What Is Enterprise SEO? A Marketer’s Guide to Search Optimization

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What is enterprise SEO?

MARKETING
TERM
DEFINITION

Enterprise SEO

Enterprise SEO is a large-scale, strategic approach to search engine optimization. It aligns your company’s business goals with the broader market opportunity and fortifies brand reputation to maximize impact across your marketing mix.

Is it just SEO for big websites?

Although enterprise SEO leverages similar principles to traditional SEO, the two are quite different. Small-scale SEO offerings deliver as much growth as possible within the limited confines of a small budget. In other words, the outcome is incremental value. Traditional SEO answers questions like: “How much traffic can we get with this budget?”

Enterprise SEO, on the other hand, delivers organic market share growth at Fortune 100 scale while also reducing risk. The outcome in this case is to become the market leader in organic search for a billion dollar product category.

It answers questions like:

• How can we grow organic market share by magnitudes?
• What will it take to reduce CAC by 75%?
• How can we protect our brand from unfavorable news cycles?

That type of growth outcome requires a completely different infrastructure and team integration. Enterprise SEO demands agility, transparency, and most importantly, a seat at the table when executives make key marketing decisions.

Enterprise search delivers impact at scale

One global enterprise insurance company has over $47 billion in annual revenue and approximately 50,000 employees. They’re in 80 countries and cover 10 industries, and their website has more than a thousand pages.

This is no small business, and neither is their search engine optimization (SEO).

Moving the organic search needle for an enterprise site like this requires more – a smarter, more sophisticated, and scalable approach to SEO. The approach should include more thorough analysis, processes, automation, integration, strategic outreach, analytics and broader coverage throughout the marketing funnel. The outcome is holistic SEO for scalable results.

A well-executed enterprise SEO program also protects a brand’s existing search footprint against fluctuations in Google’s algorithm and AI misinformation. This protection extends beyond product searches. It also builds a foundation for effective response in the event of a future reputation crisis.

Read on to see how enterprise SEO services help you to achieve higher organic rankings in the search engine result pages (SERPs) and greater ROI from SEO overall.

Dominate a product or service category

The primary benefit of an enterprise SEO strategy is that it presents your brand to searchers at every stage of the customer journey. As a result, your company becomes a trusted, familiar resource for consumers no matter their stage in the purchase funnel.

According to a 2020 commissioned study by Forrester Consulting, traffic sourced through organic search is more engaged and loyal which leads to higher customer lifetime value (CLV).

It’s naturally tempting to focus ecommerce search engine optimization efforts on product and category pages that directly drive revenue. But that won’t build trust with potential customers – and leaves the door open for competitors to do so.

What’s worse, it also leaves a brand vulnerable to online reputation issues, such as bad reviews. Negative brand content may cause consumers to have second thoughts when they’re making a final purchase decision.

Holistic on-page optimization

Enterprise SEO provides a holistic approach to high-quality content creation and on-page optimization coupled with highly targeted strategic outreach. When paired together, these strategies can be broadly impactful across the most lucrative pages and competitive keyword terms.

This approach earns a site organic traffic from a wide range of keywords. You’ll dominate large, competitive head terms, while reaping the benefits of long-tail keywords. While unpopular searches may seem insignificant, their aggregate search volume can actually exceed that of head terms. Plus, long-tail keywords are easier to win on in general, representing low-hanging fruit for your brand.

Optimizing holistically alongside scaled link building has additional advantages:

• It ensures no SEO value is lost due to poor on-page implementation. As a result, you’ll efficiently distribute link value to maximize the impact of your outreach.
• On-page and content optimization can help an article or evergreen resource page rank for a broad array of low-competition keywords. In fact, it’s often possible to rank an informational page based solely on quality and relevance of content, without direct links from external publishers.
• Informational pages can also be used as collateral in blogger outreach campaigns. A team of enterprise SEO experts armed with our technology can acquire targeted backlinks to high-value pieces of content.

The combined impact of this holistic approach pushes your pages into prime ranking positions ahead of your top competitors.

Protecting brand reputation

Branded searches are common throughout the customer journey. However, they’re most concentrated – and valuable – on the tail end. That’s because consumers have found a possible solution and they’re researching brands and products.

