Enterprise SEO Challenges & Mistakes You Need To Overcome

Enterprise companies are simply harder to work in than other companies. They’re big and complex organizations with a lot of moving parts and rules.

Enterprise companies have a lot of people on many different teams. Finding the people on different teams who you can collaborate with can be a challenge. Try to leverage the institutional knowledge of others who have been around for a while to help guide you.

Even an SEO team may be fractured, at least for less mature organizations. Eventually you usually see consolidation in the efforts and core teams being established, but it may take a while to get to this point. You can start by collaborating with other SEOs responsible for different parts of the company.

Enterprise companies are likely to have multiple websites, and each website may have a complex infrastructure involving multiple CMSs and CDNs. This kind of structure usually means there are some unique challenges and added complexity that make troubleshooting and fixing issues difficult. Try to segment out the different systems and figure out who owns and can fix problems in each.

The mistake I see many SEOs making with this is that they think things should be done just because they’re a best practice or Google says they should do it. At enterprise scale, trying to do low-level tasks that don’t have much upside potential can waste resources without having much impact.

My best tip is to equate projects to revenue, or as close as you can get to it with some other value metric. For example, I’ve managed to get redirect projects off the ground by assigning a value of $400 for each referring domain recovered.

Here’s how to find those opportunities in Ahrefs:

Making friends through networking and soft skills are important for being successful in an enterprise environment. You need people to like you and to want to work with you. You also need to be a bit opportunistic and be ready to work with them when they’re finally ready to work with you.

One way to get more buy-in is to show people the bigger picture. Communicate with other teams to integrate with them and then show everyone how that leads to more business success.

For example:

• The paid team can expand their advertising based on assets created for organic search and would love to re-market to the people who landed on your organic pages.
• The social team can help promote your content.
• You can syndicate your core content for greater visibility.
• You can capture leads and nurture responses to engage them and guide them toward conversion.

If you can show execs the whole picture of how teams can help each other to grow the business, then you’ll get buy-in and resources easier.

How are others to know if an SEO project was successful if you don’t show them? Don’t make the mistake of keeping wins to yourself.

Show off your successes in meetings and reports. Give other teams that were involved credit as well. Take that success, and find other teams that want to do the same thing.

Getting changes for SEO in an enterprise environment is often more difficult than it should be.

I already talked a bit about all the different systems you might encounter in an enterprise environment. A lot of those may be legacy systems, with no funding or support to actually fix things on them. In fact, it may be more expnsive to shut them down than it is to fix them.

The platforms themselves may have major limitations when it comes to SEO. If they’re routed through a CDN, you may be able to use edge workers to fix the issues, sometimes called Edge SEO. Our upcoming Patches system will allow you to fix a lot of issues, even on legacy systems that are often neglected.

Legal teams can cause headaches for enterprise SEOs. The legal department can kill off content or other initiatives like link building. They may not allow you to do outreach to other companies on behalf of your current company. You’ll have to figure out what you can still implement, without the need for legal approvals.

I mentioned earlier about working with other teams. Packaging an initiative so that it encourages collaboration means that it is more likely to get adopted. You need to be able to get things done to have an impact.

Enterprise companies have a lot of products and services, and enterprise websites usually have a lot of pages. What teams do you work with? What pages do you prioritize improving? These aren’t easy questions.

My best recommendation is to align to company or team goals. Most companies or teams have some products they prioritize or want to improve and that’s where you’re most likely to be able to get buy-in for SEO initiatives. Someone’s bonus is likely tied to the success of these projects, and they’re willing to invest resources to make sure they hit their targets.

You have to prioritize tasks and focus on the most significant issues. I typically use an impact / effort matrix as a visual to help others understand what I consider the most important tasks. Here’s what that looks like:

You will likely have to work with any other teams involved for a better effort prediction, but in my experience I’ve found they appreciate it if you take a first pass at estimating the effort involved. Then give them the opportunity to make adjustments based on how much effort they think it will take.

It’s not glamorous, but if you get the SEO basics right at the enterprise level, you’ll likely win. It’s hard to do that at scale, but boring projects = $$$ when it comes to enterprise SEO.

