When it comes to an Enterprise Level SEO Analysis and Service offering, it operates at a significantly higher level of complexity when compared to your average small to medium eCommerce business. This article will explore the major areas of a complete enterprise SEO service.
Often overlooked at the enterprise level, search engine optimisation certainly becomes problematic. Large marketing departments are less agile and the companies’ tech and developer teams are stretched for resources servicing the various business units.
With traditional marketing teams forced to integrate with online marketing efforts at times, it can seem hard to justify a budget towards an area which has some ‘technological mystique‘, is sometimes opaque, and can be hard to project the return on investment.
Below outlines the foundational elements of an enterprise SEO solution. This will enable you to negotiate for a focus on SEO for your enterprise, as well as justify each and every aspect of the service.
Enterprise Digital Marketing Analysis
At the core of all digital marketing efforts is measurement. To really track the value add that search engine optimisation gives enterprise business, complete tracking must be activated. Unfortunately, while an enterprise may have some degree of tracking already enabled (such as Google Analytics), others such as events, GTM triggers and other conversion goals may not be fully realized.
A detailed and data-focused agency will work towards delivering a full-spectrum of tracking for organic visits.
Typically, an enterprise site operates with multiple regions, languages, sub-domains, portals and top-level domains (TLDs). It’s vital to not only track conversions and ROI on paid search advertising but with the Organic Channel as well.
It becomes problematic for enterprise when a lackluster implementation of tracking across various business units strips data and attributes successes or conversion to other traffic sources. Ultimately, it gives the organisation as a whole a skewed picture of lead acquisition.
Addressing cross-device, cross domain tracking, as well as a range of other tools available at the enterprise level (such as A/B testing and heatmaps), can reveal strengths and weaknesses about various business units and their pages. These insights inform optimisations which can range from one area, a site, or sub-folder to support organic rankings and conversions. The key element to remember here is data is transformed into meaningful insight and becomes information.
Key Enterprise Web Analytics & Tracking Tools
- Google Analytics 360
- Adobe Analytics
- Hotjar
- Kiss Metrics
- IMB Anlaytics
- Matomo (Pikwik) Analytics
- Smartlook
Note: There are many more available, look at a comprehensive list here.
Enterprise Organic Ranking & Performance Tools
Now that internally we can see and track all movements across an enterprise’s digital assets, the next step is to gain meaningful insights into the current organic and search engine performance. Again, at the enterprise level there can be a lot of data to track and interpret.
Not all insights about organic performance will be valuable for every business unit, but from a higher level and for the SEO Digital Agency it is vital that these areas are measured to deliver bespoke meaningful insights to the right stakeholder.
As such using enterprise ranking tools facilitates compartmentalisation of keywords and ranking performance, regional measurements and report delivery.
Key Enterprise Keyword Tracking Tools
There are many other tools for performance tracking, however the most enterprise friendly are listed above.
Enterprise Competition Digital Analysis
Now that we have a solid understanding of the overall performance of your organisation, the next step is to gain as much insight about your competitors SEO performance. Why? This operates as strategic intelligence about what actions to take to develop both complex strategies and easy-win strategies to increase conversions and performance.
Not only do you monitor your companies performance, you must be proactive to interpret the competition’s actions and take steps to prevent a loss in organic performance before it happens.
Often overlooked at the enterprise level, the data points that are revealed by tracking competitors can be delivered potentially 6-12 months prior to the competitor being a viable threat to your business units. The foresight allows the digital team to make recommendations and provide mitigation strategies to ensure there is no unforeseen loss.
Typical Tasks for SEO Competition Analysis
- Search result and keyword tracking
- This reveals technical issues, search engine changes and any particular investment move that a competitor makes.
- Competition keyword research
- Identifies and models how competitors are driving sales/conversions.
- Facilitates insights into your own businesses use of terminology and page creation.
- Baseline Reporting
- Tracking your enterprises’ performance via search engines alone is not enough, how you perform within the market in terms of code, structure, content, regional visibility and off-site metrics are all valuable metrics to track.
- KPI
- Knowing the overall status of your business units in content allows for more realistic and achievable revenue or performance goals for the next quarter/year.
Enterprise Website Optimisation
Tracking, baselines and performance measurements are all now in place. The next element is making valuable actions and changes on site. Enterprise website optimisation certainly requires significant consultation between both the management, marketing and technical/development teams. Business units and key goals must all be aligned (and informed) as to what value all of these changes will make.
An enterprise digital agency goals are to:
- Illustrate the problems with the site (technical or content related)
- Interpret the marketing teams goals and align these goals to technical changes
- Provide recommendations about the strategic actions to take
- Communicate between departments to deliver a cohesive understanding
- Liaise with development teams to monitor and track implementation
Typical Enterprise SEO Tasks
- Perform Technical Analysis of Code
- Usually there are technical issues which already impede the overall performance of the existing site, this first and foremost must to addressed.