Branded searches typically return a mix of different results. You frequently find web properties that brands control, like websites, social media profiles and microsites. But you’ll also find third-party content such as online reviews, Wikipedia pages, and news articles.

While the top results generally still earn the largest individual share of traffic, positions throughout page one earn clicks. Beyond that, non-click impressions can be extremely valuable for shaping the perception of your brand. Just as people skim newspaper headlines, they skim the search results before they ultimately decide what to read.

Particularly in today’s era of clickbait, articles can have misleading headlines that affect a company’s online reputation. So if you want to control your online narrative and protect brand equity then you need to control your search results.

To do so, you must shore up your search landscape with owned properties and preferred content from other sites.

Corporate enterprise SEO proactively expands your digital footprint. As a result, you’ll be better positioned to mitigate sales losses and speed up recovery after a crisis.

Just how important is brand protection?

One Terakeet client recovered more than $32 million in monthly revenue after Terakeet flipped brand name searches on Google page one to 100% positive results. We also secured positions #1 and #2 on Google page one for branded review queries whereas the brand had not been ranking at all previously.

Program scalability

Enterprise-level SEO strategies should support future business objectives rather than targeting short-term wins at the expense of long-term sustainability.

Google’s algorithm understands better than ever how a visitor would interpret a web page. As a result, SEO now requires a multidisciplinary team of experts to integrate with stakeholders across UX, branding, content, and other departments. Those points of interface go far beyond the interactions of a traditional SEO project.

Many smaller firms and search optimization consultants call themselves enterprise SEO agencies. However, they’re not set up, nor is their workflow designed, to support this high level of integration.

“

Enterprise SEO requires technology, workflow management, and cross-department collaboration to be truly scalable.”

Jonas Sickler

Terakeet

Automation

When it comes to SEO for large companies, automation is key to achieve greater scalability.

Take keyword research, for example. There are so many enterprise SEO platforms and software solutions that can drastically increase your coverage and efficiency. Here are just a few of them: Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, SEMRush, Clearscope, STAT, Moz Keyword Explorer, Soovle, Jaaxy, KeywordTool.io, KWFinder, and Answer the Public.

For technical SEO analysis, there are even more enterprise search engine optimization platforms to automate the identification of problematic areas. These include Google Search Console, DeepCrawl, ScreamingFrog, Ahrefs, Moz, Woorank, and Botify. But there are many more specialized SEO tools such as:

• Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom measure page load times.
• Google’s Structured Data tool helps you to construct rich schema.
• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool improves mobile optimization.
• W3C Validator automates code validation.

To help you analyze content performance and manage the content development/publishing process, there’s BuzzSumo, CoSchedule, Newscred, Contently, Skyword, among others.

Need to automate video SEO analysis? Check out these tools:

• YouTube Studio’s YouTube Search Data
• YTCockpit
• TubeBuddy
• vidIQ
• Tubics.

We cover process and reporting automation below, as well. The point is, automation is critical for scaling SEO. Fortunately, the universe is abundant with enterprise SEO tools and platforms to help you 10X your output.

Workflows

Workflows are an important building block towards simplifying project management.

Whether you’re communicating with the web dev guy across the hall or an IT specialist in Japan, you need to make sure everyone adheres to the same systems, SEO platforms, and best practices. Otherwise, your SEO project management and production will suffer.

Every major promotional campaign, for example, should follow the exact same process. Content development should be a multi-layered process that benefits from systemization. Strategic outreach should be structured, with a repeatable process. No matter the activity within your SEO program, the more that workflows are defined, the more scalable your SEO will be. This is something that cannot be understated for a website with thousands of pages.

To that end, business process management software (BPM) such as Process Street, Pipefy and Kissflow can help you achieve substantial efficiency gains while adding quality control to your SEO work.

Beyond your technology stack, have conversations about standardization at the highest level within the organization so that processes can be easily implemented across the company (and the globe).

Templates

Templates fuel efficiency for large business SEO programs. When your website contains thousands of pages like global enterprises such as Nordstrom and IBM, coding up each page individually is impossible. In fact, building anything for single use will be a detriment to your website and your teams. Execution timelines will stretch on for months, and critical changes won’t be prioritized.

