Enterprise SEO allows large companies to rank high in search engines and drive website traffic. Check out these expert tips and examples, and learn about the best tools to use to increase your visibility, authority, and conversions.
When it comes to SEO, enterprise businesses often have a leg up.
Why? Because they typically have high domain authority and already rank for many branded terms.
But regardless of those advantages, enterprise SEO still comes with unique challenges due to its scale.
Let’s dive into what goes into creating an enterprise SEO strategy, plus expert tips and examples.
What is enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO is the process of using different search engine optimization tactics to bring more organic traffic to large websites for enterprise organizations.
Since enterprise websites can have hundreds, thousands, or millions of pages, enterprise SEO strategies focus on scalability.
Benefits of enterprise SEO
Enterprise-level SEO offers all the same benefits as traditional SEO on a larger scale.
Here are several benefits that demonstrate the value of SEO for enterprise businesses:
- Drives more organic website traffic to enterprise sites
- Generates more leads, sales, revenue, and market share
- Allows enterprises to target customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey
- Improves visibility and increases brand awareness
- Provides measurable results that can be tied to ROI
While many enterprise businesses already rank for branded terms like the business or product name, SEO is still essential for large companies that want to grow sustainably online.
Costs of enterprise SEO agencies
Enterprise SEO pricing can range from $7,500 to $15,000 and up per month.
Since enterprise SEO is more complex than traditional SEO for small to mid-sized businesses, the cost of enterprise SEO solutions is often more than a typical SEO campaign.
How to build an enterprise SEO strategy: 7 steps
Large organizations should have an enterprise SEO strategy aligning with their business goals. Here are the 7 steps to creating a strategy that gets results.
- Conduct an SEO audit
- Identify and fix technical SEO issues
- Do keyword research
- Create a content strategy
- Produce high-quality content
- Focus on internal and external linking
- Start link building and outreach
1. Conduct an SEO audit
Before developing an SEO strategy, identify where the site’s SEO currently stands by conducting an enterprise SEO audit.
An audit identifies things the site does well and areas where it can improve. Here are the things an SEO audit will cover:
- Indexing
- Crawlability
- User experience
- Site architecture
- Keyword rankings
- On-page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Backlink profile
Here’s an example of the SEO audit dashboard from Semrush, which indicates the site’s overall health.
(Image: Semrush screenshot)
Ready to start your audit? Check out our 10-step enterprise SEO audit with a free template.
2. Identify and fix technical SEO issues
After completing the SEO audit, enterprise businesses may find a list of issues to address.
Many of these will be technical SEO issues that impact page speed and user experience — both important for SEO.
Some common technical SEO problems include:
- Crawlability issues
- Broken links
- Redirect issues
- Missing alt tags
- Slow page speed
- Meta descriptions that are not optimized or missing
- No XML sitemaps
- The site is not indexed correctly
- The mobile site is not optimized
If you use Semrush to conduct a site audit, you’ll get a list of the issues and details about each. Use this list as a starting point to improve your technical SEO.
If your business doesn’t have the in-house resources to fix these technical issues, hire an enterprise SEO firm to take care of it.
3. Do keyword research
Since enterprise sites have many pages and potential topics, it’s helpful to segment the site before mapping out or researching any keywords.
After segmenting the site into categories or topics, start with keyword mapping to better understand which keywords your existing site pages target.
Avoid keyword cannibalization, which happens when multiple pages target the same keyword.
Most enterprise companies have a high domain authority just by being a big brand with an extensive web presence. For this reason, enterprise businesses can target more competitive keywords than smaller brands.
That’s not to say enterprise brands shouldn’t also target long-tail keywords in their keyword strategy.
The goal is to find keywords the business has the best chance to rank for with a mix of keywords across the buyer’s journey that considers every type of search intent.
In addition to doing preliminary keyword research, look at what keywords competitors rank for to see if there are gaps to take advantage of.
That’s just one of the ways HawkSEM helped Moneta Group increase keywords in the top 3 by 164% and their keyword portfolio by 326%.
Read the case study to find out what other SEO efforts contributed to these results.
4. Create a content strategy
The more high-quality content your site has, the more opportunities it has to rank on Google.
But before your team starts creating blog posts and publishing them with wild abandon, you’ve got to create a content marketing strategy.
Use the target keywords to identify topics and consider how to approach each topic differently or add to the existing conversation.
Choose topics that align with the search intent of each keyword and where the user is in the buyer’s journey.
For example, if the intent is to get more information about a topic, use the keyword for a blog post that targets the top of the funnel.
Further reading: The SEO Content Strategy You Need: A Step-by-Step Guide
5. Produce high-quality content
Content creation is at the heart of enterprise SEO. Brands that want to keep up with the competition and continue to rank for new keywords must produce high-quality content often and at scale.
