CONTENTS 1 WHAT IS ENTERPRISE SEO?

2 WHY MARKETERS NEED AN

ENTERPRISE SEO PLATFORM
SEJ PARTNER

3 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

4 THE 4 PILLARS OF
ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

5 HOW TO PLAN YOUR

ENTERPRISE SEO STRATEGY

6 6 ENTERPRISE SEO STRATEGIES & TACTICS

THAT REALLY WORK
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 7 LOCAL SEO FOR ENTERPRISE SITES
FROM 2004 TO DATE

8
CONTENTS
END-TO-END SEO:
5 STEPS FOR ENSURING YOUR
ENTERPRISE GETS IT RIGHT
SEJ PARTNER

9 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING

BEST PRACTICES

10 BRAND EQUITY:
THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

11 THE TOP 4
ENTERPRISE SEO PLATFORM TOOLS:
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

12 PARTNERING WITH AN ENTERPRISE

SEO AGENCY: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

13 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:

VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL
51% of the pages
on enterprise sites are
to Google.
Challenge accepted.

Enterprise SEOs (hey, that’s you!) who work on solving this problem
for the largest, most complex sites on the web deserve:

• Crawls that take hours, not days, to complete

• Visibility into all your SEO data, from log files to rankings
• Time & sanity-saving issue prioritization and alerts
• Autonomy to make changes without waiting on other teams

That’s Botify.

Learn more at

Botify.com
 1

WHAT IS
ENTERPRISE
SEO?
AUTHOR
ANNA CROWE
 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

More pages, more visibility, more problems. SEO can be challenging

enough, but when your pages and links number in the thousands or
even millions, it’s a whole new ballgame.

The stakes are higher, and there are more internal stakeholders to
satisfy.

Successful enterprise SEO makes a website eclipse the competition

in its category and improves online brand perception.

On the flip side, enterprise SEO failures can have a substantial impact
on revenue and brand reputation.

A major news story can send a flood of traffic to your site. A

technical issue can tank your products’ ranking in search results.

Plus, there are challenges that are just a matter of scale. An

acquisition can add thousands of pages (and all the problems that
come with them) to your site overnight.

And that’s what sets enterprise SEO apart. The sheer scale and
impact of the site’s performance require skills that go well beyond
traditional SEO.

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 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

WHAT IS AN ENTERPRISE SITE?

There’s no general consensus on what makes an enterprise site.

But the common thread is that the number of pages on the site, and
the impact they have on revenue and the company’s reputation, are
key identifiers.

One school of thought says it’s all about the size of the site. A high
volume of pages (1,000+) and brand authority are determining factors
for an enterprise site.

A small business like MarketingProfs has less than 50 employees but

thousands of pages on its site. Plus, it’s seen as a leading authority for
marketing thought leadership.

By this logic, it’s an enterprise site.

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 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

There’s another school of thought that says enterprise sites are

determined by the size of the organization working on the site.

The logic behind this line of thinking is that, if a business needs a

big team to maintain its site, then the site must be important for
generating revenue and brand recognition.

Regardless of what school of thought you fall under, all enterprise sites
have some things in common:

The impact of the website on the business’ bottom line and

reputation

The level of project management and collaboration required to

maintain the site

The level of automation needed to perform tasks across

thousands or millions of pages

WHY ENTERPRISE SEO MATTERS

TRADITIONAL FIXES DON’T ALWAYS WORK
Enterprise sites are sometimes plagued with problems that seem like
obvious, fixable issues. But their complexity makes these “simple”
issues much more difficult to fix.

Making changes is like turning a ship.

For instance, you may be tempted to create new pages to replace

legacy content.

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 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

But you have to consider how those changes will affect the backlinks
and domain authority those pages have acquired over time.

That’s the double-edged sword of an enterprise site. They often enjoy

all the perks of amazing brand authority.

But they have to be careful not to undermine it while keeping content

and SEO fresh.

Sometimes the barrier to change is organizational. It often takes

resources from IT, marketing, product, and subject matter experts to
execute content improvements.

Enterprise SEOs have to be able to demonstrate the business case for

the resources and time needed to make changes.

Another hurdle can be the sheer volume of pages, links, or technical

issues that need to be addressed. This is often the case with sites that
have a long history.

Depending on the issue, and the circumstances behind it, the cure may
be worse than the disease.

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 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

INTERNAL COLLABORATION IS CRITICAL

When a business revolves around its website, there’s bound to be more
cooks in the kitchen.

It’s not uncommon to work with stakeholders from purchasing to

public relations to maintain an enterprise site.

The site doesn’t just affect the bottom line. For some employees, it has
a direct impact on their job performance.

A category manager in purchasing has

a personal stake in whether pages
are optimized for her products.
A PR director wants to make
sure his press releases are
ranking properly in search.

And on the other

hand, there may be
stakeholders whose
actions (or inaction)
have an impact on the
site’s performance, but
they don’t understand the
ramifications.

Both challenges require a

collaborative, proactive approach
to SEO.

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 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

COMPETITION IS STIFF
Enterprise sites have to compete with other well-known brands that
have sophisticated SEO.

Take Airtel for instance. The company is a leader in the telecom space,
but it couldn’t crack the top three search results because both national
and local competitors were one step ahead of them.

It took an enterprise SEO strategy – which included optimizing content

for 2,000+ keywords and 440 local sites – for the company to beat out
its competitors.

The aggressive approach paid off, with 2,100 keywords getting into the
top three positions, and a 3,500% increase in traffic from local search
queries.

Even well-known brands shouldn’t rest on brand recognition

alone to perform well in search.

In fact, Brian McDowell says limited opportunity to

capture attention is one of the biggest threats to
enterprise e-commerce SEO right now:

“When you have such little real estate,

people are going to scroll right past...
They’re going to spend a tenth of a second
more if there’s an image, a star rating, or
availability.”

Schema markup may be basic SEO, but Brian

points out that big brands, such as Best Buy and
Target, were slow to adopt the practice.
 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

Online shopping
has created enough
headaches for
traditional brick-
and-mortar retailers.
Failing to keep up
with SEO basics can
lead to being edged
out by younger,
less well-known
brands with more
sophisticated SEO.

Just look at the

mobile search results
for “40-inch tv:”

The user sees two full product listings and a sliver of the third.

While Best Buy has upped its schema markup game and landed in the
first spot, the second listing is a completely unknown brand (to me, at
least).

See what I mean about the stakes being high?

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 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

WHAT MAKES ENTERPRISE SEO DIFFERENT

On a practical level, enterprise SEO requires more strategy, planning,
and patience than regular SEO.

SCALABILITY & AUTOMATION

Whether it’s building links or setting up microdata for product listings,
the work multiplies exponentially on an enterprise site.

And that number grows even more after a merger, acquisition, or new
product launch.

Even with a team of SEOs, doing all of that manually is a poor use of
everyone’s time. Enterprise SEO requires tools that enable you to scale
and automate SEO tasks.

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 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

MULTIPLE LOCATIONS
Local search continues to grow in importance, with 78% of local-based
searches resulting in an offline purchase.

For large enterprises with franchises or a branch network, the SERPs

should serve up location-specific content in a
way that’s consistent with their brand and drives
conversions.

And the best way to do that is to use content

templates that allow you to answer key user
questions: usually addresses, hours, reviews.

That’s what Meineke did to drive a 50% increase

in sessions. As one of the biggest auto repair
businesses in the country, name recognition
wasn’t a problem, but keeping up
with the increasing importance of
local search was.

The company focused its SEO

efforts on “near me” optimization
and voice search. The result was
a 30% increase in visibility when
compared with its two nearest
competitors.

MULTIPLE SITES OR SUBDOMAINS

Many enterprise SEOs have to manage
the varying, and sometimes competing,
demands of multiple properties while also
maintaining some sort of uniformity.

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 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

Wayfair is a big enough site on its own, but the parent company
actually owns four other ecommerce furniture brands.

Joss & Main, Perigold, AllModern, and Birch Lane sell millions of
products each, and Wayfair boasts that it sells 18 million items
altogether.

Without a holistic approach to SEO, there’s a lot of potential for

duplicate content, keyword cannibalization, and content inconsistency.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
The greater the authority, the higher the possibility for bad PR.
Negative news and discussions can quickly dominate branded search
results.

Imagine you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and there are over
14,000 searches for your name in a month. Three of the top five results
are negative stories that make claims against you that aren’t true.

No matter how good your PR team is, you need a sophisticated SEO
strategy to serve up more accurate SERPs.

That’s another aspect of enterprise SEO: undoing the damage caused

by unfair claims.

The Fortune 500 CEO story wasn’t hypothetical. It really happened to

one of Terakeet’s clients.

To remedy the problem, the agency used a combination of content

strategy and technical SEO to highlight the CEO’s accomplishments
and demote unfavorable stories.

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 W H AT I S E N T E R P R I S E S E O ?

They also made changes to his personal website, Wikipedia page, and
even responded to claims about him in community forums.

Companies with non-enterprise sites get bad press occasionally too.

But the impact, and the solution, is typically not as far-reaching.

CONCLUSION
The higher the stakes, the more impactful SEO is on a website.

When done well, enterprise SEO can help brands further dominate in
their industry. Brands that fail to execute enterprise SEO properly risk
damage to their reputation and bottom line.

Search engine algorithms change constantly, and in terms of agility,

non-enterprise sites have the upper hand.

Enterprise sites have brand authority in their favor, but they need
consistent, effective enterprise SEO to maintain that dominance.

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WHY
MARKETERS
NEED AN
ENTERPRISE SEO
PLATFORM
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU INVEST IN SEO.
SEJ PARTNER

AUTHOR
L I N D S AY B OYA J I A N
SR. DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, CONDUCTOR
 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

B2B and B2C companies generate two times more revenue from
organic search than any other channel.

That’s because Google search results are deemed more trustworthy

than display advertising or social media.

Facebook has a trust problem. One study shows more than three-
fourths of consumers don’t trust Facebook, and with good reason
– their business model arguably drives you to make rash, emotional
decisions.

Google, on the other hand, is a trusted brand because of its focus on

Expertise, Authority, and Trust. It’s in their best interest to make sure
you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Trust is the core of SEO practice in 2020. To build trust, your website
has to be fast, error-free, and truly informative.

Using an enterprise SEO software platform can increase efficiency

and productivity while reducing the time and errors involved in
managing organic search campaigns.

It also simplifies the cost-intensive work of keeping your site up-to-

date.

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

QUESTIONS YOU NEED TO ASK WHEN LOOKING

AT ENTERPRISE SEO PLATFORMS
Marketing across platforms is complex and requires the cooperation of
many teams throughout an organization.

Just making sure your business can be found where people are looking
– online search – is a process with a lot of moving parts within an
organization.

Keeping that in mind, when evaluating enterprise SEO

platforms, your purchasing manager should ask the
following questions to see which one is the right fit for
your business.

HOW DOES THIS PLATFORM INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY?

Both small SEO teams of one or a few people and larger
teams at Fortune 500 companies have to optimize
hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of
URLs.

What’s more,
optimization isn’t
a once-and-done
job – it has to become
an integral part of the
marketing workflow to
keep up with changing
consumer preferences,
search engine algorithm updates, and
the adoption of new technology.

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

The best enterprise SEO platforms will

increase your team’s productivity by
automating these tasks. With that in
mind, your punch list should include the
following boxes:

Does this platform alert the team

to content opportunities?

Does it flag technical problems

and suggest solutions? Does it help
implement those solutions?

Does it tie in different teams

across the organization to make
sure SEO priorities are shared?

Each of these functions allows a single

manager or a small team to increase
their reach through your organization
and boost their productivity
exponentially.

CAN WE INTEGRATE THIS SEO PLATFORM WITH TOOLS WE ALREADY

USE?
You have one tool for communicating across teams and two separate
tools for managing workflows that don’t talk to each other.

Throw in an analytics platform, and you have headaches and

bottlenecks across the organization.

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

In order to take your current SEO efforts to the enterprise level, you
need a platform that integrates smoothly with the software you’re
already using.

Conductor Searchlight is designed with seamless integration as a

top priority. It plugs into your existing software tools to enhance and
improve what you’re already doing.

For instance, Conductor integrates real-time DeepCrawl learnings to

make improving site health easier and faster. DeepCrawl is a cloud-
based website crawler that the world’s largest enterprise brands use to
monitor and improve site health.

Conductor also partners with Dragon Metrics to make data for Baidu
and other Asian search engines available directly in their platform.

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

An SEO platform should not only integrate with additional data

providers but also plug into your team’s workflow productivity tools.
SEO is a team sport requiring stakeholders across the org from your
SEO manager to content writer to IT lead.

Conductor Actions integrates with productivity apps like Asana and

Trello makes integrating insights to fast actions easy.

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

CAN YOU GET QUALITY DATA FROM AROUND THE GLOBE AND AT
SCALE?
As enterprises scale, the sheer amount of data business leaders have to
sift through can become a burden.

Hiring a business intelligence team is very expensive, but how else can
you manage millions – or billions – of data points?

An enterprise SEO platform should be able to report on all your data in

a flexible way that’s consumable for all your stakeholders.

Conductor’s enterprise solution provides you with advanced reporting

to meet your business needs. FlexHub reports are custom built by
Conductor’s in-house business intelligence experts to meet your exact
needs.

One of the most popular reports created in FlexHub is the location

visibility report. This is a heatmap that reveals local search demand.

Brick-and-mortar businesses love this report because it allows them to

see demand in places where they don’t have a storefront.

Businesses also pair this report with hyper-local marketing efforts to

deliver search results to consumers where they are, when they need it.

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

HOW WILL THIS PLATFORM BOOST ROI?

The best enterprise SEO platform will help demonstrate quantifiable
ROI to company stakeholders.

Though everyone knows great content and accurate information

are key to product success, day-to-day priorities can push efforts to
improve quality down the to-do list until they simply don’t get done.

Aside from growing organic traffic, an enterprise SEO platform can

show demonstrable cost savings by lowering the cost of paid search ad
buys.

According to Forrester Research, cost efficiency for paid search

campaigns improved by 15% over 3 years as overall content quality
improved trust scores and lowered CPMs.

To get these numbers, Forrester interviewed five Conductor customers

to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with an
investment in Conductor.

The results of Forrester’s research put eye-catching numbers to the

value of an SEO platform like Conductor:

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

Organic traffic growth for the interviewed organizations reached as

high as a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 113%, with a median
CAGR of 29%.

Marketing content created for SEO performed at least 3x better, and

Conductor enabled 25% greater productivity from the content team.

Organic enhancements improved the price efficiency of paid search

ads run by a hypothetical company created by Forrester for the
analysis, avoiding $2.3M in expense without reducing ad placements.

Productivity improvements at Forrester’s hypothetical organization

using Conductor’s platform saved it more than $300,000 in labor
costs.

Conductor’s robust data integration will help content teams bring

these hard-number results to stakeholders demonstrating ROI and the
value of great content.

Source: Forrester “The Total Economic Impact Of Conductor”

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

WHEN YOU BUY AN ENTERPRISE SEO SOLUTION,

MAKE SURE IT SUPPORTS YOUR BUSINESS WITH
CAN’T-LIVE-WITHOUT SERVICES
SEO is both a technical skill and an art. That means there is no one
lever you can pull to improve your SEO and increase your website
traffic or conversions.

Whether you have a multi-million dollar marketing budget or a few

scrappy marketers wearing many different hats, an enterprise SEO
solution is not only about the technology but the additional services
your team can access to reach their goals.

The advantage of leveraging an enterprise

SEO solution with technology and services
is you can easily scale up and scale down
the level of support depending on your team’s
workload, while maintaining access to your data
and the technology.

For a smaller business, you may only need an

occasional technical site audit to tell you where
you can maximize
organic search
by picking low-
hanging fruit.

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

Fortune 500 organizations that operate in many countries can

maximize their SEO using the services offered by an SEO enterprise
solution that allows for nimble, up-to-the-second execution of search
strategies across millions of URLs.

With Conductor, you have access to Orchestra – a team of SEOs

with agency-level experience at your fingertips. Technical SEO
improvements, content strategy, and user profile research are all part
of the package.

4 CRUCIAL THINGS YOU NEED BEFORE

YOU’RE READY FOR AN ENTERPRISE
SEO PLATFORM

1
IN-HOUSE SEO ain’t gonna run itself. Every business, large or
TEAM small, that has a website and uses it to get customers
INCLUDING needs professional SEO help.
PROGRAM
OWNER After all, Google is the gatekeeper for 75% of all
global organic search traffic, and search itself
accounts for more than half of all internet traffic.

An SEO’s job is to be the liaison between your

business and the billions (with a “b”) of people who
could find it through search.

That means the SEO has to wear many hats and have
a say in how the content is made, how the website

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

product is designed, your company’s online user

experience, and tracking the flow of conversions.

Whether your SEO sits with the marketing team and

reports to a director of marketing, or if you want to
make SEO a central part of your business strategy
(which you should!) and you hire a team to focus
exclusively on SEO, you need one point of contact
that will be able to keep the company focused on
leading your peers in online search.

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EXECUTIVE
BUY-IN
Creating a team isn’t enough if it isn’t supported
by the company leadership. Too many brilliant SEO
initiatives have failed because their efforts were left
to die on the vine.

