8 Critical Enterprise SEO Challenges (and Solutions to Overcome Them)

The demand for relevant, laser-focused SEO for enterprises is higher. As Google continues to roll out updates to help users find the right content on the web, there is more emphasis than ever on well-planned SEO tactics.

To succeed at enterprise SEO, you need to stay flexible, keep a level head, and plan for every contingency. Without a doubt, enterprise SEO challenges can trip up even the savviest of digital marketers. That being said, if you’re someone who cares about your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and keeping Google happy, then you’re likely to encounter one or more of these challenges.

However, the task of getting enterprise SEO right is a task that requires precision and effort. There are several hidden challenges that even seasoned SEO professionals run into—and they aren’t always aware of them either.

This blog post explores the most common SEO challenges for enterprises and what solutions you can implement to overcome them. Also, we have added first-hand expert comments brewed from the in-ground. Let’s read on.

Why is Enterprise SEO Challenging?

Enterprise SEO improves organic presence and revenue for larger organizations. The definition incorporates the planning and execution of the SEO tactics for a business with a massive number of pages on the site, irrespective of the workforce size. Usually, enterprise SEO is leveraged by the site belonging to businesses spread over multiple locations, eCommerce sites with 10k+ pages, and enterprise-grade businesses with several websites.

Enterprise SEO is the method of enhancing the search engine result of enterprise-level sites, i.e., sites consisting of thousands of pages. It is essential to have an SEO strategy in place to make the business discoverable and perform well in search engines.

There are several reasons why enterprise SEO may be more challenging than “normal” SEO.

• Enterprises have more complicated websites that need to be optimized for both search and internal user experience. 
• Enterprise websites often include multiple channels, such as email, web, and social media, which require different strategies to be implemented.
• The content on an enterprise website must be tailored specifically to the company’s needs and audience.

Despite these challenges, there are ways that enterprises can improve their SEO efforts to reach top results in search. These tips include implementing keyword research, writing relevant and quality content, Using optimized images, and monitoring your Rankings. These will lead to better results for your website in search and internal user experience.

While talking about the best entries SEO strategy, Brandon, Co-Founder of Nomad SEO, shared the notion that the best strategy for an enterprise SEO campaign varies depending on the specific business and its goals. Also, he emphasizes analyzing data and measuring results to make the necessary adjustments and ensure that your campaign is as successful as possible.

What Are the Critical Challenges for Enterprise SEO?

Doing enterprise SEO comes with critical challenges. When your business reaches a particular scale, gaining visibility and acquiring new customers organically becomes more difficult. It is a normal part of the growth cycle. However, it can be frustrating for your business if visibility and traffic are not improving as quickly as you would like.

Furthermore, Google algorithm updates are constantly changing how search results are ranked and displayed. If you aren’t aware of changes in advance, your website may temporarily decrease visibility or ranking impact. Keeping all these aspects under the radar let’s check out the 6 critical challenges of enterprise SEO:

#1. Mismatch Between SEO Tactics and Goals

When crafting a sound SEO strategy for your business, you need to be certain that the tactics you employ are all connected to your goals and objectives. While you may have already identified the main pillars of a successful online presence in your company’s strategy, things may have shifted elsewhere. Organizations often get assistance from SEO professionals who accompany them on their journey. 

A common SEO mistake is getting stuck on page-by-page optimizations from the start of the strategy. A good strategy should be looking at maximizing the breadth of targeting, which can slowly be built out as time goes on, with an eventual move towards a page-by-page focus, according to  Sam Partland, Enterprise & Programmatic SEO Consultant

#2. Inefficient Use of Crawl Budget

Under the vertical of the SEO goals in enterprise SEO, crawl budget optimization is a crucial technical challenge SEO experts have to deal with. Crawl budget of an enterprise SEO denotes the total pages of the site Google bot has crawled over a stipulated period. The equation here is Crawl Budget = Crawl Rate + Crawl Demand.

• When a site’s crawl budget is exhausted, Google bots stop crawling the pages of the sites. However, Google follows specific criteria when allocating the crawl budget for your sites, such as crawl health, popularity, content staleness, internal link building structures, and the limit set.
• It is a challenge for a site with multiple low-value-add URLs that negatively affects your site’s crawling and indexing. In addition, different URL combinations lead to onsite duplicate content or cannibalism and soft error pages.
• The soft error pages exhaust the crawl budget, as the bot spends much time on the page with less or no value, and pages that procedure value gets less time. It results in poor ranking and the reduction of set visibility. The issues are typically solved by creating 301 redirects pointing to the page(s) most relevant to your searcher’s query.

