What are the things that make an enterprise website? What is the difference between enterprise SEO and traditional SEO?
Take your time to read why an enterprise SEO strategy plan is relevant for a large organization.
What is enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO is defined as a large-scale, strategic approach to search engine optimization.
An enterprise SEO solution aligns your company’s business goals with the broader market opportunity while fortifying brand reputation to maximize impact across your marketing mix.
Enterprise SEO in one word means more pages, more online visibility and more challenges to deal with.
SEO is a challenging game, but when your webpages and links come in hundreds, thousands or even millions, it is a different ballgame entirely.
Enterprise SEO stakes are higher than traditional SEO and there are more internal stakeholders that need to be satisfied.
A successful enterprise SEO campaign will make a website eclipse the competitors in its industry and improves the company's online reputation.
On the other hand, enterprise SEO failures can have a weighty negative impact on the company revenue and reputation.
A well-established enterprise SEO strategy can send a flood of traffic to your website.
A technical difficult in your enterprise SEO campaign can tank your website ranking in the search engine, and there some challenges that are just a matter of scale.
An acquisition strategy can add thousands of pages to your enterprise website overnight.
What Is An Enterprise Site?
Enterprise site has no general consensus; it is just like a general website that is created for an organization or business group.
What makes it different is the number of pages on the site, and the positive impact they have on the company revenue and reputation.
An intelligent mind says it’s all about the size of the website.
An enterprise website has a high volume of pages (1000+) and industry authority.
If you are a small business with less than 60 employees but have thousands of webpages, then you will be seen as a leading authority in your industry.
By this logic, your website is considered to be an enterprise website.
Another word from an intelligent mind says enterprise websites are determined by the size of the companies working on the site.
The basic logic behind this line of thought is that, if a business needs a large team to maintain their website, then the website will be important for generating the business revenue and reputation.
In spite of what you might think or what your thought might be on what an enterprise website should be, all enterprise websites have some few things in common;
Why Enterprise SEO Matters?
1. Traditional SEO Fixes Don’t Work Always
Traditional SEO is focused more on generating traffic and optimizing websites based on keywords.
It is not focused however on whether the generated traffic buys in or accepts the brand and business.
Enterprise websites most times have problems that look like an obvious issue that are fixable. But the complexity of the enterprise website makes these simple issues difficult to fix.
Making changes to an enterprise website is like turning around a giant ship.
For example, you might be tempted to create new web pages to replace some content on your enterprise website.
But then you will have to take into consideration the negative effect this changes will have on your website.
The changes will affect your site inbound links and domain authority acquired by those pages in the long run.
This is the example of the double-edged sword that an enterprise site is. They normally enjoy all the benefits of amazing brand authority.
At the same time they will have to be careful so as not to undermine it while they are keeping their content and SEO fresh.
Most times the barrier to change is an organizational barrier.
It most times takes resources from IT, marketing, product and educational subject matter experts to perform content improvements.
The enterprise SEOs involve have to be able to effectively demonstrate the business case for the resources and time needed to make the necessary adjustment.
Another challenge is the sheer volume of webpages, links (inbound and outbound links), or technical issues that are needed to be addressed.
Yet, depending on the issue, and the circumstance behind these challenges, the cure might be bad than to leave the disease unattended to.
2. Internal Collaboration Is Critical
When a business lives around its website, there are always works to do and some adjustment to be made.
It is a normal thing to work with various stakeholders to maintain a successful enterprise website.
The website doesn’t only affect the business account; it has a direct impact on the job performance of some employees.
A product category manager in purchasing will have a personal stake in whether pages are optimized for her products.
A public relation director will have to make sure his press releases are ranking well in the search.
An on the other hand, there are some stakeholders whose actions or inaction will have an impact on the enterprise website performance.
3. Competition Is Stiff
Enterprise websites will have to compete with other popular businesses that have a sophisticated SEO campaign strategy.
Let’s take Airtel for an example. Airtel is a leader in the telecom industry, but they find it difficult to stay on top three search results because both national and local competitors were always ahead of them on the first page of SERP.
It took an enterprise SEO campaign strategy- which included content optimization for more than 2000 keywords and 440 local sites for them to stay ahead of their competitors.
The aggressive approach that was applied finally paid off, with over 2100 keywords getting into the top three positions and more than 3000% increase traffic coming from local search queries.
This is to show that popular brands should not rest only on brand recognition to perform better in the search results.
What Makes Enterprise SEO Different?
If we are to put in on a practical level, enterprise SEO campaign requires more strategy, planning, and more patience than the traditional SEO campaign.
1. Scalability & Automation
Whether you are doing link building or setting up microdata for your product listings, the work is always enormous on an enterprise website.
And the number will grow more after a new product is launched, or after a merger or acquisition.
Even with a team of SEO professionals, it is not advisable to do everything manually; doing it manually will waste everyone’s involved time.
Enterprise SEO requires you to use tools like Botify, BrightEdge , which will enable you to scale up and automate your tasks.
2.Multiple Locations
Local searches continue to grow in its relevance and importance, with more than 70% of local based searches which result in an offline purchase.
For larger enterprises with franchises or a branch network, the search engine results pages should serve up location base content in a way that is consistent with their company and drives them conversions.
And the best way they can do this, is to use content templates that will allow you to answer key customers questions.
3. Reputation Management
The greater the authority of a business, the higher the possibility for bad Public Relation.
Negative news and discuss can spread like wildfire to quickly dominate branded search results.
Let’s imagine you are the CEO of a top well known company in the world, let’s say Apple, and there are over 15,000 internet searches for your name in a month.
Three of the top five results in the search engine are negative stories that make untrue claim against you.
No matter how good your public relation team is, you will need a sophisticated SEO strategy to save up more accurate Search Engine Result Pages results.
This is another feature of enterprise SEO: undoing the damages that has been caused by untrue claims.
Using apple as an example wasn’t hypothetical, it happens frequently to most top CEOs around the world
In a situation that this happens to you while you have an enterprise SEO professional working for you.
Your SEO professionals will have to use a combination of content strategy and technical SEO to shed highlight your accomplishments and demote any unfair stories that are related to you.
They would also make changes to your personal website if you have you’re your Wikipedia page would also require some changes and they will also respond to claims about you in community forums.
Businesses that have no enterprise websites also get bad press occasionally, but the impact it have on their business is not far reaching like enterprise business, and the solution is also easier to solve compared to enterprise business.
To Sum Up
The higher the stakes that is involve, the more impactful SEO campaign will be on your website
When done the right way, enterprise SEO can help any business to further dominate in their industry and it can also help them to become an authority in their industry.
Businesses that fail to effectively execute enterprise SEO risk huge damage to their revenue and reputation.
Search engine algorithms changes every time, and when it comes to agility, small businesses with non-enterprise websites will have the upper hand.
Enterprise sites already have the brand authority in their favor, but they will have to be consistent, effective in their enterprise SEO strategy to maintain their dominance.