Enterprise SEO: Survey on Enterprise SEO Platforms & Marketing

What is Enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO is a full-scale, comprehensive approach to search engine optimization for large businesses that handle websites with thousands of pages and need robust SEO strategies. Enterprise SEO marketing is a field that requires both high and granular-level strategies to improve revenue for large organizations. These organizations are generally in the Fortune 1000 and have robust teams giving attention to different channels that align with company goals.

In these companies, Enterprise SEOs don’t generally have to wear as many different hats like in smaller organizations. They have the ability to look at search data and trends and can give actionable advice to all parts of an organization. They can assist with local campaigns for niche markets or on a global scale where improving conversions by 0.1% can still mean increased traffic by hundreds of thousands of visits.

Enterprise SEOs role in high-level marketing is still new and has only recently been taken seriously by large “old-fashioned” companies. The yearly increase in Enterprise SEO jobs at all levels is evidence of this.

How do enterprise companies value and scale SEO? Complete the form to download the full Enterprise SEO report and find out. 

Why is enterprise SEO important?

With many competing priorities to consider at the enterprise level, SEO can fall by the wayside. Ignoring SEO can be extremely detrimental for an enterprise organization. Failing to prioritize SEO will result in a diminished UX and significant lost opportunities when it comes to organic traffic, lead generation, and revenue generation. You could quite literally be leaving hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on the table. Despite this, SEO is often an afterthought, if not essentially ignored.

Unless SEO is integrated into every step of the process, every campaign is at risk. So how can SEOs get stakeholders across their organization to recognize the value of what they do? The answer is simple: flip the script.

Enterprise SEO is important because it gets your business in front of your target audience, driving organic traffic to the most important pages of your website.

Understanding what SEO is and why your website needs to rank higher to beat the competition will help you see why enterprise SEO is truly important.

What it takes to be an Enterprise-level SEO

There are multiple people an SEO has to report to in enterprise marketing. The specifics depend on a variety of factors. They could report to their SEO marketing manager or a digital marketing director, who oversees multiple channels. Agency SEOs have the added step of reporting to a client who sometimes blurs the lines between search engine marketing (SEM), web development, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Since Enterprise SEO is an important cog, they also have to integrate with a team that oversees other channels. Paid marketers benefit from optimized pages as well because, on a large scale, they can save their enterprise-level company millions of dollars as a result of lower CPCs. Social marketers benefit from prioritizing SEO as well as it enables amplified, innovative messaging that comes from audience intents and their search habits.

As mentioned above, Enterprise SEO agencies have their SEOs report their work to management along with clients. This sometimes comes with contractual obligations to show improvement in a given time frame. In a fickle industry like SEO and the intense competition within enterprise search results, they face monumental challenges coming from both clients and their competition.

4 Enterprise SEO strategies

Anyone can say that SEO is important for enterprise businesses, but taking the steps to implement a comprehensive strategy is better. To be successful with Enterprise SEO, you need to start with the following: 

• Assess the performance of your marketing efforts
• Determine how those efforts can be improved
• Set SMART goals
• Map out how you plan to reach your goals

At the most basic level, your team must understand how to use SEO in your digital marketing strategy. This includes conducting research, collecting data, tracking performance, and building a plan that fits the objectives of the business. Clearly communicate and distribute the plan so it can be executed across the organization.

Your marketing plan should start with these Enterprise SEO strategies:

1. Content audit: Audit your website’s existing digital content, organize it, and classify it into topic categories and formats. Identify content and pages that are already optimized and which aren’t. If your audience is made up of multiple interests and backgrounds, organize your content by persona type and customer journey stage to uncover any content gaps.
2. Competitive analysis: A competitive analysis identifies the keywords, topics, and strategies your competitors are using in their Enterprise SEO efforts. Identify the rankings of your competitors’ sites, evaluate on-page optimization tactics, and look for ways to beat the competition for specific keywords. 
3. Keyword research and analysis: A keyword analysis will unveil the phrases most relevant to your business. Identify which terms are most competitive and least competitive but may still apply to your products and services. Weigh the user’s search intent with any keyword you consider optimizing for.
4. Content marketing strategy: The relationship between content marketing and SEO cannot be overlooked. Developing a content marketing strategy will help you to organize content revisions, topic priorities, and timing for creating content assets. Content must be organized by applying Enterprise SEO best practices, and your tracked data should guide decisions for future content topics and formats. SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand, and you can’t succeed in one without the other.

Enterprise SEO marketing benchmarks

Conductor recently partnered with Ascend2 in a research study. Below is a snapshot of the results from that Enterprise SEO survey.

Results show that some of the most challenging parts of being an Enterprise SEO are finding peers of the same skill level in-house, along with a limited budget to work with. These days, most online purchase decisions begin with organic search. Organic traffic accounts for 94% of click-through rates for online browsers. That means enterprises—the largest companies in the world—have millions to lose or gain when it comes to their organic channels. Here’s a look at some more of the top takeaways from the research study:

• 72% of enterprises rate SEO as successful to some degree.
• 57% of enterprises rated limited SEO in-house skills as the most challenging obstacle to achieving important SEO objectives, while 43% reported limited SEO budget as the most challenging obstacle for their org.
• 54% said the most effective SEO tactic is quality content creation, while 50% said frequent website updating.

Enterprise SEO Platforms

An Enterprise SEO professional has to choose or recommend a platform fearlessly. It may seem hopeless when asking for a budget with management, but in doing so, the digital marketer is committing their time to an essential piece of a larger role.

What is an Enterprise SEO Platform?

