While the fundamentals of SEO and Enterprise SEO are the same, there is a huge difference between doing SEO for a blog, an e-commerce platform or comparison website.
Standard SEO checklists that include things such as, completing XML sitemap, meta properties, writing up 1,800 words content articles, image optimization and alt-tags, might work for a smaller website and blog-style websites.
But if you’re talking about doing SEO for a website of over 1,000 pages, you’re talking something else altogether. Here, you’d be talking about Enterprise SEO, and for such scale, you’re going to want to really dig into ‘Technical SEO’. Think site-structure, automated tagging, use of automated canonical tagging for dynamic pages, crawl budget optimization, and the likes.
The first tip is hence to first define the SEO scale you’re talking about.
#1 Over-optimization is not a myth.
SEO is like a rope-walking stunt. Try balancing yourself on a rope mid-air. Only the right balance will help you reach the other side safely. Too much to the left or right and you’ll fall.
What this means basically is, you’re going to want to optimize your website and content to be able to rank well in Google’s search result page. Nevertheless, too much of anything is never good.
For example, having microdata mark-ups in your code (Schema.org) would help enhance how Google understands your site content and display your website in the search results page. However, if you abuse microdata markups, by doing too many review markups, per say, you’re going to get alerted with a penalty in your Google Search Console.
#2 Think Branding. Backlinking is not necessarily the name of the game.
This doesn’t mean backlinks are no longer valuable. Backlinks have always been with SEO since the beginning; it’s the foundation on how search was first created. Think Google’s Link Graph, a map of how all websites on the internet is connected.
But what it does mean is: when you work on backlinks, you should also be thinking of branding campaigns, viral marketing and user generated content such as hosting contests. Going the route of reciprocal links, working with link farms and simply purchasing advertorials with link placements, is no longer the way to go.
Search technology is advancing towards machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which means for instance, Google’s Rankbrain will eventually know what are real link signals that your website is well perceived by online audience and is not.
#3 Think server optimization and cyber-security. Revert to technical SEO.
While many will recommend to look into content marketing to help boost SEO rankings. Fact is, if your website is an Enterprise website, content marketing efforts will overlap with branding and public relations.
There is perhaps a more important SEO aspect not to overlook which is handled by the IT team: server speed, mobile friendliness, security, website error maintenance, searchbot monitoring, website structure, robots.txt, XML sitemap troubleshooting and optimization, and lots more.
For large dynamic websites, technical SEO becomes very important, because the scale of the website itself means, a few backlinks and handful of high quality content will not do the trick.
#4 Rectify duplicate content, internally and externally.
Duplicate content is downright plagiarism.
Even for online content, it has to do with copyright. Search engines are still businesses and the right thing to do in terms of business ethics, is of course to show only one result. Which is mostly the case with search engines, after deducing which is the original content (which isn’t always accurate).
When two webpages on different websites show duplicate content, only one of the two websites will rank for that page. Most likely it would be the website with the higher reputation, even if the site with lower reputation is the original. Routinely check if your content is copied and showing on other websites. If so, you can contact the website to remove the content.
As for duplicate content on more than one page of your website, handle this by using the ‘canonical’ tag. The ‘canonical’ tag acts like a pointer to your preferred version to suggest to search engines as the original one. This way, search engines would not get confused, which is the original content and implies your website is being maintained well.
#5 Challenge: Create quality content at scale.
While there are things that technology can help automate such as making use of dynamic XML sitemaps to automatically update new webpage URLs for Googlebot to discover, there are things that technology can’t automate, without jeopardizing quality such as content creation.
Hence, how can enterprise websites generate content at scale. Let’s first define what content means. Content does not always mean writing up articles piece-by-piece. While these type of article content are usually high quality content, the impact may be too small for enterprise websites. On the contrary, content also refers to user generated content such as forums, and nested comments, as well as videos, comments, snippets, visuals and many more.
Take note, that Enterprise SEO doesn’t have to do with the size of your company. If you’re a big corporate, but your website is more of a brand website with a few hundred pages, you don’t need Enterprise SEO. But if you’re a smaller company doing e-commerce with 1,000 products being sold online, you are going to need Enterprise SEO.
Feel free to connect with any of our consultants to learn more about Enterprise SEO.