As an executive, either the CMO or the CEO, you

need to be prepared to understand the opportunities,
strategies, and objectives of your SEOs.

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

3
RESOURCES
FOR STAFF
TRAINING
Search is a constantly changing field, and your team
needs to stay up-to-date on all the latest changes.
Using an enterprise tool like Conductor makes staying
current easier by giving you professional, agency-
level support at the tips of your fingers.

Many enterprise SEO solutions have informative

blogs and videos to help SEO managers stay on top
of the game.

In addition to basic educational material, Conductor

offers Conductor Academy, a suite of courses for
staff development, to help teams get the most out of
their platform and keep their skills sharp.

Conductor also hosts C3, the most prestigious

conference in the industry, to share their expertise,
from marketing leaders to influencers to working
marketers at the world's top brands.

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 W H Y M A R K E T E R S N E E D A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M

4
CLEARLY Often SEOs are asked to:
DEFINED Increase traffic.
KPIS TO
Increase revenue.
TRACK &
MEASURE Broad mandates like that are not only not useful, they
are, in fact, totally counter-productive. Between point
T (for traffic) and point R (for revenue) there are
many measurable steps.

Enterprise SEO software like Conductor can help

shape necessary KPIs between the start of a project
and its desired goal.

Ranking on Google is often a proxy for the quality

of your content and the efforts you’ve made to
successfully answer your clients’ questions.

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TOP 5
CHALLENGES OF
ENTERPRISE SEO
AUTHOR
JENN M ATHEWS
 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

What makes enterprise SEO unique from a general knowledge in

SEO is the complexities that a larger company has from the technical
challenges of a complex site architecture to getting budget for the
tools and help needed to be successful.

I have seen many SEOs come from consulting or agency environments

that have strong technical, content, and general knowledge of SEO
but lack the ability to work with other teams or understand the
complexities that enterprise organizations face.

Without the experience of working in-house in such an environment,

an SEO will struggle to gain credibility or make any sort of impact
resulting in a stagnant outcome with no signs of growth.

Here are the top five challenges any SEO might face when working in
an enterprise environment:

Complex technical challenges

Getting buy-in

Priority for the business

Tracking effectiveness

Budget for tools/help

If an SEO can navigate through these challenges then support from

the organization all the way from the top down will become strong,
allowing for the overall health of the company’s SEO to flourish.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

1. COMPLEX TECHNICAL CHALLENGES FOR SEO

When it comes to technical SEO for enterprise organizations, the level
of complexity increases tenfold.

Sites that don’t focus on the technical aspects of SEO will often fall
short no matter how excellent content, brand recognition, or link
authority is.

When a site has 90% of its pages throwing errors around redirect
chains, improper or self canonicals, duplicate titles, JavaScript issues,
etc. are less likely to get results than their competitors who have only
20% (or less) of those issues.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

New projects that are launched are less likely

to gain traction in the search results or may
struggle to ever get indexed at all.

Larger organizations consist of multiple

engineering teams working on several aspects
to a site and often on different platforms.

As an SEO entering into an enterprise

environment, it’s good to understand that
your first few months are going to be about
learning:

How a site is structured.

How the engineering teams work.

How SEO can play a part.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

From the use of subdomains/subdirectories, pushing sitemaps.xml files,

generating robots.txt, identifying pages that need or have noindex
tags, pagination, JavaScript implementation, how canonical tags are
generated, pagination, infinite scrolling, Ajax calls, and so much more.

All of this may be common knowledge, however, working in the

enterprise environment with a large site managed by multiple
stakeholders that have business decisions that could impact SEO adds
a level of complexity that is a challenge to navigate.

When dealing with the complexities of technical SEO in an enterprise

environment, an SEO must not only be knowledgeable but be willing to
listen.

A strong enterprise SEO can look at data, analyze crawl reports and
web logs, and know who to talk to in order to understand the history of
the work that has been done for SEO.

A good SEO should be able to make authoritative decisions while

maintaining humbleness as trial and error tests present the best results.

By focusing 30% of the team’s effort on technical SEO fixes and

mitigating additional issues, an enterprise site will have greater
success.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

2. GETTING BUY-IN
Ask any SEO and they will tell you how obvious it is why companies
should invest time and money into SEO.

With a little effort from engineering, some tweaking by the content

teams, and a small investment in SEO experts any company could
make money with very little overhead.

Unfortunately, not all organizations see it that way. Whether it's a

lack of understanding of what SEO is or what all that goes into SEO
companies don’t often see it as a worthy investment.

SEOs should know that working within an organization doesn’t make it

any easier to get work done for SEO.

Calendars could be filled with meetings all day but a discussion might
come up in a meeting where stakeholders decide that SEO isn’t
important and the SEO wasn’t in the room.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

Later they find out that after a project was launched the company
could have benefited greatly from considering SEO.

The key to getting buy-in for SEO is for an SEO to get to know as many
people as possible in the organization from the top down.

Even when it doesn’t seem like someone will ever need or ever work
with SEO, it’s still good to get to know them and their role.

One of those people could be in a meeting the SEO is left out of when
a group decides that they don’t need SEO. In which case they would be
able to speak up for SEO in their absence.

Additionally, any successes the team can have for SEO are always a
good way to get organizational buy-in.

Find some pages or a section of the website that could use some
changes to help improve SEO and report on the growth that you have
accomplished.

This will show stakeholders and decision-makers that some work for
SEO can increase traffic and revenue.

They will have more respect for SEO as well as the team that works on
SEO and will want the same for their projects and responsibilities.

Getting buy-in from key stakeholders on what it takes to get work

done for SEO is one of the biggest struggles any SEO faces in a larger
organization.

From convincing the CEO that SEO can increase the bottom line, all
the way down to getting engineering teams to spend the time to make
their JavaScript crawlable by Google, SEOs can spend a lot of time
getting buy-in.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

3. PRIORITY FOR THE BUSINESS

I will, at times, refer to SEO as the red-headed stepchild (a phrase used
to describe a person who is neglected, mistreated, or unwanted) of the
business.

Many companies know that they can benefit from SEO, but don’t
understand enough about it to make it a priority.

Organizations that end up in this hole of lack of support, or

understanding for SEO, have a difficult time digging themselves out
and therefore reaping any benefit from SEO.

While getting stakeholders to buy-into SEO, it’s also important to push

to establish SEO as one of the important priorities for the business as a
whole.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

By communicating with the business

showing small, or even large, wins a team
can establish SEO as a priority and align
with what the business has planned for.

If the business is focused on location

targeting for advertising and building
content for local customers, then it would be
wise to focus efforts on local SEO strategies.

Aligning with the business isn’t always

an easy task, and not all organizations
are transparent when it comes to
communicating what is a priority to the SEO
level.

By focusing on getting to know teams

and stakeholders within the organization
the SEO team could become part of the
conversation when there are talks about
priorities for the business.

While getting SEO established as a priority

for the business is a struggle, the benefits
can be astronomical for both the business
and the SEO team.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

4. TRACKING EFFECTIVENESS
Many times I have worked with agencies that report on their wins by
showing keywords that have moved up in rankings, or pages they have
worked on appearing higher in the search results.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

The biggest struggle that SEO will often have within a large
organization is reporting. Most enterprise businesses expect SEO to
impact revenue.

While ranking changes and increases in traffic are nice, everything boils
down to how much the company makes. Tracking keywords to revenue
is virtually impossible.

Calculating can be a complex estimation based on formulas with an

understanding of what pages showed up for which keyword searches,
with a count of keywords to that page, cut by percentages of Google
traffic from organic from how much that page generated in revenue.

It’s a formula that isn’t always doable for each business, especially in
times where there are multiple pages that appear in search results for a
keyword.

The best way to track SEO’s effectiveness is to understand what is

important for the business.

Some businesses are happy with free signups and might have a
revenue value associated with them.

Some businesses have a calculation of revenue per user or consider a

click of a button, or email open as a value.

Working with data scientists and understanding hurdles associated

when reporting for SEO is one of the biggest struggles an SEO faces in
a larger organization.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

5. BUDGET FOR TOOLS/HELP

One of the biggest struggles I have faced in all my years as an SEO
and working for many enterprise organizations is getting support
and budget to hire help (agencies, consultants, or staff) and the tools
needed that can handle large complex systems.

Hiring agencies that have the technical knowledge, experience, and

understanding of what it takes to manage SEO for large organizations
are few and far in-between, and they don’t come cheap.

Getting budget support for the expert help needed takes a lot of hard
work and scrappiness from the SEO (or team) that is in place.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

SEOs shouldn’t be expected to know everything there is to know about

all aspects of SEO.

Some are more versed in content, or some may be more technically

savvy.

Some may have a good sense for navigating the red tape of the
organization but aren’t strong in content or technical. In that case,
hiring a consultant or an agency to help to make the team even
stronger would lead the business into a strong SEO presence.

The best way to approach this is for the existing team to not be afraid
to speak up and let their coworkers know when they aren’t strong in an
aspect of SEO.

Most organizations will respect this and support the hiring of an

agency or consultant that specializes in that part that is lacking.

If SEO has shown wins from technical fixes and mitigation then an
expert or agency that can help put a content roadmap together with a
growth plan would make sense.

The key is to show stakeholders that there can be success with one
aspect of SEO and that there is potential for growth from others. In the
end, everyone will benefit.

At the enterprise level, well-known tools like Moz, DeepCrawl,

and Keylime Toolbox aren’t able to handle the complexities or the
massiveness of enterprise sites.

For larger organizations, tools that are capable of handling complex

sites, and that have the staff of support that know what SEOs at that
level face, require big budgets.

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 TOP 5 CHALLENGES OF ENTERPRISE SEO

Getting budget approval for these tools can often be a struggle, but
when the support comes in and the tools are being utilized, SEO
greatly benefits in the long term.

The key is to start small with the more widely known tools and focus
on a smaller part of a site.

Use the data found to gain some wins while expressing that there
are tools that are helping, but there are struggles due to their limited
capabilities to manage larger sites.

When SEO brings in several billion in revenue for a business

and the team is asking for a tool that is a very small
fraction of that, the return on investment makes sense.

The challenges that enterprise SEOs face are definitely

unique, but they aren’t impossible.

By understanding that
enterprise SEO has its own
struggles and having the
patience and experience to
navigate through them,
any SEO in a larger
organization can
have a successful
career and the
business will
benefit in the
long run.

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 4
THE
4 PILLARS OF
ENTERPRISE SEO
SUCCESS
AUTHOR
JENN M ATHEWS
 THE 4 PILLARS OF ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

Enterprise companies are realizing that to be successful at SEO

they shouldn’t only be heavily focused on the technical stuff or at
identifying opportunities for growth to build content around.

Companies know that they need people who can communicate

to executives effectively as well as with a mix of teams (technical,
creative, some that know SEO and some that have no clue), all in the
same room at the same time.

In addition, companies are looking for more deeper-level analytical

abilities with expectations of understanding SQL, large data sets, and
issues that arise from dynamically built sites such as:

Duplicate content.
Thin content.
Products or content coming and going.
User-generated content on a massive scale
Etc.

Throughout my years working in enterprise-level organizations, it’s

become apparent that there are four aspects of SEO that become the
most important to balance in order for SEO to be successful.

The four pillars of SEO within an enterprise organization:

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 THE 4 PILLARS OF ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

1. SEO MITIGATION:
ERROR MANAGEMENT & TECHNICAL SEO
I use the word “mitigation” as I have found that a good percentage
of an SEO Manager’s time in larger organizations is spent identifying
issues after a project has been launched.

For instance, having to go back to the engineering teams and request

that bugs be filed to make the necessary corrections. If only the issues
had been identified before the launch, then the company could have
saved time, effort, and money.

The SEO responsible for mitigation works with the engineering teams
as well as project and product managers during the indoctrination of a
project and remains involved.

Education is also key as those involved understand the nuances of SEO

enough to either ask questions before making decisions or make the
decisions themselves, saving the company the time and effort in the
long term.

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 THE 4 PILLARS OF ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

2. SEO ANALYSIS/REPORTING:
CALCULATING ASSUMPTIONS & REPORTING
ON SUCCESSES
Every company needs to understand how much SEO plays a part in key
performance indicators like traffic and revenue.

When it comes to reporting, there are complexities to SEO that other

channels don’t have.

4
 THE 4 PILLARS OF ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

Google does not provide referring keywords to a site from organic

search like they do for paid search, which makes reporting difficult as
data scientists and analytics experts need to stitch data from Google
Search Console and other Analytics reporting tools to complete the
story.

Understanding that organic traffic from Google is X percent of all

search traffic and result in $x revenue, pulling
clicks from Google Search Console from specific
keywords, and then calculating the percentage
of all clicks to get the estimated revenue for
that keyword will allow companies to have
better insight into:

How their SEO is performing.

Which efforts are working.

Where there might be opportunities.

An SEO who can make these

calculations and report on
the performance to key
stakeholders is an important
part of the larger SEO piece.

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 THE 4 PILLARS OF ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

3. SEO PROJECT MANAGEMENT:

DETERMINING GROWTH & MANAGING
PROJECTS FOR SEO
While making corrections and reporting on the successes of the work
on SEO is important, so is growth.

Identifying upward trends in searches and gaps that might be present

on current or past efforts for SEO is imperative to the success of a
good enterprise SEO team.

A project manager is tasked with initiatives identified on a larger

scaled that impact a large portion of the website, including:

Overhauling design and content on a set of pages.

Driving initiatives for an internal linking plan that affects many

aspects of the site.

The project manager in SEO would focus all their time and energy
getting teams to commit to delivery dates and keep it all organized
throughout multiple teams.

In the end, resulting in revenue growth from SEO.

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 THE 4 PILLARS OF ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

4. RELATIONSHIP BUILDING:
CHAMPIONING SEO TO STAKEHOLDERS &
OTHER TEAMS
The final piece to the SEO enterprise puzzle is the ability to build and
engage in relationships across the organization.

I usually recommend that the SEO team begin with the first three
aforementioned, and follow through with the relationship-building
team members once those are in place and the team is working well.

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 THE 4 PILLARS OF ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

While the other aspects are being built out by the team, the
relationship-building part can come from the SEO team’s manager
or director, or instill this into each team member as they engage with
others in the organization.

In some cases, one of the SEO team members might be more inclined
to work with other teams than the others.

If that is the case, then this person can be tasked with engagement and
education until a full-time person is needed in the role.

The goal is to build relationships in engineering, creative, legal, and

public relations, among others.

SEO touches every aspect of the organization and will, at some point,
require support from one or more of these teams.

Having a good solid relationship with the members of those teams will
get buy-in for SEO initiatives faster with more efficiency, ultimately
leading to the overall growth of SEO and the company at large.

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 THE 4 PILLARS OF ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

In 2018, I met with REI and got to understand how they structure their
SEO. The team at REI had openings for several positions on different
teams within the organization.

The interesting part about these positions is that rather than placing
SEO in marketing with the paid search, social media, and email teams,
these positions were as program managers.

The roles are defined by the core strengths every enterprise SEO
should have. These include:

Communicating effectively across channels and teams.

Evangelizing SEO through education and documentation.

Working with teams to prioritize SEO initiatives.

Reporting for SEO to key stakeholders and identifying

opportunities.

Managing vendors (tools, agencies, consultants, etc).

Staying up-to-date with the latest SEO trends.

In a sense, these roles were covering the four pillars in one role as an
individual contributor.

As the person in the role becomes successful, teams would then be

built out to support each strength.

In the end, this will develop a strong team and presence for SEO that
would drive the success of the business.

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 THE 4 PILLARS OF ENTERPRISE SEO SUCCESS

It seems that some companies have SEO roles and teams that are
moving away from marketing and splitting up to subject matter expert
(SME) roles, or individual contributor (IC) roles sitting on engineering,
content/creative, reporting, and marketing then coming together to
communicate from time to time.

Lastly, being able to report revenue, prioritize projects, and

communicate that up through the chain.

This is all such a big shift in recent years of how corporate is

structuring and visualizing for SEO which is beneficial for the company
and the industry as a whole.

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 5
HOW TO
PLAN YOUR
ENTERPRISE
SEO STRATEGY
AUTHOR
JENN M ATHEWS
 H OW TO P L A N YO U R E N T E R P R I S E S E O S T R AT E GY

Most enterprise-level organizations expect a strategy for SEO before

the fiscal year begins.

This strategy is usually communicated up through the key stakeholders

(Directors, VPs, and even C-levels) who tend to show an interest in SEO
for the company.

Once the strategy is agreed on and confirmed by all involved, it will

act as a sort of reference throughout the year as the SEO team lead
(Manager, Director or sometimes VP) to report against progress and
key performance indicators (KPIs) that could include revenue increase,
team efficiency increase, or other metric everyone has agreed on.

Having been through this process on numerous occasions while

working both within the organization and as a consultant, I put
together an outline of what to consider when getting your strategy in
place.

As I mentioned in the 10 Important SEO trends of the Year by Search

Engine Journal:

…Google is continually updating to optimize search results based

on user intent rather than a focus on content/page to keyword
matching.

‘SEOs need to understand the nuance of what this means with

their content as well as have a firm grasp on Google’s past
updates leading to this trend.

The latest trends include patent releases by Google the last couple
of years (Neural Matching, RankBrain, BERT, E-A-T., etc.), webmaster
guidelines best practices updates, and any trending searches that
could be coming up for growth opportunities.