Despite the inefficiencies, it’s common for enterprise businesses to have developers work without SEO input upstream. As a result SEO teams can’t add or customize content on category and product pages.

In the meantime, your more nimble competitors will continue to dominate search.

Instead, collaborate with your developers to build templates that your team can replicate over and over again in line with enterprise SEO needs

When speaking about SEO issues with the development team, rely on analysis and reporting templates so that you can be speaking the same language, regardless of team member. Use templates to generate content across the enterprise consistently, as well. In addition, when conducting strategic outreach, leverage templates to enable scalability in your efforts.

In other words, wherever possible, create templates for your work for greater scalability.

Training

At the enterprise level, a mistake can be disastrous. Think of the butterfly effect: one small error can throw your entire workflow out of whack. For a large enterprise, the repercussions on the brand’s visibility can have a major impact on traffic, leads, and new revenue.

To avoid this, make an effort to provide comprehensive training for every employee involved in the SEO process. Document every workflow and process, as well as the associated expectations.

Create an environment that encourages questions so employees feel comfortable asking for clarification when necessary.

In addition, assign each task to a team or team member to keep everyone accountable for their own work. That way, if a hiccup does happen, you’ll be able to quickly pinpoint where the ball was dropped and how to get back on track.

Reporting

For continual alignment with executive management and across departments, use automated and scalable reporting. Automated reporting not only gives you a clear look at your organic search performance, it also gives stakeholders the information they need to feel confident in supporting your Enterprise SEO efforts.

Automated reporting also provides your SEO team members with the data they need to execute continual optimization to your web pages and content for performance improvements.

Online dashboards are an effective method for reporting across the enterprise. Domo and Tableau are more robust platforms, or you can explore leaner solutions such as DashThis and Grow.

Dashboards provide stakeholders with the information they need to know at a glance. This helps to streamline your Enterprise SEO operations with clear, efficient and standardized performance reporting, while averting the constant need for check-ins.

Enhance your entire enterprise marketing strategy

SEO for enterprise companies requires vastly more marketing integration between the brand and its SEO provider than a typical vendor-client relationship. For an enterprise to achieve maximum SEO results, various teams across the business need to work together harmoniously, and the SEO company must be able to effectively communicate and orchestrate efforts with different departments.

I wrote a thorough article about how to outsource SEO services if you’d like to read more.

It’s difficult for SEOs to get organizational buy-in, which is why traditional programs are narrowly focused. The enterprise approach to SEO, however, requires buy-in and integration across teams in order to maximize impact.

Enterprise SEO drives marketing and business results:

• Enhances the effectiveness of paid ads by increasing SERP coverage
• Seeds relevant keywords within PR placements to naturally pass SEO value
• Amplifies digital marketing initiatives, such as social media campaigns, to micro-influencers with dedicated followings
• Works with your design and development team to enhance user experience and boost engagement metrics that may help search performance
• Improves brand and executive reputations

Team integration and alignment strengthens your overall corporate marketing strategy. Enterprise SEO prevents departmental silos by requiring action and delivering results across the company. In other ways, SEO aligns efforts across teams to keep everyone focused on the way the audience thinks.

Enterprise SEO improves branding

Your company’s branding strategy typically focuses on specific messaging, positioning, differentiation, brand personality and core values. Branded SEO is centered on influencing the visibility of brand terms specifically, including brand name, branded products, and reviews. When executed successfully, all of these elements are reinforced. As a result, you improve multiple online customer touch points.

Another intersection of branding and SEO is in the area of reputation management. Online reputation management uses a combination of public relations and SEO principles to create positive content and push it onto the first page of search results.

With brand reputation management, the effort is often on ranking multiple websites on the first page of Google for a set of branded keywords in order to influence public perception. It’s a combination of PR tactics, such as earned media mentions, with more traditional content development and SEO techniques to push positive content higher in the Google SERPs.

In this way, Enterprise SEO helps to protect the brand, which translates into increased ecommerce sales and higher revenue. This is even more crucial for B2B SEO because company reputation often factors into business partnerships.

