Search engine optimization (SEO) is a slightly different ballgame when it comes to large companies.
Sure, the same rules apply and the same techniques work. However, enterprises have unique strengths and weaknesses, which means that they have additional factors to consider.
At Authority Builders, we’ve helped several enterprises improve their SEO through scalable link building and content creation.
This article explains what enterprise SEO is, how it differs from traditional SEO, and the techniques you can use to continue to grow your online presence.
What Is Enterprise SEO?
Let’s break that term down into its constituent parts:
- Enterprise: According to Shopify, enterprises are: “…typically large, complex organizations with various divisions and departments managed by a board of directors or an executive team.”
- Search engine optimization: The process and techniques involved in getting your website to rank higher for relevant user queries on search engines.
So, enterprise SEO is about ensuring that these large companies rank well on search engines.
For an organization to qualify for enterprise SEO status, its online presence must roughly match its relative size.
In other words, you might have a company that employs thousands of people across several locations—but if you’ve only just launched a website, then search engines might regard your company as a startup.
However, this is uncommon because most enterprises have been operational for decades. During this time they have built up large websites, with thousands of pages, lots of traffic, and high authority.
Take Apple’s website, for instance. It has more than 85 million pages indexed on Google.
And if we examine Apple.com using an enterprise SEO platform like Ahrefs, we can see that it has:
🏢 A very high domain rating (DR) of 97.
🏢 Hundreds of millions of monthly organic visitors.
🏢 Millions of keywords.
🏢 So many backlinks that Ahrefs couldn’t count them.
| 💡 What is Domain Rating?
Domain rating (DR) is a measurement of a website’s authoritativeness. It was created by the SEO tool Ahrefs and is mainly based on a website’s backlink profile. In other words, how many backlinks and referring domains point to it? Domain rating is measured on a scale of 1-100. The higher your DR, the more likely your website is to rank high in search results for relevant search terms. Other SEO tools also have their own authority scores. For example, Moz has domain authority (DA). |
Apple is one of the most recognized brands in the world and is the world’s most valuable company. It’s also well established having launched its website in 1995.
Now let’s explore what this means within the context of SEO.
How Enterprise SEO Differs from Traditional Approaches
As mentioned in the intro, the size and power of enterprise websites mean that the people managing their SEO have a wider range of considerations than those managing smaller websites.
Working with big websites that have powerful SEO is simply different to working with smaller ones.
Let’s look at some examples of the benefits and challenges to help illustrate this:
Benefit #1: It’s easier to rank
Think back to the example above where we discussed Apple’s website. Search engines trust the company’s website because it’s well established and trusted by users.
As a result, it has a very high authority score. This makes it easier for Apple to quickly rank high for almost any relevant term.
Another good example of this is the e-commerce platform Shopify. It has a DR of 95 and dominates search results relating to setting up an online business.
It ranks number one for search terms like:
- “Online business”
- “How to make money online for beginners”
- “Dropshipping suppliers”
- “High ticket affiliate marketing”
- “Online side hustles”
And much more.
Benefit #2: Building backlinks is easier
If your enterprise has high brand recognition, then this will open up new link-building opportunities.
First, webmasters are more likely to accept a link-building request from a recognized brand than one they have never heard of. This is especially true if you offer some sort of link exchange in return.
Second, recognized brands naturally get mentioned more often online. This means that you will naturally generate backlinks.
It’s still good even if you get mentioned but not linked to. This is known as an “unlinked mention” and it’s a great link-building opportunity.
For example, this Yahoo! Finance article focuses on Microsoft’s intention to launch more AI products. But it doesn’t include any links to Microsoft.
If you were building links for the company, then you could get in touch with Yahoo! Finance and suggest they add one.
| 🤔 What is link building?
Backlinks are when another website publishes a hyperlink pointing to one of the pages on your website. Search engines consider the number of backlinks and referring domains when choosing which pages and websites to rank higher in search results. Put simply, the more backlinks that point to your website, the higher you are likely to rank in search results. Link building is the techniques and processes used to actively generate these backlinks. |
Enterprise SEO challenges
Now that you understand some of the SEO benefits that enterprises enjoy, let’s look at some of the challenges they face.
