Enterprise SEO Best Practice Tips

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

While the rules and guidelines of white hat SEO should apply to every website no matter how big or small it is, getting the SEO ball rolling in a large company is often a lot harder than when working with a small to mid-size company. As an SEO provider, the most challenging part about working with a large company is that it takes forever to get things approved. There is a much larger chain of command to work through and the person I directly report to isn’t usually at the top of that chain. It turns the enterprise SEO process into a very complicated situation very quickly.

Here are 4 best practice tips to help streamline your enterprise SEO:

1. Have one person serve as liaison with the SEO provider.
The challenge with enterprise SEO is that there are too many chefs in the kitchen. And while everyone in your company has a role to play in your site’s SEO success, that doesn’t mean that every player needs to be present at every meeting. Does your IT director need to sit in on the link building campaign planning meeting? Does your social media manager need to weigh in on the keyword selection process? Instead of bringing everyone to the table for every step of the process, appoint one person to head up the SEO meetings and rally the necessary troops at each step.

2. Get your marketing sh*t together!
Pardon my language, but SEO is not a Band-Aid to fix the shortcomings of your marketing plan. I can’t tell you how many meetings I have had with larger companies and the person on the other line didn’t have a clear understanding of what direction the marketing plan was taking. They couldn’t give me an outline of their competition or even strongly define their unique selling point! Larger companies need to make sure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to their marketing or risk having the wrong information passed along to your SEO provider.

3. Be creative with your topics.
Your industry is only as boring as you make it out to be. Every business has a story to tell and you don’t want yours to be flat and dull! I see this happen a lot with B2B companies. They don’t feel like their brands are as “exciting” or “fresh” as B2C products, and that attitude is reflected in their content marketing. Don’t be afraid to inject some personality into your writing and have fun with it! People want to do business with other people, so personality will carry you a long way.

4. Understand who is implementing the changes to your site.
A former client accidentally undid all of the on-site changes it had taken me close to 20 hours to make because they didn’t inform their hosting company that changes were going to be made. The hosting company thought someone was messing with their site without my client’s knowledge and undid my changes. It doesn’t matter if you are handling the changes in-house or leaving it up to your SEO provider, just make sure everyone knows what is going on and when it should be going live.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to communication! It is not the job of your enterprise SEO provider to play the politics of your company. Make sure you have everything in order on your side of the partnership before hiring an SEO firm and you’ll have a much smoother process.