WHAT IS ENTERPRISE SEO?

No matter how big or small, or what products or services they offer, every business needs to be visible to succeed. In today’s world, that means it needs to be digitally visible. The best way to be digitally visible is to rank as high as you can on search engine results.

That’s where SEO comes in.

The whole point of search engine optimization is to improve your rankings. That said, what works for smaller businesses doesn’t always translate to enterprise businesses. That’s where enterprise SEO comes in.

Enterprise SEO is search engine optimization that focuses on big businesses. Big businesses can mean a few different things, though. It can refer to businesses that bring in significant revenue (as in millions) and businesses that have massive websites with thousands of pages. Because of the size of the sites and the scope of the businesses, the standard approach to SEO doesn’t always work well for these businesses. Enterprise SEO recognizes that and caters to the organizational structure and SEO needs of these more extensive operations.

The goals of enterprise SEO are similar to those of SEO in general. The purpose of SEO is to optimize your business’s website so that it ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher you rank, the more traffic you get to your site. More traffic gives you greater opportunities for conversions, thereby increasing your sales and your profits. It’s also a method you can utilize to protect your current search footprint against algorithm changes. As search engines update their algorithms that determine how sites are ranked, enterprise SEO acts to maintain and improve your current rankings. The other purpose of enterprise SEO is to protect and build your brand’s reputation, building trust, and customer relationships by having pages and content that keep your brand at the forefront through every stage of the customer journey.

Despite the overlap in goals, there are some unique challenges to enterprise SEO that don’t exist for general SEO. If they do, they aren’t on the same scale. Consider the structure of a large business compared to a small one. It’s often far more complex, fleshed out, and developed than what you would typically find in a small business. There are increasingly greater demands on people’s time to talk about essential SEO changes that need to be made, so the approach to handling SEO has to be different. The strategy needs to be more like a business plan that explains the importance of the project and why it needs the time and attention it does to compete with other business demands for time and attention. It will require the input and expertise from different departments and different levels within departments for clearance and implementation.

Bigger sites tend to be subject to other issues that make enterprise SEO more difficult as well. Given the thousands and thousands of pages a site may have, it may be more difficult to index and crawl. That can lower rankings instead of improving them or even result in the wrong pages showing up for search results. Because of the site’s expansive nature, there are usually multiple people working on various projects at any given point. As changes are implemented, anyone involved in those aspects of a site will need to be consulted and brought in to make sure things go smoothly.

Additionally, given the global nature of the internet, larger sites may get translated into different languages, and various projects may need to be managed across multiple countries. They may also include subdomains, or the business may own numerous websites. All of that adds to the complexity of enterprise SEO in a way that general SEO doesn’t typically encounter.

Because of the unique challenges for enterprise SEO, it’s a different beast from general SEO. Enterprise SEO recognizes the impact that things like the business structure and the size of the site have on SEO efforts. It deals with businesses that operate on a grander scale than small companies do, whether that’s in terms of the size of the site itself or the volume of revenue generated. Enterprise SEO requires a greater degree of patience, planning, and strategy to be effective, thanks to the businesses’ grander scale and sites it works with.

Despite the simplicity of SEO, once you start getting into the details, it can be incredibly time-consuming and complex. Add on the extra involvement and processes that go along with enterprise SEO, and if you aren’t already an expert, you can quickly become overwhelmed. Large companies already have a lot on their plates without adding enterprise SEO to the list of things to do. Outsourcing enterprise SEO to an agency allows you to focus on your own area of expertise. You need someone who’s experienced and knows how to handle the SEO needs of your business. You need someone who can craft strategies for your business that will help you meet your goals. By outsourcing your enterprise SEO to an expert agency, you can give your business its best shot at getting what it needs in terms of its SEO.

Large companies need the visibility and brand protection that enterprise SEO can provide. While there is some overlap with general SEO, enterprise SEO is better suited for large companies and their needs. It caters to the organizational structure of the business and the size of the site to get results. While unique challenges exist in enterprise SEO, a solid enterprise SEO strategy can yield results in your industry.