Challenge #1: It’s hard to move the needle
Imagine you’re a new site with around 50 pages. You publish a new article and it attracts a backlink from a popular media website, ranks number one, and gets lots of organic traffic.
The chances are, this will make a noticeable difference in your website metrics.
But this is highly unlikely to happen in enterprise SEO.
When you’ve got a website with millions of pages, tons of backlinks, and a high DR, publishing a single article won’t make much of a difference.
Your SEO strategy needs to be scaled in line with your organization’s size, which brings us to our next point.
Challenge #2: Content must be scaled
Let’s go back to Apple’s website. It has 85 million indexed pages and has been active for 29 years. A quick bit of math reveals that’s more than 8,000 new pages published per day!
Not all of these will be epic 4,000-word blog articles, but even publishing one high-quality article per day is challenging.
Enterprise SEO involves producing a ton of content. To achieve this, you’ll need to have a content-producing machine that can easily keep up with your business’s expansion.
This might involve:
✍️ Hiring a centralized content team.
✍️ Hiring content teams for different departments.
✍️ Using agencies.
✍️ A mixture of the above.
If you’re going to build in-house teams, then some of the roles you’ll need include:
💡 Writers
💡 SEO managers
💡 Editors
💡 Publishers
💡 Link builders
💡 Technical SEO specialists
The biggest challenge for enterprises isn’t being able to afford these roles—it’s ensuring that they all work in line with a unified SEO strategy and produce consistent work.
💡How to scale content: Make it the C-suite’s responsibility
Most enterprise organizations have a marketing communications director who is responsible for centralizing strategy and setting up systems and processes to ensure consistency. SEO—and the content produced to support it—should be part of this person’s portfolio.
Challenge #3: Content must be maintained
Keeping your content up to date is critical for good SEO. But this becomes difficult when you have thousands or even millions of pages managed by several enterprise SEO teams.
Here are some common enterprise SEO issues:
Duplicate content
Google is less likely to index or rank pages with the same or similar content to other pages on the same site. This is because it wants to show users diverse results—not just ten versions of the same information.
This negatively impacts your enterprise SEO, as less of your content will be searchable, which means you’ll get less organic traffic.
The scale of enterprise websites means duplicate content is common. Here are a couple of examples of how this might happen:
- Two people in different departments of the business may inadvertently write the same content.
- A writer might create a blog article that covers a similar topic to one that was published years ago and has now been forgotten about.
Page bloat
This happens when you have pages that you don’t need. These might be products you no longer sell or information that is no longer relevant.
Having pages like these is inefficient from an SEO perspective.
Why?
It relates to something called crawl budget. Essentially, when Google crawls your website looking for new pages to index, it will only spend a limited time doing so. This time is known as your crawl budget.
So, the more time it wastes crawling and indexing your poor-quality pages, the less time it has to discover your newer, more relevant content.
💡 How to solve content maintenance issues
These issues can be avoided and solved by implementing regular cycles of reviewing and updating content. Where necessary, you should also retire outdated content.
Duplicate content and page bloat can also be fixed through good technical SEO. For example, by adding canonical tags—they are HTML elements that tell search engines which page should be indexed when you have duplicate content.
Challenge #4: Organizational complexity
As already mentioned, most enterprises consist of multiple departments, locations, teams, etc. There are often overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities.
This can make enterprise SEO challenging.
Let’s use content creation as an example. Let’s say you work for an environmental engineering company. You want to boost your topical authority for clearing up ground contamination at former industrial sites.
You want to write a case study of a recent project that the business carried out in France. It’s likely you’d need to get the case study approved by the following stakeholders:
👍 The project team in France
👍 The French client
👍 The US-based remediation marketing team
👍 The US-based president of remediation services
👍 The UK-based global head of brand and communications
This can seriously slow down the content creation process, which makes it hard to achieve your SEO goals.
Other issues you might experience include:
⚠️ Different strategic priorities: Some departments might not see the value in SEO and may deprioritize it.
⚠️ Disagreements over technical points: For example, you may want part of your website to have a flat navigational hierarchy to aid SEO. But some stakeholders may prefer a deep hierarchy because it reflects their departmental structure.
⚠️ Nonaligned marketing departments: Enterprises often have several marketing departments. If their SEO efforts are not aligned, then it can lead to issues. For example, they might compete for the same keywords, when they could combine their efforts and rank higher instead.
