11 Best Enterprise SEO Practices & Tips
How to improve your Enterprise SEO ranking and stay in front of your competition.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO practices are becoming an incremental step in the digital marketing strategies of every company. But one type of company that should especially focus their efforts on improving their SEO is enterprises.
Why? Utilizing SEO tools ensures that the company stays competitive in the dynamic and ever-changing world of digital marketing, particularly when it comes to Google and Bing rankings. Enterprises are at an advantage over their smaller counterparts. They have the scale, the resources to sustain an in-house SEO team instead of hiring an enterprise SEO agency, and the capabilities to fund an enterprise SEO campaign.
Since these companies typically have hundreds or thousands of employees working for them, they have – in most cases – thousands of web pages associated with their corporate websites. To keep up with this competition, an optimal SEO strategy needs to be followed.
An enterprise SEO solution will allow corporations to enhance their own brand name, achieve high-value spots over competitors and third-party websites, and also prevent attacks to the company’s reputation.
In this article we will cover what makes enterprise SEO so valuable, the challenges faced, and the most effective ways to utilize enterprise SEO tools to stay ahead of the competition.
But, to first, it’s important to understand why SEO for enterprises is different compared to a smaller business.
What Makes Enterprise SEO Unique?
Enterprise-level organizations are big companies with hundreds or thousands of employees, large websites with numerous pages, and a well-established brand name among their target audiences.
Due to this, like many traditional marketers, you may assume that smaller companies do not pose a threat online – and this is where you would be mistaken. If anything, the online challenges that a company faces actually increase as the company increases its digital presence.
As an enterprise website has many web pages, offering different services, features, and types of content, the website needs to be constantly optimized as the company grows and scales further. This can only be done if the enterprise has an SEO team with dedicated SEO developers.
Enterprise SEO Challenges
However, having a larger, more complex platform to manage and optimize shouldn’t be that much more different when you have the means right? Well, not quite. Aside from the fact that an enterprise or corporate website needs to keep thousands of pages up to date, they also face two other challenges.
Keeping up with the increase in competition
When it comes to digital marketing and search engine optimization, the competition is getting savvier. Whether it’s a local business or an industry leader, everyone is using digital marketing to compete for customers and website traffic.
And if increasing search engine optimization can connect an enterprise’s site to thousands of more potential customers, then the need for a sound enterprise SEO platform, strategy, and implementation is paramount.
However, the corporate world has been fairly slow to catch up to SEO standards and practices.
Getting Executives on board with SEO Initiatives
Another huge challenge for enterprises is getting executives and stakeholders to see the value that SEO efforts bring. Some executives are simply unfamiliar with SEO concepts and the impact it has, which can lead to a reluctance to invest in this.
Some other members of an enterprise may understand its importance but fail to grasp the extent of what SEO strategies the company must take. Researching simple keywords and content creation or rewriting will not suffice.
In order to tackle this, the most effective solution is to educate executives on the results of SEO and provide evidence of how and why it’s so crucial.
11 Best Enterprise SEO Practices
As mentioned above, some digital marketing professionals assume that SEO is exclusive to keywords. but, keywords are not enough to distinguish yourself in search engine result pages anymore.
Here we have listed some of the best enterprise SEO practices you should implement.
1. Target Specific Content with Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords allow search engines to narrow the scope of the search to a more detailed one with the most relevant information. Targeting specific keywords or phrases enables enterprises to reach specific segments of their audience more effectively.
A large company needs to be an expert in their industry, and for potential customers to realize this, the enterprise needs to optimize its content so that specific search results directly meet the customers’ needs.
For example, if you are an online hat vendor, keywords such as “buy hats online” will be too broad and the competition will be too high. However, “men’s and women’s beanie hat” is more refined and will be much more beneficial to target.
It will result in stronger search conversions from organic traffic since these users have a greater specific search intent.
2. Embracing Data-Posturing
An enterprise SEO strategy that involves finding keywords and then staying put is ineffective. Search engine results change constantly, even in a matter of days, and certain URL’s fluctuate as algorithms and competitor SEO efforts become more refined.
Therefore, you want to ensure that your content is optimized for SEO as much as possible. This means considering website results, page speed, keyword performance, and digital analytics on a weekly, maybe even daily, basis.