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 H OW TO P L A N YO U R E N T E R P R I S E S E O S T R AT E GY

Your SEO strategy for enterprise SEO should reflect all of the latest
trends with the addition of plans for team improvements and additional
help to increase efficiency.

Below is a recommended outline that sets your strategy to encompass

all that is important today in SEO and includes the needs an enterprise
SEO strategy has that sets you apart from the smaller SMBs.

TECHNICAL FOUNDATIONAL SEO GROWTH PROJECTS

Google Search Console Reported Issues Keyword Groupings

Crawl Reports – Content and Bug Fixes New Keyword Search Trends
Page Speed Improvements Discovery Optimization
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Answer Box Opportunities

NEURAL MATCHING OPTIMIZATION TEAM AND TOOLS

Current Content Adjustments Agencies and Consultants

New Content Synonyms and Team Additions
Internal Linking Strategy Reporting and Crawling Tool(s)

CROSS-ORGANIZATION COMMUNICATION
SME Communication
Engineering Communication
Key Stakeholder Communication

The outline isn’t “one size fits all” since every organization is different
– from team structure to communication across the organization,
technical issues (or none at all), to agency and/or a consultant and any
reporting tools needed.

Let’s dive deeper into each point so you can decide if what I
recommend fits your organization.

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TECHNICAL FOUNDATIONAL SEO

THE WHY
Every enterprise SEO organization I have worked with/for has always
needed some form of technical and/or foundational SEO.

If a website has issues surfaced in Google Search Console, or other

reporting tools, more often than not any effort made to increase SEO
from growth strategies will fall flat.

The key to this part of the strategy is to communicate that this part
should be flexible.

Engineering hours should always be allocated for bug fixes and larger
projects to resolve any major issues.

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KPIS
Reporting on success for your technical SEO at an enterprise level can
vary.

If reporting on revenue increase, estimate an overall .5 or full position

improvement for the main domain resulting in an increase in CTR and
therefore a revenue boost from the additional traffic.

I have found some organizations I work for like to state that the
technical SEO fixes fall under a simple “keep the lights on” (same as
stress testing and general engineering processes) and therefore won’t
need any key performance results.

Whatever you decide to add for projects or checklists, I highly

recommend including this in your strategy no matter how well (or how
bad) your site’s foundation is.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE & BING REPORTED ISSUES

500 errors, soft 404s, AMP issues, structured data issues, crawl rate,
etc. All of these should be checked regularly and addressed quickly if
anything should come up.

CRAWL REPORTS: CONTENT & BUG FIXES

Hopefully, your organization has crawling tools to report on issues that
Google or Bing won’t tell you.

Similar or duplicate content, non-compliant URLs, canonical issues,

internal linking issues, etc should all fall under fixes just as GSC and
Bing reported issues do.

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PAGE SPEED IMPROVEMENTS

While page speed is important for SEO, it is also important for
conversion improvements.

If your organization has conversion optimization, or user experience

team(s) this is a good opportunity to line with additional teams to
gain more exposure and prioritize any fixes identified to improve page
speed.

I will usually identify pages (or sets of pages) that have good SEO
value but tend to be slow and determine a KPI to a specific time at the
“time to interact” (TTI) level.

AMP
If your company doesn’t have AMP, this is a good opportunity to set a
strategy on which pages should have AMP counterparts.

If you have AMP, they will most likely need improvements, or could
need some fixes within the year. Allocate time under a strategy that
defines where the pages are at, and what work needs to get done with
AMP.

Every organization is different, so add any issues you have now or

could potentially see when search engines update their algorithms or
update their guidelines.

By allocating engineering time for technical SEO this will avoid any
discussion on prioritizing and fighting for resources later in the year
ensuring the work will get done, and the site will see improvements
from SEO work by the end of the year.

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GROWTH PROJECTS
THE WHY

Playing “whack a mole” alone doesn’t work for enterprise SEO.

Planning for larger strategies that focus on growth potential will show
your organization that you can impact the business in a positive way
with SEO.

Understanding trends, new position opportunities (discovery, answer

boxes, etc) and keywords being searched by your target audience is
key.

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At Nordstrom, my team met with the buyers that were identifying

fashion trends each season. We would look at up and coming
designers, brands that were trending hot, and new style trends that
were hitting the market.

My SEO team used reports to see what people were searching which
helped us target those terms and related terms (for neural matching)
and generate pages for them that the merchandising team added
products for.

At Groupon we used local search trends

with popular things to do, trendy
food and restaurants, etc. GitHub
focuses on terms that emphasize
the security provided, CI/
CD workflows, project
management tools, and
many other related terms.

If you don’t know what

to optimize for at
the start of the year,
define a strategy called
“seasonal trends” or
“food trends” that
allocate time from
resources needed to
optimize when you are
ready to define them.
 H OW TO P L A N YO U R E N T E R P R I S E S E O S T R AT E GY

KPIS

Reporting of growth opportunities is probably easier than the other

strategies you will have in your SEO plan.

With a simple keyword analysis you’ll be able to:

Estimate impressions from search volume (use the percentage

of the search volume based on potential rankings not the entire
search volume number).

Calculate click-through rate based on estimated position (use

your current CTR report per avg position).

Calculate revenue based on current revenue per visit overall (or

specifically for the pages you’re improving for a more accurate
number).

For Discovery and Answer box, use your current numbers and estimate
a percentage increase in traffic then revenue.

KEYWORD OPTIMIZATION

Look at any low-hanging fruit with gap reports that you could gain
some potential.

Some possibilities for improvement that should be easy to include:

Terms that you get rankings for that have a high search volume
but the page isn’t monetizing well.

Pages that have high impressions and the position is on the

second page.

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NEW KEYWORD SEARCH TRENDS

This is where your trends come into play. Set a strategy around new
opportunities that could get you ahead of the competition.

DISCOVERY OPTIMIZATION

Keyword discovery is fastly playing an important role in search.

Google and Bing are anticipating what a user wants before they search.
If your site isn’t optimized for this, then you’re missing out.

ANSWER BOX OPPORTUNITIES

Answer boxes have been around for a while now and have proven to
be lucrative for SEO. Sites that have taken the time to optimize and
monetize this position are winning at the SEO game.

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NEURAL MATCHING OPTIMIZATION

THE WHY

Google is releasing updates around the neural matching algorithm

regularly.

What this means for SEO is that focusing on user intent more so than
just optimizing a page for a keyword is becoming more important to
your enterprise SEO success.

Chances are that at an enterprise level, the site has been optimized for
SEO in the past and needs some updating.

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KPIS

Given that this is an improvement on what already exists, you can

estimate a slight increase to the existing pages, or focus on pages that
might have dropped from the various updates.

CURRENT CONTENT ADJUSTMENTS

Take a look at pages that are doing well in impressions, position, and
revenue and revisit them to ensure that synonyms are mentioned on
the pages.

NEW CONTENT SYNONYMS & INTERNAL LINKING STRATEGY

Write articles and blog posts on related terms and link to those pages
to keep them at the top of the results throughout the year.

Having this in your strategy will show your key

stakeholders that you are keeping up with the
latest SEO trends and will stay ahead of
the competition throughout the
year.

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 H OW TO P L A N YO U R E N T E R P R I S E S E O S T R AT E GY

CROSS-ORGANIZATION COMMUNICATION
THE WHY

One aspect that sets enterprise SEO from the small or medium
businesses is that within a larger organization there are multiple teams
that deal with SEO.

Weeding through the bureaucracy and red tape that it takes to get any
SEO work done is the enterprise SEO’s main role.

Determining a strategy of communication across these teams will

guarantee support and that work will get done within the year.

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KPIS

Establishing improvements to report against with regards to

communication can be tricky.

If your company has tools like BrightEdge or Conductor you can

reference usage reports or dashboard access as a key performance
indicator.

If you don’t have such tools available grab a report on how many
meetings you have each month with each team, or use reports on SEO
revenue for each vertical you communicate with.

SME COMMUNICATION

Determining subject matter experts (SMEs) within each team you work
with will make your life easier in the long run.

If you don’t have people you work with now, make it your strategy to
establish who these people are and how you plan to educate and/or
communicate with them.

ENGINEERING COMMUNICATION

Engineering holds the keys to the castle and if you don’t have a
working relationship with the team you won’t get your work done.

If you need to focus on product or project managers to get to

engineering then be sure to outline that in your strategy.

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KEY STAKEHOLDER COMMUNICATION

Enterprise SEOs need executives and key stakeholders across the

organization in order to help prioritize SEO as the business level.

Oftentimes, you will hear teams say “The business sets the priorities”
when you ask why something isn’t getting done, or why your project
moved down in the queue.

If you have buy-in from the business

then your SEO projects won’t fall
down.

Coming into enterprise corporations

on numerous occasions I have found
that this part of the strategy often
gets overlooked or isn’t
documented.

By defining what
it is your plan to
do throughout
the year to keep
communication
flowing, the overall
health of SEO for
the site and for
the business will
continue to grow.
 H OW TO P L A N YO U R E N T E R P R I S E S E O S T R AT E GY

TEAM AND TOOLS

THE WHY

Another key aspect of the enterprise corporation is establishing a good

SEO team with clear roles and responsibilities, along with an agency
and/or consultant to assist in work and help champion SEO with
reporting and crawl tools.

All of these play an integral part in the overall success of SEO within a
larger organization.

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KPIS
Reporting on key performance improvements can be a bit tricky since
it doesn’t directly relate to revenue. However, by determining a solid
strategy you can show improvements in efficiency and overall growth
from SEO that will affect the bottom line.

AGENCIES AND CONSULTANTS

If you don’t have an agency or a consultant to help you with your
enterprise SEO, I highly recommend you find a good one.

Check your ego at the door by taking advantage of the extra help
and the back-up expertise when you find other teams challenge your
recommendations.

Setting a strategy on finding an agency and/or consultant is key,

and once you have one be sure to have a solid plan to utilize them
throughout the year.

TEAM ADDITIONS

As your SEO will grow throughout the year it’s good to have a plan for
new hires that can assist with the additional work.

In the previous chapter, I define what the key aspects of enterprise

SEO success are.

Falling in line with the strategic recommendations in this chapter, your

hires can take on each aspect as a specialization and turn into team
leads as you grow.

If you avoid thinking hierarchy and lean more towards roles and
responsibilities, then your enterprise SEO will benefit and your team
will be a strong unit in the long run.

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REPORTING AND CRAWLING TOOL(S)

Whether you have tools and need to review and maximize current
costs (I managed to cut the SEO budget by including a tool review one
year by $600,000) or you need to add new tools, it’s important to list
them as part of your strategy.

If you’re adding tools that you didn’t have before, and need to
justify the spend, this is a good time to say this is a team efficiency
improvement as a KPI.

By including the above three in your strategy, it will help you to get
buy-in from finance for headcount and the costs associated with the
added costs.

While you aren’t spending money on advertising that your SEM

counterparts do, this is where your overhead comes into play.

At the end of the day, your return on investment will still be much
higher than any paid advertising channel so document what you need
and fight for the budget.

A complete strategy that encompasses all of the latest SEO strategies,

as well as organizational team growth and improvements, will provide
a holistic view of the role SEO plays within the organization resulting in
overall growth for the business.

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 6
6 ENTERPRISE
SEO STRATEGIES
& TACTICS THAT
REALLY WORK
AUTHOR
WINSTON BURTON
 6 E N T E R P R I S E S E O S T R AT E G I E S & TA C T I C S T H AT R E A L LY W O R K

We all know that SEO has really changed a lot over the last few years.

With advancements to algorithms and the introduction of machine

learning to search, SEO has become harder to perfect.

We’ve compiled the top SEO tactics and strategies that still work and
help you succeed. Let’s explore!

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 6 E N T E R P R I S E S E O S T R AT E G I E S & TA C T I C S T H AT R E A L LY W O R K

1. STRIKING DISTANCE
An oldy but goody. Targeting keywords that rank in striking distance
(i.e., keywords that rank in positions 11 to 20) are low hanging fruit and
provide quick wins to improve your performance.

The process of finding striking distance keywords is easy:

Enter your domain in Ahrefs.

Go to organic keywords and click on the flag (i.e., U.S., or

wherever you’re targeting).

Click on position and enter in 11 to 20 and filter your keywords

that rank in striking distance.

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 6 E N T E R P R I S E S E O S T R AT E G I E S & TA C T I C S T H AT R E A L LY W O R K

WHY SHOULD
BRANDS DO THIS

It’s a lot easier to

move keywords
that are close
to Page 1 to the
first page.

Targeting
RESULTS
keywords that
We increased traffic by 15% from a keyword in
rank in striking
three months for one of our hospitality clients
distance is the
by moving the keyword from position 11 and to
easiest way to
position 6.
find the best
opportunities. By optimizing the title, content, building links,
and getting some social endorsements to
THE BENEFITS landing pages that rank for these keywords,
you may be able to increase your visibility
Incremental onto the first page and eventually into one of
traffic. the top three positions over time.

Potential lift in Once you get your clients or your site to the
conversions. top 3, the site will have more incremental
traffic and conversions and be more visible in
Better Visibility.
the ultra-competitive SERPs.

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2. CONTENT EXPANSION
Once you find keywords that rank in striking distance and your site is
relevant for those keywords, you can expand the current content to
meet end user intent and make it more relevant and useful for your
users.

This is especially important if you have thin or empty pages (pages

with little to no content).

The process of finding thin pages and expanding the content is easy.

Enter your domain in DeepCrawl.

Go to the Content section and click on content > body content

> thin pages.

Grab the URL and paste it in Ahrefs and see what keywords the
page is ranking for and find the position. If the keyword is ranking
in striking distance and is relevant and important, review the
page, and expand the content to cover more topics, answer more
questions, etc.

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WHY SHOULD THE BENEFITS

BRANDS DO THIS
Good user experience.
Google has been Higher domain authority.
going after sites Better engagement metrics.
with low quality or
Better visibility and more traffic.
thin content for a
while now through
numerous updates. RESULTS
We increased traffic on a page for one of
Brands need to give our B2B clients by 25% in 6 months and
users high-quality also increased the number of keywords
content. ranking from 1 to 15 by expanding the
content to cover off on new topics and
Content that has no increasing the amount of content on the
value neither ranks page from 100 to 1,200 words.
well nor provides
users with a good
experience.

If you want to make

your site rank, give
users useful and
meaningful content
that they can
consume and find
helpful.

In other words: stop

selling and start
helping.

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Here's an example of a site that has thin content and received a

manual action from Google.

There are some easy fixes to clean up thin or empty pages:

Add the noindex meta tag to those pages and block them in the
robots.txt file so Google won’t crawl the pages.

Add high quality, relevant, and useful content to the pages to

satisfy multiple intents (i.e., 600 words or more).

Remove the page and let the page result in a 404-response

code (or 301 redirect it to better, relevant content).

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3. BE A CONTENT-PRODUCING MACHINE
Content is extremely important for SEO, especially early-stage content
“awareness.”

Nearly every consumer journey starts with a problem and informational

(not transactional) search.

If brands and agencies want to be successful and win in the SERPs,

they must continue to develop high-quality content based on intent for
all stages of the user journey.

Most SEO pros will run out of things to do for their clients if they had
them for several years, but you can never stop developing content.

A blog is a great way to add content to capture early to mid-stage and

even transactional content.

Most people ask what kind of content they should create.

The answer?

All types.

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Let’s stop thinking of content as only text. Content can also be in the
form of images and videos. Video content and answer box are perfect
content types.

Let’s look at an example: [how to plant grass seed].

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The video and answer box cover off well on this intent and take up
prime real estate.

People always ask, “what performs better, short-form, or long form-

content?” (Long-form content is defined as content that is over 1,000-
1,200 words.)

Numerous correlation studies support the idea that long-form content

performs the best in the SERPs. Users engage more with content that
is longer and more valuable.

However, if you create content that is short, resourceful, and satisfies or

provides value to the user and their intent, that might work
as well.

Depending on your audience, it is best to test and see

what works better for your users to provide them
with the best experience.

Finally, when creating content, we need to stop

thinking that we need to create content that is
targeting one or two keywords. You're either
going to be
relevant for
certain topics
and keywords
based on the
user's search
intent, or you
aren't.

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We need to create content with the following in mind:

Write content that answers users’ questions.

Create unique, specific, high-quality, and original content that

provides users with a good experience.

Review and analyze the competitive landscape for any topic

or query. Determine the level of content quality needed to rank
in search and to engage your target audience and use that as a
guide to know what to shoot for.

Create content that is engaging by adding images, facts, or

lists.

Be useful and informative. Create content that your users will

get some benefit from. For example, if they have a problem,
the content will help them solve the problem either through a
product or an answer.

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4. ANSWER BOX OPTIMIZATION

Having an answer box strategy is the Holy Grail for search.

The answer box is not only tied to the answer for voice search, it
appears before the organic results, which could give you maximum
exposure and traffic by ranking in position 0.

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TIPS TO SHOW UP
IN ANSWER BOX

Target keywords
that already have
answer boxes.

Answer the
question clearly,
quickly, and in
under 100 words.

