SEO is a complicated and time consuming marketing practice, but well worth it in the long run for the return on investment.
It’s made even more complex with an enterprise company, since you have hundreds, thousands and sometimes even tens of thousands of website pages, over multiple domains, regions and languages, and a lot more keywords to keep track of and optimize. So you need to take a different approach to SEO than a smaller business would.
Using an enterprise SEO platform allows enterprise organizations to manage all of their keywords and on and off page SEO in one platform.
Better yet, having a company like Fishtank Consulting handle your enterprise SEO means you don’t even have to worry about using an enterprise SEO platform at all, and can just sit back, relax and watch your rankings increase without lifting a finger.
Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:
An enterprise SEO platform is a platform, software or tool that allows you to manage your SEO in one interface.
An enterprise SEO platform has built in SEO diagnostics and reporting for both on and off page SEO.
The diagnostic tools allow you to uncover errors and issues with pages and your website that could be impacting your search performance, and the reporting tools allow you to track your performance for different keywords.
Most enterprise SEO platforms offer a combination of the following tools:
However not all platforms will offer all of the tools mentioned above, so do your research and choose a platform that has all the tools that your business needs to successfully perform on and off page SEO.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most SEO platforms have a tiered structure, so you might have to pay more to get access to more features and tools, or to be able to publish a certain amount of reports or refreshes of data in a given timeframe.
Every business has unique needs when it comes to SEO.
These needs are usually based on aspects such as:
Make a list answering all the questions above, which should give you a pretty good understanding of what your business needs out of an enterprise SEO platform.
You can also weight each of the questions according to how important they are for your business. For example if budget or price isn’t a factor, then you can weigh this very little compared to making sure the tool has enough user seats for your team of 10, which is more important for your business.
Unless you have an agency like Fishtank monitoring your search performance for you, to succeed with SEO you need to track your performance consistently using an enterprise SEO platform.
This allows you to track your performance across the keywords you want to rank for and the ones you are ranking for already, to monitor any shifts and optimize where needed so you can reach your SEO goals.
Most enterprise SEO platforms have a high level of advanced reporting and analytics that you wouldn’t be able to track manually.
They allow you to compare your performance between two different dates, so you can see your movement up and down for particular keywords between different date ranges.
An enterprise SEO platform also allows you to track your website’s performance across technical SEO elements, providing diagnosis and making suggestions for elements that you should improve in order to reach your SEO goals.
These are all elements that would be difficult to try to track yourself, without an enterprise SEO platform.
Some of the elements SEO platforms track include:
The Site Health score is based on the number of errors and warnings found on your site, and their uniqueness. The higher the score, the fewer issues your site has, the better it is optimized for search engines, and the more user-friendly it is.
Crawl-ability refers to how easily search engines can crawl your site and discover your pages. A crawl-ability audit will look for whether your website has a sitemap, as well as which pages aren’t currently indexed, or able to crawled easily.
An audit also checks for the status codes of pages on your site. An example of these is a 404, the status code for a “page not found” error. When a 404 error occurs, this is a result of a link on the page being broken. This means that the page it’s linked to is no longer active. 404 errors are very detrimental for SEO, as are 500 errors and any other https status errors.
Page Experience is an important ranking signal that Google has announced in 2021. It collects data from the existing user experience metrics and takes one new one into account when ranking pages. The main factors included in the Core Web Vitals are:
The web page experience report looks at performance across different devices.
Slow rendering sites can cause users to leave your website. Having quick load times can improve traffic volume and increase conversion rates. Google analyzes your website’s speed as a ranking factor. An SEO technical audit should also analyze your site speed and whether your site speed is fast enough.
There is a limit of how much webpage content search engines can understand. By using structured markup you help search engines better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way.
The markup tells search engines information about the content on your page, which in turn can affect your rankings in SERPs and improve the domain authority of your website.
An SEO technical audit should identify which pages aren’t using schema/structured markup that should.
A robots.txt file lets web-crawling spiders know which pages they can and cannot crawl. These crawl instructions are specified by “disallowing” or “allowing” the behaviour of certain (or all) spiders. A technical SEO audit will look for whether your website has a robots.txt file and what pages are included in the file.
An SEO audit should identify which pages contain identical content and need a canonical tag.
Webpages are considered duplicates if their content is 85% identical. Having duplicate content may significantly affect your SEO performance.
Google will typically show only one duplicate page, filtering other instances out of its index and search results, and this page may not be the one that you want to have in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
In some cases, search engines may consider duplicate pages as an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings and, as a result, your website may be downgraded or even banned from search results.
If you have a web page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (i.e. separate mobile and desktop versions or http and https), you should specify which URL is authoritative (canonical) for that page.
A tag is a short summary of a webpage's content that helps search engines understand what the page is about and can be shown to users in search results.
Duplicate meta descriptions on different pages is a lost opportunity to use more relevant keywords. Also, duplicate meta descriptions make it difficult for search engines and users to differentiate between different webpages. It is better to have no meta description at all than to have a duplicate one.
