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 functionThe 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 departmentWhen 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 teamsLink 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 pagesI 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.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
New on Search Engine Land
About The Author
Anna Crowe is a Frank's Hot Buffalo sauce advocate (leading with obvious priorities), writer, marketer and SEO nerd. Over the last 12+ years, Anna has successfully run SEO and content programs for brands like Dollar Thrifty Rental, Marriott, Hilton, Hearst Magazine, Mailboat Records, Philip Morris International, Bloomin' Brands and Brother USA and many more. She enjoys burritos and puppies (in that order) when she's not moonlighting as a soccer coach. Https://annaleacrowe.Com/How To Create Captivating, Compelling And Optimized Content
We all know that “content is king.”
What many don’t understand is that for content to be king, it needs the support of its court.
To make the most out of your content strategy, it’s important for you to:
At this stage, you should have a comprehensive list of keywords. You should also have insights about your target audience, personas and buying cycle and what your competitors are doing.
Now it’s time to put that data to use.
In the planning stage, you’ll need to determine:
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When developing your strategy, make sure you develop different types of content for the different ways of learning that your audience personas may exhibit. Some may learn visually, others prefer videos, yet others might enjoy looking at infographics or images.
Here’s how you should conceptualize your topic clusters or content pillars:
Before developing content, make sure you have a style guide in place. For marketing agencies, this can be used as a library for assets: style guides, brand books, etc., provided to you by clients.
If you’re creating content for your own brand, this is where you can brainstorm your own style:
What are some interesting trends in your industry that might appeal to your target audience? You can supplement your editorial calendar with trending topic ideas by setting up keyword alerts or an XML feed of relevant industry sites.
Tip: Watch for new patents or studies being released in your space. If you find a new patent that can significantly impact your industry, translating it into “people-speak” can help you gain news coverage.
A fantastic tool for monitoring news and staying up to date with your industry is BuzzSumo:
You can filter by keyword, site or date and see which articles resonated the most based on social shares.
Create your editorial calendarNext, you can formulate topics and themes based on your topics, keywords and target persons. Mind mapping can help you organize your thoughts and create a strategy.
Next, map out your calendar by following these steps:
Here’s what it may look like at this stage:
Next, you’ll want to find out what channels present an opportunity and create content for each specific channel. Some of these channels and content types include:
Here’s what your editorial calendar might look like at this stage:
Your content cadence can help you determine what elements you use and how often. If you publish daily or multiple times a day, you can address all of your opportunity gaps faster than if you’re only publishing once a week or once a month.
The idea is to be strategic in the content you publish so it focuses on keyword gaps, your most devoted personas at their most advantageous stage in the buyer’s journey.
Having all the research handy can make your editorial calendar creation as simple as drag and drop!
When all of the elements are properly “framed,” it’s pretty easy to create appealing titles and to give your writers detailed descriptions to work with.
Manage your editorial calendarTo stay organized and strategic, you’ll want to include as much data as possible for each content piece. Here are some fields you should consider tracking:
Once you have all of these data points in place for each content piece, let’s look at your workflow.
Editorial workflowYour workflow will change based on your content type. If you are creating a long-form article that does not need to be reviewed by a client, your workflow could look this:
If you are creating a visual asset, such as an infographic, the workflow would require more steps and might end up looking like this:
As you go through the editorial process, ensure that you check the content for Readability level, use of keyword variants, topical entities and proper formatting such as header tags.
Content lengthHow long should your articles be? Is Google truly rewarding long-form articles? How can you determine how long each article should be?
When planning content length, it’s important to use a tool such as SurferSEO or Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant so you can map content length to the target query.
If someone searches Google for the question, “How tall is the Eiffel tower?” they probably don’t want to read a 5,000-word essay about the history of the Eiffel tower. They know exactly what they are looking for and want a quick, direct answer.
However, if your article is about “how real estate agents can get into the commercial auction field,” the person researching is more likely to want a detailed, comprehensive article and will be willing to read an ebook or a 3,000-word long-form article.
If you already use Semrush, the SEO Content Template or SEO Writing Assistant will allow you to search for a keyword and get an idea of what’s working in the SERPs for that particular query set, such as:
It’s ideal to use this data in the instructions given to your writing team for each content piece.
Beware the ides of duplicate contentBefore finalizing and publishing your content pieces, make sure there is no duplicate content used by your authors.
It’s human nature to give others the benefit of the doubt, but it’s important to make sure that the content you’re publishing is not duplicated elsewhere on your site or the web.
Two great tools to check for duplicate content are:
Sometimes, other sites scrape and publish your content on their sites after you publish. By running duplicate content checkers, you can identify those situations and request them to remove your content.
Adding internal and external linksMake sure all of your content pieces have links to other relevant pages of your own site within the body of the content. Internal, contextual links can help increase the topical relevance of your pages. Simultaneously, add links to authoritative external sources when it makes sense.
Publish your content piecesOnce your content pieces have gone through all the workflow steps and are approved, it’s finally time to get them live on your site!
When you upload to your CMS, verify that your content has all the proper tags in place and that you include the target keywords in your:
Also, make sure you assign your article to the most relevant category, which will help Google understand your site’s hierarchy.
Track your content piecesOnce you’ve published your content, create a reminder to check its performance after 30, 60 and 90 days.
This way, you can quickly identify pages that are not gaining traction and can work on adjusting the keywords or on-page SEO.
You can look at the metrics in Google Analytics and Google Search Console and change the date ranges to figure out how your articles perform.
Here are some of the elements you can review and track:
Many marketers believe that publishing an article is the end of the content creation cycle. In reality, the end of content creation is just the beginning of the content promotion stage.
Here are a few ideas for ways to promote your article after you hit publish:
Ideally, you should only create as many content pieces as you can promote.
As Google’s database becomes increasingly crowded, Google will continue to emphasize quality content, and getting your content promoted is key to standing out.
The days of spaghetti marketing are overYou can’t just throw a bunch of content at Google and hope a few stick. Instead, focus on being strategic and producing truly helpful, unique content differentiating you from your competitors.
The content creation journey is the glue that makes SEO stick. If your approach is strategic and focused on quality, the next stage, outreach, will happen naturally.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
New on Search Engine Land
About The Author
Marcela De Vivo is an industry veteran with more than 20 years of digital marketing experience, Marcela travels the world speaking about SEO, data-driven marketing strategies, and workflow automation and optimization. Marcela owns a digital marketing agency called Gryffin based in California.
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