Enterprise SEO takes the cake for the most complicated, intensive, and multi-dimensional approach to search engine optimization. If you’re running a large company, building site authority and improving your search engine rankings requires you to juggle dozens of moving parts.
I’m here to simplify everything for you.
How Is Enterprise SEO Different?
Every type of company has its nuances. No matter who you are, you’re building a custom SEO roadmap.
But enterprise companies are unique in the sense that they often have:
- Massive websites with thousands of pages
- Multiple microsites and subdomains
- Complex site structures and architecture
- A plethora of products and services to promote
- Multiple target audience segments and ICPs
The enterprise sales cycle is also considerably longer and more complicated than any other business sector.
On average, it takes between 6 and 12 months to close a deal. And the average enterprise sale involves seven decision-makers.
Not to mention, each member of the buying group has different priorities, and each of their priorities will change as they move through the sales funnel.
You’ll need dozens of different types of content for economic buyers, technical buyers, end-users, and whoever else is involved in the purchase process. And you’ll need top-, mid-, and bottom-of-the-funnel content to support them.
Despite the fact that enterprises tend to have larger marketing budgets and resources, they also have slow, bureaucratic processes that impede innovation. Something as simple as investing in a new tool or testing out different types of content takes months.
*Sigh*
How This Changes Things For Your Strategy:
We know that enterprise SEO…
- requires a significantly larger investment
- involves diversified content and targeting
- takes longer to implement
- takes longer to see results
- is more complex
…and that means many of the techniques you use for small-scale SEO won’t work the same.
As an example, you wouldn’t take the same approach for a growing software startup as you would for a huge corporation like Salesforce, which could get millions of organic visitors for any given product.
So…let’s dive into what you should do.
9 ROI-focused Enterprise SEO Strategies
Start within striking distance.
You’re probably sitting on tons of content that’s already ranking on search engines, just not high enough to get traffic. Anything you have in positions 11-20 is within striking distance. Start there.
- Log in to Ahrefs (my chosen keyword research tool).
- Paste your URL into Site Explorer.
- Navigate to Organic keywords.
- Filter by Position.
Enter values 11 and 20 and click Apply.
From there, audit each piece of content with Surfer SEO, which will give you exact instructions for optimizing the page.
Also review the content yourself against other top-ranking pages for (a) quality and (b) relevance. If you can optimize the page and improve the content, you’ll probably see it break into those 1-10 spots pretty soon.
Focus on high-intent topics.
Even if they’re low-volume. More traffic ≠ more deals.
You tell me: Which is more valuable?
- A page that gets 5,000 organic visitors and doesn’t book a single meeting
- Another page that gets 5 visitors, but converted a new customer
With an enterprise SEO strategy, a commercial keyword that nets you 1 organic visitor could be worth six figures (if you have a high CLV and average deal size, that is).
While I generally recommend focusing keywords with 50+ search volume first, you can throw that all out the window as an enterprise company.
When thinking about what to target, go beyond keywords. Think about the topics your customers are most interested in and build content around those.
- What are the main things your customers search Google for during the sales cycle?
- What questions do they ask when evaluating your product/service against a competitor?
- What does your sales team hear from prospects all the time?
- What do your current customers talk about as their pain points and benefits?
I talk in-depth about how to nail keyword-intent alignment in my article about SEO mistakes to avoid.
Target short-tail keywords.
Everyone and their mother loves to shout the value of long-tail keywords from the mountaintops.
- They’re low-competition
- They’re high-intent (assuming you’re targeting them correctly)
- They have high conversion rates
On the other hand, short-tail keywords (those with 1-2 words) are often not worth your time. Most are super top-of-funnel. And they tend to be more on the competitive side.
But if you’re a larger company with the resources to throw at a huge SEO project, targeting short-tail keywords becomes more feasible because it makes you more authoritative
Let’s take DealHub as an example. The CPQ software vendor publishes hundreds of “long-form definition articles for industry terms (we call this a “glossary”).
When you search for something related to those terms (e.g., “What is a weighted pipeline?”), their glossary pages show up like this:
They probably aren’t closing too many deals from these articles. But they are getting tons of organic traffic. And it’s boosting their authority across their entire site.
Plus, hundreds of thousands of people are going to recognize their logo. If you’ve got the size and marketing budget they do, that type of thing is important.
Go after competitive keywords.
This is another thing I’d never advise your average company to do, but is absolutely critical for an enterprise website.
Let’s say you’re a CRM software vendor. As a smaller or mid-sized business, there’s no reason for you to go after a term like “CRM software.”
- Keyword Difficulty of 83
- ~427 referring domains to rank in the top 10
- Dominated by Salesforce, Zendesk, Zoho, and the likes
But if you’re a multinational CRM software vendor like they are, not competing for that term means you’d be missing out a ton of traffic. As an industry leader (or aspiring one), showing up on search engines is part of what it takes to reinforce you’re a key player.
So, here’s my strategy:
- Make sure your foundational SEO is great.
- Find gaps in top-ranking pages.
- Create comprehensive, long-form website content around these competitive keywords.
- Include multimedia resources like infographics, data visualizations, and videos.
- Pump up your backlink profile so it’s comparable to the current top results.
