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Enterprise SEO For Accelerated Lead and Sales Growth
Most corporate sites have 1,000s of products and service pages and many global brands and company domains. This prevents both unique challenges and opportunities for Search Engine Optimization programs.
The following article will discuss the Enterprise SEO formula for accelerating your SEO programs for leads and sales growth.
Common Enterprise SEO Challenges
✔️ The bigger the website, the more complexities and problems exist. (For example, optimizing a site for different languages and a broad portfolio of domains and subdomains can be a complex undertaking.)
✔️ Highly matrixed organizations can make it difficult to get SEO on the project prioritization list.
✔️ Publishing new or updated content (lack of resources, too many responsibilities, and not enough time, not a priority, too many other projects take precedence).
✔️ Coordinating content production across multiple departments, products, and brands.
✔️ Department silos make project collaboration challenging.
✔️ Content translation and localization issues (lack of resources and slow translation turn times.)
✔️ Lack of consistent technology integration (ex. multiple instances of Salesforce or different CRMs).
✔️ IT has control over websites, domains, and code push schedules. (marketing projects can fall low on the IT’s prioritization list and can be challenging to obtain IT support for ongoing project implementations.)
The above roadblocks are common obstacles that marketing departments face for most marketing projects. Through relationship building, Executive Management support, and building a strong business case for Search Engine Optimization, you can help navigate and push your SEO projects forward.
Enterprise SEO Strategies
Enterprise SEO allows you to take advantage of your website’s scale – your 1,000s of web pages.
Each page on your website should provide valuable and relevant information that helps educate and inspire action towards lead conversion. The action can be as simple as signing up for a product newsletter to submitting a full product quote.
To accelerate your SEO efforts, utilize the following Enterprise SEO tactics.
1) Target key search terms where you rank positions 11-20.
The easiest way to find your search terms is to log into your Google Search Console and navigate to the “Performance” tab. Click on the “Average Position” checkbox to show actual search term ranking positions within Google.
Export your list and filter the data to show only search terms with positions 11-20. This is what you call your “striking distance” search term list. This means these terms are close enough to page one search results that it makes them likely candidates to elevate through SEO efforts.
To further quantify these pages are good SEO contenders, use Google Analytics traffic data for each page. Also, include engagement metrics like time on page and bounce rates.
Last, pull backlinks data for each URL using Ahrefs, SEMRush, or similar software.
Once you have pulled all the data points, combine all the information into one Excel spreadsheet.
This is the resource document you will use to determine whether the web pages will be removed (thin or low-value content), combined with similar content to form an updated page, or need to create brand new content pages.
2) Addressing Website Content Gaps
Based on your content research document, you will have a list of specific web pages that need to be updated, removed, combined, or created.
a) Thin or Low-Value Content.
For web pages that provide little customer value or are no longer relevant, 301 redirect these pages to similar content. (Typically, these pages have low traffic, poor engagement metrics, and no or only a few backlinks.)
b) Medium-Value Content (with multiple similar pages).
For pages with many similar content pages, it is recommended to combine all the similar pages into one main page. Typically, this is done using one of the existing content pages. (Be sure to 301 redirect the pages to the updated, main content page.)
c) New Website Content.
You will likely need to create many new content pages.
This will help fill in your missing site content and will provide customers with more relevant information about your company’s products, services, and solutions.
Because you are SEO optimizing the content, it also provides you with new search terms to rank for and to drive more site traffic and leads.
What Specific Search Terms Should I Target?
a) High Customer Search Intent Terms.
It is highly recommended that your new content targets high customer search intent terms. These terms represent different stages in the buying cycle.
For example, the “benefits of ERP software” is at the beginning of the purchase cycle, as the prospective customer is looking for very general product information.
For example, “ERP system demos” is an excellent high purchase search intent term. This would be considered a middle to the late stages in the customer buying cycle.
b) Ever-Green Content.
This content remains relevant over time and does not have a shelf life.
Ever-Green content helps answer common questions that prospective buyers frequently ask. Excellent sources of content can be obtained from your sales and customer support colleagues.
c) Competitor Search Terms You Don’t Rank For.
Often, these can be excellent search terms to rank for, as they help drive qualified traffic and sales leads.
By using SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs, you can quickly determine what specific search terms your competitors rank for, and you do not.
Also, you can use these tools to research paid search (Google Ads) to determine which keywords and phrases competitors are bidding on. This will help quantify which terms your competitors value and which terms you should add to your content portfolio.
3) General Enterprise SEO Content Strategies.
Although business resources and goals can vary greatly, here are general Enterprise content strategies to help drive SEO rankings, leads, and sales.
a) Grow New Content.
This means producing new, high-value, and relevant content and publishing it to your website every week, week after week. (Consistency is the key here.)
Content could be in different forms, but the most common include blogs, articles, product or service updates, case studies, white papers, and similar content. At a minimum, publish at least two new pieces of content each week.
Note: I have seen many companies struggle to produce new content weekly. Common obstacles can vary but fall within limited people resources and cross-department bottlenecks.
Keep this content process simple and don’t fall victim to “paralysis of analysis.” This means your content need not be perfect. (80% good enough should be your goal here.)
b)Use CMS web page templates to increase workflow output.
