7 Enterprise SEO Strategies That Work: Costs, Examples + Tools

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.

Here, you’ll find:

• What is enterprise SEO?
• Benefits of enterprise SEO
• Costs of enterprise SEO agencies
• How to build an enterprise SEO strategy in 7 steps
• 4 enterprise SEO examples
• Enterprise SEO vs. traditional SEO
• Enterprise SEO tools

When it comes to SEO, enterprise businesses often have a leg up. They have high domain authority and already rank for many branded terms.

But regardless of those advantages, enterprise SEO still comes with unique challenges because of 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+ 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 in 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.

1. Conduct an SEO audit
2. Identify and fix technical SEO issues
3. Do keyword research
4. Create a content strategy
5. Produce high-quality content
6. Focus on internal and external linking
7. 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.

Source: Semrush

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
• Site is not indexed correctly
• 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.

Source: Semrush

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 site 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 more to find out what else contributed to these SEO 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 all willy-nilly, create a content 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.

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 provide 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.

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

Organic search traffic for December 2023 is 541.2M. Currently, the website organically ranks in the top 3 positions on the SERP for 13,510,065 keywords.

Source: Semrush search on 12/15/23

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:

Source: Amazon

YETI uses keywords in the product title like “stainless steel” and “vaccum insulated.” The company also uses keywords in the product description.

Source: Amazon

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 “8oz stackable cup” and “duracoat paint” to describe their experience with the product.

Source: Amazon

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 December 2023, Microsoft’s organic search traffic was 76.3M, and it organically ranked in the top 3 spots for 994,208 keywords.

Source: Semrush search on 12/15/23

Microsoft’s website is structured and user-friendly, making it easy for people to find what they want. The UX makes the site easy to navigate, even though it has 202M pages across multiple product categories.

Source: Microsoft

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.

Source: Microsoft

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

REI, the largest outdoor retailer in the U.S., ended 2022 with a record $3.85 billion in sales. Undoubtedly, enterprise SEO played a role in the success of its online sales.

REI’s organic search traffic in December 2023 was 8.9M. It currently ranks in the top 3 spots of the organic search results for 126,438 keywords.

Source: Semrush search on 12/15/23

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 92 relevant keywords.

Source: Rei

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 REI offers.

Source: Rei

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 has over 804,000 pages on its website.

In December 2023, HubSpot’s organic search traffic was 18M, and it organically ranked in the top 1-3 spots for 124,605 keywords.

Source: Semrush search on 12/15/23

The HubSpot team is great at publishing a large volume of blog posts that target various keywords for different digital marketing topics.

Source: Hubspot

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 contributes to its SEO success.

Source: Hubspot

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, and competition level. These differences impact the strategies SEO agencies use to rank enterprise-level sites.

Scale

Enterprise companies can have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of web pages, sometimes across multiple sites or subdomains. Enterprise SEO teams must adjust their SEO strategies and processes to scale.

Amazon’s site has around 175,000,000 results, showing how large some enterprise sites can be.

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 at 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 its 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

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.

Source: Ahrefs

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, 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 knows 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.