Published July 1, 2015

New Tactics for Enterprise SEO

By Carl Larson

SEO for Enterprise Brands: 4 Takeaways

Enterprise SEO is an entirely different beast than “ordinary” SEO for a SME((small and medium-sized enterprise)-sized organization. The emphasis is on relationships across teams, project evangelization, and the ability to see the big picture and perform at scale. Content, architecture, mobile, SEO and SEM teams are typically silo-ed. Content can run to millions of pages across dozens or hundreds of sites and projects can take months to accomplish. Ian Lurie pointed out that Enterprise SEO is usually characterized by lack of control over the website, strong brand considerations that may trump SEO, and the need to involve many stakeholders (notably Legal) in many key decisions. Enterprise-level Search Marketers optimizing their sites tend to have already accomplished the easy wins and focus on small changes that, when rolled out site-wide, can have a noticeable effect.

Here are 4 actionable lessons derived from the Merkle | RKG’s SEO for Enterprise Brands webinar.

1. Google Goes Dynamic

Google now crawls dynamic content, such as
–    JavaScript links and redirects
–    Dynamically inserted Meta data

For example, JS-executed menu items that may not have been indexed previously are now commonly crawled and indexed by Google.

Therefore dynamic sites do not necessarily give sites a competitive advantage on Google.

Other engines (and Twitter and Facebook) are behind.

 

2. New Jargon Alert: How’s your DOM?

DOM (Document Object Model) is an application programming interface (API) for valid HTML and well-formed XML documents. It defines the logical structure of documents and the way a document is accessed and manipulated. Tests show that Google can now see the fully rendered page within the DOM. If you interfere with Google’s ability to construct your site’s DOM (such as by excluding JS or CSS directories in robots file), ratings and search experience may suffer.

 

 

For more on DOM and the crawl testing performed, see http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157

 

3. Responsive Mobile Sites Crush the Alternatives

Error rates across different types of mobile site architectures vary greatly, according to BrightEdge:

website architecture errors

Typical errors:

The clear winner is Responsive website design.

For those unfamiliar with the difference, a quick refresher on the pros and cons of Adaptive Vs Responsive vs Dynamic might be helpful.

 

4. Build Enterprise-level Personas

Take development of personas to the next level by utilizing SKA (Strategic Keyword Analysis) to develop keyword buckets for each stage in a customer’s interaction with your brand.

 

Looking at a searcher’s behavior at each different touchpoint creates a much greater level of marketing insight into her likely behavior, and allows for better tailoring of content to her needs at each stage of her purchase journey.

Conclusions

Large-scale SEO isn’t all challenges. Having the power of a household name as your brand can dramatically simplify, say, link building, social media engagement or encouraging UGC (User-Generated Content). Small architectural changes can, when rolled out across a large numbers of pages, have a significant effect. And sizable corporations typically have the resources to utilize the best employees and tools for the jobs, magnifying the ability of in-house marketers to move the needle. Some brands are so well-known that their paid and organic search teams focus solely upon branded terms, dramatically improving the odds of success. One of the best parts of being part of a brand’s marketing team is the ability to stay on top of cutting-edge optimization tactics such as those described in this article. Join the conversation by commenting below on which enterprise SEO tactics have worked for you.

Further Reading
More resources for Enterprise SEOs

 

 

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