Your enterprise SEO campaign might not be performing due to some underlying issues such as your website content, technical aspect, website page authority, website page experience, and many more.
Websites that are at the enterprise level often have hundreds to thousands of landing pages in them.
Enterprise-level website has so much content for the search engine to crawl, index, and rank.
An enterprise-level SEO can easily fall off the line due to the multiple stakeholders involved in making decisions.
Because of this, it is not easy to figure out what went wrong in an enterprise SEO strategy.
Even though each enterprise website has a distinctive business goal, its fundamentals are the same.
Today, I want to tell you about some of the most common reasons why enterprise SEO is underperforming.
You should check your enterprise SEO strategy against the list am about to provide to find opportunities you can take advantage of to improve your SEO performance and Return On Investment.
What Does Enterprise SEO Mean?
Enterprise SEO is the process of focusing on the SEO strategies of larger websites owned by larger organizations.
Larger websites are most often owned by larger companies that have established brand recognition.
But at the same time, there are plenty of smaller brands that have large websites and they can also benefit from executing their SEO strategy through an enterprise SEO lens.
If your business website meets the criteria I listed below then you will need an enterprise SEO strategy;
Reasons Why Your Enterprise SEO Is Underperforming
You might feel as if there should be hundreds of potential reasons why your enterprise SEO is not effective.
But, ultimately, the search engine ranking factors can be narrowed down to these four main key areas. Which are;
1. Landing Page Content is not optimized properly.
Google gets better at understanding content relevance and quality every year.
But when it comes to large websites, it can be a hell of a work to make sure all the landing pages in your website have quality content.
For your website to rank on the search engine, your landing page will need to have in-depth, original content.
And also, rich media, and good information structure with components such as a table of content, jump links, carousels and other interactive elements should also be added.
Your website landing page also need to measure up to google quality standard and if it does not measure up you can consider doing the following;
- 1You should invest in one or two content optimization software that will help you improve your content topical depth.
- 2You should also improve your information structure with the landing page's interactive design elements and features.
- 3You can also outsource some of your content or its optimization to an agency.
2. You are Targeting the Wrong Keywords
If your website pages are ranking well on the search engine but are not converting, there is likely to be a disconnection between your potential target audience and your target keywords query.
It is not impossible you build your enterprise SEO strategy around keywords that your target audiences are not searching for or you target keywords that are too competitive to rank for.
That’s why it’s good to mix up your website keywords targeting strategy.
Your keywords should be the mixture of short-tail and long-tail keywords in your keyword clusters.
3. You have too many similar Webpages and are Cannibalizing One Another
Most enterprise websites have lots of web pages with similar content, with this, you are not only competing with your competitors in the search engine ranking but you are also competing against yourself.
Keyword cannibalization is a common thing among many enterprise-level websites with lookalike landing pages that have little difference but are tailored to suit specific regions or markets.
It is quite simple for you to fix this issue. It is either you optimize your competing pages for different keyword queries or you add “rel canonicals”.
If your choice is the latter option, you have to make sure that the master version of the page has the highest quality of content and any lookalike pages should be identified as copies.
4. Your Enterprise Webpages Aren’t Conversion-Optimized
If your website content is bringing your website new keyword rankings, and traffic and not increasing conversions, then you will need to focus your efforts on improving your web page's call-to-action.
Below are a few conversion optimization ideas you need to look at:
5. Your website structure is a Mess
Enterprise websites fall victim to bad site structure issues easily.
With too much web content, you will need to distinctly convey the hierarchy of your website to your website visitors and google search engine.
This is essential in order for your website to rank well and also improve the user experience of your website.
To improve your website structure, you need to make sure that your website pages have useful, descriptive URL slugs that should contain keywords query that the pages want to rank for on the search engine.
You should also avoid page paths that are excessively nested and also avoid hosting web content on your subdomains.
For example:
You also have to make sure that your homepage navigation menu provides access to the most important pages that are on your website.
Adding a breadcrumb will also help the search engine to better understand your website structure and help you to distribute your page rank across your website properly.
You will also have to submit your website sitemap to your google search console account and if you haven’t done that then you should do it immediately.
6. Not Using PageRank to Your Advantage
After you have linked a page to another page on your website, you send a long portion of that page to PageRank.
PageRank is the original metric that was created by Google to better understand how much value, relevance, and authority one page in your website has over another.
If you have lots of site authority on your enterprise website, you are likely to have link equity that could be directed to boost other web pages on your website.
The majority of the link equity on your enterprise website will need to be on your website homepage.
Because of this, a pillar page model is the best idea for enterprise websites.
You should try to use blog content to link back to your key service or products category pages
Try using blog content to link back to your key service or category pages (which strengthen their importance in the eyes of search engine crawlers).
7. You are Making Mistakes with Anchor Text
The anchor text of your internal links must align with the keywords query you are trying to rank for.
If they don’t align it will hurt your chances of ranking for those keyword terms.