Blog posts, articles, case studies, and guides are all types of content that help enterprise businesses rank on search engines.
But don’t forget that visual content like images, videos, and infographics provides additional user value and can also rank on search.
Due to the volume of content that enterprise businesses must create, it’s important to have a content creation process built for large-scale operations.
That means hiring the right employees or contractors to create content and having a project management system to organize everything.
Pro tip: Using AI tools for your content can help with things like headline ideas, research, and optimization. Just don’t make the mistake of having an AI chatbot generate an entire article on a topic, then publishing it on your site without fact-checking, editing, and ensuring it represents your brand accurately.
6. Focus on internal and external linking
Internal links help search engines understand what the page content is about and how it connects to other pages on the site.
External links also help search engines understand the topic while offering additional value to readers.
Creating an internal linking strategy is more challenging for enterprise businesses due to the large number of site pages.
So it’s helpful to consider internal linking and how all content relates to each other during the content strategy process.
When using external links, ensure they lead to reputable, relevant, and authoritative sources to improve your site’s reputation.
Avoid linking to other articles on the same topic or competitor content because you could drive traffic away from your site (never to return again).
Further reading: How Does Internal Linking Help SEO? (How-To + 12 Best Practices)
7. Start link building and outreach
Creating great content is just one piece of the enterprise SEO puzzle. Link building — getting third-party sites to link back to your site — helps enterprise businesses rank in the top 3 for their target keywords.
But obtaining relevant backlinks is no easy task. Your business must build relationships with other businesses, publications, industry experts, and influencers.
This process takes time and team members, but it’s worthwhile to prove to Google that your site content is valuable.
Remember, if you want people to link back to the site’s content, it needs to be worth linking to. It should be well-written and researched with something interesting to say.
And don’t forget to include other types of media that can earn a backlink, like images and videos.
Further reading: What Are Relevant Backlinks? How to Get Them + Expert Tips
4 enterprise SEO examples
Want to see what enterprise SEO looks like in practice? Here are a few examples of large organizations that do it right.
For each of the enterprise SEO examples below, I’ve gathered data from Semrush to give a behind-the-scenes look at each company’s search engine optimization results.
1. Amazon
Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer by net sales. And while the company runs paid ads, it also drives organic search traffic to its pages.
Currently, the website organically ranks in the top 3 positions on the SERP for millions of keywords.
(Image: Semrush screenshot)
Amazon is an interesting example of enterprise SEO because a lot of the onsite efforts come from user-generated content.
For example, when a retailer puts an item on Amazon, they optimize the product listing for the Amazon algorithm. And in doing so, they also optimize it for other search engines like Google.
Here’s an example of an Amazon product listing from YETI:
(Image: Amazon)
YETI uses keywords in the product title like “stainless steel” and “vacuum insulated.” The company also uses keywords in the product description.
Another place that Amazon has user-generated content is in its product reviews.
The reviews on these ecommerce listings not only provide social proof for buyers but also give Amazon consistent, updated, relevant, and fresh content for its product listing pages.
User reviews aren’t purposely optimized for SEO, but users naturally write keywords when talking about the product.
Notice in these product reviews for the YETI cup, customers use keywords like “magnetic slider” and “durable” to describe their experience with the product.
(Image: Amazon screenshot)
Further reading: User-Generated Content: Complete Guide + Examples That Work
Microsoft
It’s no surprise Microsoft is on this list — after all, it has its own search engine, Bing. So, to say this company has a good understanding of search engine algorithms is an understatement.
In January 2026, Microsoft’s organic traffic was more than 400 million, and it organically ranked for more than 50 million keywords.
(Image: Semrush screenshot)
Microsoft’s website is structured and user-friendly, making it easy for people to find what they want.
The user experience (UX) makes the site easy to navigate, even though it has millions of pages across multiple product categories.
(Image: Microsoft screenshot)
Microsoft’s enterprise SEO team needs to target various keywords across several industries, from computers to business software to video game consoles.
It has robust product pages with a lot of written and visual content.
(Image: Microsoft screenshot)
Despite the large number of high-quality images and interactive features on the page, it still loads quickly and looks just as great on mobile as it does on desktop.
REI
The latest impact report for REI, the largest outdoor retailer in the U.S., announced that the company ended 2024 with more than $3.5 billion in net sales.
Undoubtedly, enterprise SEO played a role in the success of its online sales.
REI’s organic search traffic in January 2026 was 6.2 million. It currently ranks in the top 3 spots of the organic search results for tens of thousands of keywords.
