SEO for Enterprise Companies: Strategies, Tools, and Hiring

When your web pages and links are in the thousands (or millions), the SEO stakes are higher. More data equals more problems, and your margin for experimentation is slim.

Unfortunately, enterprise organizations disproportionately invest in SEO and digital presence, which is a huge missed opportunity for growing revenue and brand reputation. According to Search Engine Journal research, 51% of pages on enterprise sites are invisible to Google.

The good news? Nail enterprise SEO and you completely obliterate smaller players in your space.

Let’s review how enterprise SEO differs from small-scale SEO, and the top SEO strategies enterprises can implement in 2024. We’ll also review the best tools to support your marketing teams and a guide to finding the best outsourced SEO talent.

What is enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO is a specialized way of optimizing content for big organizations, so they gain higher organic traffic from search engines.

Any search engine optimization that’s done for an enterprise business website is considered enterprise-level SEO. These organizations have many employees, dedicated marketing teams, and locations across the globe.

Enterprise SEO strategies also have to be used on large sites with a high volume of pages, a strong digital presence (measured using monthly visitors or domain authority), or both.

If you’re familiar with traditional SEO techniques, you’ll notice that Enterprise SEO principles are rooted in the same best practices, but adapted to suit bigger enterprise sites.

Traditional SEO techniques include:

• High-quality content creation with search intent

• Keyword research

• Technical SEO (improving page speed, crawling, indexing)

• Internal links and external link building (also includes finding and redirecting broken links)

All these techniques apply to an enterprise site but are adapted to accommodate the sheer size and volume of an enterprise site. Enterprise SEO objectives focus on a better user experience, higher ROI, and staying on the first page of SERPs.

Enterprise SEO vs. Small Business SEO

Many traditional SEO tasks are impossible to carry out manually for a big enterprise site.

An enterprise site like Fiverr.com has 9 million indexed pages.

Fiverr.com indexed pages

For comparison, here’s a small eCommerce business Alchemy by LA. It has around 309 indexed pages.

Alchemybyla.com indexed pages.

Clearly, manual SEO optimization is next to impossible for a large enterprise site like Fiverr.com. You cannot expect SEOs to perform on-page optimization, like adding meta descriptions a million times.

Finding broken links would also be a mammoth task, let alone redirecting them.

Here are a few more differences between Enterprise SEO and small business SEO.

• Scale and Website Volume: Enterprise SEO manages large-scale websites, facing challenges in content volume and complexity, navigating intricate site structures, and extensive page counts.

• Brand Authority and SEO Changes: Enterprise SEO emphasizes establishing and maintaining brand authority, requiring meticulous planning for consistent and authoritative SEO changes across vast digital landscapes.

• Budgetary Considerations: Enterprise SEO demands a substantial budget commitment compared to small-scale SEO, supporting advanced tools, comprehensive campaigns, and ongoing optimization efforts.

• Organizational Challenges: Enterprise SEO involves complex decision-making because of multiple stakeholders, departments, and decision layers, requiring effective communication and collaboration.

• Global Reach and Multinational Considerations: Enterprise SEO extends beyond local boundaries, coordinating strategies across regions, languages, and cultural nuances, ensuring a consistent global digital footprint.

Best Strategies for Enterprise SEO

Here are strategies that help enterprise companies enhance their online presence and succeed in SEO.

1. Buckle down on site architecture

It’s easy to organize your home book collection. But your local library would be in absolute chaos without a labeling and directory system. That’s why site architecture is simple when working with a small website, and a game-changer with a larger site.

Enterprise sites have web pages in the thousands, and an easy-to-navigate site architecture isn’t just great for visitors to your site. It also helps search engine crawlers read and index your pages, and facilitates a trickle-down from popular pages to less-visited smaller pages.

Clean site architecture ultimately improves user experience and engagement and positively impacts website traffic.

• Logical Hierarchy: Establish a clear and logical content hierarchy for intuitive navigation and user-friendly experience. Make sure similar topic content is grouped.

• Simplified URL Structure: Keep URLs concise, descriptive, and static, improving user comprehension and search engine crawlability.

• Optimized Internal Linking: Implement strategic internal linking with descriptive anchor text to enhance content relationships within the site.

While flattening or simplifying the architecture, you may also find duplicate content and keyword cannibalization issues.

However, it’s difficult to change site architecture—particularly at scale. Overhauling a confusing old architecture can have a domino effect on the site, especially if it uses a custom CMS. Getting a buy-in from internal stakeholders can also be challenging, especially for a big change like this.