Regardless of the CMS you use, work with your web design and development teams to create page templates. The templates can be around different content types, from blog templates to product/service page templates.
Templates allow Enterprise marketing teams and content writers to build pages without having to do any coding. This speeds up the content publishing process greatly and provides for you to maintain high standards of work.
B) Grow Existing Content.
Generally, improving existing content will fall into these three buckets.
a) Improve Organic Click Through Rates (CTRs).
When you search on Google, the search engine results pages (SERPs) will show listings of web page resources. The listings are called search engine snippets. The snippets displayed are primarily driven by the Title and Meta Description you use for that page.
To increase your Organic CTRs, re-write, and test new Titles and Descriptions to see if this improves your click through rates. The simplest way to track this is by using your Google Search Console data.
Establish a 30 to 90-day baseline for specific terms and then change your Title and Descriptions. Measure the pre and post CTR data. Continue to adjust your Title and Descriptions to increase click through rates.
b) Improve On-Page Optimization.
If you want your Enterprise content to rank higher in the search engines, one crucial component is to do a better job of optimizing the page for your primary phrase and secondary phrases.
This involves weaving your search phrases into your content, so it appears naturally. Use variations of your primary search term. Mix up your search term phrasing to include exact and partial wording.
For example, if your primary key phrase is “home mortgage guide,” use wording variations like a guide to home mortgages, home mortgage buyer’s guide, mortgage guide for home buyers and similar terms. Also, cover your web page’s topic in enough depth to illustrate to Google you are the expert on the subject.
C) Content Freshness.
How long has it been since you updated or refreshed your site content? Often, content is published on the site and then never touched again.
Google prefers fresh content that demonstrates your level of expertise, authority, and trust. The content you produce needs to be valuable and highly relevant to your search audience.
It is common to see old website content decrease in traffic. This is called “Content Decay.”
Go to your Google Analytics / Behavior / Content Drilldown to see which sections of your website have lost traffic. It is common to see old blog and article sections decrease in total web visitors.
Review your web pages last 90 days of traffic YoY to determine if you are experiencing content decay. Then drill down into the sections to view specific page data.
Pick the top pages with high web traffic and a decent number of backlinks. (Refer to your content research document.)
Once you have determined which pages have decreased in traffic, refresh and update 20-30% of the content for those pages.
This means adding new content and utilizing different forms of content like images, videos, and infographics.
4) Improve Internal Linking Structure.
Internal linking involves all the links within your website and includes navigation and footer elements.
This is an often-overlooked Enterprise SEO strategy.
If search terms are ranking in positions 5-14, these make good candidates for internal linking campaigns.
Utilizing blogs and articles for linking to targeted pages is an easy way to help provide a structured approach to building links to “striking distance” keywords and phrases.
Sometimes, changing the wording for navigational (top-level, sidebar, and footer) elements can also be used.
5) External Link Building Tactics.
Link building is about getting other websites to link to your website. This is a critical factor in Google’s search engine algorithm and a must for any Enterprise SEO program.
a) Remove Toxic Backlinks.
A common problem I see with big corporate sites is that they can have a high number of low quality, toxic backlinks.
A toxic backlink means any site that links to your website that can reduce your search engine rankings.
Some examples include paid link farms, foreign private blog networks, sites with viruses or malware, and mirror pages (identical pages found on different domains that link to your website.)
Use SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to analyze your backlinks for any toxic links. Review the link domain list for issues like websites you don’t recognize, foreign language sites, and unnaturally looking/spammy anchor text.
According to Google, first, contact the site where you want your link to be deleted. If this does not work, then utilize Google’s Disavow Tool. You can only submit one disavow list per domain, and it can take several weeks to be processed.
b) Increase Quality Backlinks.
With link building, it is not a volume game; it is a quality game.
Obtain high-quality links from relevant websites that fit the overall theme or topics of your website.
For example, if your company produces Accounting Software, it doesn’t make sense to obtain links from sporting websites.
Some effective link building tactics can include brand of company mentions, local and industry business directories, obtaining links from business partnerships and suppliers, creating blog interviews, infographics, industry surveys, and ultimate buying guides.
To learn more about link building, read this article – “7 Simple Steps To Increase Website Backlinks.”
Final Thoughts
In this article, we discussed many Enterprise SEO strategies and tactics, which range from updating outdated content to implementing internal and external link building campaigns. Through targeting the correct search terms, updating and refreshing site content, and removing toxic backlinks, you can help accelerate SEO traffic, leads and sales growth.
Learn about National SEO Consulting Services.
Learn about SEO Consultant Services.
Learn about Technical SEO Audits or SEO Audit Services.
About the Author
Corey has over 20 years of Digital Marketing and SEO experience and is the owner of Corey Wenger SEO Consulting. Corey is an SEO Expert and Consultant and has deep knowledge in troubleshooting, educating, coaching, guiding, and scaling your SEO Strategies and tactics so that you can increase keyword rankings, leads, and sales. Additionally, Corey helps businesses develop SEO Strategies to compete more effectively against search engine competition. Corey is also an SEO Trainer and enjoys helping his clients learn and master SEO tactics, tools, and strategies.
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