Organizational complexity can also be resolved by making SEO the C-suite’s responsibility. This helps increase alignment between departments and ensures that decision-making can be escalated to a single individual.
Challenge #5: Technical SEO becomes more complex
Enterprise websites face several technical SEO challenges.
For example, even the smallest changes could impact thousands of pages and users. This means that any changes would need to be communicated to designated staff who could then fix any subsequent bugs.
Site structure can also be an issue. It’s generally considered good practice for websites to have a flat structure. In other words, users should be able to get from the home page to the information they need in as few clicks as possible.
This aids SEO too, as search engines don’t have to follow as many links to crawl and index a website with a flat structure.
However, this can be difficult to achieve for enterprises, as they often have several divisions, each offering multiple services.
The range of services also makes it difficult for search engines to understand what the website is about.
Take Microsoft for instance. It covers:
- Software
- Hardware
- Cloud services
- Consulting
- Training and certification
- Online search
- Online advertising
- Research and development
- Artificial intelligence
This is a problem because search engines like to show users results from websites that they know have good topical authority on a subject.
If a search engine can’t tell what your website is about, then it’s less likely to show it in relevant search results.
How to solve technical SEO issues
There are thousands of technical SEO solutions. Here are a couple relevant to the issues mentioned above.
Site structure issues can be made less problematic by using subdomains. This is where you essentially have multiple websites under the same subdomain.
Microsoft for example, has 190 subdomains, covering everything from Windows to developer resources.
Using schema markup can help search engines understand what your content is about. This is when you add HTML tags to your content, allowing search engines to group pages.
Best SEO Strategies for Your Enterprise
That’s the behind-the-scenes stuff covered. You now know why enterprise SEO is different.
In this section, you’ll learn how enterprises can dominate search results. We’ve listed 9 SEO strategies that work best for large companies.
Write expert content
Today, companies pump out tons of content. A lot of it is written by professional writers based on what’s ranking on search engines, with little or no original insight or expert input.
Enterprises tend to employ thousands of people with a broad range of deep expertise. Your marketing department can leverage this to create original, expert content.
Ask your experts what they think will interest people in their industry and get your writers to interview them about it.
This will result in original content based on genuine expertise, which over time will draw more organic traffic and make you rank higher on Google.
Plus, it’s more likely to generate backlinks, which will also help you rank higher.
Target featured snippets
Featured snippets are search results that appear below the AI overview but above “People also ask” and other search results.
It provides a snippet of text from a web page answering the user’s question.
According to Engine Scout, featured snippets get 35.1% of all clicks in the searches they appear for—which means it’s well worth targeting them.
According to Backlinko, search engines consider authority when choosing which website to show for a featured snippet. Enterprises usually have very high authority and are therefore more likely to be selected as the featured snippet.
Here’s how to target featured snippets:
1. Find a search term that includes a featured snippet
According to Semrush, featured snippets appear in 4.64% of all searches. Usually, they involve questions that have a simple, straightforward answer that can be explained in a sentence or two.
You can do this simply by typing keywords into Google and seeing whether a featured snippet appears.
2. Categorize featured snippets
There are four types of featured snippets. For each, you’ll need to take a slightly different approach. The four types of featured snippets are:
Definition: A 40-60 word description of something. Here’s a typical example:
Table: These are used to show data. Here’s a good example showing the world’s richest economies:
The hierarchical list: This is a list that is ordered—for example, a step-by-step process. Here’s what that typically looks like:
Unstructured list: This is a list that doesn’t have an underlying structure. The list of link-building techniques below, for example, isn’t ordered from best to worst, or oldest to newest.
Note down what type of snippet appears for each keyword.
1. Optimize content for your target snippet
Let’s assume you already have content that targets a search term (if you don’t, then it’s time to start creating it). Early in the content, add a section that will become your featured snippet. Here are some tips to achieve this:
✂️ Structure like the snippet type: In other words, if you’re targeting a table, then add a table to your content.
✂️ Include the target keyword: You should include the target keyword in your article and, ideally in the snippet itself.