Meta descriptions are used by search engines to display your page's description in search results.
A good description helps users know what your page is about and encourages them to click on it. If your page's meta description tag is missing, search engines will usually display its first sentence, which may be irrelevant and unappealing to users.
An SEO audit should inspect whether your site contains missing meta descriptions as well as missing title tags.
A title tag is a key on-page SEO element. It appears in browsers and search results, and helps both search engines and users understand what your page is about. If a page is missing a title, or a title tag is empty, Google may consider it low quality.
Duplicate title tags make it difficult for search engines to determine which pages are relevant for a specific search query, and which ones should be prioritized in search results. Pages with duplicate titles have a lower chance of ranking well and are at risk of being banned. Duplicate title tags should be identified in a technical audit.
Most search engines truncate titles containing more than 70 characters. Incomplete and shortened titles look unappealing to users and won't entice them to click through to your page. This is identified in an SEO audit.
Generally, using short titles on web pages is a recommended practice. However, keep in mind that titles containing 10 characters or less do not provide enough information about what your webpage is about and limit your page's potential to show up in search results for different keywords.
t is not a good idea to duplicate your title tag content in your first-level header. If your page's title and h1 tags match exactly, the latter may appear over-optimized to search engines. Using the exact same content in titles and headers means a lost opportunity to incorporate other relevant keywords for your page. This is identified in an SEO audit.
While less important than title tags, h1 headings still help define your page's topic for search engines and users. If a h1 tag is empty or missing, search engines may place your page lower than they would otherwise. Besides, a lack of an h1 tag breaks your page's heading hierarchy, which is not SEO friendly.
You shouldn't use more than one h1 tag per page. An SEO audit should check for this.
In order for URLs to be SEO friendly, they should be clearly named for what they are and contain no spaces, underscores, or other characters. You should avoid the use of parameters when possible, as they are make URLs less inviting for users to click or share.
A link profile is the number of websites that link to your site. The best practice is to count the number of root domains that lead to your page. So if two pages on the same site lead to milliman.com, that counts as one linking root domain. The more linking root domains you have, the more authority your site will have, potentially leading to better organic performance.
Authority Score measures the impact of a webpage’s or domain’s links. Authority Score is the compound domain score that grades the overall quality of a website by looking at metrics like backlinks, referring domains, organic search traffic, and other data. The higher the score, the more assumed weight a domain’s or webpage’s backlinks could have.
Website distribution shows how many clicks it takes to get to a page on your site from the home page. Typically, better performing pages are closer to the homepage, with deeper pages acting as supporting content.
Pages with a crawl depth of "4+" are less likely to be crawled by search engine robots or reached by a user.
A website’s Toxicity Score is based both on the number of toxic backlinks leading to the website and the importance of discovered toxic markers. Toxic backlinks come from external sites that commonly display signs of low quality or an attempt to manipulate search rankings. Some examples of toxic markers are backlinks that come from sites that have been set up only for the purpose of linking out, come from sites and content that aren’t topically relevant, or come from sites that aren’t indexed by Google.
If you’re doing your keyword research in-house, you definitely need an enterprise SEO platform.
SEO platforms offer tools to conduct keyword research that show you what keywords you should be ranking for based on your products and services, as well as keyword variations from suggestions you provide.
The keyword suggestions also provide you with a keyword difficulty score that shows you how difficult it is to rank for that keyword, as well as monthly search volume numbers, CPC ad cost, and more. The more advanced platforms also show you questions that people also ask related to your keyword, as well as the pages that are currently ranking.
Enterprise SEO tools allow you to track your backlink profile - one of the most underutilized SEO aspects.
Your backlink profile is the combination of backlinks that link to your website.
The higher quality these backlinks are, the more trustworthy your website is in the eyes of Google.
The combination of quantity and quality of backlinks is measured using a score called domain authority, that enterprise SEO tools allow you to track.
You can also compare this to your competitors, and see a huge amount of in-depth competitor information such as the exact backlinks their site has, the keywords they’re ranking for (and the ones you’re not) as well as their analytics data.
Some enterprise SEO platforms also offer competitor data. This means that you can type in a competitor’s URL (or the tool will suggest competitors for you), and it will compare your website with your competitors’ sites on everything from keyword gaps, to analytics performance, backlink performance and keyword performance.
While an enterprise SEO platform certainly makes life easier than trying to complete technical audits, on-page analysis, keyword research and reporting without an enterprise SEO platform, it still requires a lot of work to manage the tool and also to do the optimization work.
In the end, for most enterprise organizations it’s more worth their money and time to hire an experienced agency that specializes in enterprise SEO, like Fishtank Consulting, to manage their SEO for them.
Our enterprise SEO package covers all aspects of SEO, so you can sit back, relax, take all the credit, and watch your rankings increase while we do all the hard work - from optimization and copywriting, to handling the reporting, keyword research and site audits.