What’s the skinny on enterprise SEO? It’s regular SEO on Hulk Juice, and it needs a lot of data in order to pack a successful punch.
We get asked all the time what exactly is enterprise SEO, as the waters can seem a bit murky around this industry term. And while there may not be one definitive definition, there are a handful of signs that point clearly to an answer.
In this post we’ll explore what enterprise SEO is, how you can identify if your challenges are best described as enterprise SEO, and, lastly, what you’ll need to have in place in order to tackle those challenges.
What is enterprise SEO?
It’s tempting (and correct) to immediately think of enterprise SEO as being about large sites, with unique large site problems. For example, Google’s guide to crawl budget suggests that it’s only something you should worry about if you have one million indexed pages, or ten thousand pages that change content frequently (e.g. news sites).
SEO legend Aleyda Solis recently produced this graph on the relationship between website size and SEO area of importance, which resonates with many enterprise SEOs:
Priorities shift as sites grow.
More established and robust sites have more at stake and so technical considerations become higher priority than smaller sites just getting off the ground.
Larger sites will often already have the authority and content they need to rank, but instead can wallow in a mire of duplication, fail to drive link equity into deeply buried pages, or struggle to get new or updated pages crawled in a reasonable timeframe.
Big old legacy sites then compound these issues by being difficult to work on, potentially having bad on-page performance or a complex web of templates and content management systems to grapple with.
Smaller sites can be enterprise, too
However, sometimes smaller sites (at least in terms of indexed page count) can have enterprise SEO challenges, too.
Perhaps they represent businesses with a lot of legal complexity, resulting in an involved and nuanced approval process for work. Or perhaps the site is smaller, but SEO is so critical to the business that there’s a half dozen or more dedicated SEOs.
Any of these scenarios would be reasonable to describe as in the realm of enterprise SEO, and would share some of the same challenges.
So, what are the challenges that come to define enterprise SEO?
The unique challenges of enterprise SEO
If any of the following sound familiar, it’s probably a good indicator that you’re treading in enterprise SEO territory:
- Formal business cases for SEO changes
- Weekly — or even daily — SEO monitoring and reporting
- SEO forecasts that feed into business forecasts
- Sub-brand or region-specific SEO reporting
Now, we’re a little biased, but we’d say that what all of these challenges have in common is their solution — and that’s data.
If you’re making forecasts or business cases in SEO, you’ll likely be working with estimated traffic, ranking, and CTR changes, aggregated across relevant keywords. And the closer you are to having a full and accurate picture of those keywords, the better your forecast will be.
If you’re reporting very frequently or at a local level on SEO, then you’re interested in specificity — it’s not enough to just say that an average rank went this way or that, or a specific head term did or didn’t do well. That won’t tell the whole story, and you wouldn’t be reporting like this if you or the business was going to be satisfied by that.
Enterprise SEO requires a robust rank tracking strategy
To capture this level of detail, enterprise SEOs tend to require more comprehensive data from their rank tracking. This includes getting the lowdown on local results from a mix of geographical locations, tracking desktop and mobile devices, and monitoring search competitors, among others.
Local insights from more than one place
Each location has its own searching habits and challenges. As an enterprise SEO, it’s not enough to limit data-gathering to one location and assume those insights apply universally.
No matter if you’re brick-and-mortar or online-only, tracking wherever your searchers may be — and getting as granular as zip codes, street addresses, or even coordinates — will reveal the nuances in those locations, allowing you to better serve their interests.
Mobile and desktop devices
With 58.99% of all web traffic coming through mobile devices as of Q2 in 2022, smartphones are now the dominant search device and simply too valuable to ignore. Enterprise SEO is all about the big picture, so only tracking desktop means only getting half the story.
Competitor intel
Big SEO means big competition on the SERP, so it’s essential for enterprise SEOs to keep eyes on what their competitors are up to. This is best done by tracking keywords against known competitor sites, but also by tracking organic share of voice to surface true search competitors and emerging threats.
Quick competitor analysis
See who you’re up against on the SERP.
Having a more robust tracking strategy doesn’t necessarily mean “track tens of thousands of keywords,” but it might, especially depending on your vertical. The thing is, it doesn’t take long to start hitting high keyword counts.