#3. Canonical Issues

The technical SEO of a site can be significantly influenced by the canonical tags that can be added to a web page to instruct search engines that the page is a subset of a different, primary page. They are an essential component as they can significantly influence the technical SEO of a website. Canonical tags are ‘hints’ rather than ‘directives,’ so search engines might not always respect each canonical tag you specify or ignore altogether.

• Having many identical or near-identical pages may be beneficial for sites. But having several near-exact versions of a page serves no purpose if those pages do not need to exist. In enterprise sites it is an issue since the site has a massive number of pages; when a canonical issue happens, Google crawls the pages in double the amount when your site has ten thousand pages.
• Utilizing tools such as Screaming frog helps in resolving the issue, these tools crawl your entire site and produce a list of all its URLs. Also, the site audit features SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to keep track of the duplicate content and canonical issues on your site.
• These tools produce an easy-to-understand report you can use to fix those issues. The problem can be resolved by implementing 301 redirects, or you can add canonical tags to the site’s pages.

#4. Pagination

Pagination is a commonly used tactic in SEO; in the approach, the product or content is classified across a series of pages. The product or the content is divided to make it easy to consume or to bring a more digestible format. 

Pagination is mostly used in category eCommerce sites, news sites or blogs, or forum threads. But pagination can harm page rankings, particularly for the deeper level page, if there’s a lack of a thorough understanding of the website’s link architecture. In addition, in pagination, the prime issue is duplicate content that brings adverse SEO effects. The inadequate canonical tags and paginated pages might create duplicate content. 

It may happen if you add self-serving canonical tags to individual paginated pages. It’s crucial to solve the issues and overcome them; you need to implement a similar canonical tag to the view all page to all paginated pages, and the prime page, i.e., the view All page, should consist of a self-referencing canonical tag.

#5. Inefficient Keyword Research

When it comes to keyword research, not taking time to identify the primary keywords your customers use to find your products or services is a faux pas. Take the time to pinpoint the words or phrases that they’re using to find those products or services. To succeed at SEO, you will need to ensure that you’ve done your keyword research in the right way.

Other mistakes that people make when doing enterprise SEO include not taking the time to properly research their keywords, not targeting enough keywords, and not using the correct keywords throughout their website, as the perspective shared by Brandon, Co-Founder of Nomad SEO.

• When you initiate crafting your keywords for the SEO strategy, you need to have an idea of your SEO goals and objectives in mind. Ensure to keep top-of-mind throughout the entire SEO process.
• To succeed at SEO, you will need to make sure that your SEO goals and objectives are clearly defined. Once you’ve got this down, you’ll be able to craft a sound keywords research tactic aligned to your SEO strategy that’s connected to your business’s goals and objectives.

#6. Duplicate Website Content

Content creation means, not creating content that’s unique to your site or blog, or proceeding with duplicate content is a cardinal sin. The content strategy will require you to follow the guidelines outlined in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The most challenging part of SEO is the wait. Sometimes an article can take 3-6 months before taking off. As long as you post genuinely great content on a consistent basis, your content will rank over time, said Filip Pejic, from Pearly

• You are required to make sure that you’re using unique URLs, avoiding the use of keyword synonyms, and making use of high-quality images. To succeed at enterprise SEO, refrain from creating duplicate content across your channels.
• Internal linking is vitally important to help control this and ensure minimal thin content pages are being indexed. Many enterprise SEO strategies that are being launched get launched with links pointing through to 0-result search result pages (SRPs).

Once these get indexed, it becomes much harder, later on, to clean them up and stop Google from accessing them. Keeping this in mind for launch will dramatically improve long-term performance, as shared by Sam Partland

#7. Inefficient Website Architecture

To succeed at SEO, you will need to ensure that your website architecture is efficient enough to allow your page load time to pass Google’s Quality Filter (QF) check. It will require you to step back and take a look at your website’s architecture to see if you can make any changes.

It is an ongoing process, especially in the beginning. Ascertain that your website architecture is efficient enough to allow your page load time to pass Google’s Quality Filter (QF) check.

While sharing the challenges, Rob Weatherhead, SEO Consultant, holds the notion that the biggest challenges come with explaining why a technical change needs to be made. Content changes are often more straightforward to understand, but technical changes can come with high costs and timelines, so convincing teams and stakeholders that they are important can be tricky.

#8. Scalability & Lack Of Resource

Scalability is another critical issue in an enterprise. When your site has ten thousand plus pages, building a framework for scalability becomes necessary, and you need to put the mindset of a C-suite. Technologies become impartial to scale the SEO activities. But enterprise SEO is expensive because it requires higher sophistication and resources.

