SEO is broad and there is no doubt in that fact that all businesses regardless of their industries need to have a solid SEO plan to stay relevant in the business. If we categorize the SEO into broad categories, it falls under two categories which are traditional SEO and enterprise SEO. Many people think enterprise SEO is just a scaled-up version of traditional SEO but it’s not. In this article, we will have a look at what exactly is enterprise SEO and how it’s different from the normal practices.
What is considered Enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO projects are not just bigger in size than the traditional project. But they have a lot more elements than the normal one. The SEO teams handling these enterprise projects have much more responsibilities in terms of process, tactics, management, and problem-solving skills are a few to name. Executing SEO strategies with enterprise-level sites and businesses means a drastic shift in tactics, processes, and overall mentality.
Enterprise websites are not just about having thousands of pages or a lot of URLs to handle. It’s about the requirement of having distinct expertise, the ability to check and fix issues coming on the way and manage issues that can affect the large userbase. SEO architecture needs to create a complete information architecture for the website before working on it. In enterprise SEO, the team needs to keep an eye on massive revenue, stakeholders, complex processes, and sudden coming obstacles that need the experience to handle.
For example, companies that have massive user base, traffic, product line, and processes are considered under enterprise SEO. Websites like Apple, Amazon, WeWork, or Uber are considered under enterprise SEO.
Talking about WeWork, it’s smaller than Apple or Amazon but considering the fact that the revenue is around $1 billion, it can be considered under this category. In short and simple terms— sites with massive revenue, userbase, challenges, and stakeholders are considered under this category.
How Enterprise SEO is different from the traditional SEO
Affordable SEO services work the best for personal or corporate websites that are comparatively smaller in the above-mentioned terms. When it comes to enterprise SEO, here are some unique things that are only found in this category:
Multiple team collaborations
One of the difficulties that enterprise SEOs tackle that doesn’t exist while dealing with smaller companies. It is establishing seamless coordination and collaboration with other teams to get the maximum out of the efforts. Enterprise SEO needs to assure that all the teams are on the same page. And they are coordinating well so that nothing is disturbed in the process.
When it comes to small projects, only a couple of people will be dealing with everything. It can be the content, marketing, keyword target, and more. But, when it comes to enterprise SEO, there may be multiple large teams that need to be agreed on common execution strategies. It brings out the best results.
Getting new paid additions and setting priorities
When a small company gets affordable SEO services, everything is streamlined. And when there is something that needs to be bought, it’s only a meeting away. But in enterprise SEO, each team has its own agenda, add-ons, and buy-in preferences.
You are not the only individual who need of a developer’s schedule to check page functionality and the new code. Also, you are also not the single person who is dealing with the new content strategies, or approvals. Priorities can go in multi directions and keeping up with the agenda on common terms is not an easy thing.
Enterprise sites have indexability and crawlability issues
Yes, there are crawlability and indexability issues on small websites also. But when it comes to a big site that has tens of thousands of pages, then management is a challenge. The real deal is that the big websites can be hard for search engines to crawl and index in events where the crawl budget is not optimized or not just present.
Even if these two issues are fixed after a ton of hard work, the challenge of duplicate content, URL optimization, keyword cannibalization, and more are there to face and fix. And, when business owners decide to add more product line up or new functionalities, it could be a hard and massive challenge for the SEO teams
Legacy issues can hit hard
When we are talking about big websites that have tens of thousands of pages, legacy system migration can become a problem. Over a period of time, the site must have gone through multiple migrations. And it can easily affect the linking structure of the site.
Enterprise websites must have had multiple teams working on modules and migrations of the site. The SEO team often needs to take time to understand the migration. And also make a custom strategy based on that context. It happens quite a few times that fixing a problem gives birth to a new problem. To fix these, the SEO teams need to work on their toes. Because millions of people are interacting with the site every day.
Multiple version and languages
Being a large website, it caters to a huge audience base like:
- Located in different countries,
- Speak different languages
- Have different content alignment.
But from the backend, it’s actually pretty much the same website. And the SEO team needs to cater to challenges based on these things differently.
The main website often has subdomains and these subdomains also have traffic in thousands of visitors every hour. Dealing with such on-the-spot real-time issues is quite complex. With custom SEO packages, the SEO guys can fix issues in a couple of hours. But these sites take more time and effort.
These were some major differences between traditional SEO and enterprise SEO. Apart from scale, there are many things that are quite unique in these sites. And they are definitely a challenge to handle. We hope this post on Traditional vs enterprise SEO get things clear about what are the key challenges that the big site SEO team faces.
