As one of the main pillars of digital marketing, SEO is considered a top priority for any website.
But when optimizing a large corporate website versus a typical small business, these usually simple concepts can quickly become a challenge.
Essentially, the goal remains the same — driving organic traffic and ranking highly for optimized content — but implementing these guidelines on a website with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pages requires a different approach.
In order to improve your corporate website ranking and online presence, you need to understand what these different strategies require.
What is Enterprise SEO?
While corporate search engine optimization may vary by industry, in general terms it is the practice of optimizing giant websites at much higher rates than your typical business.
You can use the same strategies to do keyword research, fix technical issues, and create optimized content, but you’re dealing with a completely different beast when it comes to these established companies.
Not only do your typical SEO problems increase tenfold (think optimizing 10,000 pages instead of 100), you also have to understand all the internal politics and stakeholders that arise in large enterprises.
Any minor metadata changes or broken internal links that you want to fix? All of them must go through several directors and departments before you receive approval for this.
In order to do anything at all on a corporate website, one has to overcome various obstacles, constantly proving one’s worth and value.
Critical SEO Strategies
While the scale of corporate websites is much larger than what the average optimizer can handle, there are some benefits that you can take advantage of right away:
Brand authority . Many businesses have a high level of brand authority and awareness, which automatically increases search rankings.
By leveraging the authority that a brand already has, you can rank more easily for highly competitive keywords that may be out of reach of your smaller customers.
Valuable content
Another advantage is that most corporate websites already contain a lot of high quality content and in turn a lot of valuable backlinks.
The more pages you keep adding, the more traffic you can drive to your website.
Keep in mind that there are no secret strategies for optimizing large websites.
It’s still the same tried and true tactic you already know, only on a much larger scale.
Below are the top five optimization strategies that you should implement for corporate websites.
Site Structure
One of the biggest areas of corporate SEO should be the structure of your website. If you want Google to rank all over 10,000 pages, it should be easy to find, crawl, and index them.
You want to build a well thought out site architecture where all of your pages and content are easily accessible to users and easy to find within your crawl budget.
Your page hierarchy needs to be crystal clear to search engines, and reinforcing your internal link building strategy is a must.
However, this can be a problem for SEOs working with hundreds of pages, let alone thousands.
But if you take the time to really study the website and make sure every piece of content is in its rightful place, you ensure that Google can find every page when it is called up by the intended search term.
Research Keywords and Topics
Keyword research is without a doubt one of the most important tasks when it comes to SEO in any business.
In order to drive organic traffic to your site, you first need to determine what information your audience wants.
You will then need to research the phrases they are looking for in order to get that information and create that content with those keywords in mind.
Once you’ve identified the most relevant topics and terms, you’ll want to refine this list to highlight the biggest opportunities.
This includes browsing the SERPs around that term, analyzing the purpose of each keyword, and exploring options that can provide even better results.
The last step is to organize and prioritize this list of keywords. What are your main terms, and which of the topics and keywords you have researched are the most important elements to focus on?
Competitor Research
Another important strategy required for corporate SEO is to track the actions of your competitors.
While you may have a slight edge due to the sheer size of your business, it’s impossible to increase search visibility without understanding what is also driving traffic to your competitors.
When conducting a competitive analysis, you want to first determine who you are competing against in the SERPs.
You will then need to determine what keywords they rank for and how you can use those phrases to create new opportunities for yourself.
You can also use your competitive research to benefit from the keyword and topic research phase.
By seeing what your competitors are doing, you can better understand how customers are looking for information related to your product or service.
Analyzing your competitors can also help you identify linking opportunities that you might otherwise miss, thereby further boosting your site’s authority.
Write SEO Content
SEO content is the bread and butter of any successful SEO campaign.
As an SEO, most of your work is focused on content in one way or another, whether it’s strategy mapping or writing it yourself.
This is the biggest piece of the rankings pie and is just as important for corporate websites as it is for any other.
However, writing SEO content involves more than just placing words on a page. You need to create content to prioritize user experience and needs.
Each part should target all relevant keywords, contain compelling and relevant images or videos, and include a strategic relationship between additional relevant pages.
Technical SEO
Websites are constantly evolving, but as a result, things can change and break that prevent search engine crawlers from accessing them, hindering all other SEO efforts.
And – when it comes to corporate business – the bigger the site, the more likely you are to run into these issues.
This is why technical SEO strategies are essential along with your content and keyword research.
When working on the technical side, you want to conduct regular site audits, check and optimize site speed, implement microdata, manage redirects, and more.
To ensure that your corporate website does not fall apart, you need to conduct regular health checks and fix as many errors as possible.
You can use tools like SEMRush and Screaming Frog to get a comprehensive list of all the technical errors your site might have.
It should be noted that the process of solving these technical problems often requires working with development teams, which can be another hurdle for corporate SEO.
It is very important to keep in constant contact with the site developer from the very beginning so that you can communicate these changes quickly and efficiently.
Work with LSEO today
When it comes to corporate websites, you will need to take your standard SEO practices and beef them up to suit a lot more pages.
At LSEO, our team of experienced strategists will help you take your corporate business to the next level! Contact us today to schedule a consultation and improve the visibility of your business.
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