HOW TO RANK IN GOOGLE’S ANSWER BOX

Make sure you’re
To obtain answer boxes results, you must: using factual
Address the users’ queries first in and accurate
the content, specifically in an H1. information that
users will find
Then optimize the answer in a useful.
format preferred by users.
Include numbered
Is your content directly answering users’
list, tables, or
queries about the topic? If not, then
graphs.
update your content to make sure it
answers the user’s question. Don’t give all the
information away.
You can use tools like SEMrush to find out
Give users a reason
if there is an answer box that currently
to want to go to
appears for your query. Be sure to use
your site to learn
lists, tables, and paragraphs with proper
more.
markup.

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5. INTERNAL & EXTERNAL LINKING

Most SEO pros forget about the power of internal linking.

If you have pages of related content that can link to one another, you
should take advantage of it.

Internal links connect your content and give Google and other search
engines a good idea of the structure of your website and let them find
important pages that offer more value.

The good thing about internal linking is that you can control what
pages it links to and you can also control the anchor text that links to
another page.

Getting links from external and related sites with high authority are
still important to improve your organic performance, but as always,
continue to focus on quality rather than quantity.

Also, be sure to use social to distribute your content to get more high-
quality links and endorsements for your content.

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6. USING STRUCTURED DATA

Structured Data is important to dress up
and decorate your content since it helps
Google understand your content better.

This will increase the chances of your

content showing up in the rich results, and
getting higher click through rates, traffic,
and more.

While we’re in the age of automation, there

are also some tasks and strategies that can
be automated that can free up our time and
allow us to spend more time on strategy,
sales, and client communications.

SUMMARY
The search engines’ algorithms are getting smarter and the war to rank
on Page 1 is getting more competitive all the time.

But with the right tactics and strategies, you can get to the top of the
search engines in time.

While there are more strategies (e.g., page speed optimization) that
can improve your organic performance but were not mentioned in this
post, these are the six tactics that still work based on my experience
working with enterprise brands.

These are worth testing out on your own sites or with your clients.

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LOCAL SEO
FOR ENTERPRISE
SITES FROM
2004 TO DATE
AUTHOR
JENN M ATHEWS
 LO C A L S E O F O R E N T E R P R I S E S I T E S F R O M 2 0 0 4 TO DAT E

Since 2004, Google has been prioritizing searches based on local

results and stressing that businesses optimize for a local presence.

The idea is to connect small mom-and-pop shops, medium-sized

chains, and websites that cater to the local customer with users who
have a high intent to purchase.

It’s no wonder that a simple search for [Local SEO] brings up many
checklists that provide valuable information, including Search Engine
Journal’s Guide for Local SEO.

However, enterprise companies that target a large audience pose a

challenge in optimizing for local searches.

Sites like TripAdvisor with their Activities in Seattle page, Yelp’s

Restaurants in Seattle, and Groupon’s Things to do Near Me page
show us that enterprise sites can properly optimize for local searches.

The key is using the right signals, adding off-site optimization for
local, and developing content that makes sense based on user intent.

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AUTHORITATIVE DOCUMENT
IDENTIFICATION PATENT
In December 2004, Google filed the Patent for Authoritative
Document Identification that kicked off their focus on providing local
searches with quality local content. The abstract stating:

“A system determines documents that are associated

with a location, identifies a group of signals associated
with each of the documents, and determines
authoritativeness of the documents for the location
based on the signals.”

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The patent uses four main signals that determine a location for
a business:

1. The page associated contains a physical address with a

legitimate phone number.

2. The H1 matches the business name.

3. The URL contains the name of the business.

4. The page has many links pointing to it from a number of other

pages and/or websites that mention the location and/or the
business name.

In 2005, Google announced its Maps feature with a launch to mobile

later in the year.

The goal was to continue to push for local results forcing websites to
optimize for searches around countries, provinces, states, and cities.

In 2008, I optimized a website to save the breakfast sandwich at

Starbucks using the four signals from a database of cities for people
looking for Starbucks in their city.

The website was so successful that Howard Schultz named it in his

book “Onward“.

A few years later, I began work at usedcars.com and discovered that

the location-specific section of the site dropped considerably with
Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.

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Pages were developed for local searches of “used cars in..” plus each
city.

Each page included the four signals: addresses and phone numbers of
car dealers with mentions of “used cars in…” plus city.

Tiles of vehicles for sale in that location, special deals based on cars
priced below KBB value, and additional dynamically driven content
supplemented the page for a valuable experience.

The project resulted in contributing to over 60% of the revenue for the
business from SEO by the time my two years there were up.

MERGING SEARCH RESULTS PATENT

In March 2013, Google’s Merging Search Results patent was approved
and applied in full effect forcing many sites to reconsider their local
SEO strategy. The abstract:

“Methods, systems, and apparatus, including

computer programs encoded on a computer storage
medium, for merging search results. In one aspect,
a method combines search results responsive
to a query that is obtained from a local search
engine and a universal search engine such that the
combined search results are ordered and presented
in a way that emphasizes certain business entities in
the results.”

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With the authority results, the pages that have been chosen to be
associated with the business entity in a local result will include the
general and local page in local results.

The authority page of the business is the homepage of the business.

If an authority page ranks highly in both web results and local search
results, that URL may be merged so that it only appears one time in
the search result as a local listing.

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For example, a project I developed while at Nordstrom, a user

searching for Nordstrom in Seattle will see the local store page as the
authority page in the search results and connect to the results in the
local pack rather than the Nordstrom homepage.

With the patent, when the local search result is considered the
authority page for the query and within proximity of the searcher, the
combined results might then appear before other results in response to
a query.

Since the release of the patent, users are accessing search on their
mobile devices.

Google has placed an emphasis on more signals around “near me” and
for general queries like “restaurants” or “shopping” assuming that users
are expecting local results.

Claiming your business page on Google Places, Yelp, TripAdvisor,

Groupon, and many other location-specific websites to add local link
signals to your webpage are becoming increasingly important.

For enterprise sites, services like Yext Local SEO and Render SEO:
Local Marketing Hub will:

Manage local pages.

Provide an interface to monitor and respond to reviews.

Push the information out to the location sites (Yelp, Google,

TripAdvisor and 40k+ more).

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THE ENTERPRISE LOCAL SEO CHECKLIST

Establish authoritative pages for each location.

H1 should include the location name with a business name (or

topic).

Content on pages should include addresses and phone

numbers where possible.

Local Schema around the local information:

URLs should contain location and business name (where

applicable).

Using Yext or SweetIQ services will provide local signals from

other location authoritative pages with inbound links to pages.

Maps (preferably Google Maps) on pages with pin to address.

Unique content from:

Customer reviews. Hours of operation

Location-specific products (if applicable).
and/or services. Any events happening
Links to nearby location at the location.
pages. Location description.

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Images of location (even better if the location is in the text

and alt text on the image).

Sub pages with additional information.

Internal links pointing to pages where mentions make sense.

Targeting ranking for local SEO can prove to be extremely successful

for an enterprise company.

Nordstrom is leading the omnichannel experience with the latest

technologies with the local project I started in 2018.

The initiative has the potential to drive hundreds of millions in

increased revenue with even more potential.

Connecting online with offline activity users will be able to save

products and find them on hold in the store to try on and purchase.

If your enterprise site doesn’t have a solid local SEO strategy, it’s time
to get something started.

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END-TO-END SEO:
5 STEPS FOR
ENSURING YOUR
ENTERPRISE
GETS IT RIGHT
SEJ PARTNER

AUTHOR
KAMERON JENKINS
DIRECTOR OF CONTENT, BOTIFY
 E N D -TO - E N D S E O :
5 STEPS FOR ENSURING YOUR ENTERPRISE GETS IT RIGHT

Getting enterprise SEO right is tough, but worth it.

SEO practitioners know well that organic search has the potential to
drive a majority of a brand’s traffic (as well as its revenue!), but the size
and complexity of enterprise organizations and their websites present
unique obstacles to this.

To get SEO right, enterprises need an end-to-end strategy – one that

covers everything from framework to culture.

Let’s take a look.

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5 STEPS FOR ENSURING YOUR ENTERPRISE GETS IT RIGHT

1. THE RIGHT FRAMEWORK

Search is a process.

While it’s natural to focus on the rankings and organic search traffic
that SEO can produce, it’s easy to forget how those ranking pages
came to be.

If search engines like Google aren’t crawling your pages, they won’t be
added to the index where they can rank, be clicked, and earn revenue
for your business.

In other words, search is a process with a clear beginning and end. To

succeed, you need to focus on success at every step.

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STEP 1:
HELPING SEARCH ENGINES CRAWL YOUR SITE

Search engines don’t have unlimited time and resources. So, what’s
their solution for crawling the web?

A budget – the amount of pages search engine bots will visit on your
site before moving on.

That’s not a problem for many sites, but for enterprise websites?

It’s a big concern.

In fact, our data shows that reality has led to Google missing 51% of the
pages on enterprise websites.

STEP 2:
KNOWING HOW SEARCH ENGINES RENDER YOUR JAVASCRIPT

The modern web runs on JavaScript, and enterprise websites are no

exception.

Just like crawling, Google doesn’t have

unlimited time and resources to
render all the JavaScript on the
web, so they have a second
wave of indexing, causing some
JavaScript loaded content and
links to be missed.

Heavy JavaScript usage can also

cause performance issues.

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STEP 3:
ENSURING ONLY YOUR
IMPORTANT PAGES GET
INDEXED
Crawl budget optimization
and JavaScript SEO analysis
are necessary steps for
enterprise SEOs to ensure that
their important content gets
indexed and low value pages
(e.g., duplicate facet pages)
stay out of the index.

STEP 4:
CREATING INTENT-MATCHING CONTENT THAT RANKS
Once content is in the index, it qualifies to rank. However, just because
it’s in the index doesn’t mean it’ll show up in the top spots for relevant
queries.

Enterprise SEOs need to create and optimize existing content so that

it’s the most relevant, helpful answer to real searcher queries.

STEP 5:
CONVERTING SEARCHERS INTO VISITORS & REVENUE
Achieving top rankings for relevant queries isn’t an end unto itself.

You’ll want to be clicked on by searchers and convert those searchers

so that your company makes money from your SEO efforts.

As you can see, enterprise SEOs need to focus on the entire SEO
funnel – from crawling to conversions – in order to drive the most
impact for their organization.

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2. THE RIGHT TOOLS TO IMPLEMENT IT

Knowing what’ll drive impact is one thing. Executing it is another.

While enterprise SEOs are some of the smartest of the bunch, they
need the right tools in their toolkit to be able to get a full picture of
their website and execute the highest-priority changes at scale.

So, what should that toolkit look like?

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THE RIGHT DATA

SPEEDY CRAWLS
In order to optimize Enterprise websites are huge. That means
for the full SEO crawls can take a long time – time that you
funnel, enterprise don’t have.
SEOs need tools that
can give them data You need a crawler that can get through
from every step of your whole site in hours, not days.
that funnel.
For example, Botify can crawl HTML at a
That means needing rate of 250 URLs/second and JavaScript
a powerful crawler, at 100 URLs/second.
log file analyzer,
THE LESS MANUAL, THE BETTER
keyword tracking,
With as many pages, keywords, and traffic
and on-site analytics
as you’re managing, doing things manually
data – preferably in
just isn’t feasible.
the same platform.
Enterprise SEO tools need to give you
Unifying this data
the ability to scale while still being able to
helps you uncover
customize where necessary.
new insights like how
many pages actually PRIORITIZATION BAKED IN
exist in your website When time and resources are in short
structure (crawl) vs. supply, but you have a mountain of data
how many Google is you need to wade through, you need a
crawling (log files) so platform with prioritization baked in – a
that you can uncover tool that alerts you when things go awry
your true crawl and points you toward the highest-impact
budget. tasks.

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AUTOMATION
One of the biggest barriers to an enterprise SEO’s effectiveness is the
ability to execute.

SEOs, especially those who work in-house at large organizations, often

struggle to get their projects and fixes implemented because they have
to go through another team to do it.

Tools that offer autonomy through automation are ideal fixes for this
common problem.

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3. THE RIGHT PEOPLE TO RUN IT

In a Forrester thought leadership study commissioned by Botify, they
found that 47% of enterprise organizations say finding and hiring SEO
talent is one of their top challenges.

That’s a huge problem, considering that the best frameworks and tools
in the world can’t make up for a lack of SEO talent and experience.

There are many qualities that make a great enterprise SEO, such as:

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EXPERIENCE SOLVING LARGE SITE PROBLEMS

One of the major characteristics that makes
enterprise SEO unique is website size.

The bigger the website, the more

likely you’ll run
into indexing
challenges.

Enterprise
SEOs should
be familiar
with diagnosing
indexing
challenges and
coming up with scalable
solutions.

KNOWLEDGE OF AGILE DEVELOPMENT

Enterprise SEOs often have to work closely with engineering teams,
many of which subscribe to an agile development methodology.

The more familiar enterprise SEOs can be with sprint cycles and how
dev teams operate, the more likely they’ll be able to get their projects
executed.

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ABLE TO
COMMUNICATE
WITH
EXECUTIVES

A CROSS-FUNCTIONAL MINDSET A big part of

As enterprise SEO consultant Jessica Bowman enterprise SEO
says, “Everyone touching the website is doing is building
SEO, whether they know it or not.” business cases
so that you can
Enterprise SEOs need to be able to work with
get the buy-in
all the teams that touch the website, from
and support
content to UX to engineering.
you need to
THE ABILITY TO JUGGLE MULTIPLE AGENCY & keep going.
TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS
It’s becoming increasingly common for in-house This means
SEO teams to increase their bandwidth by being able to
outsourcing some aspects of their SEO strategy translate SEO-
to agency and technology partners. speak into
terms your
Enterprise SEOs then need to be able to executives care
delegate and communicate their vision to about.
multiple partners on an ongoing basis.

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4. THE RIGHT ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE TO

ENABLE IT
Even the best enterprise SEOs can be hamstrung by the wrong
organizational structure.

So what’s the “right” organizational structure?

Every enterprise brand is going to have to decide for itself what setup
best suits their needs, but in general, SEO teams thrive when they’re
integrated with all the teams that touch the website.

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What we find that leads to in many cases is multiple specialties within

SEO rather than generic, duplicative roles. This can include, among
other things:

An SEO project manager.

A technical SEO specialist (which can be further broken down

into sub-specialties like crawling & indexing, JavaScript, etc.).

A content SEO specialist.

A specialist in charge of SEO reporting and analysis.

In a large enterprise where SEOs need to work with multiple

stakeholders across the organization, it’s helpful to have SEOs who
are dedicated to a single practice area and can liaise with their
corresponding stakeholder.

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5. THE RIGHT CULTURE TO SUPPORT IT

SEOs can’t do their job in a vacuum.

They need help executing their initiatives (and ensuring that other
teams’ initiatives don’t harm the site’s performance in search).

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But without enterprise-wide buy-in, SEO programs are dead in the

water.

Ideally, this comes from the top.

When executives understand the value of SEO, they can encourage

their teams to follow these best practices and even hold them
accountable to SEO KPIs.

The alternative is that SEOs are left asking favors from teams that are
under no obligation to acquiesce.

Sometimes, an SEO culture doesn’t come from the top, meaning

SEOs have to take the lead in evangelizing SEO throughout their
organization themselves. This can be accomplished through methods
like:

Regular training sessions.

An SEO Slack channel where any team can go to ask SEO

questions.

Providing the data to show what happens when SEO is and

isn’t considered.

Enterprise SEO isn’t easy, but it is worth it.

When organic search has the potential to be a brand’s top traffic and
revenue driver, it’s critical to have the right framework, tools, talent,
structure, and culture in place.

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6 ENTERPRISE-
LEVEL LINK
BUILDING BEST
PRACTICES
AUTHOR
KEVIN ROWE
6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

The size of your business deeply influences your

marketing strategy.

Many large brands or websites inherently have

an unfair advantage over smaller businesses and
brands – name recognition, reach, a much larger
budget to work with, and additional resources in
other departments.

Take all of these benefits into consideration

when planning your next enterprise link building
strategy.

To successfully implement a large-scale link

building campaign, scalability is key.

Look to start with one brand or product/service

and then, as you learn what works and what
doesn’t, you can expand both your campaigns
to cover more products and your outreach to
get links from more sources.

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING:

WHERE TO FOCUS
The most successful large-scale link building campaigns start niche-
specific.

Even if you were a home improvement store like Lowe’s or Home

Depot, you couldn’t easily start a campaign trying to cover all home
improvement products you offer.

Build your initial campaign around a specific product line, category, or

other niche offerings, and then expand to others, using what works.

A good rule of thumb is to start with a one-page plan.

If you can’t fit the elements of a link campaign on a one-page plan, to

start, then you are not focused enough.

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

1. PROMOTE SPECIFIC CONTENT

In this Home Depot-sponsored post on Simply Designing with Ashley
Phipps, the author walks her audience through some of the light
fixtures and other items you can make with pipes:

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

She also directs readers over to The Home

Depot’s Apron blog for a full DIY how-to for
the fixture.

This is a great example of working with

influencers for content and as part of a
traffic-focused link building campaign.

Not only did Phipps expose her audience

and link to these available products at The
Home Depot, The Home Depot gave Phipps
exposure on their blog for the DIY tutorial.

Home Depot certainly paid for that content,

however, a niche-focused topic with a
strong connection between the brand or
product will make it easier to secure unpaid
mentions as well.

The Home Depot is a great example of a

collaborative campaign.

