Enterprise SEO Content Creation: Everything You Need to Know

Enterprise SEO is a massive undertaking. From planning hundreds of keywords and organizing your content calendar to actually creating the content, it can seem like an endless task. We get it, we’ve been there too. Starting a new enterprise SEO content creation campaign is a difficult situation to be in.

But with the right tools, enough time, and a solid marketing team, this can be one of the most effective things you can do for your largescale business. An effective campaign can generate new leads, bring in customers, and boost your brand visibility. And, being a large business, you’re already in a great position to get started.

Over recent years, SERP rankings have become increasingly difficult to break into. As a large business, you have a huge advantage as your site is already an authority in your field. Now, all you need to do is scale up your content production. But how do you do that? Today, we’re covering how to plan enterprise SEO with topics like:

• How To Plan Enterprise SEO Content Creation
• What Are the Best Tools for Enterprise SEO Content Creation?
• Strategies for Enterprise SEO Content Creation

How To Plan Enterprise SEO Content Creation

Fail to plan, plan to fail. Especially with an operation as big as enterprise SEO, you need to plan ahead of time to get the most out of your campaign. Without a clear content production calendar, you’ll be all over the place.

The first step of any effective campaign is to research. From there, you’ll have a clearer picture of who you’re producing content for and what they want to see. There are six key steps to planning enterprise SEO content creation:

1. Know Your Customer

Get to know your target market. Dig into customer demographics to understand who’s interacting with your company. For example, ask questions that can help you get to know your customer market, such as:

• Who are you writing for?
• What is the audience searching for?
• What’s the audience’s search intent?

2. Understand Your Competitors

Find out what businesses or agencies are your primary competitors. Look for metrics that can tell you about competitor content, like search rankings and organic traffic. You should also look for the target keywords and phrases that your biggest competition is ranking for. Another key detail you should be looking at is how much content your competitors are producing and what types. This information is essential to plan an enterprise SEO plan that supports your company’s success.

3. Perform Keyword Research

Bouncing off your competitors, focus on creating a database of effective keywords for your business. Use keyword research tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to research and collect keywords for your enterprise SEO plan. Several questions you can ask to help with this step include:

• What will help you to reach the top of the rankings for your company’s niche?
• What keywords are your competitors ranking for?
• What keywords does your target audience search for?

4. Create Content Briefs

Using your keywords, create short content briefs that detail the best keywords for a topic. These briefs go to your writing team and provide guides for them to form content directions and choose content types. Your content briefs can also help when working with freelance writers so creative teams have a solid understanding of your brand’s voice, tone, and style. When creating an enterprise SEO plan, it’s important to have content plans for the creatives you plan to assign.

5.  Start Writing

This one’s a big phase. Get writing with your team of content creators and produce in-depth, high-quality articles that align to your enterprise SEO plans. It’s also important to do blog research on a continuous basis so you always have a fresh bank of topics and keywords to focus on in your content.

6. Update and Optimize

Once you publish content, it doesn’t mean it’s the end of your enterprise SEO plan. Be sure to pencil in a three or six-month update period where you can edit older articles and add new content. While updating older content, optimize it for SEO and search intent and ensure included links are working.

With these steps, you’ll have a great idea of what content you should produce. From there, you just need to get started. Remember, quality really is king. Every piece of content you create for your campaign should be well-researched, insightful, and helpful to your audience. There’s never truly an endpoint to enterprise SEO. Typically, you start a new campaign, carrying on from where you left off. But, starting with a proper plan will let you know where you’re going. While it might take a while to get there, having it all mapped out is vital for success.

Read more: SEO Strategy: How to Make One and How It’s Used

What Are the Best Tools for Enterprise SEO Content Creation?

With enterprise SEO content creation, you’ll need all the time you can get. And automating whatever you can is a fantastic way of doing more in less time. Whether it’s the keyword generation process or finding broken links, automation saves hours. Turning to effective tools can help you along the way. Take a look at some of the best tools to use for planning your enterprise SEO content plan:

• Surfer SEO: Audit your site, add editors, and ensure every content page you produce hits the right keywords.
• Semrush: The best of the best when it comes to competitor research and SEO reporting.
• Screaming Frog: Audit your site to look for dead content, bad formatting, or orphan pages.
• Hemingway: Editing tool that lets you streamline your writing for clarity and readability.
• Ahrefs: One of the big dogs in SEO, covers all SEO research elements you’d need.
• Answer The Public: Generate content ideas through audience-sourced search terms.
• Searchmetrics: Plan content with high-impact SEO briefs on any keyword you’d like.

Every company uses different enterprise SEO tools, but these are more than enough to get started. Most tools also have a free trial available so you can test them all out to find the most suitable tools for your business needs. At CopyPress, we provide a free content analysis tool that shows you the gaps your content isn’t covering. Using these insights, you can create an enterprise SEO strategy that helps your business achieve its content marketing goals.

