Promotion of Corporate Websites: What is Corporate SEO and How It Works
SEO optimization can seem like a daunting task when you own a small local business and are actively promoting your website. Yet, it is solvable. When the company’s website is small, you can easily detect and eliminate all flaws and errors, constantly work on improving it, and monitor current changes. However, what if you have more than a thousand website pages at your disposal? Are standard approaches and strategies appropriate here? We can say with confidence that it is not always possible. For large organizations with large websites (1000+ pages), there was such a thing as enterprise SEO. What it is and how it works will be discussed in this article.
Enterprise SEO is a type of search engine optimization designed for corporate websites. Its main goal is to improve the organic presence of large businesses on the Internet. It is a large-scale strategic approach to SEO based on your business goals and current SERP position.
It differs from traditional SEO in a more aggressive approach, for example, targeting highly competitive keywords (standard SEO prefers low-competitive ones).
How Do You Know If Your Company Needs Corporate SEO?
If you have a large site (from 100 pages), you are already ranking for low-competition, long-tail keywords. If you want to reach a new level using highly competitive short-tail keywords, you have a vision of business development and promotion, but you understand that standard SEO is not enough to implement the plans conceived, corporate SEO is definitely a suitable option.
It is generally accepted that corporate optimization is necessary for corporate companies. If you do not know what is an enterprise company and can count yourself among them, refer to the previous paragraph.
The website of a corporate company has a strong influence on brand reputation, requires process automation, as well as well-coordinated cooperation and well-built communication.
Why Is Enterprise SEO Important to Your Business?
1. High level of competition
Corporate websites and large businesses face significant competition challenges every day. In some niches, you have to compete with the sharks of the market. Even a small local business can take your place in the search results. You must admit that it is quite difficult to win the competition for a buyer from large competitors and marketplaces. Online shopping can generally be the cause of your long-term depression if you are a retailer. Brand awareness is also not enough for search engines to prioritize your company. Enterprise SEO can solve these problems with an aggressive strategy and a smart approach.
2. Increasing the interest of the team in SEO-promotion
When the reputation of your business and the main profit directly depend on the company’s website, each employee becomes more or less interested in SEO-promotion. It is important for account managers that they have established feedback from users. It will not work without page optimization.
Most employees are the driving or inhibiting mechanism for the daily work of promotion. When the roles are assigned, everyone knows their area of responsibility. They easily integrate into all processes and understand the vector of development of the company. This solves many problems. The systems approach and teamwork that are integral to corporate SEO can be one of the keys to success.
3. Difficulty making final decisions
When you have a site of thousands of pages on which a brand’s reputation is built, a thoughtless update or any change can lead to typhoons and total disaster. That is why it is better to make decisions about changes of any nature on corporate websites with the support of enterprise SEO agency specialists and after weighing all possible risks and consequences.
What Approaches and Strategies Are Used in Corporate SEO to Achieve Results
Let’s take a look at the main approaches and strategies that are used in corporate SEO to achieve their goals. They are distinguishing features from the standard SEO that we are used to.
1. Site analysis and competitor research
The first thing corporate optimization should start with is researching the competitive landscape and determining who will have to compete in the future. Site analysis goes hand in hand with competitor research. It is necessary to determine the main advantages and disadvantages of planning further work. Read the related article – SEO Competitive Analysis.
2. Optimization of site presence on the Internet
When the site is analyzed and competitors are identified, it is time for optimization. Check the meta tags, site architecture, general usability.
Recommendation: Automate the process.
Large sites require a lot of resources and most of the processes that cannot be done manually. Use enterprise SEO tools for each stage of SEO. For example, working with keywords is much easier using tools such as KeywordTool, Kwfinder, Ubersuggest, Keywords Everywhere, and Google Keyword Planner. Read the related article – How to Do Keyword Research.
You can audit content without unnecessary stress using Seoptimer, Woo rank, Seobility, or Screaming Frog. More information in the article – Website Content Audit. You will also need tools to work with data structuring, links, monitoring, determining the site load speed, etc.