Paid search and display advertising

Advertising is expensive, and once you stop running ads the corresponding traffic grinds to a halt. With Enterprise SEO working in tandem with paid search and display advertising, you can reduce your ad spend and CPA without hurting your overall performance. Ads become part of your digital marketing plan rather than a necessity. You won’t rely so heavily on paid search, freeing up your budget while gaining real estate in the SERPs.

Another benefit of combining SEO and paid search is that a strong organic search presence enhances the effectiveness of paid ads. The more coverage your brand has in the SERPs, the more that searchers will see you as the “go to” brand. As a result, they’re more likely to click on one of your listings on the page.

You can also use paid search and advertising to gain traffic for a certain keyword while you establish an SEO foothold. In addition, you can do the same thing in reverse: focus on organic search for keywords that are too expensive to produce a decent ROI with paid search.

It amplifies PR initiatives

Enterprise SEO benefits your PR efforts by seeding relevant keywords within PR placements to naturally pass SEO value. In this way, SEO fuels better online performance and ROI from PR wins.

In addition, search engine optimization analysis provides valuable insights for the PR team. It adds deeper context around the value of websites, bloggers, and influencers as part of the PR team’s relationship building initiatives.

On the flip side, PR is an important part of off-page SEO. As you build relationships with and gain the trust of reporters and publications, getting published becomes easier and easier. This opens new opportunities for the acquisition of organic backlinks from high-quality websites.

Social media

SEO data can be valuable in driving your social media strategy. Turn these insights into online conversations about audience pain points to strengthen your social marketing results.

Enterprise SEO involves the implementation of strategic outreach to publications, partners, and influencers. You can use these channels to amplify your social media campaigns to targeted audiences for better marketing ROI.

SEO can work together effectively with paid social, as well. For example, one of Terakeet’s clients is a brand with a rich history in one of the most competitive niches on the Internet. We implemented a Facebook retargeting campaign to maximize the value of organic traffic. The goal was to stay top-of-mind for those who had already visited but hadn’t yet converted.

Over the course of the campaign we generated an additional 1,500 sessions/month. Further, the campaign also drove an average of 25 additional highly-qualified conversions per month. This demonstrates how a quality SEO campaign can increase the potential for all marketing channels.

UX / web development

A global shoe retailer website was built without the ability to add new content to category pages. The result? A massive development effort just to enable the SEO team to add additional copy so that the pages could outrank competitors.

Website scalability issues damage an SEO team’s ability to do their job and bring traffic to your site. They can impede Google’s ability to crawl your site, as well.

Integrating SEO with web development also enhances user experience and boosts engagement metrics that may help search performance.

With Enterprise SEO, the SEO team helps the corporation’s web developers to build SEO into the DNA of the website. This translates into a more agile website, aligned to the way the customer thinks and better structured to enable both a positive experience for the site visitor as well as high performance for your brand.

While nobody can predict what Google will do next, the evolution of its search engine has been philosophically consistent. And while Google is frustratingly coy about specific search signals, it’s quite transparent about one thing: giving people what they want when they want it. Thus, a forward-thinking SEO program should prioritize user experience and content quality over attempting to game the system.

Enterprise SEO keyword strategy

In the past, SEO companies optimized content for individual keywords. But Google’s understanding of search terms evolved as the company introduced Hummingbird query architecture and the RankBrain machine learning algorithm.

The search engine is now able to understand semantic relationships between words and phrases. It also interprets the intent behind a search rather than simply matching the exact keywords within a document.

While most SEO companies are intimately familiar with both Hummingbird and RankBrain, old habits die hard. Most of today’s SEO programs still target single keywords or small categories directly aligned with specific products.

Sometimes they either look through a microscope at the expense of the bigger picture. In other cases they take a holistic approach that may provide some broad lift but is unable to move the needle on more competitive – and more valuable – terms.

Both of these approaches make some sense given the challenges of performing large-scale SEO. That’s especially true of off-page SEO, as links remain one of Google’s most important ranking signals.

However, those strategies ignore larger opportunities to increase traffic throughout the content marketing funnel, including research-based keywords. As a result, competitors might steal potential customers away before they even encounter your brand.