Let’s say, for example, you’re a retailer with 50 products and 10 locations across Canada — if you use those products as head terms, and track them in each location, on both desktop and mobile devices, you’ve just hit a thousand keywords (50 x 10 x 2 = 1,000). And that’s before getting creative with the search terms.
The most important takeaway here is to make sure you have a data sample that you’re comfortable is representative, and isn’t going to miss any important stories.
If a big chunk of your traffic comes from long-tail keywords, then a big chunk of your rank tracking should represent that. If your customers tend to search for you from a mix of rural and urban locales, then your rank tracking should reflect that.
The case for daily SERP tracking
The next step needed to ensure a comprehensive data set is a timely tracking cadence. If you’re an enterprise SEO, the ability to be agile is critical — and daily SERP data is key to this.
You don’t see one day’s sunny weather report and then expect it not to rain for the rest of the week. In other words, if you’re only getting a one-day snapshot of SERP data each week, you’re missing out on critical insight.
Not only do enterprise businesses have more to lose from SEO mishaps, they’re also likely to be impacted by consequences more quickly.
Google crawls authoritative and important sites more frequently, so you don’t have days to find and react to a technical SEO error — you need to see the impact when it happens. Similarly, many enterprise SEOs will be expected to react to and explain any traffic fluctuations on a daily basis, and without (well-organized) daily rank tracking, this is impossible.
The SERPs change daily and so should your data.
Stay ahead of the curve
In STAT, you can see exactly when you’re gaining or losing ground.
Enterprise-sized amounts of data needs organization
Having all this data and granularity though can bring yet more challenges — staying organized in order to best leverage your data is a difficult aspect of enterprise SEO.
Many platforms look great with 100 keywords, but become unwieldy to the point of becoming unusable at scale (or they simply grind to a halt and fall over). This is where the ability to segment and bulk tag your keywords, along with other bulk actions, take a significant jump in importance.
With all your keywords neatly organized into different segments — like by location, product type, device, search intent, Google top 10, search volume, etc… — you can keep tabs on multiple metrics at once and spot fluctuations and insights much faster.
Smart segmentation in action in STAT
Standard and dynamic tags tucked into data views.
Of course, you may have all your keywords segmented, but are your segments flexible?
Can you make retroactive changes that update historical data for that group? Can you bulk upload new labels to apply to existing keywords? Can you create segments that dynamically include or exclude keywords depending on SERP features, rankings, or other variables?
Enterprise SEOs need to be able to pivot their approach, and their massive amounts of data, on a dime, so these capabilities are essential to effective rank tracking at scale. The ability to be agile is critical here, too.
Other SEO tools and easy data portability
Of course, while rank tracking takes on an elevated importance in enterprise SEO, it’s not only about rank tracking.
A scalable crawler is also essential to help audit your site for on-page and technical issues. Local or self-hosted options like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb scale very well, and cloud solutions like Lumar or Botify are more costly, but tailored to enterprise use.
Any of these can also be configured for change monitoring, which is a good complement to rank tracking for spotting any issues before they become critical. Alternatively, there are dedicated change monitoring platforms like Little Warden, which can be configured to send convenient Slack messages or emails.
And don’t forget Google Search Console. Rank trackers may exist to make up for the lack of detail and precision found in GSC’s ranking data, but GSC is excellent for clicks and impressions, which help round out the view of your search performance.
Reporting on the above is extremely important in enterprise environments. And not only are enterprise SEOs more likely to manipulate their SERP data outside of their rank tracking platform, but they’ll also want to be matching it up against the business information and analytics from their other tools.
This is where a platform like Looker Studio is likely to be an important part of your toolkit, or perhaps a custom solution built in BigQuery, or the old faithful Excel, or some combination of all three.
The key component is that all this data can be blended together daily without drama or excessive manual work. This is where enterprise SEOs need easy data portability from their rank tracking platform.
Scalability is key
Whew! As you can see, there’s plenty of nitty gritty nuance to stay on top of when navigating the complex realm of enterprise SEO, but if we had to sum up what successful enterprise SEO is all about in one word, it would have to be scalability.
You need to be able to masterfully wrangle massive amounts of data at a daily pace without falling behind or being caught off guard by changes on the SERPs. And once you get on top of it all (hint: we’re here to help), the rewards scale too.
