Enterprise SEO comes with unique challenges that SEOs and digital marketers need to overcome in pursuit of maximum results. The deliberately slow decision-making pace in large organizations, the existence of organizational silos, historical neglect of enterprise SEO, and a lack of understanding on the part of the stakeholders about the value of SEO can render even the most seasoned search professionals helpless.
It means that SEOs and channel owners need to realign their strategies in search of flexible solutions for the current challenges in enterprise SEO, so it can provide the highest ROI of their initiatives.
What is Enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO refers to practices of search engine optimization specifically aimed at large-scale organizations or enterprises. Unlike regular SEO strategies that can apply to smaller websites or businesses, enterprise SEO addresses the unique challenges and complexities that arise in sizable corporations with large-scale online presence.
Key characteristics of enterprise SEO include:
- Large-scale Websites: Enterprises have big websites with a considerable number of pages, products, and content in them. Such large-scale websites require special SEO strategies that can help optimize all kinds of relevant content for search engines.
- Organizational Structure: Usually, enterprises have tiered organization structures, which means decisions take a lot of time and SEO initiatives have to be routed through chains of management and approvals.
- Many Stakeholders: Enterprise SEO requires the coordination and cooperation of several groups and constituencies across the organization, like marketing groups, IT groups, content publishers, and others. Understanding and joint effort between these diversified groups is very crucial in achieving good results with SEO.
- Global Presence: Most enterprises have multinational presence where they offer their services or products to diversified markets and regions. In the case of an enterprise with a global presence, international SEO factors like language and regional targeting automatically come into play.
- Competitive Landscape: Big companies often have to fight off an aggressive competitiveness in their markets. Owing to this fact, enterprise SEO focuses not only on visibility but on efficiently outperforming of competitors in search engines’ rankings.
- Technical Challenges: Enterprise websites can be highly technically complex. Now, site speed, mobile optimization, and crawlability have to be approached head-on for a successful enterprise SEO strategy.
- Data and Analytics: Large organizations deal with massive volumes of data. The ability to use data analytics effectively with respect to measurement and improvement of SEO performance is an important area of enterprise SEO.
It’s an Enterprise SEO that deals in search engine optimization. This involves considerations on uniqueness, size, and obstacles unique to the large organization. Expert knowledge in the technical nature, strategic planning, and collaboration by other sections are put in place to attain and maintain the visibility in search engine results.
What’s the difference between normal SEO and enterprise SEO?
In its simplest sense, the most basic differentiation between regular SEO and enterprise SEO is the scale of the businesses concerned. Enterprise SEO services are fit for big organizations and involve strategies in how to navigate any kind of complexity inside a big corporate structure.
For this reason, different from the case at small and medium-sized businesses where you may have direct reporting to the CEO or founders, enterprise SEO involves reporting to leaders a few layers from the top of the organizational chart. Such a dynamic brings about its own set of issues: less timely decision-making, additional bureaucratic barriers, organizational silos, and other unique obstacles requiring strategic solutions from search experts and marketing leaders.
What is a scale in SEO?
When referring to the scale in SEO or scalable enterprise SEO, it is all about handling the ability to increase SEO efficiency and optimize impact in line with key business goals.
The secret to success with enterprise SEO lies in answering one fundamental question: can you measure, prioritize, and implement SEO programs at a scale applicable for large websites? Modern search engine optimisation professionals have all the knowledge required; however, they face issues specific to very large enterprises that require an extra level of skill and resolution to overcome efficiently.
Common Enterprise SEO Challenges and Solutions
Regard us as your ally in enterprise SEO. Whether you’re contending with significant legacy errors in enterprise SEO or encountering obstacles in gaining approval for your next ROI-driven initiative, we hold the solutions you need.
In larger organizations, the coordination of efforts can be complex, with teams dispersed across multiple offices often lacking synchronization. Even when goals align, past optimization efforts may pose difficulties. Legacy systems, outdated micro-sites consuming resources, or a lack of influence in the IT department can hinder important changes needed at the enterprise level.
Various issues and challenges are likely to emerge over time. Outlined below are some of the prevalent SEO challenges encountered in large enterprises, along with corresponding solutions.
Companies Using Legacy or Proprietary Systems in the CMS
- Problem: There is a big challenge for those outdated systems. Various departments may not get access to them; even their level of SEO capability is different, and most people are very much afraid of the steep learning curve with these systems.
- Solution: Know what the system is capable of, and start mapping the processes. Important things to learn: What structured data is available, What Redirect options are there, How Template designs are constructed, How Sitewide edits are achieved, What Internal link options are available, What Plugin options are there, Can you edit <head> data.
If finding these things is difficult, it may be time to think about updating your system or moving to another CMS.
Using Poor Tools
- Challenge: Organisations may use inappropriate tools, often because of over-sell by salespeople. Most of the tools are not well equipped to work across teams easily.
- Solution: Begin a thoughtful review of all of the tools in use to identify which are serving to improve the organization and which are inhibiting its success. Following this, engaging vendors to review enterprise-specific options – and beginning to retire tools not offering functionality required to successfully optimize a search engine.
Poor Communication and Alignment of Groups
Challenge: The challenge is that where there are a lot of teams and groups involved, managing SEO really does become a lot more difficult, not to mention trying to establish cohesion amongst the various teams and groups.
