The basic principles of SEO are the same for businesses of all sizes, but what does change is the amount of work involved in implementing SEO strategies. Large companies may need to optimize hundreds or even thousands of web pages. This makes everything from creating content to identifying technical SEO issues far more difficult for these companies.
Fortunately, it is possible to make large-scale SEO efforts more manageable. The key is taking an enterprise SEO approach. What is enterprise SEO? How can you benefit from enterprise SEO tools for managers? Here’s what you should know:
What is Enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO is a strategy that involves optimizing enterprise-level sites in an effort to improve their ranking in relevant search results. There is no universally agreed upon definition of what makes an enterprise site. But in general, enterprise sites have these things in common:
- An enterprise-level site is one that consists of a significant number of web pages, which makes implementing SEO strategies more difficult.
- An enterprise-level site has a major impact on the business’s revenue and reputation.
- A large team is required to maintain, update, and manage an enterprise site due to its size or complexity.
What SEO Challenges Do Enterprises Face?
Each of the pages on an enterprise-level site must be properly optimized, which can take countless hours. Plus, if a search engine algorithm changes, you may need to make updates to each of these pages. Managing SEO efforts for a site of this size is overwhelming, time-consuming, and challenging.
The number of pages on an enterprise-level site isn’t the only SEO challenge that large enterprises face. The stakes are also much higher for enterprises, which is why every SEO strategy must be executed with precision.
A single technical SEO issue could cause your product’s ranking to plummet. A negative news story written about your brand could suddenly steal all of the top spots in the search results. Issues like these could have a major impact on an enterprise’s reputation and revenue.
Another challenge is the fact that traditional fixes typically don’t solve enterprise SEO issues. For example, sometimes creating new optimized pages to replace old content is easier than updating old content. This traditional fix might be effective for a smaller site, but it won’t work for an enterprise-level site.
Why? If you replace old content on an enterprise site, you could potentially lose all of the inbound links and domain authority associated with those pages. In this case, the traditional fix may not be the most effective.
These are some of the many unique challenges that enterprises face when implementing SEO strategies.
What Are the Benefits of Enterprise SEO?
There are many benefits to taking an enterprise SEO approach to your digital marketing strategy. This approach may allow you to:
- Target Customers Throughout the Buying Journey
- Dominate the Entire Product or Service Category
- Implement A Comprehensive, Effective SEO Strategy
- Protect Your Brand Reputation
Target Customers Throughout the Buying Journey
Every consumer goes through a series of stages before purchasing a product or service. These stages are collectively known as the consumer buying journey or buying cycle.
Some enterprise-level marketers make the mistake of only targeting consumers in specific stages of the buying cycle.
For example, they may focus solely on optimizing product pages, which target consumers who are nearing the end of their buying journey. However, this means they aren’t targeting consumers in the early stages of their buying journey, which leaves the door open for their competitors to acquire these customers.
If you want to maximize your results, it’s important to use enterprise SEO to target consumers throughout the buying journey. Enterprise SEO introduces your brand to consumers at every stage of the buying cycle. This helps your company establish trust, raise brand awareness, and build strong relationships with your target audience.
Dominate the Entire Product or Service Category
A well-executed enterprise SEO campaign can help your company dominate its entire product or service category. Enterprise SEO can establish your brand authority and help you connect with new segments of your target audience.
An aggressive enterprise SEO campaign will provide your company with broader coverage so you can successfully dominate a specific category.
Implement A Comprehensive, Effective SEO Strategy
Enterprise SEO involves many different components, including content creation, on-page SEO, technical SEO, link building, and extensive keyword targeting. Each of these strategies can make an impact on your site’s ranking on their own. But implementing all of these different components at the same time can maximize your results.
A comprehensive enterprise SEO strategy can drive organic traffic from a wide range of targeted keywords, including general, competitive keywords and narrowly-defined long-tail keywords.
Your enterprise SEO strategy can also help you attract the attention of new influencers or bloggers, who could potentially amplify your reach by introducing your brand to new consumers.
Because enterprise SEO is so comprehensive, it puts your company in a position to secure all of the top spots in the search results.
Protect Your Brand Reputation
Enterprise SEO can help you control what users see when they perform a search using branded keywords. Most users who perform searches using branded keywords are specifically looking for your company’s website. But sometimes, they may see negative news articles about your brand, unflattering social media posts or reviews, or your competitor’s website at the top of the search results instead.
Seeing these search results could affect their perception of your brand. Even if they don’t click on one of these links, a negative or misleading headline could affect their opinion of your brand.
Enterprise SEO gives you an opportunity to aggressively target branded keywords so you can protect your brand’s reputation. You can control what appears in the results of branded searches, which allows you to control the narrative.
Plus, it puts your brand in a good position to deal with public relations crises that may occur in the future. Because you already control branded keyword searches, you will be able to quickly recover from these potential public relations disasters.
What to Look for in Enterprise SEO Tools for Managers
Enterprise SEO is unique, so traditional SEO tools may not be designed to meet your needs. If you’re ready to invest in an enterprise SEO tool, here are the features you should look for:
- Automation
- Workflows
- Templates
- Reporting
Automation
It would be impossible to manually perform all of the work required to optimize an enterprise-level site. For this reason, it’s crucial to find an SEO tool that automates SEO tasks. Automating manual, repetitive tasks makes enterprise SEO much easier and more manageable.
Workflows
You must choose an SEO tool that allows you to create workflows for different SEO processes. Why? Defining these workflows ensures that everyone on your team follows the same exact process when completing SEO tasks. It will force everyone to use the same systems, complete the same tasks in the same order, and adhere to the best practices. As a result, your team will produce consistent, high-quality work.
Templates
SEO involves a lot of repetitive tasks. This is especially true for enterprise-level sites, where the same change may need to be made to hundreds of pages at a time.
You can reduce the amount of manual, repetitive work involved in SEO processes by using a tool with templates. Your team can quickly duplicate these templates instead of manually creating the same thing over and over, which will save time and increase productivity.
Reporting
As an enterprise SEO manager, you are probably responsible for satisfying a long list of internal stakeholders. Everyone from the buyers to the advertising and public relations team may be counting on you to implement effective SEO strategies.
Each of these stakeholders may ask for SEO reports on a regular basis. Manually creating reports is time-consuming, which is why you should look for a tool that provides SEO reporting. This way, you can quickly pull and send reports to stakeholders when needed.
What is the Best Enterprise SEO Tool for Managers?
There are a number of different SEO tools for enterprises, but none that can compare to Gryffin. Built by digital marketers, Gryffin is the only tool designed with all of the features you need to streamline your enterprise SEO efforts.
Gryffin allows you to create and automate customized workflows to keep your projects moving forward toward completion. This tool provides the structure and organization you need to effortlessly oversee all of your SEO efforts, regardless of how many pages you are responsible for managing.
You can use this tool to manage all of your enterprise SEO efforts from concept to completion. Then, use Gryffin to measure the results of your campaigns. Gryffin pulls data directly from Google Analytics and presents it in easy-to-read charts and tables so you can view important metrics at a glance. You can also use Gryffin to pull custom reports to share with critical stakeholders within the organization.
All of your SEO work, all in one tool. Learn more about how Gryffin can help with enterprise SEO by starting your free trial today.