Enterprise organizations succeed at SEO by following gold standard practices that cause all websites to attract the attention of their target audiences despite complex web architectures, a high number of pages, multiple business units, and complex data analytics.
In this guide, we outline the five essential components of a successful enterprise SEO strategy, as compiled by our Enterprise SEO department over the last 5 years.
The 5 Components of Enterprise SEO Strategy
- Establish clear and measurable SEO goals
- Build an editorial calendar based on the Hub & Spoke model
- Create thought leadership content for each keyword
- Repurpose SEO content for multiple channels
- Measure & attribute results to inform adaptations
Establish Clear & Measurable Campaign Goals
Before you can craft a successful SEO strategy, you need goals to inform your keyword selection and help you identify the most advantageous channels. Because enterprise businesses often have established lead-gen pipelines, their goals are more diverse. The most common enterprise SEO goals are displayed below:
| Brand | ||||||
| Brand Awareness | Brand Health | Search Visibility | Website Maintenance | |||
| Increasing the space your company occupies in audience members’ minds | Promoting positive consumer attitudes about your company | Increasing your website’s SERPs for valuable keywords | Ensuring visibility and appeal by keeping a fresh, updated website | |||
| Lead Generation | ||||||
| Generating Leads | Driving Conversions | Omnichannel Promotion | Overcoming Competition | |||
| Delivering helpful, informative content that invites consideration | Helping prospects move down the funnel | Driving business from online to offline and vice versa | Outranking competitors and converting more searchers | |||
| Customer Engagement | ||||||
| Sustaining Engagement | Social Sharing | Thought Leadership | Attention Share | |||
| Making insightful points and keeping content interesting | Increasing brand health while discussing trending topics | Directing the conversation in your field | Increasing the percentage of industry conversation that is about your company | |||
| Sales | ||||||
| Sales Tools | Client Onboarding | Organizational Efficiency | Innovation | |||
| Developing in-depth sales tools such as product demonstrations and features comparisons | Developing materials to help new users get the most from your product | Answering questions to reduce customer service burdens | Collaborating with customers/partners to create unique offerings | |||
Prioritize your targeted goals into tiers based on how critical they are in determining the campaign’s success, with Tier I representing “must-haves,” Tier II “nice-to-haves,” and Tier III “bonuses.” While multiple goals can reside within each tier, be careful not to dilute your content focus by stacking too many divergent goals.
Next, identify the metric you will use to determine campaign success relative to each goal. Some metrics, like lead generation and conversion, will be straightforward, while others, like brand health and innovation, will be less obvious. When analyzing more ambiguous goals, consider your business and industry carefully and determine the best way to measure success for your use case.
Build an Editorial Calendar Based on the Hub & Spoke Model
Once you have established SEO campaign goals, you can dive into the campaign development process. The best way to begin is to:
- Research highest-value keywords for your goals
- Organize keywords into clusters using the Hub & Spoke model
- Order keywords based on overall value
- Create a regular publishing schedule based on value rank
Research High-Value Keywords for Your Goals
When deciding what keywords to target in your campaign, align search intent with your marketing goal to determine the purpose of each piece of content. “Search intent” refers to implicit motivation, need, or desire that guides a user’s search query and can be categorized as follows:
| Search Intent | Use Case | Keyword | Content Type |
| Buy | Searcher is looking to buy a product | VPS hosting free trial | Product page |
| Commit | Searcher is reviewing products before sale. | best VPS hosting provider | Landing page or review |
| Evaluate | Searcher knows they will buy something, but they don’t know what | VPS hosting features | Landing page/Super landing page |
| Solve | Searcher is looking for the solution to a specific problem | how to migrate to VPS hosting | Blog post |
| Clarify | Searcher wants to find out more about a problem they don’t understand | VPS hosting vs web hosting | Blog post |
| Explore | Searcher wants to expand their knowledge of a topic | VPS hosting advantages and disadvantages | Case Study or white paper |
| Learn | Searcher is looking for general information on a topic | VPS hosting | Hub page |
Pay particular attention to how each long-tail keyword aligns with the search intent category and constellates around one core keyword, “VPS hosting.” This alignment is purposeful, and it introduces our next topic: the Hub & Spoke model.
Organize Keywords into Clusters Using the Hub & Spoke Model
The Hub & Spoke model is an SEO campaign structure that organizes all keywords into broad “hubs” and the more specific “spokes” within those hubs. In our example, “VPS hosting” represents the hub keyword, and the long-tail keywords are its spokes. Each hub and spoke has its own page. The hub is typically a long, authoritative page that links out to individual articles for each of the spoke keywords. An example of this structure for the hub “VPS Hosting” is shown in the image below:
Content crafted for each spoke should be based on the user’s search intent. A “hub page” can then be created to cover the broad hub keyword and present a holistic overview of the subject while providing links to each of the spoke pages.
Aligning your editorial calendar with a Hub & Spoke keyword strategy will help ensure your content covers the hubs as exhaustively as possible, improves brand authority, widens the net you cast for new readers, and enhances your Google Search rankings. And in doing so, you’ll create a simple path for readers to access the information they are seeking about your industry, product, service, or business without having to leave your site.
