How to overcome challenges in Enterprise SEO
Managing large-scale website structures
Enterprise companies often have thousands of product pages on their websites. This isn’t a problem — unless you have tons of outdated pages.
Google allocates a crawl budget for large websites. That’s why you need to let a search engine know which pages to prioritize. This could drastically affect your search engine rankings.
But how exactly can you do that? Here are examples:
Implement canonical tags
Duplicate content is a mortal enemy of an enterprise SEO strategy. That’s a negative effect of having thousands or even millions of pages.
Thankfully, we can recommend a quick solution.
You can use canonical tags to point Google to your preferred page version. This helps you avoid duplicate content, thus optimizing your crawl budget.
Here’s how to do it:
Go to the <head> section of each duplicate page in your website. Then add the canonical tag within that section.
For example, <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/canonical-url/“>.
For a more detailed explanation, you can refer to Google’s guide here.
Create a flat site architecture
You want your most important pages to appear on your homepage. But of course, you can’t fit all these pages on one screen.
What you can do is simplify your site structure instead. It’s really one of the easiest attributes of an effective enterprise SEO strategy.
So, how can you create this flat site architecture? Take a look:
- Develop a hierarchical structure. An enterprise-level website should have categories, sub-categories, and more. This helps you organize pages in such a way that the categories appear on your URLs. You make life easier for both search engines and your visitors.
- Boost session duration with internal links. Return to SEO basics and optimize your internal links. Relevance is still key, but you also want to distribute internal links to your high-traffic pages. In turn, it also distributes authority juice to your new pages.
Ensuring consistent SEO practices across departments
When people think of SEO, they just think of the website itself.
That’s just wrong, isn’t it?
An effective enterprise SEO playbook covers the overall branding of enterprise companies. That’s how you measure SEO success.
What happens when SEO doesn’t align with your other teams (e.g., sales, marketing, IT)?
- Messaging becomes inconsistent, making it difficult for people to latch onto your brand.
- Your website encounters more errors in its technical aspects. Technical optimization is more about prevention than cure. You want your IT team to stay on top of your site performance.
- Misaligned efforts from multiple teams result in wasted marketing budget. SEO should be aligned with your core business objectives. We can’t stress that enough. After all, you do SEO to showcase your products and brand. Imagine if your SEO team did a campaign that was already done by your sales team. You’re just wasting resources. Multiple stakeholders won’t want to see that.
Now, you know about the challenges. Next, we look at solutions that will help you overcome these unique challenges.
- Use data to align SEO objectives with other departments. For instance, a specific product page suddenly surges in traffic. It means there is a drastic increase in demand for that product, right? Communicate that to your marketing and sales teams to ride the momentum. You’ll also get feedback to further optimize that page in search engine results pages.
- Capitalize on enterprise SEO tools for communication. By now, you might already know about project management tools like Trello, Asana, and Slack. Your team could even be using these platforms already. But does your communication platform include representatives from other departments?
Overcoming cross-department collaboration barriers
You might be thinking why we ended the last section with a cliff-hanger. It’s because we want to emphasize the value of cross-department collaboration on enterprise SEO success.
If you look into this Search Engine Land guide, you’ll discover that SEO projects require cross-department teams. You have SEO experts, public relations (PR) agents, salespersons, and the tech guys.
There are just so many moving parts in enterprise-level SEO.
To overcome these enterprise SEO challenges, you must break cross-department barriers.
- First, don’t keep secrets. Share data-driven insights of your SEO activities with other departments. In turn, require feedback that could help improve your enterprise SEO performance.
- Second, teach non-SEO teams the basics of enterprise SEO solution. There’s no need for advanced stuff. Educate them on the fundamentals of search engine algorithms and web content. Then, inform them about the importance of their feedback to your enterprise SEO strategy.
- Finally, get rid of legacy systems like communicating on social media or emails. Go for more advanced tools like Trello or Slack. There’s a reason why they are called the top project management tools.
Contributing to overall business objectives is one of the benefits of enterprise SEO. You can only achieve that through collaboration between content teams and other departments.
Navigating technical SEO complexities
Dealing with duplicate content and ineffective keyword targeting is just the start.
How do you deal with traffic surges? A slow website will negatively impact your online visibility.
This is the reason why successful websites prioritize technical SEO.
Our team always has this checklist of technical SEO elements to prioritize. We’ll share this list with you:
- Implement canonical tags. These tags fix duplicate content and streamline your crawl budget.
- Utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Take, for example, a popular CDN provider like Cloudflare. It will distribute your content to local and international servers. This will reduce load times, especially if you have a global target audience.
