The best time to do this is actually during budget season so you are able to make a case for additional resources as necessary. But, since budget timing varies from company to company, we’ll stick with a year-end approach to keep things simple.

I’m going to focus on the way that SEO is managed and executed within the organization rather than the performance of specific campaigns, but it is important to note that the two are intertwined.

In-House Team & Outside Support

There are plenty of different models that work, but you need to be properly staffed and supported.

• Is the size of the primary in-house team sufficient?
• What roles and duties are currently underserved?
• Can you justify additional headcount?
• How can you increase productivity without overwhelming the team?
• Does the SEO team sit in the right place in the org chart?
• Are you utilizing an outside firm for additional help with strategic support, auditing, training, validation of your efforts, etc.?
• How can you get the most value from outside relationships?

Enterprise SEO Tools

When you are dealing with millions of pages across a multitude of domains you need some help with the heavy lifting.

• Do you have an enterprise SEO toolset?
• Is your chosen toolset the right fit? Can you customize it further?
• Are people actually using it? How can you increase engagement?
• How can you make the data more actionable?
• Are you supplementing your main suite with additional tools for crawling, page evaluations, competitive analysis, domain and link data, etc.? Smaller tools do not scale to enterprise well but they are still helpful when applied in limited, targeted ways.
• Are you taking advantage of the Google Webmaster Tools API to get access to all of the data from your profiles?
• Are you paying attention to Bing Webmaster Tools?

Site Audit Process And Execution

Strategies and tactics continue to evolve, but comprehensive site audits remain a core component of any good SEO program.

• Do you have a clearly defined auditing process?
• Does the output achieve a balance of depth and detail with being easy to digest and act upon?
• Are you correctly prioritizing the recommendations based on impact and level of effort?
• Have you implemented a system to ensure that all properties are audited and reassessed at regular intervals?
• Are you using the right intervals? Auditing too often is just as unproductive as not auditing enough.
• What can you achieve at a network-wide level, and what needs to be customized to specific properties?
• Have you established realistic timeframes for execution?
• How many of the key recommendations are being implemented within the agreed-upon time frames? How can you improve this and overcome roadblocks?

SEO Training & Feedback

It is vital to provide training to technical, design, content and marketing teams, reinforcing it on a regular basis. Oversight is also needed to ensure proper execution.

• Have you established an SEO training curriculum for all key departments?
• Is there a set schedule for mandatory and optional trainings?
• Have you experimented with different lengths, settings and formats to find what works best?
• Are you providing a sufficient range of trainings on the fundamentals as well as in-depth sessions on specific topics?
• Are you balancing the theoretical with the practical and actionable?
• Are the trainers themselves good at it?
• Do you have mechanisms in place to ensure that best practices are incorporated into the daily workflow in all relevant departments?
• Particularly for content teams, have you established a system for periodic monitoring and feedback?

Integration & Coordination

Search efforts cannot succeed in a vacuum. SEO needs to be integrated into nearly every aspect of the business.

• Do you have sufficient contact points in all departments and business units?
• Are you effectively communicating SEO objectives and results to all levels of the organization?
• Are you guarding against poorly defined goals and unrealistic expectations?
• Is there a system in place to ensure SEO feedback is provided on all new technical and design initiatives prior to launch?
• Are other marketing efforts (both in-house and from outside vendors) being properly coordinated with SEO?
• Have you delegated enough responsibility to key members of each team, department, etc., to make the SEO program self-sustaining?
• Do they have the knowledge, resources and credibility to make things happen?

Analytics

You can’t know how well things are going if you don’t have a proper system in place for tracking, measurement and reporting.

• Have you set appropriate, realistic goals?
• Have you identified the right metrics for evaluating performance? This will vary quite a bit by industry and objectives.
• Are you customizing measurement and reporting in the most appropriate way for each site, project, department, management level, etc.?
• Are you cross-referencing search and social data with other business and marketing analytics?
• Are you able to clearly demonstrate the value of what is being done, and the missed opportunity of what isn’t?
• Do you have a ninja-like analytics person or team that lives for crunching numbers and making Excel dance? (If you don’t, you need one).

Hopefully this gets you started on developing a thorough process for evaluating your own enterprise SEO program.

What else do you evaluate at your organization?

On the one side, publishers who are facing declining advertising revenue are branching out and looking for new income streams. For many, ecommerce is the best opportunity at the moment.

Recent articles from The New York Times and Folio illustrate how lifestyle publishers are experimenting with deeper shopping integration.

