Everything You Need to Know About Enterprise SEO and Its Uses

Curious about enterprise SEO?Did you know Borrell Associates estimates brands and agencies will shell out over $72 billion for SEO services in 2018? Similarly, Google (the uncontested leader of search engines) made $31.15 billion in ad revenue in the first quarter of 2018. Search engines have become the new yellow pages.If you want to dominant marketing today, you must master the search engine.Sure, some of that mastery comes in the form of paid advertisement. The rest comes from building the right kind of content. We're talking about web pages, articles, podcasts, and videos that search engines will rank on page one.But that's not relevant for big companies with household brand names. They get the same amount of web traffic regardless of their SEO strategies. Or do they?If you want to find out, read on.

What is Enterprise SEO?

If your company ranks in the Fortune 1000, you have an enterprise-level company. If not, you probably don't. All companies in the Fortune 1000 have robust marketing teams. They work on a variety of channels to improve buyer interest, loyalty, and conversion.Large marketing teams have a few marked advantages over smaller teams. Arguably the most beneficial is specialization. Each member of that team can focus on mastering a single area of expertise.As such, individual members outperform their small-team counterparts every time. Members can sift through data and trends to boost their company's conversion by 0.1%. That's a paltry amount for small businesses. For enterprise-level businesses, on the other hand, 0.1% may account for millions of dollars.Enterprise search engine optimization (SEO) works at both a high-level and granular approach. The goal is to carefully parse data, trends, and metrics. That information gives marketing teams data to improve search engine visibility and page rank.

What Success Looks Like

Whether your company is large or small, your marketing team will have to develop these:

• Address link building
• Create compelling content
• Perform keyword research
• Follow social media trends
• Integrate marketing channels

But big differences separate traditional SEO from enterprise-level SEO. Arguably the largest is what success looks like.Success for a small business is simple: either an increase in traffic or conversions. An enterprise, on the other hand, may consider a shift in brand queries a success. The introduction of a new marketing channel with no drop in sales may also be a success.Large businesses may consider still other metrics, like offline promotional activity participation. They look at an increase in newsworthy products and events as a success. Their success often hinges on avenues only indirectly connected to the bottom line.Enterprise-level marketers approach each problem with the high-level and the granular in mind. They realize the intricacy of an enterprise. Complex systems contain more moving parts and are thereby more susceptible to hazards.

Communicating with Executives

Executives for Fortune 1000 companies operate differently. The eat, sleep, and breath high-level thinking. They're masters at directing disparate parts of their organization to produce wanted outcomes.They may not understand or even care about low-level details. That means traffic and keyword ranking for a particular page may not matter. The only reason those details would land in the limelight is if they had a negative, visible impact on the whole, enterprise-level organism.If you focus on SEO at this level, you'll have to consider the big picture. Does your current SEO strategy translate to an impactful addition to the business? In what way?Imagine you had to explain to your company's chief marketing officer why your local SEO strategies were working. How would you explain it?Always consider the problem first from their perspective. What would they consider a success? A failure? What key details would they need to arrive at this conclusion on their own?Build your explanation on those pillars, and you can't go wrong. You can fill in the low-level details only if they ask for them.

Different Set of Tools

If a small business is similar to an eighteen wheeler, an enterprise is an international cargo company. You can find the tools you need to maintain an eighteen wheeler in a small garage. An international cargo company, on the other hand, needs a more expansive toolbox.As such, enterprise-level SEO tools have different uses than ordinary SEO tools. Enterprise tools should focus on innovation. They should help you build creative ideas for future campaigns.Unusual keywords that you didn't account for during your initial campaign strategy are a great example. After your campaign's initial stages, you may need to repackage your content. Audiences often lose interest after content has been out for a while simply because the packaging is no longer novel.Similarly, some content just needs a new channel. Themes can be reused and rebranded for different audiences. Enterprise-level tools must help you build innovation to make this happen.Automation is also essential. You need to aggregate big data into readable reports that can be produced quickly. You may have to create said reports weekly, monthly, or quarterly.Software that automatically does it for you may save hundreds of man-hours.Most importantly, your software must provide integration. Large companies mean thousands of moving parts. Teams must have the ability to align strategies and verticals with their counterparts.Campaigns are successful when aligned with team goals rather than personal ones. The software should give employees at every level a clear picture of the company's goals. It should bolster communication rather than hinder it.

What's Next?

Well, do you have a clearer picture of this level of SEO and what it can do for you? For huge companies, hiring staff dedicated to this station is paramount. Without it, you're missing a critical link in your marketing department.Someone's got to understand all the SEO minutiae and relate it to executives in a way they understand. Well, that position has a name, and it is enterprise SEO.If you found this article helpful, take five minutes to browse through the rest of our other great articles. So long and good luck!