What is Enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO applies to large websites operating an e-commerce store like Best Buy or Amazon, a university website or medical website. Instead of having a local search focus, enterprise websites often appeal to a larger audience.
In the example search for “digital camera”, these domains rank for a very high-volume query through a very well-developed SEO plan that consists of several in-depth factors. The organic results in Google are selected based on a number of ranking factors ranging from content to user experience and the links pointing to these pages.
If you have ever wondered how a site can rank for such difficult and broad search terms, this is where enterprise SEO strategy comes into play.
Because e-commerce sites have hundreds (sometimes thousands) of pages consisting of category, brand and product URLs, a more robust search engine optimization strategy is required to get it right for Google and Bing.
Improper SEO
If you fail to get your enterprise SEO strategy right through technical implementations or mismanagement of content, your rankings could end up looking like this retailer’s.
This particular retailer began using its manufacturer’s product descriptions rather than investing into unique content and saw a sharp decline in their rankings due to a clear duplicate content penalty from Google.
Common Problem Areas of Big SEO
As an enterprise SEO agency, we see a wide variety of website issues. From technical misalignments to thin content and crawling problems, we thoroughly diagnose issues and show clients how to resolve them. Of the larger SEO issues we face the more common ones are as follows:
Thin & Duplicate Content
Pages need to be as unique as possible to be valuable to Google. Most often, this means retailers have to write unique product descriptions and content for their product detail pages (PDP). We assess duplication of product pages and provide a path forward to create more unique information. Likewise, we’ll identify pages with thin content that could be revised for SEO benefit.
Crawl Anomalies
Because Google is expected to crawl hundreds (if not thousands) of URLs on an e-commerce website, it’s crucial to help Google find the pages it needs to crawl. This entails setting up nofollow tags where necessary and leveraging directives in a site’s robots.txt file to provide Google (and other web crawlers) with the best data to crawl. Using a robust toolset, we’ll discover the URLs you don’t need crawled to prioritize the most important pages of a site.
Faceted Navigation & Crawl Traps
In addition to crawling anomalies, it’s critical to direct web crawlers on how to read through sorting functions and refinement variables like faceted navigation. For instance, depending on how an e-commerce website is set up, it’s highly likely Google is crawling and indexing duplicate content stemming from faceted URLs. We’ll help identify the potential crawl traps and resolve any issues.
Backlink Analysis
Due the number of pages found on an enterprise site, there’s a good chance backlinks are being acquired naturally. We’ll show you the most important URLs with incoming links and craft a strategy to leverage the credibility of these high value pages for lower ranked pages. Additionally, if a site has been hit with any sort of link spam, we’ll take steps to disavow any questionable links to help avoid any future penalties.
Ongoing Content Creation
Lastly, but one of the most important aspects of an enterprise site, is the ability to scale content production. We will again identify the most important pages along with content gaps to develop a strategy aimed toward growing organic traffic. Our professional writing team has written for top e-commerce websites and gained rankings in Google.
How To Get it Right with An Enterprise SEO Strategy
At Octiv, we take a holistic view of your site’s performance in Google against your key competitors, perform a thorough technical analysis of the site (page speed, canonical tags, crawl traps, faceted navigation, etc.), conduct a content audit of the site (for all page types) and develop an action plan to implement changes. There is no perfect step-by-step approach to getting enterprise SEO right; rather, it takes an in-depth understanding of how your site operates by knowing everything from its technical characteristics to the steps taken to publish a new product page of an e-commerce store.
Once on-page optimizations are implemented in the initial discovery phase of the engagement, we dive into the site’s off-page presence. Off-page includes finding and acquiring links from relevant sites, cleansing of spammy links (disavowing links) and monitoring your social media presence.
Results That Matter
Through a solid on-page plan and forward-thinking off-page strategy, you’re guaranteed to see better rankings and visibility in search engines. Proper SEO of a large website shows results shows through increased traffic, orders and of course, sales. Organic improvement can also benefit other marketing channels like paid search, social media and direct traffic.
How to Hire An Enterprise SEO Agency
Hiring a new agency to manage an e-commerce SEO strategy comes with a lot of questions and considerations.
If you are new to enterprise SEO strategy and you’re trying to figure out how to hire the right SEO agency for your company, check out this helpful video from Google’s Maile Ohye.
Pricing for Enterprise SEO Services
Enterprise SEO results can take a bit of time to show and because each retailer is facing a different set of challenges, we handle all e-commerce clients on a project-by-project basis. We will take an in-depth look at your site, assess the most common challenges and create a customized proposal for you.
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