Strategies for Enterprise SEO Content Creation

Beyond planning out content and cross-referencing your keywords, there comes a time when you need to get writing. Enterprise SEO content creation is a long process, but one that’s incredibly powerful if done correctly. As a huge operation, it’s easy to get off track if this is your first time. While producing content, here are some of our best strategies to keep you on the right path:

Improve Website Speed

Image via ThinkWithGoogle

We live in a world where you can order something online and get it delivered to your house the very same day. A world where all the information you could ever need is only a click away. Simply put, we’re not waiting around for a webpage to load. Instant gratification and our low attention span have made us impatient.

The search engine champion themselves have even conducted research into this, publishing a Google study that showed the impact of page loading times on bounce rate. As page load time goes up, the bounce rate radically increases. No matter what the page is, very, very few people are going to wait more than a few seconds.

If your page takes between one and three seconds to load, your bounce rate can increase by 32%. This only gets worse with more time, with one to five seconds pushing the bounce rate up by 90%. People don’t want to wait for information. If your page isn’t loading instantly, someone else’s will.

While this is important for every single business, it’s especially impactful for those engaging in enterprise SEO. With the scale that these operations need, you’re going to be producing hundreds of pages of content. If you’re not optimizing for technical SEO, then you’re in trouble. Taking the time to improve your page load speed is incredibly important for success here. Here are several things to look at when assessing your page speed:

• Have a host that can take the strain off all your viewers at once without slowing down.
• Optimize all of your images and compress them before uploading.
• Ensure browser caching is enabled.
• Make images an appropriate size.

While these are only a few simple solutions to get you started, they can make a big difference. Most people focus on the on-page part of enterprise SEO. Yes, content production and optimization are important. But, so is technical SEO. Don’t overlook this area, or page speed might be your downfall.

Follow E-A-T

Over the past few years, Google has steadily been doubling down on E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) content. Especially for any industries that fall under the YAML (Your Money; Your Life) umbrella, this metric is more important than ever before. That’s anyone creating content for financial services, healthcare, legal advice, or anything in that vein.

With a large audience, the trustworthiness box is pretty much already ticked for you. Expertise and authoritativeness aren’t. We’ve all heard the idea that we should be making high-quality content. That’s definitely true – but what does that actually mean, and who’s the judge? Well, Google’s the judge, and E-A-T is the criteria.

Throughout all of your enterprise SEO content creation, you should aim to keep E-A-T at its core. While E-A-T isn’t a metric that you can easily track, like backlinks or page view time, it’s still important. As a larger company, you’re already in a great position to succeed in terms of E-A-T. You have an audience, you have readers, and you have the capital to invest. You’ve got all the pieces of the puzzle to make great content. Now we just need to put them together. Let’s break down E-A-T for enterprise SEO:

Expertise

This metric is directly tied to the author of the piece. If you’re in a position to do so, invite some industry experts to post on your site. Giving them a series of articles about something related to their field is a great way of bringing further expertise to your site. Equally, having a range of different voices on your blog is fantastic here. While you might be focusing on creating lots of content under your company’s name, leave some room for guest posts.

Authoritativeness

This relates to both the content you produce and the domain you’re producing it on. As a larger brand, you probably have a range of backlinks and brand mentions around the internet. You’ll have most of this covered. The only piece you’re missing is quantity, which is where enterprise SEO comes in. If you create 10s or even 100s of posts about every single angle on a topic, you’re definitely going to be an authority on it. Think about the difference between a site with one post on SEO and one that has an entire knowledge base about it. The latter will always seem more authoritative, bringing in more views and boosting up the SERP rankings.

Trustworthiness

Especially for YAML industries, Google isn’t going to recommend just any old website. They’ll stick to ones that have been around for a while and consistently produce great content. That’s where you come in! Enterprise SEO and creating content at scale will help enormously here. Trustworthiness is all about your ability to produce reliable content. We’ll discuss this shortly, but getting rid of thin content is vital here. Long, in-depth posts are key.

Across all of your enterprise SEO efforts, your content should get three green checks for E-A-T. While not directly a ranking factor, it influences what ranks and what doesn’t. If you think that seems a little backward, you can take it up with Google.

Related: Planning a Blog Strategy for Content Marketing

Use Enterprise SEO Tools

When it comes to enterprise SEO, one of the main challenges you’ll face is the scale of content. While typical SEO can typically be handed by one person or a small team, the same isn’t true for bigger operations. With enterprise SEO, you’re producing at a high scale, often creating 30+ pieces of content in a single month.

With the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to research and then gets content ready, you should look for help where you can. Many of the best SEO teams around the world rely on a litany of tools. The tools we’ve outlined in this article are a fantastic place to start. Instead of spending a few hours doing research, you can use one of the tools to generate a report in seconds.

