Most enterprise-level organizations require a comprehensive SEO strategy at the beginning of the fiscal year.
The strategy is communicated to the key stakeholders who are interested in SEO for the company.
Once the strategy is agreed on, it can be used as a reference for progress and key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout the year. The SEO team lead (Manager, Director, or sometimes VP) can use it to report on progress and KPIs, which could include revenue increase, team efficiency increase, or other metric everyone has agreed on.
I have experience creating a strategy from both inside and outside an organization. Here is a list of things to think about when developing your strategy.
Planning Your Enterprise SEO Strategy
Google changed the way it ranks search results in order to provide users with more relevant content.
In order to understand where Google is going and identify potential growth opportunities, it is necessary to understand the implications of these changes.
Some of the latest opportunities in the SEO field can be found by looking at patent releases by Google the last couple of years (Neural Matching, RankBrain, BERT, E-A-T., etc.), webmaster guidelines best practices updates, and trending searches.
It is important to keep your enterprise SEO strategy up-to-date with the latest trends, and to also plan for how you can improve team efficiency.
An effective enterprise SEO strategy should encompass all of the important elements of SEO that are relevant today, as well as the needs that enterprise SEO has that distinguish it from smaller SMBs.
- Technical Foundational SEO
- Google Search Console Reported Issues
- Crawl Reports – Content and Bug Fixes
- Page Speed Improvements
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Growth Projects
- Keyword Groupings
- New Keyword Search Trends
- Discovery Optimization
- Answer Box Opportunities
- Neural Matching Optimization
- Current Content Adjustments
- New Content Synonyms and Internal Linking Strategy
- Cross-Organization Communication
- SME Communication
- Engineering Communication
- Key Stakeholder Communication
- Team and Tools
- Agencies and Consultants
- Team Additions
- Reporting and Crawling Tool(s)
Since every organization is different, there is no single outline that will work for all of them. Factors that will affect the outline include team structure, communication across the organization, technical issues, whether or not an agency or consultant is involved, and any reporting tools that are needed.
I want to go into more detail about each suggestion so you can see if it would be a good fit for your company.
Technical Foundational SEO
The Why
I have always needed some form of technical and/or foundation SEO whenever I have worked for or with an enterprise SEO organization.
If a website has issues that are surfaced in Google Search Console or other reporting tools, it is likely that any efforts to increase SEO from growth strategies will be unsuccessful.
The key to making this strategy work is to be clear that this part is flexible.
It’s important for engineers to set aside time for fixing bugs and working on larger projects. This will help prevent any major issues from arising.
KPIs
The success of your technical SEO can vary depending on the size of your organization.
If you are reporting on a revenue increase, you should estimate an improvement of .5 or full position for the main domain. This will result in an increase in traffic and therefore a revenue boost.
No matter how good or bad your website’s foundation is, I recommend adding this to your strategy.
Crawl Reports: Content & Bug Fixes
Your organization should have crawling tools to report on issues that Google or Bing won’t tell you.
Issues similar or duplicative content, non-compliant URLs, canonical issues, internal linking issues, should be classified as needing fixes, in the same way that GSC and Bing reported issues are classified.
Page Speed Improvements
Although page speed is essential for SEO purposes, it is also necessary for enhancing conversions.
This is a good opportunity for teams that focus on conversion optimization or user experience to work together to identify ways to improve page speed.
I will identify pages with good SEO value that tend to be slow, and determine a key performance indicator (KPI) to measure the “time to interact” (TTI).
AMP
If your company does not have Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), this is a good opportunity to set a strategy for which pages should have AMP counterparts.
If you are using AMP, you may need to improve it or fix it within the next year.
Set aside time according to a plan that specifies where the pages are and what needs to be done with them in regards to AMP.
Every organization has different issues when search engines update their algorithms or update their guidelines.
If engineering time is allocated for technical SEO at the beginning of the year, there will be no need to discuss prioritization or fighting for resources later on. This will ensure that the work gets done and that the site will see improvements from SEO by the end of the year.
How to Plan Your Enterprise SEO Strategy
1. Make a list of topics.
This means that, while keywords are still a necessary part of your SEO efforts, they should no longer be your primary focus. Instead of starting with the actual writing, the first step is to make a list of topics you want your content to address.
begin by making a list of around 10 words and phrases related to your product or service You should use an SEO tool to research keywords, identify their search volume, and come up with variations that make sense for your business. Some good SEO tools are Google’s Keyword Tool, Ahrefs, SEMRush, and GrowthBar.
You can increase the traffic to your website by associating popular short-tail keywords with topics on your website, without creating individual blog posts for each keyword.
The business would need to generate approximately 3,600 visits to their website from organic traffic to have a shot at ranking on the first page for the keyword. If a swimming pool business wants to rank for “fiberglass pools,” which receives 110,000 searches per month, they would need to generate approximately 3,600 visits to their website from organic traffic. The businessman will need to identify a series of related keywords to include in their content, in addition to the short-tail keyword which represents the overarching topic. The company could try to improve its ranking for the keyword “fiberglass pools” by using phrases like “fiberglass pool prices” or “fiberglass pool cost.”
