7 Top Enterprise SEO Problems: Fix Them and Avoid New Ones

Marketing online as a large or growing business comes with unique challenges that require specific enterprise SEO strategies.

This article tackles seven common problems and their respective solutions:

• Ineffective keyword targeting.
• Slow website.
• Duplicate content.
• Technical optimization challenges.
• Inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Poor mobile experience.
• Bad communication and collaboration.

Ready to dig deeper into each of these in the article below? Let’s go!

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

1. Ineffective Keyword Targeting

Websites with hundreds of pages often target broad keywords because they have extensive product lines and variations. Although they can compete aggressively because of their budget, it still pays to take advantage of cost-effective search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. 

To solve the problem, use long-tail and localized keywords, especially for high-converting pages, and hypersegmentation to match the content with your desired leads’ needs, pain points, and behaviors. 

2. Slow Website

Many big websites struggle with speed, ranging from large file sizes to complex codes, high traffic, and website or server errors. Regardless of the cause, crawling speed negatively affects the user experience and search engine rankings. 

It drives leads away from the website in favor of another site and sends the wrong signal to search engines such as Google. It might wrongly indicate that your pages are irrelevant or poorly designed. 

How fast should your website's speed be? Google strongly recommends keeping it at three seconds or less. Examples of good enterprise SEO that helps you achieve it include the following:

• Minifying the code to remove unnecessary white spaces.
• Reducing the file sizes of media assets, such as photos.
• Using a content delivery network (CDN), which brings content to users from the closest server.
• Caching images and CSS files on the user’s device.
• Upgrading the servers to accommodate more traffic.

3. Duplicate Content

Content is king in SEO, except when duplicated. Unfortunately, many growing sites do this. A perfect example is scraping product pages. An affiliate might copy and paste the description verbatim onto their website. 

Unless you purposely want to manipulate the search results, duplicates will not lead to penalties. However, it can reduce your click-through rate (CTR) and confuse search engines about which page to rank. You lose if it goes to your competitor or a non-converting or poorly converting page. 

How do you fix this and avoid having duplicate content? First, conduct a thorough content analysis to uncover potential duplicates. Then, consolidate similar pages in favor of the best-performing one or use 301 redirects, which send users from one URL to another. An alternative option is canonicalization, which tells the search engines which page is original and which one you wish to rank. 

4. Technical Optimization Challenges

Another pressing problem for enterprise SEO is technical optimization. Because the website is large and the structure is complicated, it is vulnerable to errors that remain undiagnosed until they are difficult to treat. These include issues with the crawl budget, indexability, and navigation. 

Besides these technical SEO best practices, do the following: 

• Use robots.txt to manage the crawl budget effectively, focusing on the most productive or income-generating pages.
• Fix broken, dead, or missing links.
• Create a comprehensive XML sitemap to help search engines understand your site structure and discover important pages.
• Implement structured data, such as schema markups, to provide additional details about the page and enhance its appearance in search engine results.
• Conduct regular SEO audits.
• Prioritize website security with HTTPS to protect user data and instill trust in visitors.

5. Inaccurate or Incomplete Data

No business is immune to poor data collection and interpretation, even enterprises. Although big websites can gather massive amounts of information, poor analytics lead to huge problems, such as reduced efficiency and poor decision making. 

It might even increase your compliance risks, your business costs, and damage your reputation when you share misleading or outdated data. These can lead to lost opportunities such as customer retention. 

Avoid these problems today and in the future by setting up data quality rules and procedures. Your team collects and analyzes the information according to best practices. You may also use data validation tools and train employees on data management.

6. Poor Mobile Experience

According to Statista, global web traffic jumped from 31.16% in 2015 to 58.33% in the fourth quarter of 2022. Because of its growing popularity, Google has adopted mobile-first indexing and suggested using a more responsive web design. 

However, many enterprises still deliver a poor mobile experience. This could be because they still focus on designing desktops or on primarily solving technical problems. Some might still use legacy systems or lack resources like the right software or mobile developers. 

Improve the mobile experience with these tips:

• Leverage browser caching, reduce server response time, and eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content.
• Keep your site's navigation simple. Menus should be short, clear, and easy to use. Calls to action must be convenient to find and click.
• Avoid pop-ups or use them sparingly.
• Apply the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework to speed up the site’s performance on mobile devices.
• Test the site's mobile friendliness regularly.
• Keep an eye on your mobile analytics data to understand how your users interact with your site. 

7. Bad Communication and Collaboration

Enterprise SEO often involves many key players, which can be problematic when they cannot effectively communicate and collaborate. 

This usually happens when they do not have clear goals or are focused on different priorities. For example, the marketing department might want to increase web traffic, but the IT team wants to enhance website security. If your business operates in multiple countries, cultural differences can cause the same problem. 

Foster better teamwork when doing enterprise SEO with these ideas:

• Build a core, cross-functional team.
• Hold regular meetings or sprints to share progress, address issues, and discuss plans.
• Use a centralized communication and project management platform such as Slack, Asana, or Trello. 
• Set specific, measurable goals and metrics for your SEO projects.
• Be transparent about SEO strategies, updates, successes, and failures to promote a culture of trust and shared learning.
• Develop a shared vocabulary or a glossary of SEO terms.

Summing Up

Enterprise SEO is demanding, but identifying and solving these seven challenges makes this online marketing technique smoother and more worthwhile. 

Do your optimization strategies need a lift? Digital Authority Partners (DAP) provides comprehensive solutions for businesses like yours, from managing multiple stakeholders to scaling your site, and enhancing site architecture and content. 

Contact us to learn more about what we can do for you.