How to Succeed in Enterprise SEO

Site Explorer, over 41 million US organic visits come from branded keywords. That’s over half of their estimated US organic traffic.

I’m not saying branded traffic is bad because it’s not. It’s high-quality and converts well, and there are likely many unbranded opportunities for these sites. But they still have to put in the work and do things right just like anyone else if they want to be successful.

Sales for most enterprise companies are longer funnel. Still, many companies want to skip top-of-the-funnel and informational content and focus more on the end of funnel traffic that converts. In doing so, they narrow their pipeline and give their competitors opportunities to be seen as experts and help people instead of them. Likewise, many companies neglect users after the sale. This leads to missed opportunities in advocacy and also upselling/cross-selling.

Optimizing existing content

You’re probably going to run into content that is too brand-focused, too product-focused, or even too keyword-focused. People will want to rank for terms with pages they control that don’t align with search intent. A good example is someone wanting their product page to rank for an informational term.

There are times you may want to optimize and even create content for branded terms, but this shouldn’t be your usual strategy. Nor should you “sprinkle some keywords” into brand-or-product-focused pages to try to rank for informational terms. These pages may be full of marketing or sales jargon and not have the content you need to rank. Your best strategy will be to create the content you know is required. That means having a content strategy in place to create new pages that align with search intent.

In other cases, what you may want to do is update existing unbranded content that’s already working well. You’ll want to make sure the content aligns with what people are searching for and what other top pages are talking about. Make the content better by finding the expert on the subject at your company and getting their insights; the type of insights other content may not cover.

One common way to prioritize content is to check for low-hanging opportunities, like pages ranking in positions 6–10 or 11–20 for their main keyword. You might be able to quickly improve these pages’ content to rank higher and get more traffic. Use Google Search Console or the Organic Keywords report in Site Explorer to find pages that fit the bill.

Creating content

When creating content, find a process that works best for your company and content creators. I like to talk to the experts or interview them to get their insights. I’ll also look at what people search around a topic and what other pages cover. You likely have a team of people who create the content, and you may be able to empower them to do this process themselves. Alternatively, you can provide them with a simple to digest outline or content brief that covers what you expect to see in the article.

If your employees want to write content, you need to find a way to empower them to do so. These are your experts, and while the content they create may require some editing, the insights from these employees are valuable and may not be anywhere else. If your experts don’t have the time to write content, another option is to interview them. Most people are usually happy to give quick insights verbally, which you can then use in your content.

I like to start with my competitor’s top pages rather than starting research with a list of keywords. If you export and combine this data, you end up with a list of your competitor’s most successful content, and you can start with the content you know already works and is likely driving value to a competitor. Every team I ever worked with, whether product-focused or marketing-focused, loved to see this data. You can find it in the Top Pages report in Site Explorer.

Creating content will have to be simple, repeatable, and scalable, and you’re going to want to cover as much of the user journey as possible. Remember that content is for people, so you should be there for the different things they search for. Be useful, be relevant, show your expertise, and you’re likely to be the company that potential customers choose to do business with.

One of the things that I liked to use with content teams was a card sorting exercise. Take the data you’re looking at around what people search and what the top pages talk about, and put them on index cards. Have your content writers organize this in a way that makes sense to them. They’re going to be grouping your data into topics and subtopics and coming up with the content sections or pages they should write. This helps train people to do this task themselves, and there’s no right or wrong answer as to how it should be organized. You can also show how top pages cover this information as confirmation that it works.

Another tip on content creation is to translate successful content. Most enterprise companies operate in many countries and in many different languages. If you have content that’s working well in one language, it’s likely going to work well in another language as well. We’ve started doing this recently with our content. Despite allocating minimal resources to this process, we already see results.

One final tip is to look into what promotional channels are available to you through other teams. For instance, social teams can promote new content, and paid teams can boost it with ads or syndication. Always make sure you budget for content promotion.

Content syndication

With larger websites, you’re likely to encounter something you may not have seen before: content syndication. Content syndication is when one or more third-party sites republish an exact copy of content that originally appeared elsewhere. It frequently happens with news content, although, to be honest, any popular site is going to have scrapers and likely a paid syndication strategy. There are a lot of benefits to syndication, including increased reach. Check out our article on content syndication to learn more about it and so you know how to follow best practices.

Building and creating links

A lot of link building happens without SEO at the enterprise level. Companies are usually really active and doing different things. You may see TV commercials, hear radio ads, have a lot of new content. Then there’s public relations, social media, paid advertising, content syndication, events, corporate partnerships, influencers, celebrity advertising, affiliate programs, and more. Most links will probably happen without you, but you can help guide many of the teams in charge of these channels with best practices.

External links

If you’re going to have link building projects, you may have some easy wins. One of my favorites is to simply reclaim links that already point to your site by redirecting pages that currently 404.

Site Explorer > yourdomain.com > Pages > Best by Links > add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter > redirect these pages to relevant current pages.

Unlinked brand mentions, or even mentions of top employees, are another easy win. Enterprises tend to get talked about a fair bit, and each one of those mentions offers a chance to get a link. Even if there’s not initially a link, it doesn’t hurt to ask for one. You can use Content Explorer to find these mentions on the web, and the inbuilt filter for highlighting unlinked domains to hone in on unlinked mentions.

You may also end up working with external sites like review platforms or aggregators. Many of these cost money, and the links don’t always pass value. But they can be incredible for exposure. These sites rank for many relevant terms, and many other enterprise professionals will likely view their reports. In many cases, if you’re not in these roundups, you may not be in the consideration set for purchasing.