If you want advice on scaling your operations without straining your team, be sure to check out our ebook on the pitfalls of scaling enterprise content. Knowing how to reduce your own workload by turning to automatic tools is vital. Whether you’re generating a bank of keywords or searching through your own site for thin pages, try to automate the process. The more tasks you automate, the more time you’ll have to focus on writing or other tasks that cannot be done by a robot. Tools let you get more done in less time, helping to drive your enterprise SEO efforts into overdrive.

Focus on the Entire Marketing Funnel

As every content marketer knows, not all content is created equally. While some content is for generating leads, other is for closing sales. Depending on where a customer is in your marketing funnel, they’ll likely come across different content. While the vast majority of enterprise SEO content will be TOFU (top-of-the-funnel), that doesn’t mean all your content has to be in this section.

Top-of-the-funnel marketing is all about capturing as many clicks as possible. With this goal, you’ve got to throw the net as wide as possible. You’ll likely be producing content that covers your center keywords, longtails, and more. An approach that heavily focuses on TOFU is great for finding new leads.

But, without any other MOFU (middle-of-the-funnel) or BOFU (bottom-of-the-funnel) content marketing, you’ll struggle to push them further with your business. Especially considering in large enterprises, those in charge typically want results, you need to make sure you have the infrastructure in place to support this. Quite simply, you can’t go all in on TOFU.

Creating a complete marketing funnel is vital for success. Even if you produce 60% TOFU, 30% MOFU, and 10% BOFU, you’ll still have a path in place for customers to follow. Not only does this help you get sales, but it will ensure your large-scale TOFU content production isn’t all for nothing. Remember, there is more to content than just top-of-the-funnel marketing. When producing at scale, try and hit all the marketing areas.

Read more: Top-of-the-Funnel Marketing: How Does It Work?

Use Multiple Social Channels

Much like how you want to target all areas of the marketing funnel, you also want to go further than your home blog. You’re right in thinking that almost all content will go onto your blog. But, content production doesn’t stop there. At an enterprise level, there are a lot of different streams that a customer can find you on. You’ll likely already have a presence on multiple social media pages, to say the least. With this in mind, always try and recycle content for many social streams.

If you’ve just produced a piece of content for the blog, write a short summary and post it on Twitter. A captive sentence or two with a link to the blog could push some users from Twitter to your blog, improving visibility. As an enterprise-level business, you should make the most of the audience you already have. Repurposing content and publishing it across different social platforms will allow you to reach a bigger audience, while also pushing content production even further. It’s a total win-win.

Improve Old Content and Pages

Ever since 2010, with Google’s May Day update, Google has focused on delivering its users the best possible content. Their attack on thin content carried on for years, with Google Panda and the Google Product Reviews update both doubling down on this. Pages that discuss a keyword but only have a small amount of content on each page after now pushed down the rankings by Google. Due to this, pages with only a few 100 words will typically never rank well. This is actually the reason that 2000-word articles are typically all over the top 10 results for any Google search.

Considering content is forever, there are probably a few pages on your website that fall into this thin category. No matter how high your domain ranking is or how many backlinks you have, these thin pages aren’t doing you any favors. Instead of leaving them there, you should always make an effort to update them.

Use tools like DeepCrawl to crawl through your business and map all of your pages. On the content section, you can see any pages with thin content. This is a wonderful place to begin, as you can get a list of pages instantly that you can start updating. Most of the time, these pages won’t be ranking well at all. But, after a few edits and updates, you’ll be able to refresh the content and push it further up the rankings. This strategy also fulfills the need to update content every few months, showing Google that you’re on the ball.

With enterprise SEO, we always want to be thinking about high returns on our actions. To get the best return from updates, we should focus on pages that are close to ranking well, but not quite there. For instance, ranking below page 10 on Google would need a major overhaul to improve. Pages that are only on the second or third page of Google have the potential to rank well. Using a tool like Ahrefs, you can review all of your thin pages and focus on improving them in order. Start with content that has decent rankings then move through the lowest-ranking pages.

CopyPress Knows Enterprise SEO Content Creation

Enterprise SEO is all about doing things at scale. A larger scope of keywords, more content produced each month, and a continual stream of updates. While many see it as just a bigger SEO operation, don’t be fooled. Enterprise SEO really does take a village, with content creation at this scale being vastly more difficult to manage.

At CopyPress, we help businesses and agencies plan, produce, and promote enterprise content at scale. With our team of creatives, you can develop an enterprise SEO plan that improves rankings, boosts traffic, and helps you achieve business goals. Schedule a call with our strategy team and find out how you can create an enterprise SEO plan that gets the results you want.

Lauren Oliver

Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress

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