Every marketing expert’s dream is to work with a major corporation. Unlike smaller businesses, these large organizations have unlimited budgets and run enormous enterprise SEO campaigns. Depending on a company, they might even give you some creative freedom, which isn’t common within the niche.
However, this comes with a caveat. Large enterprises demand excellent results. You need to be very good at your job and confident in your skills to run such a large business. Furthermore, each of these has certain policies you must adhere to.
Enterprise SEO is usually much different than search engine optimization for smaller companies. You will likely have to coordinate with other teams since large companies pursue different marketing approaches. This means that you’ll have to waste a lot of time on communication and endless meetings.
In this article, we’ll review the critical metrics that large organizations focus on during marketing and SEO campaigns.
What is search engine optimization for enterprises?
As mentioned, enterprise SEO is a process of optimizing massive corporative websites. These businesses usually have thousands of pages, several active social media accounts, and numerous employees. That being said, just performing a basic audit can be a tall task for certain SEO providers.
Truth be told, reviewing all the links and articles can be an arduous task. You simply don’t have enough time to go through all the minor things as you would with smaller blogs. In fact, it’s often more important to focus on upcoming articles than to review old ones.
An interesting thing about these sites is that they’re much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Visitors don’t realize how many blog posts they have, which is something you can only figure out by looking under the hood.
Each one of these companies has numerous stakeholders who want to get the most out of the site. This can be nerve-wracking for SEO professionals who have worked within the field for just a few years. Luckily, most of these sites are already on a positive trajectory, so your task is just to keep them afloat.
On the other hand, any small change to Google’s algorithm can send ripples through the site. So, the traffic values usually fluctuate between two extremes, which is something you should consider when making an enterprise SEO strategy.
7 Key enterprise SEO metrics
When talking about website factors, they are generally similar for smaller and bigger websites. In the end, as an SEO expert, your job is to generate traffic and revenues for a company regardless of size.
Here are a few things you need to focus on:
1. Organic traffic metrics
When implementing SEO strategies, your goal is to get as many pages on top of organic search. That being said, keyword rankings is one of the main metrics to track.
Website traffic can often be misleading. Inexperienced people might think every visitor is a potential client, but this is far from true. For example, you can rank certain web pages that are irrelevant to your business. When a user reaches your site, they might read that specific article, but they’re less likely to browse the blog.
So, whenever you perform SEO, you should focus on keywords that provide high organic traffic and can lead to conversion. It’s much better to get fewer visitors who will properly interact with the site. Among others, this will have an incredible impact in the long run by increasing the site’s topical authority.
The best way to determine if you’re getting quality traffic is by checking metrics such as time spent on site and bounce rate. If you manage to get high numbers on these two, it means that most people who reach your site are actually relevant to your business. You can check these stats with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Sales can also help measure SEO performance, although they’re also sometimes misleading. For example, the target audience might like your site, but they don’t trust you enough to buy products and services. You can only change this through increased brand awareness and CRO (conversation rate optimization).
2. Quality and quantity of links
Large websites get lots of links on a daily basis. However, that doesn’t mean you should put the process on auto-pilot. In fact, you should implement practices that would allow you to get even better and more backlinks.
If you’re working on a long-term contract, it would be ideal to start building relationships within the industry. Connect with news outlets covering the industry, as well as other top competitors. Make yourself known through HARO, and try to get guest post opportunities. If you get featured on other large blogs, you will start getting lots of tricking referral traffic.
Large corporations usually have massive social media marketing teams. This could open new link-building opportunities. You should work daily with the SMM managers to coordinate efforts and create campaigns that would promote content sharing.
The good news is that large sites can acquire an exponentially bigger number of links as time goes by. If you have already made a name for yourself online, people will recognize your brand and will be less reluctant to quote your articles.
Unfortunately, this also means that you’ll be more exposed to negative attacks. Black hat SEO is something that large companies have to deal with all the time. Occasionally, your job will come down to disallowing links sent to your website. The positive thing is that these attacks are less effective against well-established blogs.
Among others, when you take control of a large site, you might also notice that some outbound links are broken, which can further decrease user satisfaction. This is another thing that can have a negative impact on your rankings within search results.
3. Keyword grouping
Keyword grouping is important for sites of all sizes, given that search engines prioritize authoritative sources that focus on specific topics. To get the most out of this approach, you should master link baiting.