- Speed and Load Analysis
- More than anything else, speed issues have a dramatic effect upon organic performance, optimisation here is a must.
- Crawl and Indexation Analysis
- Understanding how the search engines perceive the enterprise’s assets must be analysed from logs, gaining insight as to how to improve the overall ‘trust’ and authority of the site(s).
- Persona & Keyword Analysis
- It’s the SEO Agency’s job to work with the respective business to gather and match all valuable keywords and to then match them with various personas for each and every product or service. This informs a vast amount of strategic decisions made.
- Best Practice SEO Tasks
- These you may know, metadata such as Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, Headings and ALT tags.
- Conversion Optimisation
- Again overlooked, but using insights from initial baseline measurements and interpreting user behaviour to make minor changes can have substantial impact upon the rate of conversion for your existing traffic.
- Structural SEO Changes
- With the knowledge of how the enterprise assets are interpreted by search engines, the status of the competition, and the persona modelling, structural changes are typically made requiring design, content and publishing.
The list above is an abbreviation of the tasks your enterprise SEO agency will conduct, but these are generally the initial tasks delivered in order. Throughout this process considerable consultation is required to ensure the actions taken have clear and precise outcomes to establish long-term value. This tends to be a staggered implementation with a framework of tasks, each with a clear method to interpret performance, accelerate traffic growth and conversions.
International SEO for Enterprise
At the enterprise level, operating globally or across various continents is the norm. This requires a unique approach when it comes to SEO and often requires a bespoke solution depending upon:
- How the enterprise arranges its business units
- Its regional strategic goals
- Office & call center locations
- Server location and TLD addresses
- Languages used
Optimising for each and every country is possible with a series of technical, structural and content based changes. For enterprise level businesses, it is often a neglected area of search engine optimisation. While the head office may be located in one region, so to are all of the online marketing efforts resulting in a massive loss in opportunity.
At times even optimising a specific region, for a specific goal (product or service offering) can yield millions of dollars of revenue. These kinds of wins really require the digital agency to interpret data and primary business goals to deliver unrealised and untapped opportunities.
Typical International SEO Tasks for Enterprise
- Country and Language Analysis
- Language and Cultural Keyword Analysis
- Technical site changes
- Very much dependent upon the assets available to the enterprise.
- Localising Content & Additional Platforms
- International SEO comprises of Local SEO within an international context, as such all tasks done within local SEO strategies are replicated multiple times for each target country or region.
- Geo-location Webmaster optimisation
Enterprise Content Creation
Most enterprise clients always have a content team either in-house or outsourced, unfortunately at times these content creators have a lesser level of knowledge or insight about the strategic decision being made at the SEO level.
Your enterprise SEO agency should be working in cohort with any content creation tasks, especially if this is online based content. Using the in-depth research previously delivered, the agency should be continually providing assets to content creators, communicating the keyword phrases to be used and at what level of frequency.
All too often content generated for the web at the enterprise level will have a strong focus on brand, foregoing any advantages of using data based terminology to inform how the content is written. Having an SEO agency support content creation adds value to every dollar spent on marketing material and can result in a significant increase in outcomes.
Generally the SEO agency will:
- Assist in publishing targeted, well-written website content that improves your search rankings and provides facilitate a balance between brand and search function.
- Provide direction to create SEO-optimized creative content assets like infographics, videos, whitepapers and other strategic content.
- Optimize and create content for voice search and digital assistants and natural language results.
Ongoing Enterprise SEO Management
While some tasks of the SEO agency deliver results in the short-term, the value of having consultants on your team permanently can provide cross departmental insights and facilitate longer term value across the online digital assets.
In general the tasks provided for the enterprise ongoing are:
- Monitoring of your keyword rankings, organic traffic, calls, and leads
- Monitoring the keywords rankings of your competitors
- Deliver continual reporting for each respective business unit, region and various management levels.
- Continually optimize and pivot your campaign for better performance over time.
- Execute bespoke SEO strategies overtime to address risk, opportunity and the changing nature of the enterprise.
The Value Proposition
Generally enterprise websites have a great deal of content, but are continually being outranked by smaller companies. Small changes to the content on your enterprise site can have a considerable positive effect on your organic rankings. Often, enterprise websites have substantial site equity but the content is structured in a way that creates a roadblock for the search engines.
When it comes down to it, the real advantage of engaging with an enterprise SEO solution and service is to add value to existing assets and deliver measurable, tangible and precise outcomes for the business. Depending upon the industry, these actions can have a profound impact upon the progress and the future of a company across multiple markets.
When choosing an enterprise level SEO solution, initial ROI may seem somewhat obscure, challenging to justify and hard to allocate budget for. However, if the agency fulfills the tasks mentioned above both in terms of deliverables and consultation with your marketing team, you’ll have a valuable asset to work with, continually providing ROI. The measurement doesn’t stop and neither should your SEO team.
If you’re interested in speaking to an agency with enterprise credentials, acumen and experience contact us at Metric Labs, we’re here to help!