Are you responsible for the Search Engine Optimization strategy in your Enterprise? Here’s a way to build on your SEO strategy to get you started in the right direction, including an enterprise-wide SEO strategy, hacks to do quick site audits, using your enterprise domain to your advantage and doing competitor research.
Enterprise SEO Goals
You aren’t going to go far in 2017 without a SEO strategy – especially when you’re dealing with Enterprise SEO. So sit down with your marketing team and ask yourself the following:
- What is your SEO goal? This is a loaded question – so work top down for this one. Ask what are your marketing goals? How many of those goals depend on organic website traffic?
- Come up with different scenarios on how to address each SEO objective. Would it be better served with optimized on-page SEO content? Is it better to look into high-quality backlinks? Do you need to make technical updates on your site to improve your SEO?
- Does your SEO team have the expertise to perform these tasks in-house?
- Do you need to hire any external SEO vendors? If so, who, for how much and when?
- What type of a “Buyer” do you want to pull in with your organic traffic? Buyer types can be grouped as:
- Discovery Stage: Early in the buyer journey. They look for basic keywords that describe the problem they want to solve.
- Evaluation Stage: They are mid-journey and look for industry terms that define their problem.
- Buying Stage: Ready to buy and search brand names to look for solutions.
- Based on the target buyer, you can start to invest into Content Marketing. Think about the type of collateral to offer, how often to publish and where to publish.
- What type of SEO tools are you investing in? Do you need to upgrade your current toolset?
- What is your overall investment in SEO, including personnel, training, and use of external SEO vendors.
- What type of professional development are you doing for your SEO team?
These type of questions are a good way to develop your SEO strategy. Keep in mind you’re looking for 3 things in your plan: 1) What is your goal, 2) How would you deliver on it 3) What would be the cost and ROI?
Enterprise SEO Audit
Site audits are an excellent way to determine the current status of your Enterprise and develop a sustainable SEO Strategy. SEO site audits can be performed on all your web properties (if you include more than one domain.) It’s best to perform a separate audit for your blog. Your site audit should contain the following: 1) Overall SEO score of your site. 2) Traffic through your site architecture 3) Organic visitor data 4) Keyword rankings and 5) Quick wins and High Impact areas to fix. You can get started with this hack using our SEO grading tool.
SEO Domain Hack
As an Enterprise you probably have solid domain authority – don’t forget to take advantage of this hack. Use your domain age, backlinks and domain brand value to rank well for keywords. Good domain authority means that your “off-site SEO” is already taken care off. So it would require only “On-page SEO” for you to rank well and own SERPs for keywords.
Enterprise SEO Research
This strategy is a must for the Enterprise. Don’t think your website works in a vacuum. It’s competing with organic keywords with other solutions. Research those sites – find out how well they are optimized. What keywords they rank well for. Run SEO Grading tools on their site as well as blog analysis reports to find out their content marketing style. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel – if they are doing something that can work for you, then incorporate it in your SEO plan.
Strategy SEO with Reports
As a manager working the Enterprise SEO – you realize the power of reports in creating and implementing a sound SEO strategy. You need to share reports that are 1) easy to understand, 2) consistent and 3) showcase business value. So start to either create your own Enterprise SEO templates or download a few. We’ve some suggestions on how to get started with SEO Report templates.