For a complete list of useful programs see the article Top SEO Tools for Businesses in 2020.
3. Working with content
Content is an essential part of any promotion and corporate SEO is no exception. Creating high-quality and effective content that will help generate traffic to your website is another step that incorporates optimization.
The main mistakes when working with content are problems with targeting keywords and inconsistencies between content and search intent. Let’s look at ways for solving these problems.
Before you start building your content marketing strategy, think about the sales funnel, and analyze each of its stages based on the requests and interests of your potential client. Each level of the sales funnel requires a different interaction with the content. Be careful and consistent.
Quality content draws attention to relevant keywords and can help you rank for long-tail keywords. Read the related article – Long Tail Keywords: Secrets of Increasing Your Search Traffic. Consider creating your own blog filled with textual content and important visual information such as statistics, webinars, videos, and customer reviews. A blog will help maintain interest and answer questions from an existing audience, as well as attract a new one. Having a blog can make it easier to interact with online media and social networks. Don’t forget to make your blog with SEO in mind, add evergreen content, and have a plan for further development.
Duplicate content is a direct threat to your SEO efforts
On sites with a lot of pages, duplicate content is not uncommon. It prevents Google from indexing pages correctly and confuses search bots. As a result, SEO could be bad and degrade the user experience. To prevent this from happening, do a content audit to identify such pages and use a 301 redirect. Read related articles – Duplicate Content and 301 vs 302 Redirects.
Try to cover different types of content
Some people love to read, watch videos, or scroll through memes. All of these people can potentially be your customer. This means it is definitely not worth focusing on one type of content. Use all available resources, including podcasts, videos, e-books, and more. Remember that some of this content is evergreen. This means that over a long period of time, the specific needs of your existing audience and new customers will be covered.
Learn to correctly identify the intent of a search query and incorporate it into your SEO and content strategy
Please note that the buyer goes through several stages of forming a purchase intention, which means that you must provide them with your support at each of them. When they only realize their problem, look for ways to solve it. Compare products/services, compare companies, and decide to buy.
4. Selection of keywords
We already mentioned that corporate promotion is fundamentally different from traditional approaches to SEO, especially in the choice of keywords. At this stage, it is important to analyze the keywords used by competitors, those keywords for which you rank, and move towards a common denominator – determining and generating the most suitable list of keywords for you.
What must be kept in mind by the specialists working with keywords in your enterprise: search engines are constantly evolving and make every effort to ensure that users receive relevant search results for their searches.
What Does It Mean?
If earlier optimization for individual keywords worked well, then everything would change dramatically with the advent of the Hummingbird query architecture and the RankBrain machine learning algorithm. Search engines interpret the semantic relationship between words in a search query and the overall search goal. Read related articles – Algorithms That Affect SEO and RankBrain Google: The Definitive Guide.
So how do you deal with keywords in enterprise SEO?
Working with keywords begins with a detailed analysis such as identifying the pains of your customers, solving those pains, researching the competitive field.
The user does not always resort to a branded search. These are often requested to solve a problem This will be your first step in keyword research, the tip of the iceberg, and the potential chance of getting organic traffic – unbranded queries. Think about how your potential customer’s search path begins on the Internet, which, in the end, should lead them to purchase on your site.
Next comes the selection of keywords and phrases for your product pages. Work on a list of keywords that potential customers can use to find a product online.
The next ones on the list are keywords for a hyper-targeted audience that comes to the Internet with the specific purpose of buying your product. The indicator of successful work on keyword optimization and optimization is leading in positions for branded searches and ousting competitors from the first search page.
5. Working with press and links
An important hallmark of corporate SEO is building a good reputation for enterprise brands, in addition to basic tasks like ensuring a website’s presence on the Internet. We will definitely talk about this a little later.
An integral part of this promotion work is working with the media to get links such as running viral marketing campaigns, building long-term relationships, and getting feedback about you in various media resources.