For competitive keywords, I still recommend not going after too many. Focus your enterprise SEO efforts around the ones that are central to your business (e.g., Salesforce ranking for “CRM”).
Build authority with topic clusters.
A topic cluster is a group of interlinked content that covers every facet of a given topic.
The idea is that you create a central “pillar” page that covers a broad topic in-depth, and then create smaller related pieces of content (usually blog posts) that link back to the pillar (i.e., “clusters”).
Here’s how you can apply this enterprise SEO strategy: take a high-level feature or benefit of your product/service and create enough subsidiary pages around it to show search engines you’re the definitive source of information.
Let’s say you’re a cloud computing company. You decide to focus on a broad yet significant topic within your niche: “cloud security.”
Your pillar content would be an extensive guide — something like “The Ultimate Guide to Cloud Security.”
Then, you create cluster content addressing subtopics and keywords like:
- “Best Practices for Cloud Security Management“
- “Understanding Cloud Security Compliance Standards“
- “Cloud Security Tools and Technologies“
- “How to Respond to a Cloud Security Breach“
Each of these cluster content pieces would provide in-depth information on their respective subtopics.
Where it makes sense, you’ll add internal links to the main “Ultimate Guide to Cloud Security” pillar page. And the main page will interlink back to each of the cluster pages.
For instance, you might link to the tools and technologies article in a “Best Practices” section of your main guide, suggesting tools that can help you meet compliance requirements.
Prioritize your user experience.
Some enterprises have flat-out terrible technical SEO and UX. Have you ever tried using an airline’s website to book a flight?
Terrible, I say.
- Pages that take forever to load
- Poorly designed navigation and user flows
- Broken internal and external links
- Non-responsive pages on mobile devices or small screens
If you’ve ever wondered why, it’s because their websites are built on old technology and are bloated with unnecessary features. Since they’re so massive, it’s remarkably difficult to make updates and improvements.
You’re in a better position than them. Building a website in this day and age means can optimize your UX and technical SEO the right way by:
- Using modern web technologies
- Investing in a responsive design for all device types
- Improving your page speed
- Regularly checking for and fixing broken links
- Simplifying your navigation menu
- A/B testing all the different elements of your website
The best place to start is with a Core Web Vitals audit. Most of the issues you’ll find here are easy fixes that’ll have a substantial impact (and immediate) impact on your overall user experience.
Build high-quality backlinks.
High-quality content isn’t enough. Out of Google’s 200+ ranking factors, backlinks have always been (and always will be) one of the most critical factors.
Their logic is simple: “If other authoritative, high-quality sources of information link to your content, your content must also be high-quality and authoritative.”
There are lots of different ways to earn solid links:
- Guest posting
- Finding unlinked brand mentions
- Creating linkable assets (e.g., infographics, data visualizations)
- Podcasts
- Webinars and live events
- Channel partnerships
- Community engagement (e.g., sponsoring a university’s computer science department hackathon or career fair)
For an effective enterprise SEO strategy, you need to focus on content creation, on-page optimization, and technical fixes first. Otherwise, you’ll be generating backlinks to a site that won’t convert.
Note: Even large companies with in-house marketing teams generally prefer to outsource link building — it’s the most involved and nuanced part of SEO, and it requires significant resources and infrastructure that probably aren’t worth developing on your own.
Optimize your content for featured snippets.
Whenever you Google a question, term, or phrase, you’ll see a snippet at the top of the search engine results page that answers your question or provides a summary of the content on the page. These are called “featured snippets,” and they can dramatically increase your organic traffic.
According to Ahrefs, there are four types of snippets (paragraph, list, table, and video).
A paragraph featured snippet is a small block of text that appears at the top of the SERP and answers a question concisely. Semrush and Brado studied featured snippets and found they make up 70% of snippets on search engine results pages.
To optimize your content, clearly answer the question in 50 words or less, like this:
List snippets outline the steps the user has to take to do something. For example, here’s one that comes up when you Google “steps to create a business plan”:
A table snippet is similar to a list snippet, but it presents the information in a table (shocking, right?).
I love table snippets because they’re easy to read and stand out on the page — users can quickly scan for the most crucial info.
Video snippets appear when you Google something that’s difficult to accurately describe in words (usually a how-to).
Collect data and share original reports.
THIS.
As an enterprise, you’re in a position very few others are: you have the data and resources to produce new insights.
This makes for fantastic linkable assets, and typically they bring in lots of links from other high-authority sites.
For example, HubSpot surveys hundreds of marketers and releases a “State of Marketing” report every year.
As another example, I’ve linked to Semrush, Backlinko, and several others in this article. And every piece of data I’ve used to string together my points has come from a report that the company produced themselves.
If you want enterprise-level online visibility and respect, you absolutely cannot skip this.
When it comes to enterprise SEO, you can’t afford to do it wrong.
I see tons of enterprise companies make fatal mistakes when it comes to SEO.
- They group it with the rest of their marketing activities.
- They assign nuanced tasks like keyword research and content strategy to interns who can barely work Google Analytics.
- They throw a few keywords into their articles and expect it to do something.
Meanwhile, the competition is stealing 99% of their potential inbound leads.
There are agencies like us for a reason, ya know. We’ve spent years working with search engine algorithms and tailoring SEO strategies to large-scale companies.