On the other side, ecommerce sites, in response to Panda and May Day before it, are taking steps to reduce thin, low-value pages and to improve the overall quality of their content. This, plus the increasing popularity of content marketing as a tactic, has many non-publishers essentially getting into the publishing business.

From a user and searcher perspective, this means the traditional dividing lines between editorial and commercial sites are increasingly blurred.

What does this convergence mean for search engines and more specifically enterprise SEO?

Key Considerations

• Publishers need to be careful about simply bolting on a shopping play to a subdomain or subdirectory. Done poorly, this can instantly add a high volume of thin, weak pages to the site and have a significant negative impact on the internal link graph. If I was writing an article on just this topic I’d call it something like “Publishers and Ecommerce: Great Fit or Great Way to Weaken Domains?” Smart integration is key.
• Equal care is needed in managing affiliate relationships. At a minimum, affiliate shopping links in traditional editorial content like reviews, round-ups and guides need to be set up in compliance with search engine guidelines. From an SEO perspective, the affiliate links may not help the site but you certainly don’t want them to hurt it.
• This convergence makes brand and trust signals all the more important. The engines need to understand that a credible editorial site is still just that when it suddenly puts a lot of focus on ecommerce, either directly or through affiliate relationships.
• When it comes to product-related queries, the engines tend to give ecommerce sites prominence for queries with transactional intent and editorial sites prominence for queries with informational intent. As both types of sites become increasingly relevant for both, how will this shake up the page one results? Publishers and ecommerce sites alike need to think carefully about how they map out keyword targets across the entire buy cycle.
• At the moment, I am focusing specifically on regular Web search, but there also opportunities with Google Shopping to consider. Ecommerce sites are a natural fit and typically have this covered but it is likely uncharted territory for most publishers. There may not be an appropriate fit for many editorial sites but when applicable it should be investigated.
• As ecommerce sites venture more into content production and marketing, the depth and quality of content should be a top priority. Just as publishers can’t simply bolt on a shopping play, commercial sites need to do more than just starting a blog with product-related posts or doing the occasional infographic. Even if the engines can’t always differentiate between “real” content and thinly veiled promotional content, users certainly can.
• Along those lines, content producers at commercial sites need (roughly speaking) the same SEO training and oversight as the editorial staff at a magazine or newspaper site does. Balancing SEO tactics and objectives with things like user experience, readability and editorial voice are critical.

It will be interesting to see how this convergence continues to evolve and how the engines and search marketers adapt to it.

Will trusted publisher domains with deep, quality content and strong link profiles and social signals gain a leg up for shopping related queries? Or are they stepping beyond their topical authority and still likely to trail behind category leaders for transactional queries?

As for ecommerce sites, how far can they legitimately migrate into editorial content? At the end of the day it is still about selling products. Are simple, streamlined product pages always going to have an advantage for shopping related queries? And is that more what users actually want?

At the enterprise level, the two disciplines actually have a lot in common beyond the strategic and tactical crossover. Like SEO, social media cannot be segmented as a separate activity or fully owned by any one department.

Yet social media is often siloed within an organization, making it more difficult to effectively coordinate social and SEO. In addition, for every way that social media initiatives can support SEO, there as just as many ways they can create conflicts or issues.

But since overcoming roadblocks and coordinating efforts across multiple departments and business units is already a fundamental part of enterprise SEO, what’s one more thing to deal with?

With that in mind here are five ways to better leverage social media for enterprise SEO.

1.  Google Authorship & AuthorRank

For publishers and content-oriented sites Google Authorship is good initiative for demonstrating the direct connection between social media and SEO to the organization. It is also a good way to foster collaboration since done well, it involves multiple departments.

Design and tech are pulled in to create better on-site author profile pages and for the rel=”author” implementation. The social media and SEO teams educate around effective use of Google+. And at the heart of the effort, the editorial staff provides the content and participation.

The visual author information in the SERPs combined with the Author Stats report in Google Webmaster Tools makes it possible to convey the value through concrete examples instead of just theoretical terms.

Success can then be used to encourage more efforts to leverage AuthorRank to connect author authority and social signals with search visibility in both Google and Bing. It is still early days in terms of the impact of AuthorRank, but it is worth experimenting with.

2.  Train The Social Media Teams

Whether done by the in-house SEO team or an outside consultancy, SEO training at regular intervals is a core part of any enterprise SEO program. While editorial, technical and overall marketing trainings tend to be the main focus, SEO training for any dedicated social media teams is also critical.

Since social cannot be executed by just the social media team(s) it is vital to cover social tactics in editorial and technical SEO training sessions as well. Nowadays, this tends to happen naturally but it is essential to include.