A large-scale SEO strategy must target not just these broad categories of keywords—research, product/service, and brand—but also the valuable overlap between them.

In the end, it’s much easier to predict and influence outcomes when you control the entire purchase funnel.

Keyword research

Do exhaustive keyword research to reveal your audience’s pain points as well as the types of solutions they’re looking for.

When consumers begin their customer journey, they often don’t have specific brands in mind. Instead, they’re in the research phase of the purchase funnel. They have tons of questions and they’re looking for answers through generic, non-branded queries. At this stage, they are highly receptive to what they find in the search engines, as they are eager for information, education, and answers.

Category keywords

Non-branded category keywords are a potential goldmine of organic traffic. These tend to be terms with higher-volumes of searches, and often represent individuals who are progressing down the marketing funnel but have yet to decide on the brand to purchase from or engage with.

Think of terms like boots and sandals, or more specifically women’s shoes, women’s boots, women’s sandals, running shoes for women, lace up flats, etc. This is the perfect time to interact with a prospective buyer, as they are looking for options and differentiators at this stage of the process, along with education. Dominating with ecommerce category page SEO tees up your brand for further success lower in the funnel.

Product keywords

With SEO for ecommerce product pages, you can typically perform well in organic search on your specific product names. However, you’re short-changing yourself if you assume product names are the only relevant keywords.

Do keyword research for product pages just as you would for any other page on your site. Build a list of keyword phrases that your customers might use when searching for your product. If they have significant volume, add them to your keyword strategy.

Bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) keywords

Who better to target than the people who are already looking to buy your product? This hyper targeted, bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) audience is the traffic you need to drive conversions. Those customers know exactly what they want and have their wallets ready.

Branded keywords

Rounding out your coverage throughout the marketing funnel, your company needs to dominate the search results for branded keywords. After all, these terms directly represent your brand. When someone is searching for your brand or your branded product, etc., you want to control the conversation. Do not cede an inch to the competition.

As mentioned, branded searches can occur throughout the funnel. Google may rank web properties controlled by the brand (e.g., website, social media profiles) as well as third-party content (e.g., reviews, Wikipedia pages, news articles).

With Enterprise SEO, you increase the number of positive brand listings in the SERPs through better optimization of your existing content as well as via new web properties that you control. This helps to push other content off of page one, better ensuring that you create the brand experience for the searcher that aligns with your brand strategy.

Improve content marketing

There are many preventable reasons that cause your content marketing efforts to underperform in search. The two most common issues are a failure to target keywords and/or misalignment between content and search intent.

Even the largest brands that devote substantial resources to content production make those mistakes. Our enterprise SEO solution solves both of these problems without sacrificing the voice or integrity of the brand.

Check out this article to learn more about the benefits of content marketing.

Controlling the entire conversion funnel

The stages of the conversion funnel include:

• Research Searches (Awareness Building)
• Product / Solution Searches (Consideration)
• Branded Searches (Decision)

To ramp up your marketing ROI, you must target prospective customers at every stage of the funnel. Use search data to uncover insights about your customer’s behavior and different needs during their decision-making journey.

With search data, you can explore the unique needs of your audience in each phase and develop a content strategy that maximizes results throughout the entire funnel.

Content optimization

Content strengthens your ability to gain visibility for relevant keyword phrases far beyond your category, product, and brand terms. Through on-page and content optimization, you can exponentially increase your rankings for long-tail keywords. Create an SEO-focused blog strategy with articles, as well as a content hub, video library, webinar series, or other forms of evergreen content.

Creative B2B content marketing helps you break through the noise and capture the attention of a broader audience. By making your content stand out, you’re more likely to earn organic social shares and backlinks to the content.

With that said, however, one of the benefits of producing optimized evergreen content is that it’s often possible to rank an informational page based solely on quality and relevance of content, without direct links from external publishers.

Search intent

Have you already identified relevant keywords but been unable to rank for them? Your content might be misaligned with search intent.

For example, many brands attempt to rank a product page for an informational query rather than a transactional term. Likewise, they may publish an article that barely skims the surface of an in-depth informational search term.

Effective Enterprise SEO maps intent to content to ensure that searchers have a positive experience when consuming your content.

