Semalt: Possible Reasons Why Enterprise SEO May Not Perform As Expected




Having a business can be tough. It feels frustrating when you put in all your effort with the hope of getting a particular result only to see that it fails to meet that expectation. 

Luckily for you, with SEO, we have a sense of what may be going wrong. When your enterprise SEO fails to meet its projected performance, it usually has something to do with the content, page experience, technical, or your site's authority. 

Having an enterprise-level website usually means you have hundreds of landing pages. This is a lot of content for Google to find, crawl, index and rank. With so many web pages to build and optimize, it is easy for an SEO enterprise plan to go off track. Also, we have to remember that several stakeholders need to sign off on these plans. All of this contributes to creating enterprise SEO challenges. But it doesn't have to be that way, and we will show you how.

What Is Enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO is a term we use to refer to the size of an organization and the size of its website. As you must have noticed, large businesses usually have large websites, with wider market share, more authority and they are more famous. 

But is it impossible for small businesses to own larger websites? No. Small businesses can not only own, but they also enjoy certain benefits when they approach their SEO strategy from the angle of an enterprise. 

Does Your Business Need An Enterprise SEO Strategy?

Not everyone wants to try out enterprise SEO, but some websites absolutely need it. If your business meets the following criteria, you need to have an enterprise SEO strategy:
  • Large size: Websites with a high amount of landing pages or websites that are owned by a large company or organization. 
  • Wide Reach: If the website serves national or international markets and if it has a big market share.
  • Brand Recognition: If the website has a well-established brand that is seen as an authority in the industry. 

Common Reasons Why Your Enterprise SEO May Be Underperforming

There are many possible reasons why your enterprise SEO may be underperforming. But it ultimately leads to an issue in one of these key four areas: 
  • Content 
  • Technical aspects 
  • Site authority 
  • Page experience 
When you know what to do and how to do it right, enterprise SEO shouldn't be a problem. By being conscious of these high-level ranking factors, we have an idea of what to search for when diagnosing an enterprise website. 

Fixing Up Your Content

Google is continuously evolving and figuring out better ways to understand content relevance and quality. However, having a large website comes with certain challenges that make it more difficult to produce high-quality content. When you need just twenty high-quality content, it's not so difficult to handle, but in the case where you have a million pages that need content, you notice just how difficult it can be. 

In order for all your web pages to rank, you need quality content that is in-depth and original. They should also attract and keep the attention of your audience with good media and proper content structure as well as other components that make them stand out. 

Here are some tips you can use if any of your landing pages fail to measure up to Google's standards. 
  • Invest in content optimization software. These are easy to use tools that can help improve your topical depth. 
  • Improve your information architecture. Using interactive design features has proven to be quite useful in this area. Visual cues like images and videos are a great place to start.
  • Outsourcing your content creation. Many times, companies are too busy producing to focus on creating content. And considering that they may not have the professionals or the knowledge to produce content on a large scale, it is wise to outsource. Professional content writers live to create content that makes them better and more efficient. 

Optimizing For Wrong Keywords

There are cases where a webpage rank but doesn't attract any traffic or convert any of its traffic. It is possible that there is a disconnect between your target audience and the keywords you optimize for. We've encountered cases where the enterprise SEO was built around keywords that no one searched for or the keywords were too competitive. 

This is one of the reasons why we always advise our clients to blend their keyword targeting approach. There should be a combination of short and long-tail keywords in your list of target keywords. 

The landing page should also target keywords with low competition as well as keywords that are likely to become highly competitive in the future. 

Too Many Low-Quality Pages In Google's Index

Due to its large size, enterprise websites often get indexed as low-quality pages in Google's index. Your website has a crawl budget, and when you waste all of that on low-quality pages, Google assumes the remaining pages on your site are of low quality. 

Especially for enterprise SEO, thin or low-quality pages are inevitable. It's something every large website has. However, they should be kept at the barest minimum. You can also prevent such pages from getting indexed in place of your top-quality pages.

Here are steps you should take:
  1. Add "no index; no follow" robot tags to those pages.
  2. Prune the web pages with low organic traffic and organic search. It would be best if you then redirected PageRank to pages you feel more confident of.

Too Many Similar Web Pages

Cannibalizing is common when you have too many pages. Over time, you begin to have content that looks too similar. When you have a lot of web pages with similar content, you won't be competing with just your competition but also with yourself. 

Keyword cannibalization is a situation where multiple pages on your site rank for similar or the same keywords. This forces a division in the amount of traffic that goes to each page. 

To fix this issue, you can either optimize those pages for different keywords or add rel canonicals. 

Webpages That Haven't Been Optimized To Convert Traffic

If your enterprise website earns you new keyword impressions, rankings, impressions but not conversions, consider remaking your CTA and the user's journey. To convert an audience, you need a call to action. CTAs tell your readers what action to take after viewing your content. 

Here are some conversion optimization ideas:
  • Make your submission forms simple and keeps only relevant fields 
  • Have a chatbox on your site 
  • Give readers / viewers multiple chances to convert. There should be more than one CTA in your content
  • Sticky banners are an interesting feature for mobile users 

Final Notes

Any SEO plan requires trial and error. You will try many strategies, and some will fail. It is important that you do not lose faith and you continue making small changes. Measure how much impact these changes have and redeploy the most effective strategy. 

This strategy gets you the most effective enterprise SEO campaign that will deliver more consistent results. 

Our services here at Semalt helps businesses like yours stay on top. Our teams ensure your SEO strategy is successful. To find out more, kindly contact us.