The more everyone in the organization understands the relationship between social media and SEO, the better they’ll be able to execute on it in productive ways and avoid conflicts.

3.  Factor SEO Into The Social Promotion Plan

Organizations involved in content marketing will typically have an established workflow for promotion and user engagement through a variety of social channels, using both brand and staff profiles.

At any given time, new content tends to get the majority of attention which makes sense. However, it is just as important to ensure that high-priority evergreen content continues to be included in the mix.

Additional factors like ensuring that canonical URLs and search-friendly language are used in social promotions are also important to consider.

With language, particular attention should be paid to optimizing the text generated by social sharing buttons. This requires a finding a balance between keyword support for SEO and keeping the titles interesting and engaging enough to draw attention in social.

Some companies address this by incorporating three separate title fields in their content management system:

1. The on-page headline
2. The HTML title tag
3. A separate title for social sharing

This allows each to be customized and optimized differently when and as needed.

4.  Coordinate With Outside Agencies

Larger organizations frequently bring in third-parties for a variety of social media initiatives related to both strategy and execution.

Dedicated social media agencies, PR firms and advertising agencies are typically good with creative and experienced in best practices for social engagement, but they are not always well versed on SEO (even if they claim to be).

As a result, providing oversight and feedback on the SEO implications of their activities is a necessary function. SEO issues related to social are most frequently triggered by well-intended third parties.

On the positive side, the outside agencies are also a great resource to leverage on behalf of SEO. Effective coordination will turn their activities from a potential liability into a good opportunity.

5.  Integrated Measurement & Reporting

Finally, make sure that both social media and SEO reporting are integrated into departmental and company-wide reporting.

The analytics team has likely increased their level of social media reporting in recent years and hopefully comprehensive SEO measurement and reporting is already in place. Cross-referencing the data as much as possible is a good way to emphasize the importance of each and the relationship between them.

Social media reporting is often split between the main analytics solution and a variety of additional sources such as Facebook Insights, Bitly Enterprise and management suites like Radian6 or HootSuite. Tying all this together is a large project in and of itself, but do make an effort to connect the data to SEO objectives as well.

Photo from bsv1990. Used under Creative Commons license.

The good news is the main obstacles are fairly universal and there are ways to overcome them. To help you navigate the process, here are nine common enterprise SEO roadblocks and the solutions for each.

Let’s start with a couple fundamental, site-oriented roadblocks:

1.  CMS Deficiencies

Many companies are hamstrung by an outdated content management system (CMS) and off-the-shelf options are not always well suited to the challenges of optimizing large sites.

The solution is often to develop your own CMS. This is a good option but be careful, building a homegrown CMS has proven to be a graveyard of empires for many an enterprise. It is a lot harder than you think and in the end, it will take much more time and resources than expected.

Adding significant customizations to an existing product is not easy either but it tends to be a more realistic way forward. If possible go a step further and incorporate special tools and functions as referenced in Large-Scale Content Optimization Tactics For Enterprise Sites.

A reasonable interim solution is to use a hybrid approach. For instance, publishers that are locked into a legacy CMS will often utilize WordPress on specific site sections. WordPress VIP is a decent option at the enterprise level.

The catch is that a website on a collection of platforms is at risk of becoming more complicated instead of less so. But if your CMS is holding you back and a full-scale migration is not in the roadmap, a partial solution is better than none at all.

2.  Technical Issues

Every site has technical issues in one form or another and large sites tend to have larger problems. Poor indexation or over-indexation; duplicate content; problems with pagination and faceted navigation; inefficient crawl paths; a weak internal link structure that fails to support deeper site content, to name a few.

We don’t need to go through the fundamentals of technical SEO here (or design and template issues for that matter) but without solving these problems, you cannot make significant gains.

The primary solution is to identify the problems and recommend improvements through a comprehensive site audit, the trusted weapon of any good SEO. This is followed by ongoing monitoring (preferably with the aid of an enterprise SEO toolset) and periodic reassessments. Like it or not new issues will never stop cropping up.

But the best site audit in the world will do little more than gather dust if you cannot get past the bureaucratic hurdles that exist at nearly every large organization. Successful, sustainable enterprise SEO often comes down to effective change management.

So let’s focus on roadblocks that are more organizational in nature…

3.  Budget Allocation

Without budget, your SEO efforts are going nowhere. Whether it is all done in-house or outside help is brought in – it takes time, money and resources to make real progress.

As Brian Provost covered in The Ultimate Guide To Enterprise SEO, “free” search results are not actually free and enterprise SEO is not cheap. The technical, editorial and marketing components all require resources, not least of which is capable people to execute the recommendations.