An Enterprise SEO Platform is a marketing technology that helps large businesses manage, implement, and measure their brand’s organic search presence. The enterprise platform is a comprehensive approach to search engine optimization for websites with thousands of pages and robust marketing strategies.

As organizations build their internal marketing teams, they rely on Enterprise SEO Platforms to unleash the full potential of those teams. Their teams become faster and more effective with the proper workflows and integration—producing results that outperform external agencies.

Top 3 features of Enterprise SEO Platforms

In any field of enterprise marketing, you need tools that can assist the marketers with the immense task at hand. In particular, Enterprise SEO Platforms should have features that can help with innovation, automation, and integration.

• Innovation: An Enterprise SEO Platform should focus on innovation in the creative ideas it gives you for future campaigns. Keywords that may not have been accounted for during content ideation are a great example. Generally, themes for campaigns are decided first, but after a period of time, you may find that audiences are looking for the same content in different ways. In this way, the right platform can be a great asset for uncovering high-intent keywords that turn searchers into customers.
• Automation: This is an essential feature for enterprise-level reporting. The right Enterprise SEO Platform should be able to aggregate large data into a readable report that can be sent weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Time is saved when an Enterprise SEO doesn’t have to dedicate countless hours compiling raw data manually into readable formats.
• Integration: This is necessary when an enterprise-level company uses all digital marketing channels. Teams need to be able to align with their peers’ strategies and verticals seamlessly. Campaigns are always more successful when there is a team goal rather than a personal one.

6 Pillars of an Enterprise SEO Platform

Many industry leaders are executing their SEO strategies in-house, and others are following suit. An Enterprise SEO Platform enables your organization to have a successful organic marketing program across these six pillars.

1. Customer-first strategy: Putting customers first is the driving force for the best organic marketing. You need to understand the needs and problems of your customers and how to create the right content to help them. An Enterprise SEO Platform supports a customer-first strategy with on-demand customer intelligence, allowing you to identify the most relevant topics for your target audience. A true enterprise platform also analyzes all the aspects of successful content—customer voice, on-page factors, and what competitors are doing.
2. SEO workflow: How fast your team can create content, implement technical changes, and make optimizations will directly impact traffic, conversions, and revenue. When you bring SEO processes in-house, the workflow takes days rather than weeks or months. You need someone (or a team) in your organization armed with an enterprise platform to own the SEO process and move projects to completion.
3. SEO reporting: Organic marketing success depends heavily on having access to detailed reporting. Without an enterprise reporting platform, your team could be sifting through data for days to determine how content is performing. Enterprise SEO reporting tracks the visibility of your content, and your team can easily tailor reports to a specific industry, role, or business challenge to reveal new insights. Spend less time tracking down data and more time understanding and implementing with an Enterprise SEO Platform.
4. System integration: The best enterprise solutions bring tools and apps together into a single system. This integration maximizes the impact of the tools your team already uses by enabling you to work together in a powerful platform that streamlines workflow. The marketing team should be working from the same playbook—a single source that shares the same relevant data with everyone who needs it.
5. Cross-functional team support: SEO demands diverse, skilled players to work together and share data. The Enterprise SEO Platform you choose must deliver useful information both to advanced SEO users and beginners. By empowering team members to work together within one platform, regardless of skill level, everyone will have access to the information they need to make real-time decisions.
6. SEO services & support: There will likely be times when your marketing team needs to expand its bandwidth. An enterprise platform allows you to ramp up or down outsourced services for changing projects. Conductor’s on-demand SEO services help you with audits and keyword research, for instance, while allowing you to drive initiatives in-house.

SEO tools

Relying on smaller SEO technologies can potentially slow down the operations of a large business. Some tools might provide the same data, which presents redundancy and conflict. You may even question the validity and precision of the tools’ data. SEO tool overlap can become an issue of consistent quality.

When scaling your Enterprise SEO efforts, a mix of small toolsets can become a challenge. You don’t want to hamper the growth of your organic presence. You need a platform to support large-scale needs. Unlike tools, which are generally for only one user per team, an Enterprise SEO Platform is built to handle volume, scaling with the size of your datasets.

Switching to an Enterprise SEO Platform like Conductor can save one of your business’ most precious resources: time. Tedious manual processes are automated. It’ll be easier to consolidate and collaborate on SEO strategies (and achieve your goals) with a central platform.

Showing Enterprise SEO results

Generally, reporting is done at a monthly or bi-monthly cadence in collaboration with other digital channels. An Enterprise SEO’s value cannot be determined by organic search alone. There are many touchpoints a person may have on their purchase journey before actually becoming a customer. Enterprise SEOs have a large influence on this journey through search engines.

Natural search has also been proven to yield the highest conversion rates compared to other channels. This is mainly because a searcher’s perception is that they found it online rather than companies having a hand in selling it to them through traditional advertising. Enterprises can gain thousands of customers from low-hanging fruit through simple optimizations. The role that has the highest chance of doing this successfully is an Enterprise-level SEO.

Summarizing the benefits of Enterprise SEO

To sum up, an Enterprise SEO has a lot to offer to a digital marketing team. They have to meet not only their own SEO goals but the company’s overarching goals as well. They can influence searchers throughout their buying journey before they convert into a customer. Given the right SEO support system, they can improve their efficiencies and quality of work enormously through automation.

Download the full Enterprise SEO Report

To inform this report, Conductor administered the Search Engine Optimization Survey and completed interviews with 442 marketing, sales, and business professionals at organizations with over 1,000 employees. Download the Enterprise SEO Report today for additional, exclusive SEO benchmarks for large companies and see how your efforts stack up.