A Guide to Enterprise SEO

Large companies don’t just need enterprise SEO because they are enterprise level. Similarly, a small business with a large website might actually need enterprise SEO even though they are not enterprise level. So what exactly IS enterprise SEO?

First you need to ask yourself, what makes an enterprise website? What qualifies as a website that is in need of enterprise SEO?

Well to be clear, it’s mostly about the number of pages, especially products or services. If your website has 1,000 or more products, it is most likely an “enterprise” level site, or one that would require enterprise SEO.

T-Mobile is a perfect example. Their site has several thousand pages. Bing indexes 34.4k pages and Google indexes 41.7k pages. T-Mobile has specific product pages for every device the company supports. It’s this large number of pages that makes T-Mobile’s website an “enterprise” level property, not the size of their overall business.

Alternately, massive holding company that would most certainly be considered “enterprise” level like Berkshire Hathaway has only 796 indexed pages and would not qualify for enterprise SEO. While sites like this could almost certainly benefit from enterprise SEO techniques they wouldn’t be counted as enterprise websites.

By contrast, there are a lot of smaller to mid-level online stores with 1,000+ products but just 300 or so links. The actual number of pages vs. links doesn’t matter. It’s lots of pages, but few links which provides little clout or spidering potential for search crawlers. Enterprise SEO could solve this problem and increase the organic ranking of the site.

One of Apex’s typical clients is a mid level e-commerce store with 1,000+ products. They are unlikely to possess enough authority to rank deep pages. What little organic traffic they do get will come from very specific long-tail queries. Without real enterprise SEO work, a lot of their pages may not get indexed and deep crawls will be few and far between leaving them invisible to most searchers.

Components of Effective Enterprise SEO

Keyword Selection

As is the case with all SEO, enterprise SEO begins with intelligent keyword selection. A smart business will look at Google trends and choose the most high volume keywords relevant to their brand and build out their core and sub categories around them.

Once these high value keywords have been selected they need to be repeated throughout top level and sub-categories. Then woven into copy, descriptive text, etc.

This seems like a very simple process but is one that can take a lot of time and effort if you have a website with thousands of products and hundreds of categories.

 

Automated Rules

Ever received a spreadsheet or database with 5,000 products? Do you want to set up these pages one by one? Can you? What if you have to have the pages up in a day? For this reason you need a content management system that allows for rules that will create consistent title & meta tags throughout several pages.

At the very least, automation should create the URLs, title tags, H1 tags, breadcrumb navigation links, and canonical tags. A lot of additional technical SEO may need to be done by hand or in most cases a developer can create scripts that will allow for bulk pages to be SEO’ed.

Optimized Templates

A good template will have all the proper tags ready for you to go (meta description, image alt, machine readable markup) this will prevent you from needing to optimize one page at a time. However, it is wise to take a look at your analytics data and maybe pick out a couple of the pages that are most important to your business for a custom SEO sweep.

At the enterprise SEO level, templates also need a bit of intelligence to be applied to them. The last thing anyone wants is a webpage with holes in the text created by empty database fields, or worse copy that looks like it’s been strewn together poorly by a robot. A human being can recognize when data is not present and adjust accordingly.

With mobile devices already composing on average 60% of your audience, it is also wise to have a mobile responsive template in place. Not only does this make for a better user experience, major search engines will reward you for having a mobile optimized site.

SEO’ing Pages By Hand

Regardless of how good your CMS is or how many choice templates you have, a lot of pages are going to need to be touched by a person.

A major mistake lots of enterprise sites make, especially ones that receive content and data from suppliers, is to use the stock text. This can seriously hurt your SEO as you have duplicate content or content that is not seen as valuable by a search engine.

If you are a massive company paying people to do the manual labor may not be such a chore. Additionally an SEO agency such as our company Apex Digital Media, has the resources to accomplish large scale enterprise SEO quickly and efficiently. Whatever you do, if you choose an agency make sure you research them and look at case studies.

Optimizing a website with hundreds or even thousands of pages or products is no easy task, even with an expensive top of the line CMS. However difficult the task though it’s likely one that needs to be accomplished.

(source: http://searchengineland.com/enterprise-seo-202672)

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