Securing budget means getting executive buy-in, so you need to be able to make the case for SEO and to justify continued investment. Bill Hunt has advocated using a missed opportunity matrix for years. Ian Lurie also offers some good ideas in The Challenge Of Justifying Enterprise SEO.

4.  Poorly Defined Goals & Unrealistic Expectations

A major roadblock to securing ongoing support and resources is often poorly defined goals and unrealistic expectations.

Overall goals like increasing search referrals and conversions are only the beginning. You need to clearly define just what the company is trying to achieve, both at a high level and for specific site sections and content or product types.

Your analytics team plays a vital role here in helping to establish benchmarks and report on progress in a meaningful but easily digestible way.

Goal setting applies to execution too at the department level. Tech, content production and marketing should all have a series of well define goals to measure against.

Along with this comes the need to avoid unrealistic expectations. Executive teams have a tendency to set lofty goals as a way to rally the troops and spur on activity. But if there is zero chance of reaching the goals you will quickly lose hearts and minds.

Managing expectations also means teaching patience. Enterprise SEO is a long-term play with the benefits realized over months and years. Use quick wins and low-hanging fruit to demonstrate its value but make sure everyone understands that SEO is a never-ending process.

5.  The IT Department

The IT department gets a special shout-out since many a technical SEO initiative comes to a grinding halt here.

At the end of the day, the technical teams are going to do what they can to help the organization based on what they have been mandated to do. If SEO projects are not at or near the top of the queue, nothing significant is going to get done.

The solution here is both top-down and bottom up. If you’ve done a good job of making the case for SEO and winning budget the mandate and the resources will be there. Ideally, you’ll even have a certain number of tech team members dedicated full-time to SEO projects.

In reality, however, dedicated headcount is not easy to get and many other groups will be advocating for tech resources just as strongly, sometimes with projects that are more quantifiable. So you’ve got to prioritize your recommendations and do want you can to provide an estimate of impact.

Get as much as you can into the roadmaps and make sure you’re getting the right things pushed through. If you have multiple sites, identify solutions that can be applied across the network.

As referenced above use quick wins to demonstrate value, but find a way to push through some bigger asks too or you won’t get the long-term, sustainable gains that are needed.

For more suggestions, see Ian Laurie’s How To Get The IT Team On Your Side.

6.  Lack Of Consistency

It is one thing to effectively train staff members and give them the tools to succeed. It is quite another for them to consistently apply these things and incorporate them into their daily workflow.

Take content production for instance. It is not that editorial teams do not care about search engine visibility; in fact, they want their content to succeed. It is simply that they will never care about it as much your SEO team does. That’s just human nature and really who can blame them.

The solution is ongoing training combined with spot checking and feedback at regular intervals. Human oversight is always needed.

7.  Lack Of Coordination

The same goes for coordination of efforts between various departments. Every team needs to understand the SEO implications of their work.

Marketing and PR teams in particular need to be well integrated because so much of what they do has a positive impact on SEO, yet so often this impact is not fully realized.

A helpful approach is to appoint an SEO point person for every brand/department/team. This adds a deeper level of integration for the SEO team and creates more direct contact points for staff members with people that speak their language.

8.  Complacency

As Marshall Simmonds pointed out in Why So Many Companies Fail At Enterprise SEO, sites that have done reasonably well in search in the past tend to rest on their laurels over time.

This is a formula for eventual failure. Sooner or later, something will get missed or simply done less well. In addition, the engines are making more changes than ever so there are constantly new things to factor into your efforts.

Enterprise SEO requires diligence and ongoing oversight. Adding new blood to key teams from time to time will bring renewed focus and energy to the program. Conducting periodic outside reviews of your sites, teams and processes is a good way to evaluate and validate your efforts.

Ok, enough about internal processes. Here is one more roadblock that relates to both company and site:

9.  Weak Brand Or Domain

Strong brands and certainly strong domains tend to perform well in search. Leaving the debate on brand signals aside, there are a wide range of indirect benefits for known brands such as increased user trust, higher CTRs and greater engagement.

At the enterprise level, many organizations benefit from having well established brands on authoritative domains. But that is not always the case.

Big site does not automatically equal big brand or strong domain.

Companies have large marketing departments and audience development teams for reason. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a brand, as well as an audience or customer base, in any medium. Online, and specifically search, is no different.

So get your technical issues in check and ensure that you have well optimized templates and content. But make sure you are putting just as much effort in building up brand and domain strength.

Fortunately, you’ll already have many mechanisms in place for this. Just make sure that SEO is being factored into the planning and execution of all marketing and business development initiatives.

Photo from ell brown. Used under Creative Commons license.

