Things to Learn When Enterprise Company Engages with SEO Company

The main goal of any website is to rank high on a search engine page.

13:48 03 January 2019

Google, till now, is still the strongest and most used search engine. Ranking on Google’s first page is not something that comes easily or quickly whether you own a small business or a large enterprise. When people are searching for something online, be it information, a video, a product, or a service they express their need through typed words and these words are keywords that with good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices their search can lead them to you. In the Local Search Industry of last year, SEO was in second place of twenty-one standings, after word of mouth, as the most effective channel to attract new customers. SEO beats the internet’s most popular sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It also beats out traditional means such as public relations.

A result like this shows that enterprise companies, regardless of its strength, we need to take SEO seriously and learn more about enterprise SEO.

What is an enterprise?

Well, we know that enterprises are large businesses. A large enterprise is any company that employs two hundred and fifty people and over. This is in the physical world, but in the virtual world an enterprise is based on the pages of its website, not the number of employees. It’s one thing handling pages of a small business, and a whole other story handling hundreds and thousands of pages online. So a website that sells around a thousand products can be considered an enterprise site. Some cell phone sites, for example, are indexed by Google to have 41.7k pages. Each page might be a specific product page for each device it carries. So that’s a whole lot of pages that cannot be handled by one person. So large enterprise businesses hire SEO firms to work specifically in the area of SEO to increase audience reach and manage the many factors that go into running a successful site. If your site is smaller, there’s nothing to prevent you from using enterprise SEO, but you might not need it or you might not have the costs for it.

What is enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO just might sound like fancy wording for regular SEO, but it does go further than keywords, good content, links, integrated SEO tools, and integrating marketing campaigns into various platforms of social media. Because of the immense amount of pages that enterprise companies have to manage, there has to be more and better practices of SEO. Plus, keeping in mind that enterprises are not a one-man show and usually have different shareholders involved, and/or partnerships and this is often accompanied with stricter rules or guidelines to follow makes enterprise SEO a more complex matter.

Here we'll discuss more things to keep in mind when a SEO company is hired to work with an enterprise company.

Who's in charge?

With several departments involved in enterprises and lots of red tape, it's important to have one person calling the shots. Things will slow down if you constantly have department managers butting heads. Whatever suggestions are given by the SEO company or decisions made must work for each department.

Great content

There's a lot to be said about content. If a SEO company has been handling an enterprise for a long time, they might run out of ideas, but content is one area that is always open to new and intriguing ways to invite in more customers, and increase traffic.

We often think of content as the only text. But there are all types of content which includes lists, FAQs, images and video among other forms. Video content is a big booster not just for traffic but also for sales. Consumers are more likely to purchase after watching a video content than those who haven't. Because it's a major booster, videos needs to be professionally shot and the videos should be segmented to different demographics and geographical locations.

There is also long and short form content and various factors go into deciding which works best. There have been studies that show that long form content performs better with Search Engine Results Page (SERP) which is a list of returned results by the search engine in response to a specific word or phrase typed in. But if you use a short form, high quality content that addresses the needs of the customer or potential customer, it can fare just as well with SERP. It is the job of SEO companies to work on these factors, try them and see what works best with which audiences.

In summary, content should be:

• Interesting and capture people's interests
• Informative and useful
• Responsive to people's questions
• Providing good users' experience
• Distributed to social media platforms

Where does SEO belong?

This can be an ongoing battle among departments. Some enterprises might think SEO belongs to the IT department, other might see it as belonging to the marketing department. The SEO must work across the board that all departments benefit.

Internal and External Links

The most basic SEO depends on links for improving organic performance. A good SEO company will take advantage of internal links that relate content of one page to another page on the enterprise site. Links give more structure, making it easier for search engines to find important pages of value. External links are also important in that they give you high authority on your site from related sites.

Focus on visitors

It's easy to get too caught up in keywords and site crawlers. Also called web crawlers or web spiders, these are programs that search engines use to search keywords before indexing them and providing up-to-date data. When doing so, companies forget to focus on the actual people visiting a site. When keywords and other technical factors become the main focal point, it actually makes navigation on your pages more difficult for visitors. The site needs to be easy to navigate, with guidance provided for visitors, or helpful messages. The focus on the visitor is on equal footing as SEO strategies.

