Like the proverbial snowflake, every website is different. Excellent SEOs know that every site must be researched thoroughly and tailor their efforts to that company and vertical. The strategies used to rank smaller websites, even if they’re in low-traffic but high-competition verticals, won’t work for big companies. Enterprise SEO brings with it a set of challenges — and opportunities — different from those associated with smaller sites. Big companies and large websites require a comprehensive enterprise SEO strategy and implementation. Without an understanding of effective enterprise SEO, it’s easy to get buried in an avalanche of technical problems and ineffective efforts. Read on to find out 5 ways to ensure enterprise SEO success.
1) Fix the Foundation
In addition to researching the business and competition, it’s vital that your enterprise SEO company conduct a thorough technical audit. Pouring resources into a site full of broken links and other technical SEO problems is like trying to fill a leaky bucket. Dynamically generated URLs and new product pages can create thousands of broken links and duplicate content. Developers and SEOs have different priorities and it’s up to the SEO team to make sure the site is coded in a SEO-friendly manner.
2) Institute a Communications Protocol
Enterprise SEO involves many stakeholders. With the company’s own executives and marketing personnel and external design and development agencies involved, as well as the legal concerns and need to get approval for content and design changes, it can be difficult to negotiate the different players and concerns. Creating and getting approval of a communications protocol will help ensure that decisions are made in a timely fashion and by the correct parties.
3) Make it Scalable
When a site has hundreds, even thousands of pages, it’s not possible to manually optimize and link against each page. Successful enterprise SEO hinges upon creating a scalable strategy. Here are some ways to create scalable SEO strategies for large website.
Template Metadata: Even if you managed to manually optimize thousands of titles and descriptions, it will be nearly impossible to get marketing and legal to review and approve each one. Thus it’s important that you create a template to generate unique metadata. Product titles and geographic modifiers can be used to create unique metadata quickly and effectively.
Optimize Elements: Even a huge enterprise SEO team will be unable to optimize thousands of pages. And there’s even less chance that a company will be willing or able to run thousands of edits through their legal team. One way to get the most reach out of your optimization efforts is to optimize elements that are used on multiple pages. Adding keywords and targeted links to a footer is a quick and effective way to spread desired phrases and anchor text across the site.
Link Against Categories: Successful enterprise SEO depends upon identifying the pages upon which link building should be focused. For most large websites, the best pages to link against will be category pages. A few of the reason category pages make the best targets for link building campaigns:
- They are more likely to be updated frequently with fresh content
- Links on the category pages to subpages are often targeted (the anchor text contains a keyword) and if not, it’s usually possible to implement this change
- The pages that link off the category page are relevant to that page’s content thus creating more valuable links
- Link juice will flow from the category pages, meaning linking against one page will have the effect of raising the rank of multiple page
4) Trust But Verify
Make sure everything that is supposed to be completed by another team is completed. While someone else may be responsible for that action, you are responsible for your SEO efforts. As mentioned in point number 1, if there are problems with the foundation, it’s hard to build a solid house. Considering that a few keystrokes can un-index an entire site, or duplicate an entire site, it’s best to double-check that all requested changes are carried out and carried out correctly. It’s not an issue of competence; everyone is busy and things can slip through the cracks. Having a proper communications protocol allows you to know whose responsible for fixing something and allows you to follow up on improper implementation in a timely fashion.
Enterprise SEO is a serious business. Sites with thousands of pages and products can stand to make or lose large amounts of money if they’re search rankings rise or fall. Large websites can’t be approached with the same strategies one would use for smaller sites. Successful enterprise SEO requires an ability to strategize and execute large-scale SEO initiatives as well as great project management skills. When contracting a NYC search engine optimization company for enterprise SEO projects, make sure they have extensive experience doing search marketing for big companies and large sites.