Enterprise SEO: How Does It Differ From Traditional SEO?

Ed Pronley

July 18, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

person using a tablet to look at a graph of enterprise SEO data

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for any size business. But as your business continues to grow, you’ll need to be able to adapt your SEO approaches. An enterprise SEO strategy is one approach that can help your corporation or Fortune 500 company thrive. In this article, we discuss:

What Is Enterprise SEO?
Why Is Enterprise SEO Important?
Difference Between Enterprise SEO and Traditional SEO
Tips for Improving Your Enterprise SEO Strategy

What Is Enterprise SEO?

Image via Pexels by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi

Enterprise SEO is multifaceted, but overall, it’s the approach enterprises and corporations use to manage websites, maintain relevant content, and rank in search engines. In most cases, you can classify enterprise SEO as a content strategy for companies with high revenue generation, like multi-million and billion-dollar corporations. You can also categorize it as a way to optimize website content across hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pages—like Amazon or eBay. Enterprise search optimization supports both of these scenarios, making it a valuable marketing tool.

Read more: A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Why Is Enterprise SEO Important?

Enterprise SEO is critical to managing websites with numerous pages and unique URLs. It’s also an important approach for large companies to reach target audiences. As your company grows, generates more revenue, and engages and converts new customers, adapting SEO strategies to your enterprise’s activities is crucial for staying relevant. Enterprise optimization also ensures content complies with legal standards and business terms, fits the brand image, and meets the expectations of teams and departments.

Difference Between Enterprise SEO and Traditional SEO

Whether you’re a small to mid-sized business or an enterprise business, it’s important to use traditional SEO practices to help you boost your content marketing campaign. That often includes strategies like:

Building backlinks
Targeting keywords
Improving readability
Adding metadata

Though enterprise SEO uses similar strategies, it differs when focusing on the big picture. Those differences include:

Scalability

Enterprise businesses need the ability to scale their content production and SEO strategies at a moment’s notice. And, unlike small businesses, they generally have the ability and resources to do so. The reason enterprises need to scale so quickly is because of how much more area they have to cover. Because they’re such a large business, they often have more web pages and websites to manage. That requires more people to help them develop a stronger online presence and compete with other enterprise companies.

At CopyPress, we understand the importance of scalability. In fact, our specialty is helping clients scale their content production to match their marketing goals. But scaling your content creation is tricky. If you do it incorrectly, it can cause a whole mess of other problems for your business. Luckily, we’ve written down some of the most common challenges scaling creates, and how to avoid them. Download our free eBook on the pitfalls of scaling enterprise content.

Brand Reputation

Traditional SEO is important to help build brand awareness and develop an online reputation. That’s why it’s so crucial for businesses to use SEO and boost their search engine rankings. However, enterprise businesses already have a strong brand awareness because they’re such large corporations and have been around for a while. This longevity often requires enterprises to focus their SEO efforts on keeping up their brand reputation versus building it. That means conducting damage control on any bad PR and attempting to lessen unfavorable search results.

One way to do that is by targeting similar keywords and addressing news stories that might have a negative effect on their reputation. The articles that the company writes can then replace the actual stories on the SERP, potentially negating any bad press. This isn’t something that small businesses generally need to worry about until they grow.

Keywords

Both small businesses and enterprise companies need to target keywords to have an effective SEO strategy. However, small businesses often need to focus on long-tail keywords to stay competitive while larger businesses can target any size keyword because they have the resources to do so.

Long-tail keywords are exactly like they sound. They’re longer keywords that don’t have as much competition on search engines. For example, the keyword “content marketing” has a lot of competition versus the long-tail phrase “how to develop a content marketing strategy”.

Smaller businesses would have an easier time creating content and ranking it by targeting the latter keyword. Enterprise companies, however, could choose to target the smaller keyword because their website and content generally have more authority, ultimately increasing their ranking organically.

Local Search

Depending on where they’re located, small and medium-sized companies might need to focus their efforts on local areas of business. That includes targeting keywords specific to their area of business and the audience that lives in that area. Enterprise businesses might have multiple locations around the country or world where they operate, requiring a larger content creation team to build an SEO strategy. That’s because content production for an American audience will be different from content for, say, an Australian audience.