Scaling

This is actually a decisive factor that differentiates enterprise SEO from regular SEO. Too many people might think that engaging with a SEO company is a one-shot thing. It's not and it's an on-going process. This means that the strategies and tactics being used are scaled constantly to know what is working and what is not. As said before, this might not be a tedious task for a site that has a few pages, but when dealing with the sheer volume of pages of an enterprise, scaling is much more of a challenge. This all needs to be planned from A-Z. And the plan should start a good six months earlier before the implementation.

Scaling has a lot to do with adding new factors while taking away old factors. Because there is such rapid growth in how search engines function, what worked on your site just even six months ago, might no longer be working to increase your rank and traffic. This means out with the old and in with the new. And there might be quite a few things happening on the site that is slowing things down without you even realizing. It's also important to realize that not everything new has to be good, so a SEO company has to be aware of what actually is good for your enterprise and do away with the bad. This is by no means an easy feat since the SEO work is supposed to be good for all departments across the board. Scaling isn't just about SEO, but it takes into consideration the entire management process. A collaborate approach to SEO that includes project management, identifying roles, and workflow are all aspects to be considered. For example, the workflow is not only about amount, it is also about how that work will get done.

It's important to note here that when deciding to work with an SEO company, expectations should be documented clearly. Don't leave any gray areas up for grabs. Doing so will create problems in management and how to go about doing things. Every step that is or will be taken needs to be clarified from the enterprise side and from the SEO side.

Automation

Part of scaling is automation. If some factors are not automated, it will take too much time to check results when this time could be spent on other areas. Certain tasks need automation, such as:

• Monthly rank check
• Monthly visitor and conversation checks
• Bi-weekly technical checks for broken links, malware, page errors, etc.
• Link-building checks using SEO tools to track and analyze
• On-page optimization, which is optimizing each page separately.

This means focusing on page titles, tags, imaging, among several other tasks. This literally can’t be done without using a tool or tools and SEO techniques to help you.

The competence of SEO companies

There are core basics that any SEO has to offer an enterprise. Some of these basics are:

• Targeting the terms and words that have the most impact for your business
• Maintaining the means of how search engines find your site
• Optimizing content to make keywords relevant
• Engaging audiences
• Understanding how digital marketing links and other relevant sites to yours
• Interpreting and analyzing results to make SEO decisions

Yet, besides these basics, as an enterprise company, you will need more, and the SEO strategist needs to know how to scale these basics to large websites. This would include:

• Influencing websites on a large scale with web crawlers. Web crawlers choose the most valuable pages, and the SEO team needs to have the most valuable information shows up in search results.
  
  
• Servicing on an international level. Large businesses will often target multilingual sectors. If the site or page is not optimized, there is a risk that users will not find the relevant pages to their search since the pages are not matching their location. SEO working on a large scale prevent that from happening.
  
  
• Understanding the technical abilities and lack of abilities of your website. Like stated, making manual updates to a large site is not feasible, optimizing separate pages manually is also not feasible, so a SEO company needs to scale the core on-pages information on a template level of work.
  
  
• Ability to create links and monitor thousands of back links that your site might have accumulated over the years if you've been in business for some time.
  
  
• Make sense of results. A SEO company will receive an incredible amount of data that needs to be analyzed in order to know what is working and what is not, and what are the next steps to be taken. The SEO must have strong analytical skills to translate data into meaningful actions.

Overall benefits

There are too many benefits to list when working with a SEO company. As starters, you should know:

• Small changes or shifts can save you millions of dollars.
  
  
• Fifty percent of searches are done through mobile phones. This means a need for a good local outreach. SEO strategies connect brands with the local market, its audience and even how people search.
  
  
• SEO helps to create partnerships and increase your authority, and does so by building up trust and reputation.
  
  
• Enterprises use different marketing strategies and SEO supports the efforts put into these strategies.
  
  
• SEO will give deeper insights into the target audience.
  
  
• You will get more opportunities through SEO management to break into new grounds that have not been covered by your enterprise as of yet.

It’s a myth to think that if you have an enterprise business up and running and doing well, that that is enough. Word of mouth, while still the strongest of channels, might not be strong enough to maintain and improve what you have now. An SEO company can take you to higher grounds, higher ranking, and better strategies that will keep you in the competition, give you a lead or at least not fall behind.