You can use Site Explorer to check your competitor’s links and referring domains as well. You can look at their overall link profile or even their recent link profile to see how they are getting or creating their links. With this data, you can also determine if there’s anything else you may want to do for link building.

You have an almost unlimited amount of link building opportunities as an enterprise company. Everything depends on your budget and your imagination, but when people ask me the most significant difference in link building at the enterprise level, I usually tell them it’s acquisitions. The easiest way to rank for something new is to buy a company that already ranks well for your target terms. You add not only a product/service or new features to your products, but you also inherit the existing content, which was likely part of the reason the acquired company was already successful.

With these acquisitions or other websites that your company may control, you also have opportunities for more links. Where it makes sense, you’ll want to add links between these websites. Ultimately you may want to consolidate the content into one site, but that’s not always feasible. Even if it is, it may not happen within a reasonable timeframe, so you may want to add links between the sites in the meantime.

Internal links

I’ve always found internal links to be a powerful way to help pages rank higher. Even these links may be difficult to get in an enterprise environment. Sometimes different people are responsible for different sections of the website, which can make internal linking time-consuming.

On top of the political hurdles, the process for internal linking can be a bit convoluted. You either have to know the site well and read through various pages looking for link opportunities, or you can follow a process that involves a lot of scraping and crawling to find opportunities.

At Ahrefs, we’ve made this simple, scalable and accessible so anyone can find these opportunities. We have an internal link opportunities report in Site Audit that will recommend internal links where appropriate.

There’s a tutorial in the report itself explaining how it works.

I’d also recommend watching out for opportunities to use better link anchor text. It’s common for page creators to overuse generic link anchor text such as ‘learn more,’ ‘read more,’ or ‘click here.’ You can look for usage of this kind of generic copy in the Internal backlinks report in Site Explorer.

Penalties

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a big website that doesn’t get at least a couple of penalties a year. While this may be surprising to some people, it happens because many of these sites have people abusing uploads or user-generated content sections where people are spamming links. It’s not usually a concern because the penalties usually only impact parts of the site. However, some websites experience more significant issues. When this happens to a well-known brand, it usually makes the news.

Technical SEO

Enterprise sites can have complex infrastructures and a lot of legacy systems in place. There may even be many different teams responsible for maintaining everything, which means the technical environment and the political environment can be tricky. Sometimes pages or sections of the site will have issues that never get fixed because doing so is too expensive.

One mistake can keep millions of pages out of the index or remove an entire site from search results. There are so many moving parts, so much that can go wrong, and so many times that you’ll need to choose the least bad option. You won’t have control of everything. Just do the best you can and when you have the opportunity, make the most future-proof decision you can.

When focusing on technical projects, you’re likely to have an unlimited number of things fighting for your attention. You must learn how to prioritize tasks and focus on the most significant issues. While it would be great if you could get everything technically perfect, it’s simply not realistic. One of the things I like about Ahrefs’ Site Audit is that you can choose to ignore issues that you don’t find important.

In the world of enterprise, you’re likely going to rely on many different teams to get work done. You’re going to have to be opportunistic and help many of these teams on their own timeline, when they are ready to go, but that doesn’t mean you can’t prepare for them ahead of time. You’ll want to find out how these teams work, their processes and tools, and opportunities you may have to interact with them like scrum calls, team calls, or office hours you may be able to join. If you can be very clear in your communication with the team, it will make the process a lot easier. Learn to write tickets in their project management system that communicates the problem, expected outcomes, and the value of implementing the changes.

One final tip is that if you don’t seem to be making progress on projects, try to sell the changes you want to make as A/B testing. Many companies want to do more testing, and you can “test” your changes to see the impact they have. With a measurable impact, you can argue for a more permanent fix.

Project ideas

I wanted to cover some projects to help you get started with technical SEO in an enterprise.

1. Indexing. You probably have some pages indexed that shouldn’t be, and many pages noindexed that should be indexed. Canonicalization is another issue to check to make sure the correct version of the page is indexed. You can also help identify security issues and data leaks by looking at what pages have been accidentally indexed.
2. Redirects. Find broken pages on your site that have links pointing to them, then redirect those pages.
3. Future-proofing. Anything you can do that will keep something from breaking in the future or will keep processes or systems from changing again in the future is worth looking into.
4. Broken links. Find them and fix them.
5. Pagespeed. Make your website faster.
6. Implement schema markup to gain more presence in the SERPs.
7. Add sitemaps. I would make sure this is automated. Manually creating a sitemap is rarely a smart use of your time.
8. Create guidelines, checklists, and decision trees. Basically, anything that will help people make the right decisions will save you time in the future.
9. Automated testing and site monitoring can help catch issues before they make their way into the system or quickly after.
10. Log file analysis. I always say this is a big maybe. Log files can be political, technically complex to pull and store, and costly. You’ll have to estimate the time and resources needed to see if your use cases justify the resources.

Final thoughts

There’s so much at stake in enterprise SEO and so many opportunities. Don’t get discouraged if you’re not making progress. Just try another way and never give up, and you’ll make progress. When a company and its people finally get behind SEO, they can dominate an industry.

In this article, I wanted to communicate some of my experience in the enterprise world, and some things that I thought would be helpful. I hope it’s valuable information to some of you that are reading.

If you have any tips, experiences you’d like to share or questions, let me know on Twitter.