(Image: Semrush screenshot)
REI product pages aren’t the only pages ranking in the top spots for keywords on Google. REI also optimizes many of its category pages for competitive keywords.
For example, REI’s Women’s Snow Pants category page ranks organically in the #1 spot for dozens of relevant keywords.
(Image: REI screenshot)
It may look like a typical category page, but there’s optimized content at the bottom using various keywords to describe different women’s snow pants that REI offers.
(Image: REI screenshot)
HubSpot
HubSpot is a unique example of enterprise SEO because it doesn’t have as many employees or products as the other brands on this list, but it does have more than 800,000 pages on its website.
In January 2026, HubSpot’s organic search traffic was more than 4 million.
(Image: Semrush screenshot)
The HubSpot team is great at publishing a large volume of blog posts that target various keywords for different digital marketing topics.
(Image: Hubspot screenshot)
HubSpot is a leader in the digital marketing industry because it consistently publishes well-researched and well-written blog content.
This high-quality blog content ranks for keywords organically and earns the company backlinks, which contribute to its SEO success.
The HubSpot enterprise SEO team likely has a backlink and outreach strategy that doesn’t involve just waiting for people to organically link to the site content.
However, the site organically earns a lot of backlinks due to the high-quality nature of its educational content, which takes some of the work off of the SEO team.
Enterprise SEO vs. traditional SEO
The main differences between enterprise SEO and traditional or local SEO for small to mid-sized businesses are:
- Scale
- Complexity
- Competition level
These differences impact the strategies SEO agencies use to rank enterprise-level sites.
Scale
Enterprise SEO teams must adjust their SEO strategies and processes to scale.
Doing keyword research, writing meta descriptions, and updating content on 10 website pages takes far less time, effort, and project management than it does for 1,000 pages.
Enterprise businesses must ensure their processes and systems can handle the workload at scale.
Complexity
The more web pages a site has, the more complex its SEO strategy. While many traditional SEO strategies work for enterprise businesses on a larger scale, the approach is more complex.
For example, internal linking is an SEO strategy that can greatly impact small business websites.
When a larger company like Amazon, which has millions of pages, implements internal linking, it must be done at a much larger scale to have any impact.
On the flip side, SEO issues also become more complex at scale. For instance, duplicate or thin content may be a problem on small business websites, but it’s fairly simple to fix.
Whereas enterprise websites have so many pages that finding and correcting this issue on all their pages will take far longer.
Not to mention, duplicate or thin content is more likely to happen with a larger site because many different team members are working on the pages simultaneously, and the SEO team may not have buy-in from all these team members.
Competition level
Enterprise brands are competing against many other companies within their market.
With such a high level of competition, enterprise SEO companies have to adjust traditional SEO tactics to work for a higher level of competition.
While traditional SEO focuses on long-tail keywords with low competition but high value, enterprise SEO focuses on more competitive keywords — short-tail keywords with high competition, high value, and high search volume.
Enterprise SEO tools
Enterprise businesses require tools built for their initiatives. There are both dedicated enterprise SEO platforms and SEO platforms that offer higher-level plans specifically for this type of business.
Enterprise SEO tools make it easy to track progress by giving you one dashboard without the need to use additional tools or spreadsheets.
They also make SEO reporting frustration-free, allowing you to download comprehensive reports to share with all stakeholders.
Semrush
Semrush has an enterprise SEO platform for large-scale SEO management.
The enterprise platform offers additional functionality that’s important for larger organizations, like automation, AI workflows, teamwork tools, and advanced reporting capabilities.
Ahrefs
As another popular SEO platform, Ahrefs has a plan specifically for enterprise companies.
The enterprise plan offers higher limits on things like users, projects, and data, as well as additional features beneficial to enterprise businesses, like access management and an audit log.
(Image: Ahrefs screenshot)
ConversionIQ
At HawkSEM, we use ConversionIQ, our proprietary software, to track enterprise SEO campaigns.
This tool granularly tracks every step of the buyer’s journey, helping us understand what aspects of the campaign are working and what we need to adjust to optimize for a higher ROI.
“Tracking with ConversionIQ goes beyond just providing metrics for enterprise SEO campaigns,” says Sam Yadegar, co-founder and CEO of HawkSEM.
“It provides more insight into the client’s target audience, which is data we can use to scale other marketing channels like social media.”
The takeaway
Enterprise SEO is more complex than traditional SEO due to the scale of enterprise websites.
Behind all the great examples we’ve shown of enterprise SEO at work for popular large brands is a team of experts who know how to create and implement an SEO strategy at scale.
If you don’t have a team member who specializes in enterprise SEO, it’s time to call in the experts.
If you’re ready to hire an enterprise SEO agency, reach out to us to today get started.
This article has been updated and was originally published in March 2024.