Even though enterprise SEO budgets look big, resources are never unlimited and there’s a ton to do.

Enterprise SEO teams are usually strapped for resources and are in a constant battle with other teams for resources. You have to prove why you should get the resources over everyone else. Show them the value of your work.

It can be hard to hire the right people and fill the gaps in your team. Sometimes it’s easier to hire an external agency than get another headcount. They typically come out of different parts of the budget, and because it’s easier to fire contractors and agencies, this is often the preferred route to get more personnel.

The way I’ve seen this work best is to have agencies fill in the gaps from your team. Maybe that’s doing more grunt work, specific tasks your team might not have much experience with, or just providing additional resources to enable your team to do more.

Enterprise SEO tools are expensive and the onboarding process can be a long and difficult process. Getting rid of a bad tool once it’s integrated into your systems can be even harder. Make sure you do your homework and select the right solution for you.

Some enterprise SEO tools have sales teams that promise the world, but the tools disappoint, and no one uses them.

I’ve also seen some companies restrict the usage of outside tools and rely solely on internal tools. This can often be more expensive, even though the tools are often sub-par.

Some popular enterprise SEO tools include:

With so many different tools and so many different needs, how do you know what’s right for you?

Most enterprise SEO teams go through similar organizational challenges as they evolve. This is sometimes referred to as the SEO maturity model.

Enterprise companies will typically have some kind of top pages or top keywords project. These look at the most critical pages and/or keywords for your business and help you see their performance over time and any trends or issues.

They’re typically used in meetings where there is a quick analysis and an action plan created for any issues or for any successes. You try to look at what worked well so you can replicate it, and try to look for any issues to see what happened.

You can use the Compare pages tab in the Top Pages report in Site Explorer to get this kind of view for your pages. We will be adding one for the Organic Keywords report in the future as well.

The typical crawl cadence I’ve seen for enterprise companies is 1 month. That means it could be nearly a full month before spot issues. There are better ways.

In some environments, you may be able to set up unit tests to have automated checks for issues before they launch.

You can also use Ahrefs Site Audit to crawl staging and dev environments to check for any issues before they’re launched to the public.

You don’t always need a full crawl of the website which can take weeks to run on an enterprise site. You just need enough to see if any important changes were made.

This is a sneak peak at what we have coming that we’re calling always-on crawling.

The idea is to switch from scheduled crawls, which users tend to schedule weekly or monthly, to a prioritized crawling system that’s always on and notifies users of issues faster.

One of the mistakes many SEOs make in an enterprise environment is getting caught up in ‘busy work.’ Yes, the more things you’re involved in, the more things you can catch and influence.

I often see SEOs making the mistake of working only on one page at a time. While you need some of this, you run the risk of finding yourself in a position where you’re just ticking off boxes and not strategizing or having a bigger impact. The result is micro gains while still having macro problems.

Enterprise is all about scale, and that includes how you work. You have to focus on what will have the most impact, which means that you need to step away from the busy work and have time to look at the bigger issues and see the bigger picture.

You need a mix of projects in order to be successful. Most companies have some projects around top pages or offerings to make sure those drive more revenue. You might also be tasked with optimizing a certain section of the site, collaborating with specific teams, or working on initiatives that are company-wide but important to SEO.

There are many different types of content you can create, but with limited resources, enterprise companies typically focus on bottom of the funnel content.

You need to find a way to expand to the top of funnel content such as informational content and videos. This helps to expand your pipeline and gives you the opportunity to be seen as the expert instead of your competitors.

Every touchpoint for a brand is a chance to gain more awareness and credibility, that will eventually lead to conversions. Eventually, you’ll want content targeting every stage of the funnel.

There’s a lot of money at stake for enterprise companies, and your competitors are also making investments in SEO. You can’t just sit still. You’ll want to monitor what your competitors are doing and use that to your advantage. For example, you can use their wins to show they’re pulling ahead in a certain area, and shift resources or argue for more resources in that area to keep pace with them.

There’s so much at stake in enterprise SEO and so many opportunities. When a company and its people finally get behind SEO, they can dominate an industry.