✂️ Target “People Also Ask” queries: Just below a snippet, you often find a section called “people also ask”—these are similar questions related to your main keyword. They are ways of asking the same questions in a different way. You might find that these terms are easier to get snippets for than your main search query as fewer sites will be targeting them.
✂️ Keep it neutral: Avoid expressing an opinion or using your brand name. Google wants to provide users with unbiased, factual answers.
✂️ Avoid the first-person: Write “guest posting is a proven link-building strategy”, not “our guest posting is a proven strategy”. The latter confuses search engines because they wonder who “we” is and don’t realize you’re talking about guest posting in general.
Target branded searches
Enterprises often have well-known brands in their sector. Therefore, it’s likely that people will search for their company name or one of the brands they sell.
These are good opportunities for SEO since you are almost guaranteed to rank for them because your website is super-relevant.
Here’s how to target branded searches:
-
Branded keyword research
Log into Google Search Console and click the “Search results” tab on the left-hand side.
Click “New” and choose “Query” from the drop-down menu.
Type the name of your brand and click “Apply.”
You’ll now be shown a list of branded terms that Google users have searched for. You can download this as a spreadsheet.
2. Categorize branded terms
There are three different types of branded terms. Each one represents users at a different stage of the buyer journey.
They are:
🔍 High intent terms: These indicate that customers want to buy your product or service. They might include: [brand name] price or [brand name] deals. These terms represent the most direct route to increasing revenue.
🔍 Comparison queries: These are when a customer types something like “[brand name] vs [competitor]. They are particularly common in the SaaS sector. At this stage, customers know the solution they want and are weighing up the pros and cons of different suppliers.
🔍 Navigational terms: These tend to be functional search terms where customers want to find specific information on your website. Examples include: [brand name] returns or [brand name] jobs. There are two reasons to target these terms:
- Customers may be considering buying but want to get more information first.
- They help improve the user experience.
2. Create content to target branded terms
Finally, create content that targets your search terms. Here’s a good example from real estate software provider, Paperless Pipeline.
It compares its software against that of its competitors, Dotloop and Skyslope. This approach targets not only its own branded terms but also competitor terms, i.e., Dotloop vs. Skyslope.
Create pillar pages
If you’ve got thousands of pages on your website, the chances are they collectively cover relevant topics comprehensively. You can leverage this by creating pillar pages.
Pillar pages are thorough, authoritative resources that cover a broad topic in depth. They often serve as the central hub for related content on a website.
It typically includes links to various subtopics, or cluster content, which provides more detailed information on aspects of the main topic.
This structure enhances SEO by improving site navigation and helping search engines understand the relationship between different pieces of content.
They also help deal with duplication. Overlapping articles can be combined to form a pillar page.
Here’s a good example from outdoor gear retailer, REI. The company compiled a beginner’s guide to rock climbing, covering every aspect of preparing and learning to rock climb and linking out to a ton of guides on the subject.
Automate internal link building
Internal link building is critical for helping users and search engines navigate your site. It therefore ensures a good user experience and that your site gets indexed rapidly.
But internal link building can be difficult when you produce hundreds of articles every year. It’s even harder if you already have thousands of pages that you need to build internal links between.
The good news is that there are plenty of software options out there that will do it for you.
For example, Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin that automatically suggests internal linking opportunities. It also shows you pages with little or no links pointing to them and suggests ways you can build links to them.
The tool places the links at the touch of a button, saving you tons of time.
Create free apps
Linkable assets are one of the most effective link-building strategies. It essentially involves creating content that your audience will find useful. Content doesn’t necessarily mean words on the page, in fact—one of the most popular types of linkable assets is free apps or tools.
The only downside to these tools is that they can take a lot of time, resources, and technical expertise to develop.
However, this is exactly why this tactic suits enterprises. Large businesses often have the in-house resources available to create genuinely useful apps.
Here’s a good example from pet food provider IAMS. They offer a breed selector to help potential dog owners choose which breed best suits them.
Check out our guide to linkable assets to find out how to create free tools and apps.
Publish original research
Another great linkable asset is original research. There are several reasons why this is effective:
- People love sharing interesting facts and statistics on social media.
- Interesting industry insights make engaging news stories for journalists.
- Writers often seek facts to support their points.
- Statistics pages are another popular link-building technique. Their curators are sure to welcome new research to add to their existing content.