If your website’s content is spilling over the new architecture, consider using new subdomains to give each content category a website of its own.

2. Target low-hanging fruit keywords

Much of the SEO advice on keyword ranking centers on picking low-competition keywords. However, enterprise sites have the domain authority to go after higher-competition keywords. Enterprise SEO strategy should also be built around short-tail rather than long-tail keywords.

Even if search engine result pages are flooded with content around the keywords in your niche, an enterprise site can overtake them and stay at the top. Enterprise sites should also regularly target featured snippets.

3. Don’t neglect local SEO

While enterprises are often global companies, this doesn’t mean Local SEO isn’t important. Enterprise companies often need to optimize their content for multiple local locations. This means meticulously looking at how pages perform in different geographical areas. Your site must comply with Google Map SEO to show up in ‘near me’ searches.

“I worked with a popular car rental website. Many of their local pages targeting individual cities were underperforming in search engine rankings,” says Blake Smith, Enterprise SEO Consultant.“The root cause was as a suboptimal internal linking structure.”

To fix this issue, Smith had to work with mapping out the site’s entire link structure and identify high-potential pages for organic traffic. He then strategically increased internal links to these pages from higher authority pages on the client’s site.

“The results were remarkable. We increased traffic to the local city pages by 83% year over year, boosting search engine rankings, user engagement, and conversions,” adds Smith.

Top SEO Tools for Enterprises

Here are the best enterprise SEO platforms that make running enterprise websites easier. We’ve chosen all-in-one platforms that help you with research, optimization, and measuring performance—and can handle the volume of data that large organizations demand.

1. Semrush

Semrush homepage

Semrush is one of the market's most popular enterprise SEO tools. This all-in-one search engine optimization goes is a solution for keyword research, website audits, competitor research, PPC, and social media campaigns.

Ideal as an enterprise solution, leading global companies use Semrush—Tesla, Decathlon, P&G, Samsung, FedEx, and more.

Semrush covers all bases as an SEO tool for enterprise companies. This includes on-page and off-page SEO, Local SEO, content gap analysis, rank tracking, and quality backlink building.

Pricing

Semrush has a free forever plan, but its features might need to be expanded for an enterprise company. Top features like keyword research, competitor research, and keyword tracking all have a limit of up to 10 daily queries. You will need to upgrade to a paid plan for more access.

You can also opt for a 7-day free trial for all paid plans.

• Pro: $129.95 monthly. Best for small teams, since it includes 5 projects, and up to 500 keywords to track.

• Guru: $249.95 monthly. Best for mid-sized businesses or agencies. Includes 15 projects and up to 1500 keywords to track.

• Business: $499.95 monthly. This plan is best for enterprise-level needs since it includes 40 projects and up to 5,000 keywords to track, with collaboration tools for enterprise SEO teams.

Pros

• In-depth competitor research tools for enterprises

• Technical SEO features including site audits, high-speed crawler, log file analyzer

• Daily keyword rank tracking

• Online reputation management

• Heat maps on how site visitors interact with your pages

• Detects algorithm ranking updates to reduce volatility

• Bulk analysis tool to analyze up to 200 prospects in one go

• Detailed organic traffic insights

• SEO content templates

Cons

• One of the priciest SEO tools in the market

• Free plan is completely unusable for a bigger company or website

• Team collaboration features could be better (many are designed for an agency)

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs homepage

Used by Accenture, Uber, IBM, and other leading companies, Ahrefs is an Enterprise All-in-one SEO toolset. It offers competitor analysis, site audits, keyword research, content explorer, and a rank tracker.

Ahrefs is most commonly used for SEO data and web crawling. 64% of SEO professionals trust Ahrefs’ link data over other tools.

Regarding Enterprise SEO, Ahrefs has multi-lingual features suitable for global companies. It also offers extensive metrics and granular reports to track performance—which is essential for collaboration and communication between marketing teams and executive decision-makers.

Pricing

Ahrefs does not offer a free plan but has a few free tools that can be used without a subscription. These include a keyword generator, SERP checker, backlink checker, and more.

Here are Ahref’s paid plans:

• Lite: $99 a month. Best for small businesses or hobby projects.

• Standard: $199 a month. Best for freelance SEOs and marketing consultants.

• Advanced: $399 a month. Best for larger in-house marketing teams.

• Enterprise: $999 a month. Best for enterprises and agencies.