Solution: Enterprise SEO demands the development of robust relationships across the organization, extending beyond your immediate team. To foster collaboration, consider the following actions:
- Network with individuals throughout the enterprise.
- Initiate the creation of shared goals.
- Engage with various teams regarding upcoming changes.
- Leverage communication and collaboration tools.
It aligns all the stakeholders in one direction to bring about the necessary change an organization needs for its SEO goals.
Ineffective Use of Content Leads to Missed Opportunities
Problem: Content is valuable, and for an enterprise, there is a huge problem when opportunities are missed out because of improper deployment strategies.
Solution: Bring alignment in content goals across the organization by doing the following:
- Create a universal content calendar across the organization.
- Develop governance models that will drive the strategy behind the creation and deployment of content.
- Design and update workflows on a periodic basis for maximum efficiency in content management.
- Clearly detail the approval process of content editors, writers, and final approvers of content.
Once workflows are in place, deployment of content can happen quicker and more efficiently, which will enable your organization to take advantage of timely opportunities with news and trending. Set up processes to avoid pitfalls like duplicate meta titles and keyword cannibalization.
Resource Drain Due to Micro-Sites
Challenge: Many Enterprises have built up a number of microsites that – often – are very hard to manage.
Solution: When there are a few excellent link-building opportunities and ways to focus content in microsites, a lot of resources get burned up in maintaining them. If possible, merge these microsites into your flagship website, considering that all parties involved will be transitioned correctly.
Resistance from Development Teams towards SEO Strategies
Challenge: It is, in fact, an uphill battle to get development teams on board with your SEO strategy. Yet, there are a number of ways through which you can attempt to elicit cooperation and support from IT departments.
Solution: The most important factor for successful collaboration with development and IT teams is the fact that their roles are key to technical SEO; there needs to be good relations with these teams by using several methods to gain their support. Discuss your plans and challenges and collaborate on solutions that take advantage of the development teams’ knowledge.
This collaboration with the development teams is what moves an enterprise SEO effort forward. Shared successes, such as server scaling and speed optimizations, that have improved the rankings and results will help drive home the importance of working together. Give them credit and kudos at meetings to further facilitate this collaboration effort.
The “It Works” Mindset
Challenge: The problem is when sales are up and the company is growing, management is loath to change or add to marketing budgets as they think what they’re doing currently works. This is one of those thinking points that makes buy-in hard from teams.
Solution: To win backing for your plan and to promote its growth, a customized methodology is essential. It must comprise:
- Demonstrate tangible results.
- Create visualizations-reporting charts and graphs-that show how changes impact the business.
- Sharing user stories that show how much better their experience could get.
Teams will be much more on board when they begin to see how well something works towards the business’ growth. Evidence of results should be provided, and for where there might not be immediate evidence of these results, projection of where any changes proposed will help the enterprise grow can be instrumental in gaining positive support.
Lack of Tools for Tracking Effectiveness
Challenge: Businesses expect ROI from an investment, and SEO is one of the most important investments they make. It has to be measured to show its outcome. Unfortunately, too many organizations do not have the necessary tools to measure their campaign performance.
Solution: Measurable success is indispensable in order for expectations of managers and owners to be met. If you are not able to show how your work contributes to the business, then job security becomes an issue. Take advantage of the tools that can help track:
- Timing of Implemented Changes
- Business consequence of those changes
- Reports that detail effectiveness of campaigns
When you can show the value of SEO, it becomes so much easier to get support for your plans and strategies throughout the organization.
Absence of Governance
Challenge: The absence of governance will hurriedly create chaos for existing and future SEO teams. If governance is absent in an enterprise, you are tasked with the responsibility to drive key changes.
Solution: Businesses need to set rules regarding quality and standards. Governance may consist of various sections in an enterprise which have detailed rules and guidelines to be followed:
- Content teams
- Publishing teams
- Designers
- Developers
- And all other groups
Governance basically is all about policies, standards, and well-defined processes that are followed diligently. Good governance ensures that everyone plays the game by its rules. Good governance allows not only for smooth operations at present but also, when teams change, it becomes easier for others to continue with the set principles. If well applied, governance contributes to a coherent digital strategy, web accessibility, reduction of bugs and errors, and consistency across the enterprise.
Neglecting Technical SEO Challenges
Challenge: Enterprise work means burrowing through all the phases of large businesses, and in those, technical SEO can play a very important role. While the technical aspects of SEO may not be as easy as some of the other avenues of the work, they are integral and require attention.
Solution: Any oversight with regard to technical SEO should be revisited in steps such as:
- Site speed optimization.
- Creating solid internal linking.
- Identification of crawl errors and fixing.
- Sorting out issues regarding duplication.
- Implementation of canonical tags.
- Improvement in server response time.
Sometimes, small and insignificant-looking technical SEO problems are left unnoticed and build up over time. Sorting them out as early as possible paves an easier way to optimization goals.
Inadequate Redirect Control
Challenge: At the enterprise level, redirect management can quickly become unmanageable and actually do more bad than good for a Search Engine Optimization campaign.
Solution: Quite obviously, control over redirects needs to be regained, and first things one can do to get it under control are:
- Using crawlers for the discovery of all redirects.
- Repairing broken redirects or loops.
- Creating a master database of redirects.
- Putting redirect governance procedures in place.
Second, adding in an approver of the redirects at the end is a good idea so you can make sure you have a second tier of review to help avoid problems. Thanks for reading.