Similar to free apps and tools, enterprises have lots of resources available to conduct research.
But they also have another benefit—the number of customers they serve results in a ton of data that they can study and report on.
For example, Swedish telecommunications technology provider Ericsson serves over 180 countries worldwide.
A huge proportion of the world’s mobile traffic flows through its systems, allowing it to accurately report on the world’s mobile network usage and predict future trends.
It regularly publishes this information in the Ericsson Mobility Report.
Find unlinked mentions
This happens when someone mentions your brand online but doesn’t link to it. This provides an excellent link-building opportunity, as you can simply reach out to the person and suggest that they link to you.
As already mentioned, enterprises often have well-known brands that regularly get mentioned online.
Here’s how to find unlinked mentions with Ahrefs:
- Open the Ahrefs Content Explorer. In the search bar, type in your brand name, website URL, or a relevant keyword related to your content. Click the orange button. You can exclude results from your own website by adding “-site:[your domain address].
2. After the search results load, apply the following filters:
- English results (or your language) only
- DR 30-100
- Page traffic 50-100M
Then click “Show results.”
3. Review the results to find unlinked mentions of your brand or keywords. You can sort by metrics like domain rating (DR) or the number of social shares to identify the most valuable mentions.
4. If you want to keep a record, click on the “Export” button to download the list of unlinked mentions for further analysis.
5. Once you have the list, you can contact the site owners or authors to request linking to your content.
Use the Skyscraper technique
Skyscraper is a link-building technique that involves looking at the link-building techniques that your competitors have had success with and then doing them 10x better.
Essentially, you need to create something that’s so good it stands out above all the rest—like a skyscraper. Then, you reach out to websites that link to your competitors’ inferior content and propose that they link to yours instead.
Once again, enterprises are uniquely positioned to create something better than the competition, simply because they can commit many resources to doing so.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to Skyscraper:
- Start by brainstorming a topic relevant to your niche that you want to improve. For example, if you provide project management software, you might want to improve upon the existing guides to workplace productivity.
- Next, look for popular content on this subject. We can do this with the Ahrefs Content Explorer again.
Type your topic or keyword in the search bar. Sort the results by “Referring domains” to find the most linked-to content.
3. Now you can analyze your competitors’ content.
- Click on the top articles to review their content. Take note of what makes them successful (e.g., depth, visuals, data).
- Look for gaps or areas where you can provide additional value or updated information.
For example, perhaps existing articles explain how to be more productive but they don’t explain the psychology behind productivity or the tools available to measure it.
4. Write a more comprehensive and engaging article than the ones you analyzed.
Include:
✅ Unique and up-to-date insights
✅ Better visuals
✅ Links to useful resources
✅ More detailed guidance
You should also optimize the content for relevant keywords. The best way to find keywords to target is to see what your competitors’ content is ranking for.
In Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, click the drop-down arrow next to the competitor URL and select “Overview.”
From here, click “Keywords”.
This will take you to a list of organic keywords that the content ranks for. Click the “Traffic” tab so that the keyword with the highest traffic is listed first.
This is likely to be a good keyword to target.
However, there may be similar keywords that get even more traffic. Click the keyword and take a look at the section labeled “Keyword ideas.”
In this case, the “Also rank for” section includes several significantly higher traffic keywords that you could target.
5. Now it’s time to identify which websites to build links with. Go back to your initial Content Explorer results and note the sites that linked to the original articles.
You can do this by clicking on the “Referring domains” box.
Visit each site and look for the person in charge of content. For larger businesses, this will be a content manager; however, at smaller companies, it could be the CEO or managing director.
6. Perform outreach: Write personalized outreach emails to the authors or site owners, informing them about your superior content and suggesting they link to it instead.
Our article on blogger outreach contains more details on how to do this successfully.
Build Backlinks at Scale with Authority Builders
As you can tell, building backlinks is a critical part of boosting your SEO. However, it’s also one of the most resource-intensive aspects.
Building links at scale requires a big team and specialist expertise. If you want to start building links for your enterprise without the hiring and employment costs, then consider using a link-building agency like Authority Builders.
We have a team of more than 60 professional link builders, plus a wide network of freelancers that we can call upon to help you achieve your SEO goals. Schedule a free call today to find out how we can help you.