Enterprise SEO: Scalable Strategies for Growth

Enterprises have the kind of resources that small businesses can only dream of, but that doesn’t mean search engine optimization (SEO) is smooth sailing. In fact, it often involves new challenges: refreshing thousands of web pages (“where on earth did they get this source?”), using different languages, and more. 

To create a successful enterprise SEO strategy, you need to think big. Really big. This guide will help you handle everything from finding errors to managing teams. 

Key Characteristics That Define Enterprise SEO

Both enterprise and traditional SEO aim to achieve higher search engine rankings and bring in more organic traffic. But there are a few significant differences: 

• Larger scale: Enterprise businesses just involve more of everything — more content, more keywords, and more visitors. Automation tools and standardization can help you juggle it all. 
• More complex sites: A simple blog? Ha. An enterprise website may have thousands — yes, thousands — of landing pages and other content. If your technical SEO game isn’t on point, you might end up with a clunky mess. 
• Tension between brand vs. local relevance: You’ve got your official brand voice, but you also need to consider regional audiences. Say “knackered” in a blog, and your American readers will be scratching their heads. 
• Longer implementation cycles: In small businesses, SEO decisions may only involve a handful of people. But in enterprises, multiple departments — like legal and PR — typically need to sign off on even minor changes. 
• More collaboration: Enterprise SEO often involves cross-departmental teams or even external creators. A content strategist might write a brief, while a freelancer creates the blog. And legal crosses out a few risky sentences before publication. 

While the bar is higher, so is the potential payoff. With the right enterprise content strategy, your company can dominate search results and attract a steady stream of organic traffic. 

Building a Strategic Foundation Across Large Websites

Enterprise websites often have tens of thousands of URLs. Optimizing all these pages for SEO takes careful — some might say obsessive — planning. 

Many businesses use a pillar system to organize content. For example, Patagonia groups its blog posts into categories like “Activism Stories” and “Climbing Stories.” This step also speeds up keyword research because you can spread terms across the same "family" of posts.

Enterprise teams also need to decide which content to prioritize. High-traffic landing pages may be refreshed quarterly to maintain their peak condition. Meanwhile, a blog post that only gets 20 visits a month or has evergreen content can go longer between updates. 

Aligning SEO With Business Goals

Enterprise SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every action should align with the organization’s overarching marketing and business objectives. Otherwise, you might have stakeholders working in opposite directions (or bickering in meetings).

Let’s say your marketing team is trying to double the company’s Instagram following. You could work together to create short videos that link to more detailed blog posts, increasing traffic on both platforms. 

Managing Cross-Department Collaboration

SEO for enterprise companies is a group effort. Sure, you might have a dedicated SEO team, but they typically work with these departments: 

• Content creation 
• Engineering 
• Legal 
• Marketing 
• Product 

Getting buy-in from all these players is critical. Clearly communicate why SEO matters, and explain how they can support your efforts. For example, the engineering team could help you build an SEO-friendly web structure and insert structured markup data. 

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Keyword Research and Content Mapping at Scale

Enterprise SEO solutions — like Moz Pro and Screaming Frog SEO Spider — can help you audit your site’s keywords. That way, you’re not painstakingly tracking everything in an old-school spreadsheet (shudder). 

These tools can reveal unexpected gaps and opportunities. Maybe your audience cares deeply about sustainability, but you only mention it in a single blog post from 2019. Or competitive analysis might show that your biggest rival has the #1 spot for “recycling fashion tips.” You can catch up by creating white papers and other resources that incorporate relevant keywords.

You should also use platforms like Ahrefs or Google Search Console to detect competing content. For example, two blog posts might include the primary keyword “best harnesses for small dogs,” splitting your traffic. You can avoid these issues by deleting the weaker blog or combining them. 

Scalable Content Optimization Techniques

Meticulously reformatting thousands of pages by hand could take months. Save your sanity with these shortcuts: 

• Use AI-powered enterprise SEO tools like Ahrefs and Indexly to automatically identify broken internal links and other issues. 
• Create templates with spaces for title tags, meta descriptions, and other SEO must-haves. 
• Ask your engineering team (collaboration, remember?) to set CMS rules. For example, your system could auto-populate URLs based on blog titles.  

Leveraging Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO utilizes data and automation to rapidly create hundreds, or even thousands, of web pages. For instance, you could turn a database with product descriptions into SEO-friendly product pages. It’s an incredibly effective way to produce content at scale — no typing necessary. 

Governance and Workflow Best Practices

Working with different teams can be complicated at best, downright chaotic at worst. Here’s how to keep everyone on the same page: 

• Spell out your ideal tone, banned words ("absolutely no Gen Z slang"), and other details with brand guidelines. 
• Create a content development workflow with checklists and approval processes.
• Set clear quality standards, such as not using AI-generated content. 

Technical SEO for Complex Site Architectures

As an enterprise company, you can expect to encounter some of these technical challenges: 

• Crawl budget: Even Google isn’t all-powerful. Publish a thousand pages in a week, and it might not be able to index them all right away. Removing duplicate content and speeding up loading times can help prevent this issue. 
• Faceted navigation: Letting users filter your content can improve the user experience — especially on product-heavy sites — but it can also bloat your index with thousands of duplicate URLs. Use canonical tags to tell search engines to only index the main ones. 
• Legacy CMS constraints: Older systems may not support certain SEO elements, such as alt text, or look clunky on smartphones. Your IT team may be able to build workarounds for these issues. 
• Unlinked mentions: Some businesses will, intentionally or unintentionally, reference your content without linking it. For easy link building, use Google Alerts to catch these mentions and reach out to politely request a link.

Automation Tools That Enable Scalability

These platforms can help you automate part of your to-do list (hey, you’re busy) and grow your online presence quickly: 

• BrightEdge to automatically reformat content and build domain authority
• Conductor for AI-generated content and automatic competitor analysis
• Botify to build AI workflows for internal linking, indexing, and other tasks

Reporting for Multiple Stakeholders

SEO reporting for enterprises typically focuses on overall content performance, rather than individual elements like new blog posts or funny videos. Here are a few content metrics to collect: 

• Attribution models to see which content influences visitors 
• Conversion rate 
• Keyword rankings 
• Number of backlinks
• Number of leads 
• Organic traffic growth 
• Revenue 
• Session duration 

Use this data to create custom dashboards for different audiences. Executives, for instance, probably mostly care about revenue and traffic. Meanwhile, operational teams need nitty-gritty details so they know where to make improvements. 

Scaling SEO Across Global Markets

Use hreflang to adapt your content for different languages and regions. For example, you might use “wedding venues in Los Angeles” and “wedding venues in Ohio” depending on the visitor’s location. That way, audiences always see the most relevant content. 

Take Your SEO Strategy to the Next Level

Big companies need big SEO solutions. Whether you need someone to run your whole strategy or are just looking for content creators, Compose.ly has you covered. Check out our expert enterprise SEO services, or watch these content lessons for enterprises for more practical tips.