You can create a list of 10-15 relevant, short-tail keywords that your target audiences are searching for, using search volume and competition as your measurements. Then, rank this list based on monthly search volume.
The keywords that you have identified serve as the pillars that support a cluster of long-tail keywords.
2. Make a list of long-tail keywords based on these topics.
You will start to improve your pages for certain keywords during this step. For each pillar you’ve identified, use your keyword tool to identify five to 10 long-tail keywords that dig deeper into the original topic keyword.
We create content about SEO on a regular basis, but it is difficult to rank high on Google for this topic because it is so popular and is only an acronym. We also risk diluting our own ranking power by creating multiple pages that are all targeting the exact same keyword phrases and potentially the same SERPs. We also create content on how to conduct keyword research, how to optimize images for search engines, how to create an SEO strategy (which you’re reading right now), and other topics related to SEO.
Businesses can attract a wider range of potential customers by appealing to a variety of interests and concerns. This creates more opportunities for people who are interested in the products or services being offered.
This technique is known as “clustering.” Use your long-tail keywords to create blog posts or web pages that explain the specific topics within the pillars you’ve selected. This is a technique called “clustering.” Your long-tail keywords are related to each other and can be grouped together under a main topic. The algorithms used by search engines are based on the relationships between different groups of data. These relationships are used to connect users with the information they are searching for.
It is more likely that you will be able to convert traffic into leads if you have content that is specific to what your audience is looking for. The value that Google finds in websites it crawls is based on the pages that provide in-depth information on a particular topic. These pages are seen as the best answer to a person’s query and will therefore rank higher in search results.
3. Build pages for each topic.
It is difficult to get one page of a website to rank highly for multiple search terms. But, here’s where the rubber meets the road.
Use the pillar topics you came up with to create a page or post that gives a high-level overview of the topic using the long-tail keywords you came up with for each cluster in step two. The goal of a pillar page is to be a comprehensive resource on a particular topic. It should cover all of the main subtopics in detail, and provide links to other related content.
In the end, you should have as many pillar pages as you need to reflect your business offerings. It will be much easier for your prospects and customers to find you in search engines if they use keywords.
4. Set up a blog.
Blogging can help you rank for keywords and engage with your website’s users. In other words, every blog post is an opportunity to rank higher in search engine results pages. If you don’t have a blog for your business already, you should think about making one.
As you write each blog post and expand on your clusters, you should do three things:
- Don’t include your long-tail keyword more than three or four times throughout the page as Google doesn’t consider exact keyword matches as often as it used to. In fact, too many instances of your keyword can be a red flag to search engines that you’re keyword stuffing to gain rankings, and they’ll penalize you for this.
- Second, always link out to the pillar page you created for your topics. You can do this in the form of tags in your content management system (CMS), or as basic anchor text in the body of the article.
- Once you publish each blog post, link to it within the parent pillar page that supports the subtopic. By connecting both the pillar and the cluster in this way, you’re telling Google that there’s a relationship between the long-tail keyword and the overarching topic you’re trying to rank for.
5. Create a link-building plan.
There are other methods you can use to get your website content to rank higher, but the topic cluster model is the most effective.
Off-page SEO primarily focuses on link-building. The process of attracting inbound links to your website from other sources on the internet is called link-building. In general, websites with more authority linking back to your content will have a greater impact on your rankings.
brainstorming various ways to attract inbound links. You could begin by exchanging links with other local businesses, or by writing a few blog posts and sharing them across different social media platforms. You can also solicit guest blogging opportunities from other blogs as a way to promote your website.
6. Compress media files before uploading them to your site.
This is an important step in the SEO process, especially for mobile optimization.
As your blog or website grows, you’ll have more images, videos, and related media to support your content. It is easy to forget that files that create attractive visuals for websites can be large and take up a lot of space. The size of the media files you upload to your site is important to monitor because page speed is a crucial ranking factor.
The size of the file affects how quickly an internet browser can load your website. The images take longer to load on mobile browsers because the devices have less bandwidth. The smaller the file size, the faster the website will load. But how can you compress images while still retaining quality?
It may be beneficial to compress files such as images, videos, and gifs before uploading them in order to reduce file size. There are various sites that offer compression of images, for example, TinyPNG and Google’s Squoosh. These sites can reduce image file sizes to a very small size. A good rule of thumb is to keep files in the kilobytes (KB) range.
7. Stay up-to-date on SEO news and best practices.
Just like marketing, the search engine landscape is ever-evolving. There are many online resources available that can help you stay up to date with current trends and best practices. Here are a few resources to check out:
8. Measure and track your content’s success.
Search engine optimization can require a lot of time and effort, so you’ll want to be sure that your strategy is effective. You need to measure your progress to determine how well your system is working and find ways to make it better.
You can track organic traffic using your favorite web analytics tool, or you can create your own dashboard using Excel or Google Sheets. This text is discussing the importance of tracking various metrics in order to gauge the success of SEO efforts. Additionally, it notes that tracking progress can help to identify areas where further improvement is needed.
The latest SEO strategies, as well as organizational team growth and improvements, will provide a holistic view of the role SEO plays within the organization resulting in overall growth for the business.
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