Order Keywords Based on Overall Value
After selecting your hubs and mapping out spoke keywords, the next step is to prioritize each keyword based on how much impact ranking for that keyword will have on your enterprise’s goals. At the beginning of a campaign, this will be a ballpark estimate based on each keyword’s inherent transactionality and its estimated search volume. Later in your campaign, these rankings should be adjusted based on empirical data such as which keywords have generated the most interest in the form of backlinks, shares on social media, and email clicks, as well as whether or not it has led to qualified leads for your business.
Create a Regular Publishing Schedule
Ranking your keywords in this way not only helps your team prioritize which keywords to create content for first, but also which keywords will benefit the most from regular updates. Your schedule for both publishing new content and updating existing content should be organized into an editorial calendar that lays out each keyword and its value rank, ideal page type, site location, publish/last updated date, and content plan as shown in the example below:
| Value Rank | Keyword | Page Type | Last Updated | Page Location | Content Plan |
| #1 | “vps hosting” | Hub | 5/5/2023 | Link from header nav under “Specialties” as “VPS Hosting” | Comprehensive descriptive page introducing searchers to how VPS hosting works, benefits and expected cost, and options for migrating from self hosted, with links to 8 supporting “spoke” pages in “further reading” box at bottom. |
| #2 | “vps hosting services” | Service Landing Page | 5/9/2023 | Linked from header nav under “Services” as “VPS Hosting Services” | Sales landing page containing a quick value statement at the top; validation logos; a How it Works diagram; and a brief deeper dive into Next Steps with CTAs |
| #3 | “vps hosting company” | Service Landing Page | 5/12/2023 | Included in title tag of “VPS Hosting Services ” Sales LP above. | Same as above. |
| #4 | “vps hosting companies” | Comparison Table Blog | 5/15/2023 | Linked from header nav under “Resources” as “The Best VPS hosting Companies of 2021” | Comparison blog with featured table comparing 5 semi-competitors to client + client along the X axis, and various categories along the Y axis, e.g. Packages, Pricing, Notable Clients, etc + a 1-5 star score. Below table, companies are described more fully, along with Pros and Cons, in dedicated sections below. |
| #5 | “vps hosting benefits” | FAQ Blog | 5/18/2023 | Linked from blog grid only as “What are the Benefits of VPS Hosting?” | List page: Immediate pros/cons list at top, followed by explanation of which companies it’s right for; companies it’s wrong for; a process diagram; and a How to Get Started section leading to a CTA. |
When creating your publishing schedule, plan to publish at least twice a week on a consistent basis, as consistent publication of high-quality content is the largest single factor in Google’s algorithm.
Create Thought Leadership Content for Each Keyword
After you’ve built an editorial calendar, you can begin to create content. Achieving a high Google ranking, and therefore high CTRs and organic traffic, requires that each page you create:
- Quickly and clearly answer the search intent implicit in the keyword
- Demonstrate expertise by explaining complex concepts to your readers
- Be organized in a skimmable structure through its formatting and visual design
- Include tables and graphics that engage the reader and help present unique information in an easily digestible format
- Use the correct tone and jargon to signal to your reader that content is relevant and written by an industry insider
These five guidelines will help your team to create excellent content for each keyword, but for a more in-depth discussion refer to our guide on How To Write The Best SEO Content.
Repurpose SEO Content for Multiple Channels
While the high-quality content required for effective enterprise SEO is indeed time and resource intensive, that same content can be repurposed for use in multiple different channels to increase the efficiency of your overall marketing spend. One of the best ways to do this at an enterprise level is to invest in creating highly detailed research reports that can be portioned out across multiple channels, as shown in the below image:
This concept can also be applied to smaller pieces of content. For instance, a blog article created for SEO can be revised to become a script for video marketing; likewise, key points from a white paper can be condensed to share on social media. By repurposing in this way, you can create more reach for each individual piece of content they create, build engagement across channels, and increase the overall perceived authority of your brand.
Measure & Attribute Results to Inform Adaptations
Few strategies survive contact with the real world, and the final element of enterprise SEO is to regularly adjust your campaign based on key metrics. The table below shares common SEO KPIs and benchmarks for each.
| KPI | Benchmark | |
| ROI | Year 1 | 160% |
| Year 2 | 861% | |
| Year 3 | 1,223% | |
| 3-Year Average | 748% | |
| Bounce Rate | 36% | |
| Average Session Duration | 3:36 | |
| # of Autofill, Transactional Keywords on Page 1 | 91% growth year-over-year | |
| Pages Per Session | 2.2 | |
| Conversion Rate (Visitor-to-Lead) | 2.4% | |
| % Change in Organic Traffic | 47% growth year-over-year | |
By tracking your performance over time across each of your chosen metrics, your team will be able to identify opportunities to further optimize content and adjust your campaign as necessary. This is one of the most important aspects of a long-term successful SEO campaign.
Outsourcing Enterprise SEO
Even for many enterprise-level businesses, SEO can be a challenging marketing channel to use effectively. Internal experts are often needed for active R&D, and most in-house marketing teams are more comfortable utilizing paid ad campaigns. As a result, many enterprises choose to outsource their SEO campaigns to an experienced partner.
At First Page Sage, we specialize in working with enterprise-level firms and bring a proven track record of delivering high-ROI SEO strategies to enterprise businesses. If you’re interested in learning more about a partnership, you can contact us here.