3. Get a Dedicated Team on Board
To accomplish data-posturing and an effective Enterprise SEO strategy, a dedicated team is necessary. Whether that’s an in-house SEO team or hiring a specialized SEO agency, it makes a huge difference.
Hiring an SEO manager, assembling a dedicated team that has expertise in the various elements of digital marketing, and clear goal-setting can make optimizing your web pages far easier.
4. Leverage Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing isn’t just a successful strategy, it’s also the most cost-effective. Partnerships with social media influencers especially are becoming an increasingly popular option.
However, Influencer marketing is not only a great tool for start-ups but also established enterprises. It is an organic way to reach more consumers with the use of social media. Although launching an influencer campaign by an enterprise can seem foreign, it is a great way to attract an entirely new audience and a group of young consumers.
5. Leverage Clients & Customers
In combination with influencer marketing, leveraging existing connections can also be useful.
Many companies have a ‘Partners’ page on their website. If you are a client of theirs, asking for a link on that page is not unreasonable, and will generate traffic to your web page. After all, that is a valuable and desirable backlink opportunity you should take advantage of.
Whether it’s an event information page, your sponsor, or a donor appreciation page on a nonprofit website, asking existing partners for links can be an effective tool.
6. Internal and External Linking
Linking allows enterprises to increase their credibility and perceived expertise and is a vital enterprise SEO tool.
Internal linking creates an internal directory of sorts. It shows users that they can learn everything they want from the enterprise’s website alone. Whether it’s for general information or specific, if internal linking is done well, users can stay on a corporation’s website and not have to create a second search. A great example of this is Wikipedia.
Additionally, most enterprises have multiple brands under their umbrella with their own websites and identities. And in this situation, external linking is a must. Having these websites link to one another – when it makes sense to do so – is a surefire way to keep users within the “circle”.
External linking connects users to a page that has useful information on a given topic. It further reinforces the perception that the enterprise is informed and engaged within their market and field.
7. Re-Optimize Instead of Starting From Scratch
Re-optimizing existing web pages makes it easier for users to find and navigate them. But also, it is so much faster for search engines to index them since they only need to update their data. Why tear everything down to start from scratch if you can build on past success.
Re-optimizing provides enterprises and their SEO teams with thousands of web pages to work on and provides a great starting point.
8. Make use of Local SEO Content
As mentioned earlier, instead of making your content general, you want to make your enterprise SEO content-specific. This includes local SEO – optimizing your SEO for local searches.
It’s difficult to make an enterprise that is spread across various cities, countries, or even continents seem relevant to any individual community. Taking the time to produce local listings will help to bridge that gap and increase your content effectiveness.
9. Optimize Images Through Alt Text
Optimizing images is a clever tool to stay ahead of the competition. In the digital world, images are incredibly useful. Alt Text connects internet searches to corporate web pages by strategically using imagery to attract attention and keep users on a domain for a longer period, which will inevitably translate to increased conversions.
10. Increase Site Speed and User Experience
Sluggish load times and performance on your website will kill your web traffic. Your web site needs to be fast, efficient, and user-friendly. If not, it will lead to higher bounce rates which will lead Google to believe your pages are not rich in content and value. Thus, your web rankings will plummet.
11. Use Automation to Simplify the Process
Enterprises would benefit from adding automated processes to their web domains. In the interest of resource and time-allocation, there are tasks that employees will be doing which could be done by an SEO software at a much faster rate.
By allowing automated processes to run certain parts of the website operations will create value on the user-experience end. As for your team, they can spend the saved time focusing on tasks that are really important, such as content creation, optimizing meta tags, and so on.
Final Thoughts on Enterprise SEO Practices
Even if you have never optimized your enterprise for SEO, it’s not too late. Hire an enterprise SEO agency that can build a comprehensive SEO strategy or build an in-house SEO team, it will benefit your enterprise greatly.
Although you may face challenges in getting all executives to understand the importance of enterprise SEO, educate and inform them to get them on board. The sooner you have a dedicated SEO strategy, the better.
With data to guide you, combined with the practices and tips mentioned in this article, you have all the tools necessary to plan and implement an enterprise SEO strategy. It’s time to make SEO work in your enterprise’s favor.
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