Duplicate content

A content audit can help you spot duplicate content that plagues many enterprise websites. Similar content is dangerous because it confuses search engines and dilutes link equity. Between URL variations and scraped content, backlinks are spread among a number of pages rather than consolidated to one specific URL. Google ends up indexing the wrong content and showing users the wrong pages in the SERPs.

The result? Poor SEO and a bad user experience. Apply 301 redirects and canonical tags where necessary and create a content strategy template that helps your content team avoid duplicate content.

Content atomization through iterative content pieces

Scaling content production is a challenge for many large enterprises. To 10X your content production effectively, various content pieces should be created with atomization in mind.

Content atomization is the process of repurposing a core piece of content to generate new content ideas. Let’s say your enterprise serves a dozen different industries. Rather than create an entirely new white paper for each industry, you could create one white paper that is 75% applicable to every industry. Customize the last 25% and voila! You have a dozen white papers for a fraction of the work.

Not everyone likes reading and not everyone watches video. Content atomization helps you spread your reach and give everyone in your target audience the type of content they prefer. No matter where they seek their information – Google, YouTube, your blog or newsletter – you’ll be top of mind because your content is everywhere.

Drive backlinks at scale

Backlinks are a pillar of off-page SEO success. For a large enterprise, though, securing a few random backlinks here or there will not get you very far. Instead, aim to achieve scale with your link acquisition initiatives through structured strategic outreach to publishers, partners, and influencers.

Terakeet’s Chorus SEO technology fuses CRM functionality with a database of more than 9 million of these entities. This makes it easy to scale a campaign to thousands of outreach targets, all within a hyper specific niche.

Publishers

Publishers need content, so developing partnerships with publications is a win-win. You get backlinks and exposure and the publication gets quality content.

When developing a strategy to reach out to publishers, identify what thrills their audiences. For example, a pitch to a reporter at CNBC might focus on how your product is disrupting your industry. A pitch to NPR might focus on the steps you’re taking to create a greener, more sustainable manufacturing process. Who you pitch will determine the kind of content you produce.

Strategic partnerships

Acquiring non-paid backlinks through strategic partnerships is low-hanging fruit, and should be considered for any Enterprise SEO engagement. If the partnership is a formal one, then it might look like a link on a “Partners” page or in a blog featuring a joint endeavor.

However, you can be much more creative than that. If you’re a major fashion retailer, perhaps you could work with one of your brands to develop seasonal fashion guides. Or you can join forces with a corporate partner for a social cause. Or, you could be interviewed in their blog. The cross-promotional opportunities help you 2X your audience, while gaining backlinks in the process.

The link building opportunities through corporate partnerships are almost unlimited.

Influencer partnerships

The world of influencer marketing is an iceberg. At the top, a small group of mega-influencers command the lion’s share of digital marketing dollars. But brands often encounter the same influencers whether they’re connecting through a marketing agency, a platform, or striking out on their own with their in-house marketing team.

Conversely, effective Enterprise SEO relies on grassroots, unpaid influencer marketing campaigns to generate the natural backlinks that drive SEO value. As mentioned, Terakeet leverages Chorus, our database of more than 9 million publishers and micro-influencers to achieve scale. This can sometimes result in hundreds of influencers helping to promote a brand or brand-related content to their passionate audiences. Bear in mind that this all happens organically, without any payment or transaction. Another result may be thousands of influencers eager to participate in product releases and promotions.

By focusing on niche publishers and influencers with targeted audiences, you can disseminate a powerful, focused message that directly resonates with a specific buyer persona, at scale.

Learn how to create detailed buyer persona examples to target your customers.

Affiliate programs

Social proof and exposure is essential for any brand, and affiliate programs provide just that. Think of Amazon and their affiliate program, “Amazon Associates”. Bloggers, brands, publishers, influencers – all kinds of people – can join this program.

While performing outreach, Terakeet sometimes receives compensation requests from influencers who want to work with the brand, but who require compensation or product in exchange.

Terakeet can compile influencers’ compensation requests for brands to leverage for their affiliate programs or even a sponsored post. We can then pass this information along to the affiliate program contact.