Non-descriptive anchor text like, “Read more,” “Click here” and others like it will not help your enterprise SEO.
It will not help the google crawlers to better understand what the different pages on your website is all about or which pages are most relevant to users' queries.
8. You have too many Broken and Low-Quality Links
If there are too many broken links on your website, too many links going out to low-quality domains, or other linking issues you might have on your website, Google will quantify your site to be lower quality website.
You can make use of website crawler tools like Screaming frog or Ahrefs to crawl your website and look at your website's external link profile.
If any problem is detected, make sure to repair any broken links or you should update your external links with more relevant and authoritative resources.
9. You’ve Maxed out Your Crawl Budget
Google search engine has a specific number of pages it will crawl on your website on any given day which is called the crawl budget.
It is possible that your enterprise business website might have maxed out its budget.
As a matter of fact, a 2018 study research showed that Google’s search engine crawlers failed to crawl half of the web pages of large websites.
If you are a small business owner with small websites then you don’t have to deal with a crawl budget.
As an enterprise company you need to think deeply about part of your web pages that you will be willing to spend your crawl budget on.
Getting to know this will bring back your enterprise SEO strategy.
If you have pages on your website without the potential to convert customers then it is a best practice you don’t let Google crawl it.
10. Your Enterprise-Level Website Is Slow
There are lots of things to put in place before a large website can be running fast and they are extremely important to any enterprise SEO plan.
A large website with slow loading time will not generate conversions for all your enterprise SEO efforts.
Below are the level levels of “slowness” that might be affecting your enterprise website loading time.
- Server-Side
Insufficient memory can result in slow database lookups for web content on your website page.
Yet, insufficient computing resources can be fixed easily by upgrading your website server with your web hosting provider or you can purchase a dedicated hosting server.
WordPress has a lot of plugins that will help you with this, the plugins will help you fix issues that are under the umbrella of your website with a single click.
- Under-Optimized Assets
The media contents in your website pages need to be optimized properly, if they are not properly optimized your website will not load quickly and Google will notice that.
You can thumbnail or compress your website images to smaller, more appropriate resolutions, or you can make use of a content delivery network (CDN) to serve images so as to reduce the load on your web server.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network that provides static asset caching for free for anyone using them as a free DNS provider.
11. Poor Page Experience Metrics
With the latest google page experience update, the user experience and technical performance of your web pages are more important than they use to be before.
The new standard for page experience is Google core web vitals, and you will need to measure up your enterprise website.
To see if your enterprise-level website meets the google web vital criteria, you can check the Core Web Vitals report in your Google search console account for any errors.
Once this has been resolved you will submit a validation request in GSC. Google will notify you if the issue has been fixed or not.
12. Not Enough Site Authority
If your business is a small business with an enterprise-level website, you are not likely to have enough site authority to rank for top-competition keyword queries.
This is the reason why it’s important you target lower competition keywords so that you can make some small wins for a short time until your authoritativeness finally improves.
Link building, Digital PR, Guest Blogging, Content marketing, and a strong online social media presence are some of the great ways you can earn backlinks for your website and improve its authority.
You should be consistent in earning new backlinks from quality websites as part of your enterprise SEO campaign.
13. You’ve Accumulated Toxic Backlinks
Enterprise companies with a strong website authority and large backlink profiles may find it hard to keep up with the links they accumulate.
Large companies also fall victim to negative SEO due to their established brand recognition and their position as an enterprise organization.
To avoid your website from accumulating toxic backlinks that go unchecked, you should try to perform quarterly backlink profile audits on your website to weed out toxic links.
After that, you should submit a disavow file with those toxic links and stay up-to-date on the new quality links you are trying to earn.
14. All of Your Content Are Ranking When It Doesn’t Need To.
A lot of enterprise-level websites default all their web pages to “index, follow,” robot tags. But the fact is that not all your content needs to be indexed.
What makes a website landing page worthy of the search engine index is if it has ranking potential + conversion potential.
If you have a landing page on your enterprise website that has low content and is not likely to rank well, you shouldn’t bother wasting your budget by letting Google crawl it.
15. You’re Not A/B Testing Your Enterprise SEO Optimizations
Getting to the first page can usually be accomplished by following SEO best practices, but getting to the top spots for highly competitive keywords takes more nuance and granularity.
Try SEO A/B testing specific optimizations on your web pages like page titles, meta descriptions, internal links, content length, and other elements.
Google Search Console’s comprehensive and daily keyword tracking will make accurately tracking your SEO A/B tests easy.
My Final Thoughts on Improving Your Enterprise SEO Performance
A good SEO strategy requires iteration; hence, you shouldn’t be discouraged if you are yet to get it right.
Making a few changes here and there, measuring their impact, and redeploying the perfect effective strategies will help your business enterprise SEO campaign to produce more great and consistent results.
And if you have an issue doing it yourself, you can HIRE ME to do it for you. I help businesses grow with the best SEO strategies.