Additionally, because the subject of the

blog is so niche (pipe light fixture kits), the
post did well on social media as well, with
over 1,800 pins at the time of publication.

This example does not suggest that paid

links in sponsored content will drive ranking
but is a great example of a link that can
drive traffic.

9
 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

2. INCREASE SITE OR SITE SECTION AUTHORITY

Besides growing your inbound link portfolio to specific pages, link

building is also a great way to increase your site, sub-domain, or page
authority, usually if you are a smaller brand within the brand portfolio.

If you’re working on link building for a smaller brand that is owned by

a larger corporation, be sure to leverage the name recognition and
reputation of the products and their manufacturer.

For instance, this post on Ma Nouvelle Mode is for a product line at a

jeweler. This review gave more exposure to that specific product line,
while also mentioning the jeweler, whose name may be more well-
known.

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

Targeting a specific topic, as well as a specific brand or line, is what

makes influencer and link building campaigns more effective.

If you try to be too broad (e.g., if Staples tried to promote all of their
available school supplies during the back-to-school season), you risk
the reader losing interest or not knowing what to focus on.

More likely than not, a post about “getting all the back-to-school
supplies we need at Staples” won’t get as much traction as “where
to find the cheapest notebooks” or “how sticky notes have made me
more productive.”

HOW TO APPROACH ENTERPRISE-LEVEL

LINK BUILDING
Once you’ve narrowed down your focus to a specific product or brand,
you need to work on your approach.

Below are some of the areas you can focus on to actually get links for
large corporations or brands.

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

3. UNLINKED BRAND MENTIONS

A brand has a wonderful advantage to generate links with unlinked
brand mentions.

These are mentions or references of your brand terms, typically in

articles, that don’t link back to your domain.

In general, these links are natural and as the writer clearly knows the
brand but for some reason didn’t link.

These types of links are also much easier to get than others, meaning
they are easier to find and the conversion rate on securing a link can be
as high as 15-20%.

I have most recently been using Ahrefs’ Content Explorer because you
can find the mentions over time and I trust their dataset to be large.

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

4. LEVERAGE INFLUENCER MARKETING

Start building your link building campaign by researching the specific
publications, influencers, or bloggers that you want to reach out to.

Use a tool like Buzzsumo to find popular posts about related topics
then work backward to research the publication the post is on.

For instance, if we wanted to do more posts about DIY projects for The
Home Depot, there are several blogs that we could reach out to:

How has the competitive landscape changed?

Find out if your competitors secured their market positions in recent

months.

Try experimenting with the date range filter to get the best results for
what you need and to see what has been trending recently.

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

5. LEVERAGE CLIENTS & CUSTOMERS

In addition to reaching out to influencers for content campaigns, why
not utilize your existing connections?

Many companies have a “my favorite products” page. If you’re one of

their clients, asking for a link on that page isn’t unreasonable.

Here’s a screenshot of some of the non-affiliate products and tools

author and entrepreneur Chris Ducker shares on his resources page:

Any nonprofit work your company does could be a potential for a link
as well.

Ask to be mentioned on the event information page if you sponsor an

event or on the donor appreciation page if you donated to an annual
drive and the nonprofit mentions and links to donors on its website.

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

Of course, asking current customers and clients for links should be

done with tact and savvy. You don’t want to come off as opportunistic.

Be specific without sounding demanding. Often, something like:

“I noticed that you listed the event donors on

the event page [link to URL], can CompanyXYZ
be included as well? We love the work we’re
doing with you and look forward to [something
specific and genuine]”

Be upfront and to-the-point so the request seems painless.

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

6. INTERLINK AMONG CORPORATE/BRAND SITES

Often enterprise companies have multiple brands with their own online
identity and website.

Have these websites link to one another when it makes sense (and is
helpful to the user).

This could be offering related products, comparing a small to large

scale solution, or sharing promotions that work across different brands.

Gap Inc. does a good job of this from an e-commerce perspective:

When you’re on one of their brands’ websites (in this case, OldNavy.
com), there is a tabbed format at the top that takes you to their other
brands.

The shopping cart and several of the promo codes work across all their
brands, making for a more seamless shopping experience.

This saves the consumer time – they can do all their shopping online
across four different stores at once.

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 6 ENTERPRISE-LEVEL LINK BUILDING BEST PRACTICES

CONCLUSION
Remember to always be purposeful with your link building.

Don’t go after any link that seems doable. Build a thorough strategy.

Link building is best with a multi-faceted approach.

Target a specific audience using a niche topic for influencer marketing

projects, then work with your customers and your own sites to get
more links where it makes sense.

9
 10
BRAND EQUITY:
THE KEY TO
ENTERPRISE
LINK BUILDING
AUTHOR
KEVIN ROWE
 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

Organizations that have substantial brand equity, or are

working to build it, you will have a gold mine of untapped
linking opportunities scattered on a blog, influencer, and news
sites.

While good PR teams are great at getting their company and

brand or product story published, they don’t always have the
direction, or it’s out of their scope to align that work with SEO
and link building efforts.

The reality is most organizations have not captured link

building as a PR metric, but they should!

That said, as a rule of thumb, generating branded anchor text

for unlinked brand mentions can generate a significant number
of links with minimal effort.

Some people have reported 15–20% successful placement

rates from outreach to secured links.

Data-driven link building is certainly a good option to secure

a significant number of links. However, the amount of time it
takes to build this content increases the resources needed to
generate a link.

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 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

4 TYPES OF UNLINKED MENTIONS TO FIND

There are four types of brand mentions to search for.

The route you choose will depend on your company structure and how
you brand the company, the products, and its people.

1. COMPANY BRAND
Depending on the structure of your company, the corporate or
company brand name may provide the most unlinked brand mentions.

The brands can certainly have a lot of mentions. For example, B&H
Photo Video and Audio has a lot of online references, as seen in the
Moz report.

10
 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

An example of a company brand:

2. PRODUCT BRAND
If your company sells a product with a well-known brand name, then
finding the product brand mentions is a very effective approach to
generate links..

A product brand example is the Allbird Wool Runners from Allbirds.

This popular sneaker brand has 137,000 unique unlinked mentions.

Although most of these are not good prospects for links, this will
certainly create some opportunities.

This could be a direct-to-consumer CPG or a digital product like a

branded training course.

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 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

3. ECOMMERCE RETAIL BRANDS

This refers to a product that an ecommerce retailer sells from another

company or CPG brand product.

You see that Farfetch sells Gucci Sneakers, but this product is
produced by Gucci and Farfetch is a reseller of that product.

4. EXECUTIVE OR COMPANY INFLUENCERS

Executive influencers have become an effective growth strategy,

and some influencers have gone on to launch successful products or
services.

It’s difficult to speak of executive influencers and not bring up Gary

Vaynerchuk.

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 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

If I were handling SEO for VaynerMedia, I would have a full-time job

claiming unlinked brand mentions for the term “gary vaynerchuk.”

If you want to determine if this process is the right fit for your brand,
then here are two ways to identify if there is a significant volume of
mentions.

Google Search Operators

The manual method involves using Google search operators to find all
of a company’s brand mentions outside of their website and primary
social media channels.

Using the “intext” operator to define the “company

brand,” in conjunction with using the minus operator (e.g.,
“-intext:searchenginejournal.com” and -insite:facebook.com) to only
return sites without links to the domain, you will be able to start finding
all of the off-page results.

10
 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

As the listings come up in Google, you may find it very difficult to sort
through and make sense of the results without going page by page.

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 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

Industry Tools

If you prefer more data on the prospective sites and content, then
there are several tools that you can use.

Since I’ve already written a few times about how to use Ahrefs, I
wanted to explore other great alternatives:

Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer

I like the simplicity of the tool, and if you use Moz data, but you still
need to know your operators.

The main benefits are the tool’s “mention authority” score and the
ability to build a campaign around it.

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 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

Make sure to use quotation operators around text for exact matches.

So if you’re searching for a product brand like “shure sm7b”, you’ll get
results that only have that phrase.

Now that you have a prioritized target list of opportunities, it is time

to figure out how to contact the authors to get consideration for
backlinks.

FIND THE RIGHT CONTACT

Here is where the PR team can start making your work even easier,
starting with their list of journalists.

If the team has been in place for any amount of time, they should have
relationships with journalists, bloggers, and influencers in their space.

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 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

Those relationships can help make your life easier in terms of the initial
outreach and some quick wins getting backlinks set up.

Getting the inhouse team involved helps manage the client and
expectations, creates buy-in to the process, and develops a sense of
joint ownership of the results.

While the spreadsheet of journalist relationships is

a helpful starting point, once a program begins
to scale, you will need to automate.

If you are dealing with a medium-sized business

or enterprise account, they will likely have tools
already in place, such as Cision, Muck Rack, or
Meltwater.

These traditional PR tools have press release

distribution, journalist management, media
intelligence, and PR reporting as their core
DNA, and they can be helpful in aspects of
the backlink outreach effort.

However, they are not specifically

designed for this purpose.

I have found that BuzzStream is a

useful tool to prospect and build
relationships with lists of journalists, run
PR campaigns, and, most importantly,
conduct effective link building
campaigns, all from one platform.

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 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

CREATE A NATURAL & IMPACTFUL LINK

The last part of this equation is how you secure a link in the article and
pitch the site.

I group these because the pitch will require an understanding of how

much content, if any, you’ll need to provide the publisher.

HOW TO APPROACH THE REQUEST AND CONTENT

Update the brand mention: This is a fast and straightforward

method of securing a link, but it has a lower response rate
typically. With this, you will only get the link update for the
exact mention of the brand name.

Custom paragraph: A paragraph that updates the content

around a brand mention provides added value to the
publication’s audience by appending a deeper understanding of
the topic. Thankfully, this method will not tax your resources.

10
 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

Full content refresh: Many, if not most, of your unlinked brand

mentions will be in articles older than six months, typically.
In this case, I recommend a full content refresh. This means,
update the material for the site and then rewrite with recent
resources and more in-depth content.

HOW TO PERFORM OUTREACH

When you think about it, the easy part is gathering the link
opportunities and establishing the list of appropriate contacts.

The question now is, how do you get them to take action on behalf of
you and your client?

Here are some key considerations when building the outreach program:

To scale, you must automate/semi-automate: Undertaking an

extensive link building program with tens of thousands of link
opportunities, you will need to automate and try to minimize
the complexity of outreach.

Personalized templates: Templated outreach scales

effectively and is highly measurable in support of campaigns.
Keep in mind you are also building a relationship with bloggers
and should take the time to personalize your one-to-one
outreach appropriately. Most email software, like MailChimp or
Buzzstream, will offer some form of dynamic insertion into your
email-based.

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BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

Automate the Follow Up: Writers are busy, and as a

professional, you should follow up. Instead of manually doing
follow up, use automated drips and reminders to help stay on
top of things. I’ve been experimenting with AI email response
automation with RoboResponse.

Analyze and optimize daily: Conduct periodic reviews to

examine your progress while the campaigns are in process and
adjust as necessary to optimize your results. I like to roll out
emails in small batches and A/B split test titles and copy.

Report on The Metrics: The final step to a link building

campaign is the review of internal metrics. You should review
how team members contribute to the end results and report
back to the client on the success and set a baseline plan for the
next effort. For a custom outreach campaign, monitor backlinks
can allow you to find and monitor links and growth against
historic link profiles.

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 BRAND EQUITY: THE KEY TO ENTERPRISE LINK BUILDING

A FINAL NOTE
A strong brand will create a lot of opportunities to build links.

Through creative analysis of your company’s brands or internal

influencers, there can very well be a large volume of low-hanging fruit
capable of a powerful impact on search engine rankings.

While getting backlinks is relatively simple in concept, it is not easy.

As discussed in this article, having the right tools to simplify the

process and keep things organized is vital to scale the project and your
offerings overall successfully.

As a final benefit, along with scale, automation will provide the

simplification of reporting and the visualizations needed to determine
and articulate program success.

10
 11
THE TOP 4
ENTERPRISE SEO
PLATFORM TOOLS:
AN IN-DEPTH
REVIEW
AUTHOR
JENN M ATHEWS
 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

With millions of pages and keywords to manage and report on,

enterprise SEO is increasingly more complicated and time-consuming.

Using an enterprise SEO platform tool can increase efficiency and

productivity for organic search marketing teams in a large organization
that are managing organic search initiatives.

These SEO tools can help you with:

Identifying opportunities.
Tracking performance.
Optimizing content.
Backlink reporting and management.
Cross-organization communication.
Competitive analysis.
Integrating analytics tools.
Technical analysis from crawling to conversions.
Local, national, and global.

While there are many free SEO tools available, none are able to
manage the large scale and complexity that comes with an enterprise
site.

For the past 20 years, I have seen enterprise SEO platform tools come
into the space with the promise of providing the ability to increase
efficiency in reporting on the aforementioned.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

However, few tools have managed to truly capture all that an enterprise
SEO needs.

I gathered a shortlist of a select few that can handle the complexities

and volume of an enterprise site including:

seoClarity

Conductor

Botify

BrightEdge

The tools I chose to review are all companies I have encountered

throughout my years managing teams at enterprise-level organizations.

I asked the sales reps to run me through a review process complete

with filling out an extensive questionnaire (similar to what would be
in an RFP) and lengthy demos focusing on what ecommerce and B2B
enterprise-level companies would need for their SEO reporting tool.

It’s a process that took me a few months and was completely worth it.

This review should help you begin your evaluation process while you
decide which enterprise SEO tool best fits your needs.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

SEOCLARITY
In the summer of 2019, I attended the SMX Advanced conference in
Seattle with my team from Groupon.

We walked through the hall browsing the various booths for any new
SEO companies breaking into the space.

The sales team at seoClarity had some of the coolest swag and eager
salespeople ready to show us what they have to offer.

Founded in 2009, seoClarity is an enterprise SEO and content

optimization platform powered by Clarity Grid infrastructure.

It’s the combination of petabytes of data (keywords, daily crawls of the

web, and years of historical data), machine-learning algorithms, and
patented analyses.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

The tool enables real-time, interactive analysis, and insights to improve

search visibility and deliver the best customer search experience.

Executives, SEO practitioners, content marketers, data analysts, IT,

product, and merchandising teams will all find seoClarity useful.

The company works with over 3,500+ brands across top industries
with a heavy footprint that includes travel and hospitality, ecommerce,
automotive, higher education, and technology.

ECOMMERCE & B2B FEATURES

seoClarity has a proven track record of aiding in
growth from SEO for B2B companies.

In this case study, the company was able to

identify and resolve problematic technical
elements, then push out the data delivered by
real-time reporting to gain a holistic view of
the entire search landscape.

The result was a 30% year-over-year growth in

organic search traffic.

seoClarity can be a powerful tool for

ecommerce focused businesses as well as
users gaining insight into category-focused
optimization, identify
duplicate content, and
continue to improve pages
for SEO.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

KEY FEATURES
During the demo, I stopped the sales rep for a moment to walk me
through the Actionable Insight portion of the tool.

The basic idea is that while the tool offers up suggestions, those can be
manually overridden based on impact and effort that might be unique
to the company.

Content Fusion was also talked about with its powerful ability to scale
content writing and optimization.

It analyzes top ranking content and provides insights to help clients

write the most authoritative content faster than ever before.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

seoClarity’s additional features that set the tool apart from the
competition include:

Rank Intelligence provides an advanced, real-time exploration

of ranking data to easily navigate and understand ranking
performance – at scale. It includes 27+ SEO metrics to slice,
dice, and analyze ranking data, including unlimited competitor
comparisons.

Unlimited daily rank tracking from every country, on

every search engine, both desktop and mobile. It includes
all instances of Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, Naver
and more.

Research Grid provides interactive and dynamic keyword

research and discovery to analyze the performance of content
and provides access to the entire search landscape.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

Clarity Audits is a site audit technology that includes 40-

plus technical health checks and includes a built-in HTML and
JavaScript crawler, that crawled up to 48 million pages.

Includes an unlimited number of crawl projects or

number of pages crawled, internal link audit, and analysis.

Content marketing suite includes the full lifecycle of Content

Optimization management features and services and also applies
User Search Intent throughout for content research, content
ideas, and an AI-driven content writer, Content FusionTM.

Bot Clarity is an advanced log-file analysis tool to identify

search engine crawl issues as they happen. It also identifies
spoof-bots acting as search engines and how quickly new pages
are being crawled by the search engines.

Actionable Insights algorithm designed to learn from hundreds

of data points and automatically generate insights to scale SEO
practices across the enterprise.

Page-level analytics and advanced Google Search Console

integrations identify close to 100% visibility into the term “(not
provided)” and includes 16 months of historical GSC data. It
allows the correlation of keyword-level data with all SEO metrics.

Built-in workflow management system for customizable team

collaboration.

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 DEEP LEARNING OR ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
From anomaly detection to
helping write higher quality
content, the latest version
of the seoClarity platform is
built from the ground up to
take advantage of machine
learning advancements and
artificial intelligence.

seoClarity acts like a personal

data scientist to constantly
analyze all SEO data, metrics,
and actions to provide live
insights based on the ever-
changing search landscape.

seoClarity clients love the instant insights with Content Fusion by

helping writers understand how to cover a topic with authority in just a
few seconds.

Their proprietary machine learning applied to ranking data provides

fast, relevant answers to every level of an organization by helping:

Recognize trends as they happen.

