agency’s fresh perspective drives more powerful results.

The Benefits of Investing in Enterprise SEO 

Enterprise SEO challenges are greater, but so are the rewards. These include the following:

     1. Increased Visibility, Traffic, and Leads 

Enterprise SEO’s core purpose is to make your website more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant queries. Higher rankings lead to exponential growth in organic traffic across your entire site. 

For major corporations, small increases in visibility drive hundreds of additional visitors. This surge in traffic often results in more high-quality leads as enterprise sites optimize conversion paths for diverse buyer journeys.

     2. Cost-Effectiveness and Strong Returns

Enterprise SEO requires large upfront investments in audit and optimization labor. It is also costly for technology solutions and content creation. 

However, this sizable time and resource investment pays off when correctly used. A sound optimization strategy delivers impressive returns over time as the ranking benefits compound. Additionally, it drives digital advertising costs down because SEO now delivers consistent organic or free leads. 

     3. Better Customer and User Experience

It is tempting for enterprises to assume that user experience (UX) and customer experience matter less because of their existing brand equity and customer loyalty. However, even the largest companies cannot afford to neglect them for the following reasons:

• Optimized site architecture and navigation allow users to easily find products and information within a vast website. It increases dwell time, especially for high-converting pages. It also improves the site’s compliance with best practices and regulations. These include accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
• Fast page load speeds keep users engaged and boost your search engine rankings. It also makes your website user-friendly for mobile devices, which more people use to look for and buy products and services.
• Clear calls to action, minimal steps, and frictionless transactions enhance completion rates and decrease cart abandonment.
• Localized content tailors messaging and offers to connect better with targeted audiences.
• Improving relevance and satisfying search intent build trust with search engines and the target market.

Crafting an Enterprise SEO Strategy

Now that you know the different enterprise SEO benefits, how do you build an actionable game plan? An experienced agency tailors the strategies to your goals, needs, niche, and audience.

The following is a basic plan:

     1. Conduct a Thorough Site Audit

An enterprise SEO agency always begins its work with auditing. An unaudited, complex website often has many potential and existing issues. These range from duplicate content to broken links. 

It also needs better-designed navigation. Most of all, it fails to maximize its ranking potential through better schema and UX.

A deep audit typically covers the following:

• Crawling every page to reveal technical problems, such as 404 errors.
• Structural analysis of site architecture and internal linking.
• Page speed performance review on desktop and mobile.
• Checking security vulnerabilities and infrastructure weaknesses. 
• Keyword discovery and ranking analysis.
• Content audits.
• Competitor analysis.

A full audit ranges from less than $500 to over $5,000, depending on the site size and depth. Expect thorough enterprise SEO audits to take at least four to eight weeks. Allow time for the team to gather and analyze accurate data and present it in an understandable report.

After the initial audit, schedule it two to four times per year. Prioritize it before and after major website changes, migrations, or relaunches.

     2. Define Concrete Goals 

Setting concrete goals is critical for enterprise SEO but comes with unique challenges compared to smaller sites. Because the site is massive and complex, aligning objectives across products, locations, and buyer journeys is difficult. 

Leadership must balance short-term wins with long-term growth without creating competing priorities. Additionally, predicting the return potential for pages receiving thousands of visits takes experience.

SEO teams often lead the goal-setting process. However, it requires cross-functional collaboration to be effective. 

For instance, C-suite executives match the strategies to broader business goals, such as increased revenue. Product managers provide insights into buyer needs and pain points. Web and IT teams advise on technical feasibility. Analytics contributes data-driven insights from historical performance. Finance helps model the growth potential and return of achieving each goal. 

The best enterprise SEO goals are also specific. It resists vague objectives, such as “improve rankings,” and favors quantifiable metrics tied to business key performance indicators. 

Here are some great examples:

• Increase organic traffic to key product pages by 25% year-over-year.
• Improve ranking for priority keywords from position 5 to 1–3 within six months.  
• Reduce brand name search bounce rates from 50% to 30% in two quarters.
• Generate 100 additional leads per month by optimizing conversion paths.

Concrete goals transform vague directives into trackable execution plans that demonstrate the business value that enterprise SEO provides.

     3. Identify Target Keywords

Thorough keyword research guides enterprise SEO strategy. After all, the right key terms display your business to the right target audience. 

Large corporate websites usually have the advantage of targeting more diverse terms than smaller ones. They have more pages that might rank higher and enhance traffic for low-performing types of copy. Further, they often have the resources, such as money, to go after broader, more competitive terms. 