- Conduct regular SEO audits. Do you want to measure the success of your enterprise SEO efforts? Audits are the answer. For technical audits, you can use enterprise SEO tools like Screaming Frog.
Creating a future-proof enterprise content marketing strategy isn’t just about the “content”. You want to deliver a foolproof user experience, too.
Handling extensive data and analytics
Amazon has millions of product pages. Zillow has over 70 million property listings.
It’s not just the traffic that these large websites deal with daily. They also analyze user behavior, form signups, and other actionable insights.
That’s why there’s an increasing demand for advanced analytics tools.
Now, we have your attention. What are examples of these advanced analytics tools? Here’s a list that our experts have curated for you:
- Google BigQuery: BigQuery serves as your data warehouse. It isn’t just a storage tool, though. It transforms massive amounts of data into AI-driven insights. For example, news websites use BigQuery to analyze SEO performance across their articles. Remember, news websites put up a large number of articles daily.
- Google Analytics 4: Don’t overlook Google Analytics just because it’s free. GA4’s scalable ability to analyze user behavior is a game-changer for enterprise companies. Here’s a quick guide to GA4 that you can use.
- Botify: Botify doesn’t just diagnose issues in keyword rankings and search results. It also turns SEO data into AI-powered recommendations. Enterprise companies use Botify to prioritize high-value pages for indexing.
- OnCrawl: This tool analyzes your real-time logs to improve your enterprise SEO strategy. OnCrawl is an enterprise SEO platform that also provides data visualizers for easier monitoring.
Ensuring speed and performance at scale
Deiloitte conducted a study where they observed how a 0.1-second site speed improvement can affect websites.
The result? Here’s a list:
- Increase of 8.4% in retail conversions
- Increase of 10.1% in travel conversions
- Bounce rate improvement of 8.3% in lead generation information pages
Remember, that’s just a 0.1-second improvement in your loading time. This could result in millions of dollars in revenue for enterprise websites. Woah.
So, what’s stopping you from ensuring that you have a fast website? You should buy into these enterprise-level SEO techniques:
- Compress images and other media files. Image compressors can reduce file sizes while maintaining image quality. That’s how advanced these tools are. You can use TinyPNG for images and FreeConvert for videos.
- Enable browser caching. Reduce load times when you enable browser caching. You can manage your server directly through Apache or NGINX configuration. Cloudflare can also automatically set caching headers.
- Invest in scalable hosting solutions. Don’t settle for cheap hosting solutions. We can’t stress that enough if you want business success. Cloud hosting providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud are recommended. These are platforms that are built specifically for an enterprise environment.
Managing multi-location and international SEO
Take, for example, the eCommerce giant Amazon. It was founded in the United States, but it doesn’t just cover the audience in the US.
Amazon’s website expands to multiple regions. It even takes on the primary language spoken by a particular region. You could see Amazon Japan written in Japanese characters.
This is part of international SEO, which is crucial for an enterprise SEO strategy.
There are challenges that you can find on a long list, though. Here are the common ones:
- Duplicate content leading to search engine penalties
- Inconsistent business information
- Low authority due to inadequate local citations
- Failure to comply with local regulations
Now, how do enterprise websites avoid these challenges before they happen? You should tick these boxes:
- Ensure accurate business information. Your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) details should be consistent across all versions of your website. Moreover, this should be the same with information on your social media platforms.
- Implement hreflang tags. These tags will tell a search engine about your targeted language and region. You can use tools like Weglot to automatically implement hreflang tags.
- Partner with local influencers and directories. You need backlinks from reputable sites for Google to really trust your website. You can launch a PR link-building campaign or contribute guest blogs to other sites in your niche.
Fortis Media’s approach to overcoming enterprise SEO challenges
Enterprise companies don’t really deal with limited resources. They have enough budget and funding on their pockets.
The challenge is how to distribute these resources.
You might think that an in-house SEO department is more budget-friendly. But think of the ongoing training, monthly salaries, and expensive subscriptions to SEO tools.
That’s why companies partner with an enterprise SEO agency to drive business growth. For example, Fortis Media offers a full suite of SEO initiatives. These include the following:
- Maximizing your Content Management System (CMS)
- Analyzing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) through analytics tools
- Streamlining your website for visibility in multiple regions
- Acquiring valuable backlinks through a white-hat link-building strategy
Plus, you don’t have to subscribe to any SEO platforms. We have access to these powerful tools, not to mention our expertise in utilizing them.
Do you need help securing stakeholder buy-in for your business? Our seasoned digital marketers can future-proof your SEO playbook.
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