Increase team efficiency.
Show clear, measurable results.
Capture new revenue opportunities.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

COMPETITIVE REPORTING & ANALYSIS

Users can access rankings for any domain, subdomain, URL, and their
backlink index.

seoClarity claims to be the only SEO platform to offer unlimited

competitive comparisons, on the fly, against existing keyword rankings
or within the entire search landscape.

Clients can uncover opportunities and compare against five

competitors at one time to recognize content gaps with just a few
clicks.

Users can quickly filter for their keyword research and identify content
gaps, in addition to comparing their keyword portfolio ranking data
against any competitor, on-the-fly.

seoClarity will also surface opportunities for content that competitors

are ranking for, but the client’s website isn’t.

ANALYTICS INTEGRATION
seoClarity provides analytics integration in the form of an open data
platform, importing data from virtually any analytics source, including
Adobe, IBM, Google Analytics, and internal data warehouses.

LINK EVALUATION: INTERNAL AND/OR EXTERNAL

With seoClarity clients can fully understand their current link structure
and gain insights into the impact and opportunities for new links in
order to boost their search visibility as well as overall user experience.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

LINK EVALUATION: INTERNAL AND/OR EXTERNAL USER LEVEL

SETTINGS
With seoClarity clients can fully understand
their current link structure and gain insights User accounts
into the impact and opportunities for new for the seoClarity
links in order to boost their search visibility system can
as well as overall user experience. be set-up and
customized for
EXTERNAL LINK ANALYSIS each user.
While the internal link analysis is valuable,
the seoClarity platform also combines Each user’s access
multiple backlink data sources through can be set by role-
consolidated link profile data with based or user-
integrations for Ahrefs, BuzzStream, based giving them
Majestic, Moz, and Google Search Console access to only
providing clients with a holistic view into the areas that are
their backlink portfolio. needed.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

ACCESS TO TOOL, REPORTS & DATA SUPPORT

Users can access seoClarity’s robust API,
various exports and transform and load seoClarity’s client
virtually any data point. success support
includes:
Reports or analyses are collected by
24/7 phone
seoClarity into a data storage system for
and email critical
long-term storage, or integration into an
support.
internal data warehouse, through Adobe
Marketing Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Live chat.
Box.com, FTP data exchange, or custom
data warehouses. Online
knowledge
base of articles,
PLATFORM UPDATES & TECHNOLOGY TRENDS training videos,
seoClarity has a two-week development
and use case
release cycle.
studies.
Their roadmap is built 100% based on
Active online
client feedback to solve real challenges in
user community.
enterprise SEO and content marketing.

PRICING STRUCTURE
Pricing packages
are based on the
combination of domain
profiles and the number
of keyword search
queries tracked.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE GETTING STARTED

seoClarity has tried and tested SEO workflows for getting onboarded
and set up in the platform quickly.

Each client’s dedicated Client Success Team has defined workflows to

help seamlessly get them onboarded and trained in the platform to
start showing value quickly.

SUMMARY
seoClarity clients spend a lot of time leveraging their dashboards for
reporting.

Dashboards are 100% customizable and help streamline reporting to

easily communicate updates of performance with many levels within
an organization.

Rank Intelligence is another capability that clients tend to rave about

making it different than your typical rank tracking tool offering on-the-
fly analysis to gain clear insights from ranking data.

Clients love the ability to compare against any competitor depending

on the segment of the business they are analyzing.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

WHAT SETS SEOCLARITY APART FROM THE COMPETITION?

seoClarity is the only enterprise SEO platform to provide all SEO
data, metrics, and capabilities under one integrated platform without
artificial limitations.

Some of the key functionality that set seoClarity from the competition
are:

No artificial limitations including:

Unlimited competitor comparisons (on-the-fly analysis).

Site audit technology allows for unlimited crawl pages and projects.

Extract and download data right within the platform.

Unlimited users.

Unlimited dashboards for reporting.

Built and support of infrastructure on daily ranking updates where

all SEO data and metrics are updated continually (as often as every
24 hours) and stored indefinitely.

Constantly building solutions that help solve their clients’ most

complex SEO challenges. Their dev roadmap is built 100% on client
feedback. seoClarity’s approach is, if two clients request it, they
will put it into the dev roadmap, updating and upgrading existing
features in 2-week development cycles.

You can learn about seoClarity and read through their customer case
studies here.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

CONDUCTOR
I was first introduced to Conductor by a THE PLATFORM:
friend, an executive at a company listed in
Provides insights
the mid-200 range of the Fortune 500.
around what
This friend very enthusiastically customers are
recommended the SEO enterprise platform searching for.
and connected me to the company’s CEO.
Delivers
I was immediately impressed with the
recommended
break into the SEO world of Conductor
actions so users can
Searchlight SaaS in 2010.
drive visibility and
Conductor’s Searchlight is an enterprise revenue.
SEO and content technology that
Measures the
encourages and enhances collaboration for
impact made
customer-driven teams.
through SEO efforts.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

Conductor provides results through a combination of organic

marketing technologies and strategic digital services.

It offers technology-first insights around how a company’s audience

is searching organically while surfacing recommendations and
opportunities to better optimize content improving visibility and
overall technical health of large scale websites.

The platform measures how a site’s content is performing online and

the positive or negative impact of technical optimizations the team has
implemented for SEO by:

Understanding the audience.

Investigating competition.
Tracking visibility.
Analyzing content performance.
Optimizing content reporting and sharing.

In addition, Conductor’s digital services team provides resources and

strategies outside of their technology offering giving customers the
added resources they may need to drive SEO success.

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KEY FEATURES
The beauty of Conductor’s enterprise SEO
platform is that it is created around three
principles: simplicity, consistency, and providing
insights over data.

One of the top two reasons customers

consistently give Conductor a 9 or 10 NPS,
contributing to the company’s NPS of over 50,
is usability.

At the heart of the platform is Insight Stream,

which provides an activity news feed for
customers (traffic changes, new content ideas,
competitive alerts, etc.).

Users scroll through insights gathered from

a variety of tools, and can chat with team
members directly in “stories.”

The interface is clean and focused, presenting detailed information

progressively as users scan and scroll through.

It’s easy for users to manipulate data through filtering, sorting, and
customization so they can see the information that’s most relevant for
them and their particular role within the organization.

The reporting suite is uniquely flexible, enabling users to pull third-party

media and data into custom dashboards.

All of Conductor’s reports are interactive and designed to allow the user
to head down through the rabbit hole of data in a seamless workflow.

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DEEP LEARNING OR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Conductor’s Insight Stream analyzes the client’s search data to
highlight content performance, keyword alerts, competitive insights,
and optimization opportunities across multiple domains and countries.

Stories within the Insight Stream can be shared with various

stakeholders to ensure insights are effectively communicated across
teams and have actionable items associated to grow their SEO.

Additionally, Insight Stream becomes more powerful as different data

sources are brought into Conductor including web analytics, Google
Search Console, DeepCrawl, Keyword Objects, and more.

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COMPETITIVE REPORTING & ANALYSIS

Conductor identifies the competition that appears on the first page
with the addition of Conductor’s Market Share views identifying
domains owning universal results within search (i.e., answer boxes,
video images, etc.).

These insights aid in identifying which competitors have built out

targeted content for any specific featured snippets within search.

Rank Comparison enables users to cross-compare their positions with

up to four different domains within a single view – making it easy for
users to easily identify key competitive areas that may need to focus
their efforts on.

Allowing for the ability to narrow competitive insights down to specific

categories, the local and device type level, and across various types of
search results (images, videos, and answer boxes).

This data can be quickly filtered to derive insights:

Where the content is exclusively ranking.

Where competitors are appearing.

Where there is opportunity to capture an untapped market.

Where the content is placed among the competition in the SERPs.

For on-demand research, Conductor’s Explorer helps with competitive

research outside of managed keywords.

This view is a direct representation of Conductor’s partnership with

best-of-breed keyword index, SEMrush, and identifies the number of
keywords driving traffic to competitor domains as a whole.

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Domain Explorer is fully global and does not restrict users to only
reporting on countries within their account configuration.

Additionally, competitive research can be tailored to focus on any

targeted subdomain or subfolder.

Customers use these tools for benchmarking market share against

tracked and non-traditional competitors.

The need to identify new competitors in the market and having a

better understanding of the competition’s search strategy are areas of
opportunity to gain visibility against competitors.

ANALYTICS INTEGRATION
Conductor provides a secure API based
integration with both Google Analytics and
Adobe Analytics. No custom tagging required.

Conductor integrates both domestic and

international page-level analytics reporting
on keywords tracked in Conductor that are
ranking on all URLs.

Highlighting which keywords are ranking well

and driving traffic to individual pages allow
users to gain a deeper insight into their SEO.

Current Conductor customers leverage

this data to measure performance and
demonstrate ROI around their organic search
efforts.

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EXTERNAL LINK
ANALYSIS

LINK EVALUATION: INTERNAL AND/OR EXTERNAL DeepCrawl

Conductor’s integration with DeepCrawl
integrates with
helps clients perform internal link audits in
Majestic to provide
order to:
additional value to
Remove duplicate and out of date site audit reports
content: Consider whether to delete, with external
deindex, or canonicalize out of date link reporting.
content. Majestic metrics
automatically
Deal with primary navigation issues pull and feed into
(web crawl depth report): Are all pages reports such as:
reachable within a few clicks of the
homepage. Redirecting URLs
with Backlinks
Conduct technical checks: Broken
Links, any links to internal pages Broken Pages
returning a 404, unlinked pages, pages with Backlinks
in sitemaps which aren’t linked. All
Disallowed URLs
should contain a link from at least one
with Backlinks
other area on the site.
Pages with
Check for pages with too many
Backlinks but No
links: Pages with more than 100 links
Links Out
(including those in headers and footers)
look spammy to search engines. Non-Indexable
Pages with
Backlinks

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USER LEVEL ACCESS TO TOOL, REPORTS & DATA

SETTINGS One of the appealing features of Conductor
Conductor is the ability to export reports into excel or
offers unlimited CSV for those data geeks like me.
seats within the
Users simply add a report to the Workspace
platform and can
(or dashboard) which easily reports on
be leveraged by
and automates sharing key organic search
many different
insights across the organization.
stakeholders
across the Workspaces can be automatically shared/
organization. emailed to both Conductor users and non-
Conductor users on a daily, weekly, monthly,
Account
or quarterly cadence.
and access
management is Nearly every view within the platform can
primarily based be added to a Workspace making it easy to
on user roles. cross-reference traditionally silo-ed data-sets
Users in certain within a single report.
roles are granted
access to Additionally, Workspaces will automatically
specified data. update regularly making it easy to automate
and save time on reporting.

For custom reporting, the Conductor enterprise SEO platform has

an easy to use API which can be imported into various business
intelligence tools. Various API endpoints are available in relation to
keyword level and competitive information.

For less self-sufficient users, Conductor’s Business Intelligence team

offers customizations through their FlexHub offering.

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PLATFORM UPDATES &

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
FlexHub is a custom reporting
overlay where Conductor data What is most impressive
analysts can leverage the API about Conductor is their
endpoints of Conductor and its ability to constantly roll
partners to provide insights into out new features.
specific business needs.
All feature teams have
Pre-configured template reports full visibility into their
require slight modifications and can customer’s needs and
be delivered within two weeks. demands thanks to their
Customer Advisory Board,
Larger and more specific custom
surveys, bug reports, sales
reports are scoped on an ad-hoc
escalations, etc.
basis and will be delivered based
on the number of hours required to The design of the platform
complete. allows for experimenting
with new features from
SUPPORT the ground up and for
Offering 24 hours of tech support innovations to happen
5 days a week through in-platform with little overhead in
chat, email, and phone is a huge win terms of delivery to
with customers. customers.

The chat feature is a huge win with Feature teams have the
clients with a support satisfaction flexibility to build new
score of 99%+ and response times offerings in an agile way
on chat under 45 seconds (email just and offer them to a limited
under 4 hours). set of customers to iterate
rapidly.

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The company provides on-demand online training courses to help

facilitate their client’s understanding of the platform.

There is an in-depth Knowledge Base that is filled with product

documentation, workflow examples, and FAQs for all of their features.

They also offer webinars that go through a variety of topics related to

the platform, SEO, and content.

Users can schedule on-demand sessions with a variety of experts

(technical, product, SEO) anytime, in addition to the regularly
scheduled sessions with their customer success team.

A unique feature, Conductor offers a wide range of deliverables that

can be requested on-demand through their Orchestra Menu offering.

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PRICING STRUCTURE
Priced competitively, Conductor has multiple factors that influence
pricing including the number of tracked keywords.

Talk to a Conductor rep to schedule a demo and discuss pricing for

your needs.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE GETTING STARTED

Conductor’s onboarding experience focuses on platform training and
account configuration.

Conductor’s unique Training Camp is a comprehensive program

designed to get team members trained, certified, and executing on
initiatives within Conductor in as little as two weeks.

Each training is customized to meet defined business goals set at the

beginning of the partnership. In addition to Training Camp, Conductor’s
Audience Research team will work on account configuration. Audience
research services include:

KEYWORD DISCOVERY: In-depth keyword identification and

selection reflecting business setup and the search landscape.

CATEGORIZATION (KEYWORD CATEGORIES): Dynamic

category creation to reflect site structure and potential content
opportunities at a keyword level.

CONTENT SEGMENTATION (PAGE GROUPS): Dynamic content

segmentation to reflect site structure and potential content
opportunities at a URL level.

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Identification and optimization for relevant seasonal keywords begin at

the onset of every partnership with the Conductor team.

Through thorough audience research and in-depth conversations on

seasonal company strategies and objectives with every client, the
Conductor Audience Research team focuses its efforts on finding
relevant, high impact keywords based on the inventory calendar
released by the client.

Conductor primarily targets optimizations for category pages, as

inventory turns quickly.

Category pages are optimized to reflect applicable, seasonal keywords,

based on objectives discussed and agreed upon with the client.

As the primary focus is usually increasing qualified traffic, the seasonal

keywords agreed upon can range from high monthly search volume
head term keywords, to lower monthly search volume keywords
targeting a more niche audience.

Incorporating a seasonal strategy into organic search approach, with

guidance from Conductor’s Professional Services team, ultimately
allows retailers to capture more qualified traffic and drive higher
conversions.

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WHAT SETS CONDUCTOR APART FROM THE COMPETITION?

EASE OF USE
Ease-of-use and proper navigation is a cornerstone to the Conductor
design philosophy.

The platform is advanced enough to meet the needs of the most

technical user, yet simple enough for a user to get value with little to
no experience.

While part of that is achieved through simple navigation, a robust

Knowledge Base and support model are essential to this experience.

Conductor’s Knowledge Base offers users overviews of any page/

feature within the platform. Users will also have access to:

Guided workflows.

Getting started guides.

FAQs.

Product releases.

Industry news.

And more.

In addition to a dedicated Account Manager, email, phone, and in-app

chat are available for the team to use at their discretion, as well as ad-
hoc deliverables through Conductor’s Orchestra Menu.

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GLOBAL REPORTING
Global marketing organizations rely on Conductor to be able to scale
their SEO efforts across multiple domains, in dozens of markets, across
tens of thousands of keywords, and in hundreds of locations.

Most enterprise customers require reporting that rolls all of this

information in one central location in order to effectively use this
information to drive marketing decisions.

Conductor is uniquely positioned to help teams both in the platform’s

ability to scale and roll up this information in a digestible format.

An example of this is seen in Conductor’s Global Market Share

FlexHub report, which can be configured to roll all of a company’s web
properties and markets into one single global competitive report.

PARTNERSHIP ECOSYSTEM
Beyond its own data collection processes, Conductor Searchlight
draws from diverse sources of technologies to offer truly best-in-class
solutions to its clients.

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Conductor has established long term partnerships with some of

the most trusted names and best-in-class applications in the digital
marketing ecosystem.

Its development philosophy is to build best-in-class solutions where

they don’t exist and, if they do already exist, Conductor partners
with that technology and synthesizes the data in meaningful ways
throughout its platform.

Forrester released a review on SEO platforms which identified

Conductor as a “Leader” in the space.

In addition regarding customer reviews from Trust Radius and

G2Crowd, Conductor is seen as a top performer in comparison to
others in the space.

You can learn more about Conductor and read through their customer
stories here.

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BOTIFY
A few years ago, I was attending a conference in New York and was
able to get away for a quick demo for the Botify platform.

Just 5 minutes in and I knew we needed Botify for Nordstrom, and

have repeatedly asked for demos for other companies since.

Botify solves a huge problem for large, enterprise websites: with such a
large complex site, over half of the content typically won’t be crawled
by search engines.

Whatever isn’t crawled, won’t be indexed, which means it won’t show

up in results, won’t generate traffic, and definitely won’t make money
from SEO for the business.

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The Botify enterprise SEO platform was built on the holistic

understanding that SEO professionals need to understand every phase
of the search process, from crawling to conversions, in order to really
gauge what improvements are needed.

Botify includes a log file analyzer, a crawler, keyword tracker, and

analytics integration.

This not only allows you to see your website at every phase of the
search process; it also allows you to see, over time, how and what is
impacted.

Botify users are SEO practitioners who work on some of the largest
sites on the web.

It covers the full spectrum of search and is built for technical SEOs
responsible for identifying indexing issues all the way to marketers who
need to analyze content for quality.