At the enterprise level, a single site can have millions or tens of millions of pages, and larger organizations such as news publishers may have 20-30 different sites or more.

So, how do you effectively manage all those pages?

The in-house SEO team certainly cannot check every page by hand. An agency can be brought in to do individual page audits but this is costly (and ultimately inefficient) and it creates an outside dependency.

Enterprise SEO tools like BrightEdge or Conductor offer a good way to monitor both technical and editorial issues side-wide, something that is critical to any large-scale SEO effort.

However this type of post-creation monitoring and assessment requires the content producers or SEO team to go back and make revisions. Reworking key page elements cannot be entirely avoided but it is important to reduce the need for it, especially on a large scale.

With all this in mind, here are some tactics for managing and improving the content optimization process for enterprise sites.

Enterprise SEO Training

Training is a fundamental component of enterprise SEO. Go to any in-house or big site SEO session at a conference and training will be repeatedly emphasized (and rightfully so).

When it comes to content production, every person in the organization that touches content in any way should be well versed in editorial SEO best practices.

A well-trained staff takes much of the heavy lifting off of the SEO team by incorporating proactive optimization practices into their daily workflow. This frees up the SEO team to focus on other issues and ultimately produce greater returns for the organization.

I won’t go into the details of training curriculums here, but keep in mind you’ll need to cover a range of topics and tools. See my post on Editorial SEO Tactics for the Newsroom for more on how publishers approach training.

Also remember that no one truly gets it after just one session (even if they think they do). Institutional training is an ongoing and never-ending process.

Develop An Integrated Content Scoring System

An excellent way to incorporate SEO oversight into pre-production is to build a content scoring system right into your CMS.

Then each time a new piece of content is uploaded all of the key page elements (title tag, URL, headline and subheadings, META description tag, image attributes, etc.) are scored on how well they support the targeted keyword phrase.

The scoring interface should be simple and straightforward. Entering a keyword phrase into the system produces a score for each page element based on a number scale (like 0-10 or 0-100), percentage or letter grade.

Scoring criteria and minimum requirements are established for each page element and ideally the content cannot be published until all the requirements are met (with an override mechanism built in).

I’d like to provide a screenshot of a real example of course, but the built-in systems we’ve been involved with at Define Media Group are proprietary to clients.

However, here is a simple illustration of the concept in action via our own enterprise SEO toolset:

To take it a step further, you can pull keyword research plus search and social trend data directly into to platform to help content producers better select their keyword targets.

Also consider adding in safeguards against keyword cannibalization. When new content is uploaded the system, it could identify already existing content with similar keyword targets to help the staff avoid overlap and further refine their targets.

Other potential CMS add-ins include suggesting related content for internal linking or providing gap analysis by channel or topical area to determine missed content opportunities (based on keyword targets supplied by the user).

But at a basic level, what you are trying to achieve is an automated system that helps the majority of your pages to be relatively well optimized right out of the gate.

This should go without saying, but I want to emphasize the fact that such systems are designed to enhance and improve quality content, not to facilitate any type of mass production of low-value pages as referenced in Eric Enge’s Don’t Fall Into The Made-For-SEO Website Trap.

Your goal is to put useful tools in the hands of well-trained, well-qualified content producers.

Spot Checking & Reporting

This all sounds great, but even the best trained, best equipped (and usually best intentioned, except when they are on deadline) writers still fall short on on-page optimization from time to time.

In the publishing world, this might mean overuse of witty, print-style headlines. In e-commerce, it could mean certain product pages are published with nothing more than generic manufacturer descriptions.

So even with pre-production systems built into the CMS and post-production analysis via enterprise SEO toolsets, large networks still need human oversight.

The best way to achieve this is through editorial spot checking and reporting at regular intervals. This can be done by the SEO team, or better yet give the responsibility to a key editorial contact for each site, section, division, etc.

Monthly spot checking is typically a good approach as that frequency will not feel intrusive. With weekly checks, there is a risk that the staff will start to turn a deaf ear to SEO feedback. The format should be simple and actionable and sent to everyone on the content production team.

The evaluators pick a limited number of new pages (representing a cross-section of content types) and provide feedback on the choice of keyword target and how well the key page elements have been optimized.

In a selection of ten pages including two or three that are well optimized and seven or eight with opportunities for improvement is a good ratio. It is also useful to highlight examples for which there is not a clear, easy answer (such as the best phrase to target).

Providing ongoing feedback with real examples helps to drive home the point that content optimization is both an art and a science. When it comes to practical application of best practices the staff needs to use their best judgment and find the right balance between optimized language and editorial voice.