Backlinks are an important part of any SEO but in the case of a large enterprise and a website, a few links will not give the expected result. Therefore, a certain strategy is needed that can provide a systematic approach and large volumes. More information can be found in the article – Build High-Quality Backlinks in a Scalable Way in 2020.
You need to think about who you can potentially work with, because “working with the media” is a generalized concept. List publishers, influencers, and partners can help you achieve your goal on mutually beneficial terms. Maintain existing contacts and do not forget about building new ones.
Publishers are usually pretty straightforward. They tend to be on the lookout for good content. This means you definitely have something to offer them, especially if you’ve done a good job optimizing your content and blogging. In exchange for content, you can get backlinks.
Before building relationships and talking about partnerships with publishers, study in detail the audience of their resources and the main weak points, analyze how they intersect with what you offer/produce. What needs of their audience you can cover, what to offer them, and how appropriate it will be.
The situation with influencers is more complicated: not all bloggers with millions of subscribers have an active audience and it is not always possible to get a decent result from advertising or interaction that you expect. You also need to consider the fact that in your niche, competitors of the company can go to the same people and this can become a big problem. In order for the interaction with influencers to be effective, you need to conduct research: look at the activity of their audience, what types of interaction get the most response (for example, giveaway or review), collect basic data on the audience. Do not write off microbloggers. They are much more effective in their niche and their audience is much higher in quality. A niche audience can also be one hundred percent hit where your product/service will resonate with users. Read the relevant article on the topic – Influencer Targeting and How to Use it for SEO.
Corporate partnerships are a goldmine of backlinks. This is probably the easiest way to get them through barter. For example, place a clickable logo of your partners on the site in the “Partners” section in exchange for the same on their site. You can add some imagination and make interesting collaborations. Team up with designers to create a guide on how to create the perfect New Year’s table with their crockery, or how to match crockery sets to suit your living style. No one is holding you back in this direction. Turn on your imagination and create something that will help not only get backlinks but also expand your audience.
Recommendation: Pay attention to affiliate programs.
A good way of additional promotion is by participating in affiliate programs that can help improve brand awareness or simply attract a new audience. Amazon has one of these affiliate programs: they actively invite influencers, bloggers, media, and brands to collaborate.
6. Evaluation of results
The final stage of implementing any strategy is evaluating its results. This involves testing conversion rates, optimizing investments, tracking their ROI, and a general analysis of all the work done with the site.
The results of the work do not tolerate abstraction and must be quantifiable. Only by having numbers in your hands and analyzing the process of introducing certain technologies, you will be able to conduct a comprehensive analysis (and subsequently a comparative analysis) of the results obtained and build a further strategy for the near future.
Impact of corporate SEO on brand reputation
Building and protecting brand reputation goes far beyond the site. When a customer has already heard about you and has the intention to study a product or service before buying, they turn to the Internet for help. This is where your site is the endpoint of the entire purchasing decision process. Branded searches can greatly affect the final of this decision. The user will read about you on Wikipedia, re-read reviews, look at the mentions in the media. If you dealt with only your site, the result may upset you.
What is the solution? You’ve probably already guessed it: control search results to protect capital and build a positive perception of your brand. It may sound a little unrealistic, but this is one of the key objectives of corporate SEO. If the results of the first page of branded search queries are 100% positive, the company’s revenue will increase significantly.
The branding strategy of large companies tends to be centered around the core brand values, identity, and positioning. Corporate SEO creates the visibility of a brand’s terms by increasing its online presence. Corporate promotion works well in conjunction with general PR, establishing relations with the media. The frequent mention of you and your products in leading publications will help you get closer to resolving the issue of positive search results for branded queries. Placing relevant keywords in the media also contributes to your PR ROI.
Keep in mind that brand reputation is just as important for B2B SEO as goodwill can have a profound impact on business partnerships.
