What is Enterprise SEO?

Updated on April 15th, 2024 at 11:13 am

SEO has never mattered more to big businesses, especially those with a large website or those looking to grow into competitive and valuable online spaces. Here is what enterprise SEO is, what SEO looks like when performed at scale and how you can find an enterprise SEO specialist to help with your projects.

Enterprise SEO Defined

Enterprise SEO is the management of the SEO for your business and corporate websites by an SEO specialist. 

An enterprise SEO can help you manage your website, its pages and your organic search performance and digital marketing strategy to help ensure that;

• Clicks, leads and sales growth through the website for your corporation
• Website revenue remains consistent and in line with projections and forecasts
• Risks of sudden SEO drops due to algorithmic or manual penalties are reduced
• Risk to the business through regulatory action, advertising standards organizations or any governing body rules are adhered to. 

How Enterprise SEO Will Help your Business

Correctly implemented SEO at any level can provide real value to businesses with a website. 

Enterprise SEO can help you identify and make the most of any opportunities your business has to generate additional revenue through your business website.

For example, an enterprise SEO consultant would be able to;

• identify new opportunities for your business to expand into based on keywords related to your business that your website does not cover yet.
• Help you increase ROI for your business with monetisation tips and how to drive more engaged traffic to your product pages.
• Work with compliance teams to identify risk within the business and make changes to help mitigate the risk
• Forecast performance changes over upcoming financial years to allow you to estimate how much the business will grow and which business sectors will drive this growth.
• Report on performance to senior management and give explanations as to why and how Google changes can impact SEO performance.
• Assist in the expansion of the business into new markets or geographic locations by templating SEO strategies for additional marketing teams to pick up. 
• Manage the day-to-day running of SEO, and set up projects for SEO teams within the business. 

The list above isn’t exhaustive but will require collaboration between your SEO marketing team and your wider business teams. An effective SEO team will be able to educate engineering and development teams as to the value of SEO and ensure that consistent changes are made to the website to help improve SEO performance.

Here is what we can offer you if you choose us as your enterprise SEO consultant.

What is an Enterprise SEO Marketing Strategy?

Enterprise SEO strategies won’t differ too greatly from conventional search engine optimisation strategies that you’d create to optimise small or medium size commercial business websites. 

This includes the core elements of SEO; technical optimisation, content and authority. 

Scaling each of these elements is likely to be where most of the challenge lies. 

Technical Optimisation Elements

1. Maintain and improve page speed; page speed is one of the most critical factors for driving up revenue. Fast, responsive websites on any device are best for SEO.
2. Improve internal linking; not just adding links to high performing pages but creating methods of scaling internal links to and from high quality sections to impact entire subfolders.
3. Remove low quality content; low quality content and thin pages can cause issues on any website, especially those with many hundreds of thousands of pages. Identification and correct removal, with a 301 redirect, of low quality pages is an important element of any enterprise SEO strategy.
4. Technical SEO page templates; ensuring content on pages is laid out correctly.

Content Elements

1. Refresh, rewrite and improve old content; search engines tend to prefer old domains and URLs so ensuring content on your older pages is refreshed and up to date can help improve your overall visibility. 
2. Scaleable quality content creation, more frequently now than ever before, automation and AI content is used as an important part of many SEO strategies, especially for larger sites where there can be heavy duplication of certain products.
3. Cluster content and pillar pages to target high value head keywords for particular topics relevant to your enterprise business and its activity.  

Authority Building

1. Building links and link management is important for enterprise clients to help ensure the ranking potential and performance of the domain are not affected. 
2. Implementing authority elements on the site; including product reviews, business ratings and reviews, testimonials and user feedback can all help pages rank and convert better.  

There are many more elements to consider when creating an enterprise SEO strategy. 

Why Technical SEO is Important for Enterprise Clients

Technical SEO is an important part of SEO management for any enterprise.

This is because technical SEO issues can cause rapid and irrecoverable traffic changes if left undiagnosed.

For example;

• You can block all organic search traffic from your website with an incorrectly placed single line of code in your robots.txt file.
• You can temporarily remove your entire domain and all of its pages from Google search results if you use certain Google search console features incorrectly.
• Technical SEO issues can cause huge crawl budget issues if elements like canonical tags are misconfigured, with spaces or with iterative strings added. 
• Incorrectly configured parameter URLs can create large amounts of duplication of content on pages across your website. 
• JavaScript dependency can block content from displaying to users and search engine spiders if it is required to load webpage HTML. 
• Pages that load slowly or score poorly in Core web vitals reports can erode sales as users opt to buy from competitors with faster websites due to impatience. 

The correct technical management of enterprise SEO projects can help negate the costly impacts of sudden and unexpected traffic decline, by reducing the risk of technical issues occurring.

Regular auditing of enterprise websites can help to detect issues with critical HTML elements like canonical tags, keep tabs on changes to robots.txt files and ensure content on your pages is still accessible to search engines and discoverable in search engine results. 

How Much Does Enterprise SEO Cost? 

The price you’ll pay for enterprise SEO will depend on several factors including;

• The size of your website; i.e. page counts, larger websites will be priced at more. 
• The sector your website occupies; complex, high risk or professional sectors will likely cost more than simpler industries. 
• The annual turnover of your business and how much of this is attributable to your website. Higher turnovers usually mean higher fees. 
• The proportion of revenue your website drives for your business; a business that sells products online but also has physical stores.
• Your current web presence. Brand new sites for an established organization may require a lower fee until traffic begins to flow in. 

Most SEO retainers are priced anywhere from £1,500 to £4,500 per month for medium to large eCommerce and commercially focused websites.