• SEO success entirely depends on how you are putting some serious perspectives into your efforts. And it is an ongoing process that can’t be rushed, and without the proper resources, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to deliver your best efforts or if you don’t have the budget to work with. How much funding you’ll need is going to depend on several factors, including your industry and the success level of your competitors.
• Multi-department collaboration, freeing up the bandwidth for the core SEO challenges crucial to cross the faux passe. Automation and a user-friendly dashboard, and reliable reporting are necessary to keep the SEO efforts on track.

Generally, though, you’ll need to allocate some amount of budget to the SEO process each month. Additionally, SEO providers such as FirstPrinciples, who efficiently handle an enterprise client, often provide a more comprehensive range of services and expertise, which can be beneficial for large businesses with multiple websites or a complex online presence.

Bonus: Lack of User-Friendly UI/ UX

To succeed at enterprise SEO, you need to make sure that your website is easy enough to navigate. It requires keeping an eye out for issues with your website’s user interface (UI/ UX). The process includes making sure that the information displayed on your website is as accurate as possible and ensuring UI/ UX is clean and clutter-free. 

Unlike other aspects of digital marketing, your website’s UI/ UX is something you will need to keep in check from time to time. While you don’t want to make too many changes to the site design, you do need to make sure that it’s easy enough to navigate. It ensures that your users have an enjoyable experience when navigating your site and are therefore more likely to return.

How To Overcome Enterprise SEO Challenges?

If you already have a clear picture of your website’s current performance and your company’s goals, then it’s easier to figure out which SEO tactics are currently working and which aren’t. If you’re not sure about your specific metrics, try running a few tests to see what affects what.

• If your website isn’t ranking for the keywords you want, change your landing page or try tweaking your linking or content strategy. If you find a tactic that works well, make sure you focus on doing more of that and less on the other things.
• Overcoming the lack of in-house resources, outsource SEO experts to help with your SEO campaign. They can be a team of SEO specialists or consulting firms. It is crucial to hire someone who is an SEO expert and has experience working with enterprises.
• Both can help you promote your website and improve its traffic and rankings. Invest in the right tools and software to manage your SEO campaign. You can use blog software and social media tools to promote your website and attract more visitors.

At least two of your digital marketing channels need to be connected to deliver a cohesive, unified brand message.

• Incorporating design elements into your SEO campaign can help you achieve better rankings and improve your site’s overall user experience and retention.
• According to SEO experts, the most effective way to overcome inefficient keyword research is by using link building. The reason behind it is that when you use link building to get backlinks for your website, the website that provides the backlinks is likely to be more relevant and trusted than other websites. It helps you to achieve higher rankings for your keywords.
• The foremost approach you adhere to is to figure out the actual problem. Why do you think your keyword research is inefficient? What are you missing? Once you know the fundamental problem, you can figure out a solution. What are you missing? If you’re missing important data, opt for an SEO audit. SEO audit is crucial to keep your SEO strategy up, stay relevant in search results, and enhance your site visibility.  

How To Optimize Website Architecture?

There are diverse tips you can follow to improve your website’s SEO visibility through better website architecture:

• Use image alt tags: An image is one of the vital components of any webpage, so it’s vital to ensure it is optimized as much as possible. Web browsers and search engine robots use image alt tags to display the description associated with an image when someone looks for information about an object or person depicted in an image.
• The description should include not only the title of the image itself but also any descriptive phrases or other information about what is pictured in the image. This will help to improve your site’s SEO visibility.
•  Optimize images for size: When creating images for use on your website, ensure that you use high-quality images with large dimensions. Web crawlers will likely exclude images that are too small due to their low quality, which will negatively impact their visibility throughout your site’s content delivery network (CDN).
• If you change the size of your images while they are already in place on your site, they may be cached at their original size, which can result in poor loading time and page performance if they cannot be updated due to file size constraints.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to overcoming SEO challenges in an enterprise environment. However, there is a certain aspect you can opt for to minimize the impact of these challenges on your site’s performance:

Wrapping Up!

While doing enterprise SEO, identify the main differentiators between your products or services and your competitors.

• Make sure that the tone and attitude conveyed in all of these different touch points are aligned so that people know what kind of product/service they will be getting when they purchase from you.
• Also, make sure that all of these different touch points contain high-quality content relevant to your brand voice and the topic at hand so that search engines can appropriately rank it.

Lastly, to combat enterprise SEO challenges and to succeed, ensure a clear delegation of tasks for content writing, backlinking, technical SEO, and design. Leverage the google search console to speed up indexing; add the table of contents or TLDR section in your blog posts.

Set up a streamlined workflow with the developer to ensure schema tags are appropriately set up, religiously A/B test your CTAs, and break the monotony of content creation. Experiment with diverse forms, including GIFs, Videos, Podcasts, etc. A consistent brand voice is vital for building customer trust and credibility. It should reflect the brand’s values and personality and deliver a clear message about what the company stands for.