1 million URLs: How to pivot your SEO strategy when you reach enterprise level

“We don’t have enough content on the website. We need to publish 100 pages per month.”

That is typically what I hear from the C-suite and across departments when they hire an SEO director for the first time at an enterprise company. 

Content has long been considered the holy grail of SEO – continually sought after but difficult to grasp intent, relevance and trust. 

More content published doesn’t mean better rankings. Martin Splitt and Lily Ray debunked this myth advising not to produce content for the sake of producing content. 

So, when you get to the one million URLs, does your view on content frequency change? How do you maintain organic traffic increases without more content? And without an increase in organic traffic, how does more revenue come in from organic?

The truth is when it comes to enterprise SEO, if your work doesn’t improve the bottom line, then your SEO strategy needs a gut check. 

Your enterprise company now recognizes that SEO drives revenue. Seize the shift. 

There is a clear paradigm shift from small business SEO to enterprise SEO. It can often feel like an unwelcome sense of deja vu. The reality is when you get to millions of webpages; your SEO strategy needs to adapt. 

Also, the relationship between technical, content and backlinks is entering a new era. Page experience is here to stay.

Over the past few years, enterprise SEO professionals have been forced to tailor their strategies to focus more on content topical relevance and authority and improve Core Web Vitals. 

Luckily, if your enterprise company hired a director of SEO, they understand the importance of SEO for revenue. SEO is integrally connected to sales. 

Now is the time to create a new enterprise SEO strategy that balances short and long-term results. Think of this as an opportunity to be on equal footing as your marketing counterparts. 

As your mindset shifts from small business SEO to enterprise SEO, think about the entire funnel – from top to bottom – to create a holistic approach to SEO to support the different areas of business within your company. 

Segment your technical SEO audit by categories or business function

The transition from SEO to enterprise SEO can be a bit scary from a technical perspective. One small change can have a major impact on your revenue. 

This is what happened with Ryanair.

On the flip side, one small change to your page speed can have massive improvements across your entire website. 

EBay targeted its category pages for image optimizations and eventually trickled this down to all website pages. For every 100 milliseconds improvement in search page loading time, eBay saw a 0.5% increase in “Add to Cart” count.

Enterprise SEO professionals need to get away from top-level and understand the inner workings of a company’s org structure. 

As an enterprise SEO professional, your job is to respect and prioritize your technical SEO audits and roadmap based on categories or themes on the website or business function. 

When you begin to segment your technical SEO by your company’s org structure, you’re opening the door for a collaborative discussion across multiple departments.

For example, I’m working on an audit for a company that sells printers, sewing machines, scanners, label makers, etc.

The business has structured its org chart by business unit (BU). There is one department that supports printers. If I presented a technical SEO audit to the printer’s team about sewing machines, that would be a complete waste of time for those BU leaders. 

By sectioning your technical SEO based on BU, you can prioritize what’s most important to each. 

Audit content by type and department

When it comes to auditing and strategizing on your enterprise SEO content, you want to rinse and repeat how you segment your technical SEO. Stick to the auditing based on content type and company org chart. 

Remember, your value is created by a more holistic approach to content that drives last-mile decisions as opposed to a siloed approach. Utilize key stakeholders across teams to better understand pain points and see how you can help solve a problem with content. 

Then, you want to focus on the right content fueling the engine for each department.

Ola King said it beautifully.

Once you’ve identified the top-performing content, start establishing templates and documentation to replicate the process on a larger scale.

By supporting other department initiatives with your content, you create a true partnership that drives meaningful, high-value organic traffic. 

Leave the link building to digital PR and content distribution teams

Link building is dead. There I said it. 

Now before you start to troll me on Twitter, let me explain. 

Link building is dead at enterprise companies. 

Why? 

There are already multiple departments managing the link building work internally. 

The goal of enterprise SEO with link building should be more about collaboration across your org structure. 

I’m not alone in this ideation. See what Nick Wildson, CEO and founder of Torque Partnership, says. 

Think about it.

Your PR department is already doing link building by increasing brand reputation and guest posts for your CEO (or other department head). 

Under the PR department, you may have an Influencer or Ambassador Manager generating sponsored content and user-generated content. 

Your social media team is already repurposing your content into social media, even repurposing to the C-suite social channels. And the social team manages your YouTube or Google Profile. If you’re lucky, the social team also owns Reddit, Quora and Wikipedia. 

You want to create documentation and guidelines to support these department initiatives. You don’t have to own their strategies, but you can contribute to them with an SEO eye to establish guardrails. 

With that said, there are certain SEO link-building tactics like broken link building that should continue to be on your radar quarterly for quick wins. 

A solid enterprise SEO foundation is the key to scaling to one million organic landing pages

I noticed enterprise SEO professionals often ignore or don’t take the time to invest in foundational SEO. Even if it’s not sexy, foundational SEO will get you over the finish line.

Today, enterprise SEO leaders have an opportunity to connect the customer journey to the full-growth business plan. Your goals should be focused on scaling content and website performance in a more meaningful way for the customer.  

By building connective tissue across other departments, your enterprise SEO strategy will begin to get engrained into the culture and transform your company to be more competitive and unlock new levels of content creation, giving you center stage in the C-suite.

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