From local mom and pops shops all the way through multinational corporate retailers like Adidas and Nike, SEO, or, Search Engine Optimization, is a vital aspect of running a successful business. SEO is not one single thing but rather a collection of strategies and procedures to make your website rank higher and convert more sales through search engines. To make this happen, your company will need to think about a number of different ongoing digital marketing and backend website optimization techniques.
The bottom line is, when people make a certain query on Google, Bing, DuckDuckgo, or any other search engine, you want your company to come up at the top. Analytical data has shown that every search subsequent result ranking will receive a significantly fewer amount of click throughs and conversions. This is even more true for results that come after the first page of results.
While SMBs and big enterprise brands need to think about the same general problem and tactics, they often have much different sized budgets, domains, number of employees, and other strategic resources. Here are some things to think about in regards to your company’s SEO strategy.
Types of SEO
Whether you’re outsourcing to an agency or using a team internally, it’s important to keep in mind the three different types of SEO to think about: technical, on page, and off page.
Technical SEO
This refers to the backend operability of your domain. Make sure that your website is “crawlable.” This means that your pages are easy for a search engine to scour and navigate in a technical sense.
Indexability is just as important. This refers to the ability for the search engine to take the information from your website and show it within the search engine results page (SERP). These aspects are crucial for the technical side of your digital marketing team to continue to work on and optimize.
On Page SEO
All of the tags, keywords, alt-text, and internal linking on your website make up the elements of your on page SEO. This content, copy, and labeling that you put on your pages will affect how your site ranks on search engines. Proper on page practices targeting specific keywords can work wonders for your overall SEO strategy.
Off Page SEO
Off page SEO refers to relevant search related information about your business that isn’t contained without your domain. This includes your business’s social media, other social media mentions, backlink profile, and your profiles on Google Maps, Yelp, and local Facebook mentions.
Enterprise SEO Strategies
For bigger businesses, SEO strategies have to be a little bit different. It’s typically more involved and competitive, so it’s important for businesses to devise a cohesive and consistent strategy to ensure long-term success. Just remember, seeing results can take a long time, so be patient.
- Control the Narrative
- Do Your Research
- Optimize Your Website
- Think Local
- Links Matter
- Keep It Informative
- Stay Proactive and Adaptive
- Hire an Agency
Control Your Narrative
When someone looks up your company, brand, or product, your website should come up first! If you’re an enterprise corporation and don’t rank highly enough, you can have competitors, third party websites, and news agencies controlling your space.
Correctly addressing and properly staying ahead of your company’s SEO needs and demands will stop others from hijacking your narrative/messaging or from highlighting detrimental information that can hurt your brand name. By ranking high, your presence will be dictated correctly on your own terms.
2. Do Thorough Research
Market research is vital in every aspect of business; this is certainly true for SEO, too. Find out what your target audience is searching for on Google, Yahoo or Bing. Use available tools and consider hiring SEO market research companies. Determine what your competitors are ranking for and how you can compete for similar keywords that pertain to your specific market and product.
Be aware of keywords that are too broad or don’t pertain to your particular niche. Trying to rank for these searches will likely increase your website’s bounce rate. Instead, narrow your target keywords to searches relevant to what you sell and those keywords with high volume with low competition.
3. Optimize Websites Too
Remember to constantly check on the performance and optimization of your websites. This includes both desktop and mobile browsing. Run a tight operation that focuses on improving the user experience and providing the reader with valuable information.
Loading Speed
Make sure that your website loading time is fast. According to one study, going from a one to three second loading time increased a website’s bounce rate by an average of 32%. Think about whether your server and bandwidth is right for you. Survey your image sizes, page redirects, and possible unnecessary plugins that are weighing down your site’s performance.
Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
Especially for bigger enterprise organizations that have vast elaborate websites, be aware of your landing pages having repeated information, tags, and keywords. By making sure you don’t have duplicate content or targets, you can prevent what’s called keyword cannibalization. This is when your website is competing against itself to perform for the same targeted search.
Mobile Friendly
In 2021, 72.9% of the eCommerce market share was purchased from mobile devices. If your website is not designed for smooth mobile browsing and shopping you’re missing out on valuable sales. Make sure your business is equipped and up-to-date for omnichannel experience. Continuously test your site to ensure that your mobile runs the same as your desktop browsing.
Uniform Fonts and Themes
This omnichannel emphasis can be made much easier by implementing uniformity across all of your landing pages. Make it easier for your employees to add content and update pages across your domain with consistent fonts and themes.
4. Think Local
Even if your business is an enterprise international company you should think about the importance of your local presence. This means registering your brick-and-mortar locations on Google Maps, Yelp, Google My Business, and other locally-driven platforms.
Also consider registering your business and utilizing the exposure you can get with Facebook and Instagram. Reviews and page likes can help you rank higher no matter what size your business is.
5. Links Matter
Include plenty of internal and external links on your website. Internal links lay a scaffolding that helps build your site’s infrastructure, making it more authoritative and complete under the scrutinizing eyes of Google’s algorithm.
External links help connect and affiliate your website with other useful and trusted domains. These trusted domain references help increase your site’s credibility and improve your SEO status. Just make sure that they are actually relevant and provide thematic and topically important connections.
6. Information Richness
Provide something useful. Search engines are more likely to rank your page higher on SERPs if you actually offer an answer to a question. Instead of stuffing keywords (which Google will identify and demote), try to bring forth helpful information that actually serves a purpose for the person doing the search. You can do this with blog posts, news articles, interviews, or videos and charts that are relevant to your company’s product.
For example, if you are an olive oil purveyor, you can try to rank by providing an in depth recipe for making the best pesto. Better yet, offer a step-by-step list or video to enhance the ease and detail that you’re providing.
7. Be Proactive And Continually Adaptive
SERPs are not a static entity. They are constantly in flux and can change in a moment’s notice. Try to stay ahead of the trends and ebbs and flows of search engines by constantly monitoring and analyzing your company’s SEO status. Like any other aspect of your business, search engine optimization will be an ongoing process and effort.
8. Enterprise Seo Experts: Think About Hiring An Agency
There are plenty of technology SaaS companies and agencies that you can choose to hire, all with various pricing tiers and levels. Some offer software suites that can be utilized by your in-house SEO or digital marketing team. Others perform complete outsourced SEO services that are tailorable and custom-built for enterprise clientele.
Depending on what you are trying to achieve for specific aspects of SEO, it’s worth shopping around to see what companies offer. Some enterprise businesses use more than one of these agencies for different needs. If you can afford it, then it’s probably worth it!
Here are some companies to check out:
SearchMetrics
SearchMetrics offers a software suite, an API for data integration, and consultory services to over 1000 different customers. They boast enterprise clientele like Toyota, who they helped increase organic traffic by 50% for non-branded search terms.
SEMrush
While they have many tier options for smaller businesses, they also offer custom options for bigger organizations. They have plenty of success stories of increasing organic traffic for budding companies such as marijuana information company Leafly, Argentine credit card company Naranja, and alcohol delivery company Drizly.
Contentking
Contentking, which is owned by the bigger organic marketing platform Conductor, does real time SEO analysis, monitoring, and auditing. Their current portfolio includes enterprise powerhouses Netflix, Adidas, H&M.
BrightEdge
Claiming to be #1 for SEO agencies, and having some serious enterprise companies to prove it, BrightEdge may cost more than its competitors, but there’s a reason that half of Fortune 100s use their services. They also have huge clients such as L’oreal, Microsoft, Marriott, and United Airlines.