Pros

• Comprehensive backlink analysis

• Robust keyword research tools

• Accurate rank tracking

• Site audit for technical SEO insights

• Content explorer for topic and trend research

• Competitor analysis and comparison

• Extensive database of keywords and SERP data

• SEO reporting and visualization tools

• Alerts for brand mentions and backlink changes

• Link intersect feature for link-building opportunities

• YouTube SEO analysis

• Multiple user access with custom permissions

• Integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Cons

• Backlink index is not guaranteed to include all links

• Expensive compared to similar tools in the market

• Exporting larger data sets takes time

3. BrightEdge

BrightEdge homepage

BrightEdge is an SEO solution powered by AI and machine learning. Top features include SEO content marketing strategy building, keyword research, social media strategy, local SEO, and mobile optimization—making it a great SEO solution for local businesses and digital solutions.

Specifically for enterprises, the platform has robust tools for measuring performance, calculating ROI and conversion rates, and performing competitor analysis.

Pricing

BrightEdge’s pricing is not publicly available. Contact the team to request a demo and get a pricing proposal.

Pros

• Comprehensive data and analytics

• Forecasting and predictive analysis for target audience

• Global SEO capabilities

• Mobile SEO optimization insights

• Competitor analysis and benchmarking

• Helps with enterprise SEO strategy

• AI-powered insights on the dashboard

• SEO automation and workflow management

• Collaborative workspace for teams

Cons

• No information on pricing

• Steep learning curve, the interface can be complex to use

How to find an Enterprise SEO expert

When you’re hiring an SEO expert, make sure they have adequate experience and understand enterprise SEO strategies.

In-house marketing teams often lack the skills and resources needed for enterprise SEO demands. Roughly 57% of enterprises rated limited SEO in-house skills as the most challenging obstacle to achieving their SEO objectives.

Instead, you can turn to external experts, SEO agencies, or freelancers to provide that niche experience your business needs—at least in the initial stages. Not only will you get access to a specific skill set, but they can set up a strategy that your internal SEO and content marketing team can learn from and eventually take over in the long run.

At the enterprise level, many SEO consultants take on project management and consulting to identify SEO issues and set up workflows that enable efficient content production.

External hires are also the quicker and cheaper option for tight project deadlines—ensuring a knowledge transfer for your internal teams that will benefit you in the long run.

You can find SEO experts through:

• Personal network: Turn to communities or friends in different industries who can refer enterprise SEO experts

• Online Professional Platforms: Consider putting a detailed job post on professional spaces like LinkedIn or Reddit hiring Communities

• Freelancer Marketplaces: You can also sign up on websites like Fiverr or Upwork to help you get in touch with industry experts

If you’re posting a job post on LinkedIn or a job board, include key Enterprise SEO skills and capabilities in your job description. Here’s an example of an enterprise SEO job post for Head of SEO at TripAdvisor

Ask candidates for case studies or any other result-based evidence from previous SEO efforts.

How to find an Enterprise SEO expert on Fiverr

Fiverr’s freelance marketplace is a great place to find professional and skilled SEO experts.

Step 1: Sign up or create an account on Fiverr.

Step 2: Once you’ve signed in, click on Search Engine Optimization in the Digital Marketing section to explore SEO experts for your business.

Step 3: Fiverr will automatically display they’re top performing SEO experts. You can also click on the sub-categories to make your search easier:

• Off-page SEO

• On-page SEO

• Keyword Research

• Technical SEO

• Competitor Analysis

• Voice search SEO

• Full SEO package

You can also choose filters such as budget, service options, the seller’s ranking, and delivery time, depending on your needs.

Fiverr results will update according to your preferences, showcasing a freelancer’s help statement, rating, and prices.

Step 4: Click and scan through seller profiles to make your decision. You can read reviews, look at portfolios, and more all on one page.

Step 5: When working with a larger SEO project, you want to double-check and ensure you pick the right SEO expert for your organization. Ensure you look through their industry experience carefully.

Step 6: Review their pricing packages and select one that aligns with your budget. You can always contact the seller before deciding to clarify any doubts or concerns. Once you’re done, select ‘Continue’ to place your order!

Step 7: Once they accept your order, use the Fiverr messenger app to communicate and get started.

Find an SEO expert for your enterprise today

External enterprise SEO experts bring unparalleled expertise and a fresh perspective to your SEO efforts. They can work with your internal teams to set you up for success. SEO agencies charge their highest slabs to enterprise organizations, and often work hands-off, with a low transparency operating mode. Working with an experienced SEO consultant can be a great one-time investment for your organization.

Fiverr’s marketplace houses SEO experts who’ve worked with top enterprise companies. Sign up on Fiverr to find the best freelance SEO talent.