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The platform works with enterprise organizations that have large

complex websites (i.e., millions of URLs) and count on their website(s)
for a substantial portion of their revenue.

In many cases, that translates into working with retail/ecommerce,

publishers, classifieds, and travel organizations.

Botify can layer 750+ data points for any URL on any website.
Customers use Botify for:

Analyzing their website architecture for SEO.

Finding and fixing indexing issues.

Identifying trending keywords.

And so much more.

Some of the more Popular components to Botify include:

BOTIFY ANALYTICS
The crawler component (and really the foundation) of the Botify
platform allowing customers to evaluate the structure and content of
every page of every version (AMP, mobile, desktop, etc.) of their site
just like a search engine would, and keep track of changes over time.

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BOTIFY LOG ANALYZER

This allows customers to feed their server log files into a dashboard
built specifically for SEO pros.

The log file analyzer provides insight into how search engine bots
are crawling a site, paired with crawl data, customers gain a deeper
understanding of what’s going on.

BOTIFY KEYWORDS
The keyword and position tracking component of Botify, which comes
from their integration with the Google Search Console API.

The GSC API provides users with more data than the GSC performance
dashboard allows.

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BOTIFY STUDIO
It allows users the ability to custom build dashboards based on
Botify data collected in the crawl and schedule them to send to SEO
stakeholders.

BOTIFY DATA STATION

This incorporates the ability to export data via pre-set exports or
custom scenarios depending on the user’s needs.

BOTIFY API
It can be used to pull information from Botify’s database to use in other
tools, or even on a client’s own website! The Botify Chrome extension
is a great working example of this.

KEY FEATURES
There are a few key features within the Botify core platform worth
calling out.

JAVASCRIPT CRAWL
Users can render pages of a website the way a search engine might.

Track which resources are executed, and collect valuable user-centric

performance metrics (time to first paint, time to interactive, and other
performance metrics) to ensure their JS content is rendered and seen
by search engines.

DATA LAYERING
Users can layer any other data point onto their URLs to get insight into
the “why” behind what they are seeing.

For example, is a URL not ranking?

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Layer on log file analysis data and a user could find that Googlebot
hasn’t been crawling that URL – no wonder it’s not ranking!

Page not getting crawled by Googlebot?

Users can layer data from their Botify crawl and find a possible
correlation between low crawl rate and low content uniqueness. The
possibilities are virtually endless.

SEGMENTATION
Users can look at specific sections of their site in isolation (e.g.,
evaluate blog content separately from ecommerce content). Learn
more from Botify’s knowledge base.

CONTENT QUALITY ANALYSIS

This gives the user the ability to evaluate content like a search engine
would, including the ability to eliminate template content from their
analysis.

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DEEP LEARNING OR ARTIFICIAL

INTELLIGENCE
Data science is a part of Botify’s DNA
ANALYTICS
and every new project includes some INTEGRATION
components of this.
Botify works seamlessly
That being said, they have informed with Google Analytics,
me that they are planning an Adobe Analytics, and
announcement in Q4 that speaks also AT Internet.
exactly to this question, so stay tuned!
They can connect
with a site’s analytics
COMPETITIVE REPORTING & ANALYSIS account to bring in
While the focus of the Botify suite is valuable visits data to
to provide users more insights and overlay with their Botify
information on their website, they can Analytics crawl data.
also use Botify Analytics to crawl a
competitor’s site. Users can see real-time
trends and report on
The technical issues they’re how technical issues
experiencing may or may not be are impacting site
valuable for them to know, but they’ll traffic and ultimately
be able to get a good grasp of on- revenue.
page optimization and content.
Botify also connects via
Understanding a competitor’s API with Google Search
content makes it easier to perform a Console through Botify
content gap analysis on a site to see Keywords – showcasing
where they may be missing out on an entire keyword
opportunities. Just as an agency or profile, and uncovering
consultant would spend hours and hard to find trends.
charge large fees for.

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LINK EVALUATION: INTERNAL AND/OR EXTERNAL

Most enterprise-level websites have no shortage of backlinks, but
where the real wins come from are often found in internal links and
distribution of PageRank throughout the site.

Botify can evaluate an internal linking structure and showcase how well
a site is connected.

From the distribution of internal links (follow/nofollow), compliant

URLs with low counts of internal links, non-compliant URLs that are
being linked to, links going to non-200 URLs, to page depth metrics.

USER LEVEL SETTINGS

Users are allowed Guest(Read-only) and Admin level access. All owners
share a library of dashboards and features. There is no limit to the
number of dashboards or filters an account has.

One of the nicest features of Botify is that it doesn’t limit the number
of logins. Larger teams are also allowed to group users into what they
call “Organizations”.

Organizations have teams, which can essentially determine access to

projects and reports that only they are allowed to see and use.

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ACCESS TO TOOL, REPORTS & DATA

Any report across Botify Analytics, Botify Keywords,
and Botify Log Analyzer can be exported to their
Data Station where users can download the report.

Additionally, Botify has a range of APIs that tie into

Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, or most CMSs.
The Botify API Developer site is a great resource PRICING
STRUCTURE
with more information.
There are a
PLATFORM UPDATES & TECHNOLOGY TRENDS few different
Botify, as a company, works in an agile technical variables
environment so they are always releasing new that go into
updates – from backend improvements like crawl Botify’s
speed or JavaScript rendering capabilities to UI/UX pricing
improvements. structure, but
they don’t
New functionalities are typically released every 3-4 share these
weeks, but sometimes even more frequently. publicly.

Suffice it to
SUPPORT say, their
Botify offers support through their Customer pricing is
Success Managers, who are their customer built to
advocates helping to get clients everything they ensure
need. customers
are getting
They also offer professional services, which blends
the most
SEO expertise and platform expertise to answer
value out of
some of the more difficult and technical questions a
the platform.
client has.

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WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE GETTING STARTED

The Botify enterprise SEO platform team has never seen any websites
with zero potential. Using Botify will help identify where that potential is.

Expect to be able to save a lot of time and energy uncovering those

opportunities. The team recommends starting with simple features and
then moving on to more advanced features.

If there are ever any questions, their SEO support team is available to help.

SUMMARY
The ease of uncovering insights that a client may miss with other tools is
where Botify shines the most.

Clients respond well to how Botify can combine data from the Botify Suite
to see how content quality, technical issues, and internal page rank impact
the crawl rate and keyword rankings.

Botify also provides various reports within the platform – and a powerful
API that can be used with any BI platform to create dashboards that can
leverage data to influence organic search and development projects.

Having daily log analysis to see how Google is crawling a site and the
types of errors in real-time is something that clients also love.

Seeing how a code push or content update last night is impacting their
site this morning is what sets Botify from the competition.

Overall, because Botify really aims to be the best solution for enterprise
SEO teams, their customers can really tell that they are designing
everything for their needs: scale, speed, granularity of data, security, API
features, and more.

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WHAT SETS BOTIFY APART FROM THE COMPETITION?

One of the key differentiators is that Botify takes a URL-first approach
to SEO data, rather than a keyword-first approach.

They start by providing a complete picture of every URL on a website

(not just desktop, but AMP versions, alternate language versions,
mobile versions, etc.) and then layer onto everything needed to
understand each individual URL.

Botify does this in a way that’s compliant with Google’s terms of

service integrating with Google Search Console for keyword data
rather than scraping the SERPs.

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A few specific differentiators include:

JavaScript rendering at scale: Get the results of JS crawls

quickly and accurately.

Speed and scalability: Botify can crawl through up to 50

million URLs at speeds around 250 URLs per second.

Structured data: Automatically extracting 15+ different types of

structured data without needing to set up custom extracts to pull
information.

Daily log file analysis: See search engines crawling a website in

near real-time.

Google Search Console integration: Keyword and URL organic

search performance and rankings trended daily, monthly, or even
year over year.

They also have a pretty incredible engineering and SEO

support team.

You don’t have to just take my word for it, Botify has provided a lot of
great testimonials on their G2 profile.

You can learn about Botify and read through their customer success
stories here.

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BRIGHTEDGE
Founded in 2007, BrightEdge is a global search and content marketing
platform driven by massive data collection, artificial intelligence, and
real-time insights with a robust customer success model.

My first demo of BrightEdge was in 2011 while working for ADP

managing usedcars.com’s online marketing and analytics.

BrightEdge stayed in my head as I continued on with my career and I

was able to use it with various clients and other companies.

BrightEdge is a great resource for digital marketers, content marketers,

and SEO managers alike.

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You don’t have to be an expert in SEO to be able to use the tool, gain
benefits from it, or understand the data.

Companies that would benefit from BrightEdge are those with a strong
presence in:

Ecommerce/retail.

Travel/hospitality.

Finance.

B2B and B2C tech.

Consulting/services.

Universities/educational institutions.

Real estate.

Restaurants.

Healthcare agencies.

Media/entertainment.

BrightEdge’s focus is on developing an all-encompassing search and

content marketing strategy by bringing all aspects of a strategy into
one platform.

This includes keyword research, competitive analysis, technical SEO,

content optimizations and creation, backlink research, keyword
tracking, and reporting.

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What sets BrightEdge from the competition is the DataCube tool

which brings its proprietary keyword index of over 3.5 billion topics
(and growing) enabling users to perform on-demand research and
hone on the specific area of focus or site section that matters most.

KEY FEATURES
There are four big key selling points to BrightEdge that sets them apart
from the competition.

BRIGHTEDGE INSTANT
Search is becoming a real-time industry with how fast things are
changing on Google.

BrightEdge Instant is the industry’s first solution to the need for having
real-time insights into:

Rank. Page speed performance.

Search volume. Competition.

Recommendations. Voice search opportunities.

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It covers tens of thousands of locations and languages across the

globe, including non-Google engines like Amazon and YouTube – and
without having to add keywords (which won’t affect pricing).

As search moves into non-traditional search engines, BrightEdge

enables users the ability to identify how they stack up against
competitors’ content.

More specifically, it looks into how users are performing on sites

like YouTube and Amazon to ensure clients are developing content
strategies for all areas where their customers are looking.

BRIGHTEDGE DATA CUBE

One of their “greatest hits,” the proprietary keyword index of over 3.5
billion topics and growing, empowers BrightEdge clients to perform
on-demand research – quickly identifying search terms with how any
website ranks in comparison while easily honing-in on the specific area
of focus or site section that matters most.

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Using their simple, flexible, dynamic filters such as keyword, URL,

search volume, rank, universal listing type, and more make this tool a
favorite among users.

The index can not only be used for head-to-head site benchmarking
but also spans back over 5 years, providing clients with a tremendous
wealth of insight into consumer behavior/demand for any site of focus.

BRIGHTEDGE RECOMMENDATIONS
This takes the guesswork out of search by providing a simple,
actionable to-do list to improve clients’ organic performance,
leveraging the ability to analyze the top-performing pages for every
keyword of focus.

For more experienced SEO pros, this analysis is displayed in one

convenient view, saving the time of manually checking the source
code/HTML for each competing page individually.

ContentIQ
BrightEdge’s technical site audit solution is built directly into the
platform allowing users to gain a deeper insight into how their SEO
is performing.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

DEEP LEARNING OR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Because BrightEdge collects and stores all of their own information,
they are in a unique position in the market to be able to analyze the
data on behalf of their customers using artificial intelligence.

BrightEdge Insights digs deep into thousands of data points on behalf

of their customers to save hours of time on analysis and enabling their
customers to spend more time on making changes that can drive
performance.

For example, Insights will analyze a client’s keyword footprint and

automatically identify the best pages that should be optimized for
Quick Answers based on where the keyword is in the current top
5 positions, but not yet owning Quick Answer for that particular
keyword.

Additionally, BrightEdge’s platform analyzes the top 10 ranking pages

for all tracked keywords and identifies trends/themes that are causing
the other pages to outperform the website and provides prescriptive
steps/changes to make in order to improve performance.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

COMPETITIVE REPORTING & ANALYSIS

BrightEdge enterprise SEO platform looks at competitors in two
different buckets, natural competitors, and named competitors.

Natural competitors are any websites that are currently outperforming

a site for any keywords/topics the user wants to perform well for.

Named competitors are the websites a client will identify as directly

competing with from an overall business perspective.

NATURAL COMPETITORS
For natural competitors, BrightEdge identifies the top-performing
websites for all of a client’s most important topics, analyzes content,
and provides recommended changes to make in order to improve
performance.

BrightEdge also regularly tracks performance and market share over

time to account for the constant changing of the search landscape and
identification of emerging sites/competitors.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

NAMED COMPETITORS
For named competitors, BrightEdge tracks keyword movement and
performance week over week for in-depth reporting.

They also use this rank data to drive reporting of other metrics such as
market share against top competitors.

Brighedge’s Data Cube also enables customers to perform unlimited

research against any website they want to identify keywords and
competitors where they are lacking.

By understanding the competition users can ensure they are

benchmarking themselves against who Google is rewarding today, not
who they think Google is rewarding.

Additionally, this analysis saves hours of time of looking at competitors’

content in an attempt to understand what they are doing differently.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

LINK EVALUATION:
ANALYTICS
INTEGRATION INTERNAL AND/OR EXTERNAL
Providing analysis on both internal and
BrightEdge external links, BrightEdge partners with
integrates with Majestic for their backlink information
Google Analytics, and connects the data directly into the
Adobe Analytics, and platform on a weekly basis.
Coremetrics through
multiple options Customers use this to:
including API, SFTP,
Monitor trends in their overall backlink
and hybrid options.
performance compared to their
It also supports competitors.
custom analytics
Correlate this to rankings or other
integrations, so
metrics.
be sure to ask
a BrightEdge More importantly, identify where their
representative during competitors are getting links that are
a demo. helping to drive their performance on
Google.

BrightEdge looks at Trust Flow, Domain and Page Authority, anchor

text, etc. to help their customers know where to get not only a high
quantity of links, but high-quality links.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

BrightEdge analyzes internal links in a similar way.

They strive to help customers understand where they have internal

linking opportunities ensuring that they have strong anchor text
(mapped to consumer demand) and are linking from high authority
pages to low authority pages to improve on their SEO.

USER LEVEL SETTINGS PLATFORM

The enterprise SEO platform has multiple levels UPDATES &
TECHNOLOGY
of access that can be assigned to individual TRENDS
users.
The
There is typically an organization admin user BrightEdge
that has full access to the platform and the platform
ability to assign permissions of other users. rolls out with
updates every
Standard users have the ability to use the full 5-6 weeks
platform including tracking keywords, creating with new
dashboards, and access to all aspects of the features as
platform. There are read-only users as well. well as system
improvements.
ACCESS TO TOOL, REPORTS & DATA
All reports and dashboards within the platform
are exportable on an unlimited basis in PDF or
CSV format.

BrightEdge also has an open API to pull

information out of the platform and into data
warehouses or reporting tools like Domo,
PowerBI, and Tableau.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

PRICING STRUCTURE
There are a couple of different factors that
SUPPORT can influence pricing including the number
of keywords tracked, domains tracked,
100% of competitors tracked, and the number of
BrightEdge pages crawled for technical audit.
customers are
assigned at least BrightEdge customers get unlimited users,
two dedicated downloads, reports, exports, etc.
resources in
the form of WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE
a Customer GETTING STARTED
Success Manager BrightEdge works with organizations of all
and a Strategic shapes and sizes, from some of the biggest
Account Manager. to some of the smallest companies in the
world.
These resources
are simply not They have experience working with every
there to “teach industry out there and are well-positioned
you how to to leverage both their experience and
login or XYZ” the expertise to help any organization
(as they put it) regardless of size or experience.
but are there as
extensions of Their passion is to help clients exceed their
a client’s team goals by capitalizing on the largest and
to ensure that most proactive channel on the planet.
they are seeing
BrightEdge has built a platform that is easy
success in the
to learn for newcomers to search, but also
channel and
flexible enough to grow and scale within
hitting goals.
large, experienced teams.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

In addition, their award-winning customer success model is designed

to align with clients’ level of experience, introducing many to the
channel for the first time, while also enabling sophisticated SEO
professionals to hit the ground running.

SUMMARY
BrightEdge’s Data Cube and Customer Success Team are what their
customers respond to most. BrightEdge customers love the support
they get with the BrightEdge team.

BrightEdge likes to see themselves as not just a simple vendor that

provides training and usage of the platform but integrated into a
client’s business goals and metrics and an extension of the team.

The company reports that customers who have moved from other
solutions to BrightEdge continuously boast about the move to
everything being housed in one platform, that they save hours of time
a month on historically manual, non-revenue driving, tasks.

By automating those tasks and analysis for them, their customers are
able to spend more time on creating and optimizing their content,
which helps to move the needle.

Flexibility and customization of the platform allow customers to

essentially create an unlimited number of reports/dashboards within
the technology.

This helps them tell a much more clear story of the value of their work
within the channel.

Additionally, within the Data Cube, BrightEdge customers love

how they are able to narrow down on their sites to find the best
opportunities.

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

WHAT SETS BRIGHTEDGE APART FROM THE COMPETITION?

EASE OF USE
Everything needed to effectively optimize a site is accessible in one
place, utilizing a unified methodology, where each “system” is able to
speak to each other.

This allows their clients to track something in one place, the platform
to produce an associated action in other, and quickly generate a
corresponding report to capture everything.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
With an endless amount of data available on the web, it is almost
impossible for even the most sophisticated SEO professionals to make
sense of it all.