Paid advertising and corporate promotion
When you want to be heard and noticed, paid online advertising is a good way to achieve this goal. The problem is that you are heard and seen only during the period while advertising is active. Therefore, large companies often have to allocate unreasonably large budgets for advertising. They see no other way out of the situation. There is actually a solution and it is quite obvious. Combining your advertising opportunities with corporate promotion. Advertising will be only part of the marketing strategy and you do not have to rely solely on its capabilities. This way you can increase the number of positions in the search results and spend the budget saved on advertising on other business needs. Read related articles – The Coordination of SEO and PPC to Improve E-commerce Results and SEO vs. PPC.
Interaction with social networks
You cannot underestimate the importance of social networks for business or completely forget about them in matters of building and protecting brand reputation. Corporate optimization implies strategic work on the representation of your brand in networks, interaction with partners, and opinion leaders. It can also help in building an audience, identifying potential or existing customers’ pain points, and interacting directly with them. Paid advertising on social networks can also give completely new positive results if you connect corporate SEO to it (we described how it works in the previous paragraph).
Integration of SEO into web development and UX
Imagine a terrifying situation. Your site was built without the ability to add new content to your product category pages. You invited the best enterprise SEO agency to work on website optimization and they gladly inform you about the need to break the code in order for you to be able to win the SEO battle with competitors. You probably won’t like all of this, but there will be no choice. To avoid such situations, it is better to integrate SEO into web development right away to improve search performance, improve usability, and increase engagement rates. The same goes for UX. If web development and UX work in harmony with corporate SEO, it will help make the brand as effectively as possible, and the site will be flexible and understandable. Always prioritize positive user experience.
Additional Guidelines for the Best Results in Corporate SEO
Establish a common workflow
At first glance, it may seem that you have well-oiled work and there is no need to fix something. However, make sure all departments follow the same system, are up to date on SEO strategy, and use the same tools. I think it’s not worth saying that everyone should have a certain area of responsibility. Everyone should be engaged in their own direction and at the same time, be initiated into all other processes. Do you think a content manager will be able to describe your product updates without having a well-established relationship with the web development department? Therefore, all employees should always be in the context of the company’s development process and understand where you are going. This also applies to SEO.
You can use dedicated business process management software, for example:
Conduct corporate training
A mistake when implementing corporate SEO can be very costly, both materially and morally, hitting brand reputation and budgets. Many employees of your company are involved in the promotion process. This does not mean at all that they are all well familiar with the nuances of SEO, in particular, corporate SEO.
Set aside budgets for training each such employee and believe that this investment will fully pay for itself. You can avoid many mistakes. Organize the process so that employees always feel supported and are not afraid to ask questions. You must agree that before making a rash decision, it is better to contact specialists in order to avoid unpleasant consequences. Determine the area of responsibility for each member of the team and explain the importance and value of the work. Maintain a friendly atmosphere and encourage mutual support within the team.
Use templates
In order to optimize processes on large sites, ask your development department to make templates that you can use depending on the needs of corporate SEO. For example, it can be templates for reporting analysis, content generation, and much more. This will make your life much easier.
Use automated reporting
We already mentioned that quantifiable reporting is an integral part of the entire corporate SEO process. Automate it to make it easier to interact with everyone who needs to receive and analyze it. Reporting will enable team members to always be aware of what is happening and plan their future work based on the results obtained.
The following online platforms will come to help in solving this issue:
Do not be afraid to seek help from specialists
Enterprise SEO can be a huge challenge for companies that have never gone deep into the optimization process and are not very good at it. Relying on your own strength is fine, but it is better to use specialists if possible. After all, you hardly know the specifics of enterprise search engines or can determine the vector of your optimization powered by SEO stats. Agencies and specialists providing enterprise SEO services will be able to provide a decent presentation of your enterprise on page and implement all the steps that we described in the article. Choose trusted people and companies and the result will not be long in coming.
Corporate SEO focuses on a holistic approach to creating quality content and optimizing website pages. When combined with targeted strategic outreach, this is a combination that has great results for increasing profits and improving brand reputation. The result of this optimization work is dominance among large and competitive headlines, improved ranking, and audience expansion. Implement corporate SEO and constantly work to improve it. You will not regret the invested effort and money.