As an enterprise, you can target these types of keywords:

• Brand names to control your reputation and credibility.
• Competitor brands to capture their traffic.
• Industry terms to showcase thought leadership.  
• Product and service keywords with high commercial intent.
• Location-specific for international markets.
• Keywords for snippet optimization.

The old-fashioned keyword research method focused heavily on search volume, ranking difficulty, and density. A more innovative and effective B2B keyword approach is matching the terms and phrases to user intent. 

Suppose you are a SaaS company offering project management software called ProjectSoft. Here is a table of your potential targeted keywords:

     4. Optimize On-Page SEO

As an enterprise site, you already have hundreds of pages of content. Analyze them, pick high-performing ones, and optimize them further to rank for more and better keywords. 

An SEO team updates old content with these ideas:

• Conducting a keyword gap analysis to identify optimization opportunities. For example, what key phrases or terms did the competitors fail to rank? Does your industry have new niche markets and trends you can dominate? 
• Improve keyword relevance by adding the term or phrase in the titles, headers, meta descriptions, and content. Include relevant keywords too.
• Follow the E-E-A-T principles. Use content to showcase your experience and expertise. For example, directly answer search questions with a knowledge base or FAQ page.
• For better relevance, supplement thin content with more detailed information. 
• Add related links to interconnect content in topic clusters.  
• Update outdated statistics, examples, or references.
• Insert higher-quality graphics, charts, videos, or other media.  
• Avoid keyword cannibalization by consolidating similar pages in favor of the high-performing ones and using 301 redirects. 

Match the content with the buyer personas. For example, target informational industry terms to attract IT manager personas who are still researching. Focus on pricing for CFO personas nearing purchase decisions.  

Leverage various content types based on the customer’s journey. For example, general blog posts are ideal for audiences in the awareness stage. Case studies work best for those in the evaluation phase. 

     5. Implement Structured Data for Technical SEO

Structured data adds more context to help search engines better interpret a page’s relevance to the keyword. It helps enterprise websites in several ways:

• Enhanced site links in SERPs to improve clicks to key pages.
• Richer data for voice search optimization.
• Review snippets to showcase credible third-party commendations.
• Comparison tables or ratings for product sites. 
• FAQ schema for long-tail informational queries.
• Breadcrumb trails to aid complex site navigation. 
• Corporate contact info and social profiles in knowledge panels.

The most impactful schema varies by page. For ecommerce, product and review markup drive sales. News sites benefit from article and authorship schemas. FAQ markup assists SEO for knowledge hubs. Your audit should determine the best one for your pages. 

     6. Develop and Manage Off-Page SEO Strategies

On-page optimization sets the technical SEO groundwork. However, enterprises need equal off-page optimization to scale visibility. 

Link building not only raises the overall domain authority but also helps pages that are not doing well by connecting them to pages that do well by using contextual anchor texts and keywords. In the process, more internal pages have a higher chance of ranking for various key terms. It then drives more traffic.

An enterprise SEO agency’s off-page optimization plan usually involves the following:

• Earn links from high-authority industry domains.
• Prioritize keyword-specific anchor text links important to goals, such as product pages.
• Leverage paid partnership opportunities with leading media, events, and vendor sites for guaranteed high-value links.
• Produce valuable content and tools that generate organic links. ProjectSoft could create an in-depth productivity guide or a SaaS app as lead magnets.
• Build an outreach team responsible for cold email, influencer networking, guest posts, and other channels. 
• Allocate a significant budget to link building and outreach. 
• Closely track new links achieved monthly and site visibility metrics, such as referring domains.

     7. Measure and Track Results 

Analytics is indispensable in guiding an effective enterprise SEO strategy. It identifies top-performing pages and campaigns based on traffic and conversion data. It also highlights successful activities. 

Evaluating search query performance reveals new relevant keywords and topics to target. Additionally, analytics reveal the root causes of decreasing rankings or technical issues. This way, you can address them before they escalate. Most of all, it is valuable for segmenting data and using it to match campaigns to your audience. 

Many teams now use AI-powered tools to collect and report real-time data. It also tracks the most critical metrics based on your goals such as the following:

• Organic traffic growth across the site and key pages.
• Conversions and sales by traffic source. 
• Rankings for target keywords by priority. 
• Click-through rates from SERPs.
• Decreases in bounce rates.
• Referring domains and links gained. 

Summing Up

The right enterprise SEO strategy delivers immense value to the bottom line. However, it is often rife with challenges. Most companies need help handling enterprise optimization. 

Engaging an enterprise SEO agency provides the expertise and additional workforce needed to be competitive and thrive. Digital Authority Partners (DAP) is an award-winning team that has developed successful global brand search strategies. 

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Let us talk about how our customized solutions can meet your organization’s unique needs.