Their artificial intelligence engine, Data Mind, takes much of this effort
off of our clients’ plate, by analyzing tremendous amounts of data to:

Identify trends at scale and stay ahead of market/industry

changes.

Capitalize on the best opportunities to drive growth.

Make data-driven decisions.

Real-Time Insights

BrightEdge Instant is the industry’s first solution to the need for having
real-time insights into rank, search volume, recommendations, page
speed performance, competition, and voice search opportunities

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 T H E TO P 4 E N T E R P R I S E S E O P L AT F O R M TO O L S :
AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW

PACE OF INNOVATION
BrightEdge develops its technology internally. They are not reliant
on other data providers where they have no control over the product
roadmap or SLAs.

This allows them to take feedback directly from their customers and
build technology suited directly to their needs.

BrightEdge releases updates to the platform every 6 weeks based on

this feedback to constantly keep their customers ahead of Google.

You can also learn about BrightEdge and read through their over 50
customer stories and case studies.

WRAPPING UP
While there are many SEO tools for agencies available, the tools
reviewed here are focused on users that work within large corporations
that need a quick and easy resource to:

Report on ROI. Track keywords.

Work across the organization to successfully drive SEO to success.

In my years, I have used many free tools as well as the reasonably

priced monthly fee SaaS tools like Moz, SEMrush, and even Keylime
both for my own websites and some SMB clients during my consulting
and agency days.

That said, enterprise-level companies need more robust platforms that

can provide a one-stop-shop for the most experienced SEO all the way
down to the marketers, product managers, and executives.

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 12
PARTNERING
WITH AN
ENTERPRISE
SEO AGENCY:
WHAT YOU NEED
TO KNOW
AUTHOR
JENN M ATHEWS
 PA R T N E R I N G W I T H A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O AG E N CY:
W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N OW

Choosing the right SEO agency can be a daunting task in itself.

Considering the complexity of what is needed from an enterprise SEO

agency adds an entirely new level that can be overwhelming.

With so many SEO agencies popping up all over, how do you know
which ones truly know how to optimize a website with the latest in
Google’s algorithms without trickery or spam?

My experience over the last 20 years has found me on both sides of

the fence.

I started my career building an SEO agency from a few people and a

handful of clients to over 500 clients and staff of over 100 people in
less than a year.

Cut to several years later (2006) and I’m on the other side for
classmates.com (at the time a very large company) and interviewing
for agencies to provide extra support.

Since then I have worked for Concur, Smartsheet, ADP (managing

usedcars.com), Nordstrom, Groupon, and now GitHub.

With each enterprise organization I manage SEO for, I bring in a

consultant and an agency (if there isn’t already one on contract).

The jump from working with a small to medium business into a large
organization with corporate bureaucracy is not easy for anyone,
especially an agency.

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 PA R T N E R I N G W I T H A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O AG E N CY:
W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N OW

CHOOSING THE RIGHT SEO AGENCY FOR

ENTERPRISE SEO
A big factor in how your enterprise SEO agency will perform for you is
having a clear understanding of what you will need them for once they
are on-boarded.

Setting up expectations during the RFP process will not only help you
weed out the capable from the not-so-capable, but will set you and
them up for success in the long run.

Drafting up a business case with your agency and tools for SEO will
help you get organized on your needs and what your plan is for your
agency going forward.

The business case will also help communicate expectations with key
stakeholders and gain buy-in.

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 PA R T N E R I N G W I T H A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O AG E N CY:
W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N OW

WHERE TO FIND ENTERPRISE SEO AGENCIES TO CHOOSE FROM

I personally have a list of agencies that follow me with new in-house

roles and I recommend agencies as a consultant for clients depending
on their needs.

Agencies will always say they can do anything but, from my

experience, I know who can do what better and will always recommend
accordingly.

If you don’t have your list, a tweet to SEOs, or a post to a

Facebook Group asking for recommendations can help.

If you have time, attend a few conferences (e.g., SMX

Advanced, Pubcon, Mozcon) to gather your list.

Peruse the booths, talk to speakers from

agencies on the topics that your needs focus on,
and talk to other attendees.

Get to know other SEO professionals

at an enterprise level and ask them
who they use, who they like, and
why they like them.

If you are planning on reviewing

a large number of agencies for a
specific need, then a Request For
Proposal (RFP) is needed, but not
always necessary.

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 PA R T N E R I N G W I T H A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O AG E N CY:
W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N OW

As long as you are clear on what your needs and expectations are, you
shouldn’t have any problem during the review process.

Allow each agency to chat with you one on one about your
expectations, and present to a larger team as a second step.

I usually like to get a list of what the other teams would expect (in
Groupon’s case, we had five SEO teams plus several business verticals
across the global organization I needed to coordinate with).

This requires several meetings upfront but saves time and follow-
up from unexpected questions when it comes down to the agencies
presenting.

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 PA R T N E R I N G W I T H A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O AG E N CY:
W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N OW

WHAT MAKES AN
ENTERPRISE SEO AGENCY DIFFERENT?
Agencies with enterprise-level experience will
AN AGENCY
usually skip past the obvious fixes since they
THAT HASN’T
have an understanding that there could be WORKED WITH
business reasons for them. A COMPLEX,
ENTERPRISE-
LEVEL SITE
An example is the Nordstrom website. It’s
MIGHT NOT
a blaring SEO issue that anyone going to UNDERSTAND
“nordstrom.com” is redirected to “shop. THAT:
nordstrom.com”.
It isn’t as
I’ve always said that any SEO that didn’t bring easy as it
that up doesn’t know SEO. appears.

However, they should: The business

might not
Continue with the understanding that
support it.
there could be a business reason.
There could
Follow up with the impact vs. effort it
be legal
would take to fix it.
reasons.
Be open to feedback with any pushback
The fix
(or explanation) the SEO team might give
might not be
during a review.
scalable.

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 PA R T N E R I N G W I T H A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O AG E N CY:
W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N OW

Enterprise agencies will also understand that the level of engagement

for a larger company might be higher than most of their smaller clients.

Enterprise SEO agencies need to be proactive since the SEO team at

the company is more often distracted by all of the work that needs to
get done.

Regular check-ins and open communication are critical to the success

of the relationship. I have always worked best with agencies that have
local offices and/or make frequent in-person visits.

The best agency I have ever worked with has an SEO manager that:

Sits in the office under contractor status with their own desk,
company email, logins to tools and reporting.

Attends regular meetings between engineering and verticals

across the organization.

In the end, the relationship is that of an extension of the team that

regularly communicates, proactively suggests growth strategies and
foundational fixes, and follows through to ensure the work is getting
done.

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 PA R T N E R I N G W I T H A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O AG E N CY:
W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N OW

MANAGING YOUR SEO AGENCY

The key to managing your enterprise SEO agency is to keep the levels
of communication flowing.

Give them the tools and access they need to become successful and
help them champion any work they need through.

Too many times I have inherited strong and capable agencies that fell
quiet with no actual work done in a matter of weeks, or even months.

Frustrations were on both sides, to no one’s fault.

Contracts are always signed with positive optimism and a solid plan,
but with communication dropping and little to no support, the agency
can’t be successful and therefore your SEO will fall short.

Set up expectations and a plan (roadmap) of deliverables that the

agency should follow.

Be supportive where you can when they need you to be, and follow-
through with other teams the agency needs to complete work as
promised.

Have at least weekly check-ins with a clear list of what they are
working on, what your team is working on, and expected delivery
dates.

Talk through where you all are at with tasks for each, and always end
with any recommendations they might have to keep the work flowing.

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 PA R T N E R I N G W I T H A N E N T E R P R I S E S E O AG E N CY:
W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N OW

Monthly check-ins with key stakeholders always help to hold everyone

accountable.

Other teams can make use of the agency, but also need help
understanding their role in work that needs to be done.

I like to end each quarter with a report on tasks completed and ROI on
the projects or tasks completed more than 3 months prior.

In some cases, I have seen weekly, monthly and even daily reporting,
but then the agency becomes a reporting agency rather than an SEO
agency, and when the contract is up it isn’t renewed.

Find your sweet spot for communication and expectations, adjust as

needed, and review the contract as often as you all feel it is necessary.

When you all are working together then you will see the success for
SEO that both sides are there for.

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 13
THE FUTURE OF
ENTERPRISE
SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE
& VERTICAL
AUTHOR
ANDY BETTS
 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

Part of what makes the search industry exciting is that it

is fast-moving and applicable for every type of marketer,
industry, and situation.

Most recently dramatic shifts in consumer behavior due

to COVID-19 has meant many organizations are turning
to SEO.

In fact, SEO has never been so popular, and marketers

pivot quickly to meet the demands of new types of
consumer behavior.

Even before the global pandemic SEO was becoming

mission-critical – being the front and center of digital
marketing strategies spanning channels such as paid
media, local, mobile, video, email, and across verticals
like Amazon and ecommerce.

Every week, new announcements create opportunities

for brands to deliver better customer experiences
through search.

The importance of voice search, visual and video in

particular, and vertical search has grown to be key
components of SEO strategy regardless of the time,
place, and economic situation.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

LOOKING THROUGH
THE ENTERPRISE SEARCH LENS

For enterprise brands, long-term planning is vital and SEO specialists

are increasingly likely to have influence in the boardroom.

As such, we can’t simply react to the latest trends if we want to gain a

competitive advantage.

So, how can we set a long-term enterprise SEO strategy when things
change so often?

Fortunately, amidst the flux that defines the industry, there are some
clear signals that tell us exactly where we’re going.

If we alter our conception of search and think beyond the traditional

web, we can see that the pieces are falling into place already.

In a fragmented hardware market, with Internet-enabled devices

appearing in our homes, our cars, and our pockets, search is a unifying
force.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

This 2016 chart, taken from The Economist, reveals the trends that
executives believed will have the biggest impact on marketing by
2020.

These trends intersect with

search in different ways.

Equally, they will all enable

search to take a more
prominent, valuable role in
the lives of consumers.

Enterprise brands should

take note and lay the
groundwork for the
future today, by focusing
on three areas that are
already re-shaping the
search industry.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

THE THREE V’S OF SEARCH TODAY:

VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

1
Visual search turns a smartphone into a discovery
engine, taking an image as its stimulus to provide
VISUAL related results.
SEARCH
The benefit of this is that consumers can search for
something without having to describe it through text.

13
 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

It is sufficient to show the search engine what we are interested in and

it can do the rest on our behalf.

This can be placed in the wider context of “queryless search,” a

development that sees search engines either preempt or interpret a
consumer’s intent without the need for an explicit query.

In fact, Gartner thinks that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be

conducted without a screen, while over 100 million consumers will
shop in augmented reality by the end of this decade.

Visual search is in prime position to benefit from these trends.

Early leaders in the field include Pinterest, Google, Amazon, Microsoft,

and a host of retailers who can see the huge opportunity visual search
presents.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

The appeal of visual search is self-evident. It can search for us when we

don’t have the words to explain what we want.

Pinterest reports that it handles more than 600 million visual searches
per month already via its Lens tool, so there has been some impressive
uptake among consumers.

The technology required to understand images is very sophisticated.

Google’s Clay Bavor summarized the size of the challenge recently:

“In the English language there’s something like 180,000

words, and we only use 3,000 to 5,000 of them. If you’re
trying to do voice recognition, there’s a really small set of
things you actually need to be able to recognize. Think
about how many objects there are in the world, distinct
objects, billions, and they all come in different shapes and
sizes. So the problem of search in vision is just vastly larger
than what we’ve seen with text or even with voice.”

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

HOW LARGE ENTERPRISE BUSINESSES CAN

There has been PREPARE FOR VISUAL SEARCH
significant
progress in this Cover the basics: Upload image XML
area, with Google sitemaps, check the indexation status of
Lens, Pinterest images, and keep product inventory up to
Lens, and a date.
range of visual
Conduct in-depth research: People use
search products
visual search to complete different tasks. Try
from retailers
to understand these demand states so you
all reporting
can meet their needs with the right content.
increased
accuracy. Optimize images: Images should be
optimized using standard image SEO best
However, as
practices, but there are other factors to
marketers, we
consider for visual search. Remove clutter
need to help
from images, keep focus objects in the
search engines
foreground, and maintain a consistent
by providing the
aesthetic that is unique to your brand. This
right information
will help search engines understand who
in the right
you are and which products you want to
formats.
promote.
Otherwise,
Use meta data: Meta data elements are
they are left to
essential markers of context and are used
decipher a very
heavily by the likes of Google and Pinterest.
unstructured
Ensure that you are using the right Schema.
environment with
org markup and use relevant key phrases in
no clues.
metadata tags.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

2
The analog/digital dichotomy we know today will
dissolve as the Internet of Things truly takes off.

VOICE Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2020 there will

SEARCH be more than 75 billion devices connected to the
internet, while comScore predicts that 50% of all
searches will be by voice in 2020.

With key players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft now having
passed the 95% accuracy threshold, voice search has entered the
mainstream.

And yet, 62% of marketers have no immediate plans to optimize for

voice search:

At first glance, this seems an oversight, but we must also understand

how and why people use voice search before deciding how to prepare
to take advantage.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

Google summarizes the benefits of voice search as follows:

It allows them to more easily multitask.

It enables them to do things faster than other devices.

It empowers them to instantly get answers and information.

It makes their daily routine easier.

Google also makes clear the contexts in which consumers are prepared
to engage with a voice-enabled smart device.

These points start to direct search marketing efforts in the immediate

short term.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

However, while
Google Home
and Amazon
Echo devices are HOW LARGE ENTERPRISE BUSINESSES CAN
PREPARE FOR VOICE SEARCH
a common sight
in modern homes
Think beyond the current landscape:
already, we should
Voice can be an enduring way to engage
view this as a
with brands, but it must become more
stepping stone for
conversational. Audio clips in search results
the tech giants
and branded messages via home devices
rather than a
will become commonplace soon. The early
destination.
mover advantage will be significant.
Voice search
Focus on speed: Load time is already a
will become
mobile ranking factor and search engines
much more
should prioritize content that can be served
conversational in
immediately in response to voice queries.
its format and also
more ubiquitous in Be concise: Consider the reasons your
its presence, as it audience would search via voice. As
will be embedded Google’s research reveals, convenience
in billions of is a key driver of usage. Incorporate this
devices. knowledge into your content creation and
test different formats.
Brands must be
creative if we are Organize your information: A logical
to move past the hierarchy of content, marked up with
stilted dialogues structured data, will help search engines
that characterize navigate your websites and apps.
voice search today.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

3
As search develops into a multimedia experience, it
also starts to fragment into a range of specialisms.
VERTICAL
SEARCH We can see this if we look at popular vertical search
engines like Kayak, Skyscanner, or Trulia.

These websites cater to a specific type of industry (or vertical), which

allows for a more targeted and streamlined experience.

Vertical search (VSO) can be described as the indexing and exposition

of content focused on a site, category, or industry.

Amazon is the giant in this space. With 55% of product searches now
beginning on

Amazon, it is the go-to place for online shoppers in the West.

Amazon’s dominance
of overtly commercial
searches makes it an
enticing prospect for
retailers.

However, marketing
for Amazon is niche
in itself as revealed
in research from
Anders Hjorth and Dan
Saunders at Innovell.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

Similarly, search engines like YouTube continue to grow in popularity as

people seek out particular content formats.

While Google is aiming to incorporate all of this within its ecosystem, it

will struggle to match the detail that a specialist service can provide in
each area.

For brands, this creates both opportunities and challenges.

Maintaining an up-to-date presence across all of these vertical search

engines can be time-consuming, but there are some consistent rules
that can aid this task.

First of all, we need to understand the usage patterns across each

search engine.

If we envisage search through the lens of the jobs-to-be-done

framework, it becomes clear why vertical search is increasing in
popularity.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

These eight steps help to put brands in the shoes of the consumer and
maintain a focus on successful outcomes.

From this perspective, it is evident that consumers will use vertical

search when it helps them get things done quicker, better, or cheaper
than traditional search.

Brands can pinpoint these desires and map out content that caters to
the shifting demands of the same consumer across different platforms.

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 THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
VISUAL, VOICE & VERTICAL

HOW LARGE ENTERPRISE BUSINESSES

CAN PREPARE FOR VERTICAL SEARCH

Analyze behaviors: People navigate

to vertical search engines for a CONCLUSION
specific experience that caters to Search will be a unifying
their needs. Analyze data across force among the various
each platform to identify their strands of digital
requirements, so your brand can engagement.
respond appropriately.
Marketers should seize
Maintain a cohesive experience: the initiative today and
Consumers expect a brand to assume a leading role
communicate in a consistent way within their organization,
across all touchpoints. Search is a as it is search that will
vital component of this branding underpin all of the
strategy – especially across different emerging trends of the
vertical search engines. next few years.

Integrate with vertical search Through visual, voice,

engines: Work alongside the various and vertical search,
platforms to integrate and serve your the industry will
content in their results with minimal become a multimedia,
manual intervention. omnipresent channel
that guides consumers
Optimize site experience: to better decisions and
Consumers will often end up on experiences.
a brand’s website as they explore
further. This experience must match Brands that act today
or better that of the vertical search will be in prime position
engine if they are to continue the to capitalize for years to
conversation. come.

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