Read more: All About SEO Writing

Tips for Improving your Enterprise SEO Strategy

Here are some tips to help you improve your enterprise SEO strategy:

1. Understand Your Target Audiences

It’s likely that an enterprise business might have multiple target audiences that they need to analyze and understand. That’s because enterprises often have a lot of products or services they’re selling. Not to mention the multiple locations or websites they might be using to sell them. That might create audiences with different demographics or with different needs. In order to perform quality SEO, it’s good to know how those audiences differ and what they want from the content they read.

Maybe one part of the company sells software as a service (SaaS). Its audience might prefer content that focuses on software tutorials to help them. Another part of the enterprise company might sell advertising services. Its audience might prefer content that answers advertising questions or challenges. The change in the type of content each part of the business creates will drastically affect their SEO strategy, including what keywords they target and what external or internal links they provide.

2. Create a Style Guide

A style guide is a great tool because it ensures that all of your content has a consistent tone and voice. This helps a large enterprise to create matching content across their websites and locations. It also allows them to work with a larger team of writers and content creators. These writers can work with the brand and the style guide to create content audiences can instantly recognize.

At CopyPress, we work with our clients to develop a style guide that fits their brand voice. This style guide allows our team of over 2,500 writers, editors, and quality assurance specialists to create content for them at scale. No matter the industry or niche, our team of creatives can deliver compelling, quality content every time. Schedule a free strategy call with us today to start boosting your content marketing strategy.

3. Develop Pillar Content

Pillar content is long-form content that creates a foundation for future content the brand creates. For example, let’s say your company creates an eBook to share with your audience. Your company could then use highlights from that eBook to develop even more content, like infographics, short blog posts, and social media posts. Each of these pieces of content could link back to the pillar page.

This helps to develop a great system for internal linking. That helps people navigate your site and allows you to easily direct them to the right landing pages. With enterprise businesses, it might even help with external linking if you have multiple sites that you manage. You can link each site or piece of content to another and build a backlink portfolio.

4. Refresh Older Content

Enterprise businesses often have thousands of web pages. Each of these pages contains content that requires frequent updates to get a post to reach the top of the SERPs. By the time a post gets to the top of search results, it might not have the best information for your readers. That’s why it’s so crucial for businesses to update older content. Updates ensure materials are still accurate and valuable to target audiences.

When refreshing older content, start with your top-ranking posts. Determine which ones could use some updated information. Some questions to consider: did you use facts or statistics from studies that are now outdated? Are you linking to any pages that no longer exist? Does your content still help your audience? Can readers still relate to what you’re delivering? From questions like these, you can find the best way to improve your content so readers keep coming back to the site.

5. Build Quality Links

One of the best ways to improve your website’s SEO is to build quality backlinks from authoritative websites. Because most enterprises already have considerable brand awareness within target markets, this process creates new advantages and challenges. For instance, more industry authority makes it easier to reach out to other companies for backlink requests. Requesting backlinks works best when you find an article or piece of content that aligns to your brand. You can request for that other business to link to your company’s content, building a repository of backlinks.

One of the challenges of backlinking for enterprises is the fact that a lot of websites already link to you. Linking to an authoritative site helps to build their own SEO, but if their site isn’t very trustworthy, it might bring your own SEO down. Though Google does a good job of distinguishing between these links, it’s still a good practice to distinguish yourself from unreliable and low-authority sites you don’t want your business to be associated with.

6. Understand The Bigger Picture

It’s important to understand how your enterprise SEO fits into your overall marketing strategy. SEO is great for generating traffic and improving your search engine ranking, but that’s a single just step in a larger process. Establishing a conversion plan, on-brand CTAs, and lead conversion strategies are all aspects of the bigger enterprise SEO picture.

SEO for enterprises is important, but it’s nothing without the other half of your marketing strategy. That’s where compelling, quality content comes into place. You want to target your audience, give them value, and give them a reason to stay on your site. At CopyPress, we know how to develop content that targets and converts your audience into quality leads for your business. Take a look at our content writing services and see how we can develop new content for your business that improves your marketing campaign.