Enterprise SEO costs tend to be a little higher because corporate and enterprise websites tend to be larger, more complex and may have multiple demands and dependencies that your SEO marketing agency will need to consider to get working.

As an enterprise SEO client, you can expect to pay between; £8,500 – £17,500 plus per month.

You will be able to find cheaper services but you have to remember, that finding someone who is used to working with enterprise-size websites, providing reports to directors and who understands the risk of poorly implemented SEO changes is very important to the success of any relationship you establish with your potential enterprise SEO company.

Use our SEO cost calculator to get an idea of the cost of enterprise SEO.

What are the Goals of Enterprise SEO?

The goals of enterprise SEO will usually align with the broader objectives of the business and can include a focus on;

• Increasing brand awareness for the business
• Increasing leads and sales through the website 
• Build a content strategy around a product or service to help users understand features and functionality.
• Maintain steady and stable growth in line with business projections into the coming financial year
• Mitigate the risk of algorithmic changes and resulting traffic drops 

During the pitching process, where you have the opportunity to screen different SEOs to explain what they can offer and how they can provide value to the business, you should be able to get an idea of the enterprise SEO agency that will offer the best service for your organization, that most closely resembles the current priorities of your corporation.

Challenges of Enterprise SEO

Like any type of SEO, enterprise search engine optimisation has challenges, limitations and difficulties. 

One of the primary difficulties of SEO for enterprise organisations is scaling SEO activity to benefit many thousands or even millions of pages.

Enterprise SEO predominantly includes working for larger websites that may have tens of thousands or millions of pages. Making changes to a website that positively impacts these pages in one go can be extremely challenging.  

Other challenges include;

• Staffing and personal; because enterprise SEO takes place on larger sites, where multiple changes or optimisations need to be rolled out simultaneously, it can be difficult to find adequate staff to help ensure content changes meet the requirements of the business. 
• Prioritisation; multiple tasks in SEO can be a very high priority and simultaneous technical release and content updates might be recommended. Ensuring everything runs smoothly and efficiently can be simpler with the right SEO.
• Goals; many businesses struggle to define their goals and objectives clearly. Especially when it comes to websites and web traffic. So goal definition is a skill your enterprise SEO consultant should offer.
• Measurement; defining what success looks like is hugely important. A challenge for many businesses, however, effective enterprise SEO can help you identify what you’re looking for as well as the quantities required that will help move the needle for your business.

The major issues aren’t unlike those found in SEO for small businesses or SEO for medium sized, growing organisations. 

Although developments are accelerating SEO, is a fairly manual process that includes writing, reading, critical thinking and analysis to produce pages and content that meets the needs of both human users and search engines. 

What is Enterprise SEO Consultant?

An enterprise SEO consultant is someone who is skilled in running SEO projects and campaigns for enterprise organisations.

They can offer you SEO founded on core principles of SEO that manage risk to the business while helping improve SEO performance.

An effective enterprise SEO consultant should have;

• technical SEO expertise
• content strategy experience
• knowledge of link building methods that won’t create additional risk
• effective communication skills to engage with stakeholders across the business
• project management skills
• strong analytical skills to understand and interpret large data sets
• problem solving skills to help overcome complex issues with web functionality.
• Recommend tools and services to help automate process, check content quality and test for technical issues
• Tools like Surfer SEO can be invaluable in helping enterprise level websites rank for competitive, commercially valuable keywords.

We offer experienced technical and content SEO consultancy, here’s where you can find out more.

What Questions Should You Ask an Enterprise SEO Consultant?

When onboarding an SEO specialist to handle your enterprise SEO project it can be important to ask questions to ensure the consultant has the right skills and experience to provide the right type of assistance for your business. Here are some examples of a few;

What do you see as the biggest challenges for the business website? – your SEO should demonstrate some understanding of how the website works and the intent of users landing on the site. 

How will you help us track ROI and growth? – your potential SEO specialist should be able to explain how performance tracking works and reference tools they use to offer clarity for partners.

How long will it take to see results? – the ideal answer here will be based on both a knowledge of the existing issues or opportunities your website has, as well as their prior knowledge of working in a similar sector or on a similar site. You may find a stock, 3 – 6 months response is unsatisfactory. 

How would you go about encouraging teams to follow your best practice advice? – asking this question will give you an idea of how your SEO specialist will communicate with teams within your business and an idea of their communication style.

Correctly implemented, enterprise SEO can help maintain consistent performance of your website and help your business grow towards your commercial goals.

Enterprise SEO FAQs

How will enterprise SEO help your business?

Enterprise SEO can help your business to; improve your websites online visibility, this increase in visibility can improve the number of sales, leads and customers that your website generates. Enterprise SEO should align with the goals of your business, to improve the elements you feel are most important to your organisation.

How technical SEO is important for enterprise businesses?

Enterprise organisations can benefit from technical optimisations that impact pages across your website. For example, you could improve page speed across a batch of product pages to increase the number of sales these pages make. Alternatively, you could fix an issue with a robots.txt file that contains a rule which blocks a batch of long copy pages from being indexed by Google. Allowing the pages to be crawled and indexed could allow you to get more traffic from search engines to your website. Technical SEO issues can be hugely varied and are often specific to each website so a full website audit is recommended.

What are some examples of enterprise SEO software?

Enterprise SEO software can include; crawlers like screaming frog, rank tracking, auditing and keyword research tools like ahrefs and content optimisation tools like Surfer SEO. There are many free SEO tools, like those offered by Google that can help you improve the organic search performance of your website whether you’re working for an enterprise organisation or a new digital business.