Embedding SEO in a Larger Marketing Scheme
The size of enterprises typically makes every branch of marketing larger and impactful compared to smaller businesses due to larger marketing budgets, teams, and objectives.
For example, paid traffic is higher, social media traction is more impactful, and search traffic is more diverse.
In such circumstances, enterprise SEO has a stronger effect on other marketing departments and other marketing departments have a stronger impact on SEO. For example, increased digital ad expenses facilitates more analytical data about behavior and conversion potential of certain pages, which, in turn, can inform better SEO content decisions.
Another example would be optimizing SEO pages at scale, which might lead to an influx of support tickets, social media inquiries from website visitors, or conversions.
Always make sure to sync major SEO campaigns with other marketing departments to gauge their potential effect in the enterprise setting.
Managing Scale Of SEO Optimizations
In enterprise SEO, many SEO optimizations happen at scale: updating the structure of hundreds of pages at once, updating CMS code, website layout, website navigation can have drastic effects on your SEO performance.
This is a snowball effect: even when you update the smallest things, search engines still try to crawl every page on your website, so, depending on the scale of optimizations, you might be effectively changing hundreds or thousands of pages at once.
For that reason, in enterprise SEO, testing and tracking the impact of SEO changes, even the smallest ones, becomes crucial.
If you plan to implement some changes to the website pages, try and test the impact of these changes on a smaller number of pages first: roll out changes manually and track the changes in rankings and impressions over several weeks as often the result of your optimizations in SEO is delayed by that long.
Track Your Competition
The scale of enterprise companies usually entails having a lot of competitors, big and small, competing for the same slate of keywords and rankings.
Often the SERP (search engine results pages) will be changing a lot, especially for your most commercially-lucrative keywords.
For that reason, set up a few real-time dashboards to track your competitors and their rankings to always be aware of significant changes in their SEO strategy.
Sometimes a complete website overhaul of a competitor or their very successful PR campaign can change SEO status quo significantly, taking over some of your important rankings, and you always need to know what happened and how to work through that.
Because enterprise-scale businesses’ websites can be hundreds of pages–each designed to meet a specific geographic region’s needs–it can be difficult to optimize each page efficiently and effectively without a strategy in place; And because enterprises are typically already well-known within their market, marketing practices like SEO can appear superfluous.
Let's explore some effective SEO strategies tailored specifically for enterprises.