Basically, SEO experts should always cluster their articles. Perform keyword research and list the most important topics for your business. Use keywords with high traffic to create in-depth pillar pages. Once you do so, start making satellite articles and interlink them to the pillar page.
In other words, you should always prioritize posts on your blog. You don’t actually need to rank every article that you create. Instead, it’s much better to have a few solid web pages that will drive the majority of your traffic.
After you create one such group of articles, you should start promoting them. Contact other bloggers within the industry and news outlets. Try to get as much traction as possible via social media. Getting high-quality links is crucial for ranking the pillar page in SERPs.
Keep in mind that this strategy only works if you have an excellent main article. These posts should provide unique insights you can’t find anywhere else on the internet. This is the only way to attract the necessary attention and get lots of backlinks. Aside from written content, you should also add beautiful graphic solutions.
Keyword grouping is a bit tougher if a corporative site already has numerous articles. You must delete and modify many of these pages to create a logical system. Furthermore, you would probably have to create new pillar pages with up-to-date, relevant information. Otherwise, there’s a chance that the site will suffer from content cannibalization.
4. ROI
Enterprise brands often hire CRO experts to increase sales on their sites. However, this is something that SEO experts should also tackle. Usually, search engine optimization professionals get lost in all these metrics, thinking they’re doing a fantastic job. But at the end of the month, all these investments might not provide any returns.
Everything we’ve mentioned so far makes sense if you can convert. Getting lots of visitors and great site stats won’t help your business if you’re not making any money. So, you need to consider how this will affect the company in the long run when creating content or building links.
Of course, it’s tough to optimize sales pages. Nevertheless, you can still drive traffic indirectly by connecting them to highly converting articles. Alternatively, you can point visitors to your service and product pages from your landing page.
After driving traffic to a site, you need to leave breadcrumbs that visitors can follow. You can use call-to-action, pop-ups, web chat, and other features to increase your engagement level. A good solution is to provide offers that would entice them to buy from you.
Whatever the case might be, you should always consider website sales and how they compare to investments. When talking about corporations, in particular, it’s best to focus on building brand awareness.
5. Proper indexing
Enterprise-level websites that have existed for a while usually don’t have much trouble initially indexing their pages. The Google crawlers visit the large site almost every day, so whenever you post something new, the robots will quickly pick it up.
However, that doesn’t mean you’ll never suffer from crawling errors. For example, there’s a chance that someone has blocked access to important articles on your site by using the noindex attribute. Alternatively, you might encounter sitemap issues.
Indexing is especially important for large websites. If Google notices some crawling problems, it might significantly decrease the pages’ visibility. The best way to tackle this potential issue is by performing consistent checkups with Google Search Console.
Once you take over control of enormous corporative sites, you likely encounter a handful of indexing issues. These are common problems that marketing teams often disregard, even though they represent a major missed opportunity.
6. Tackling technical issues
Aside from crawling errors, there are numerous other technical issues you might encounter when auditing enterprise brands. And considering the sheer size of these platforms, each of these errors can have a massive negative effect on traffic and conversion.
A good example is website speed. It’s an issue you can quickly remedy but can cause a significant dip in traffic if you don’t do so. If it takes too long for people to reach your pages, they will simply bounce, sending an extremely negative signal to the Google search engine.
Similar goes for mobile-friendliness. Your pages should be shown properly on mobile devices so that the target audience can interact with them. Just imagine creating fantastic product pages, only to realize that people can’t actually buy from them.
Generally speaking, large sites don’t suffer from that many issues. Even before you were hired, the company probably had a team that managed this kind of stuff. However, given that things constantly change within the SEO field, you should stay in the loop with the best practices and implement them when possible.
7. Branding throughout the site
Although branding isn’t necessarily an SEO metric, it’s somewhat connected to optimization. Whenever you create new pages or build links, you need to consider how this would affect your business. For example, you should write content according to the corporative voice. It should resonate company’s policies, vision, and mission.
Measuring branding practices is a hard thing to do. Unlike traffic or the number of backlinks, there isn’t a numerical value that would track this stat. Nevertheless, it’s something you should always consider when performing your daily duties. Branding has a passive impact on everything you do, and it can help not only optimization but also other marketing efforts.
You might say that increasing awareness is much more important for large corporations than performing SEO. It’s not that optimization is irrelevant; it’s just that you can get much more value from branding. It affects every marketing process, from social media to pay-per-click, email outreach, affiliate marketing, etc.
If you need enterprise SEO services, make sure to contact MiroMind today!