Enterprise SEO: A complete guide for scalable search success

Master enterprise SEO with strategies for scale, governance, and global visibility. Learn how large organizations drive results across millions of pages.

Enterprise SEO is the process of improving search engine visibility for large, complex websites with thousands of pages or more.

The basic SEO principles and techniques are the same as traditional SEO, but large sites are more complex. Enterprise companies and other large businesses have more people and departments involved in the decision-making process. And there’s more at stake.

Enterprise SEO affects market share, brand reputation, and the bottom line. It’s essential for maximizing your business’s online visibility—building brand awareness and getting your products and services in front of as many people as possible.

Who is this guide for?

In-house SEOs, digital leads, and agencies supporting big brands. In this article, we’ll discuss the unique challenges enterprise websites face, SEO strategies, collaborative approaches, and future trends.

Challenges unique to enterprise SEO

Some enterprise SEO challenges are due to the scale of the website (or websites). Others relate more to the scale and structure of the organization itself.

Scale

Enterprise websites are big. The largest sites can have millions of URLs, and a website of this size comes with its own challenges:

  • More keywords to research and track
  • More pages to optimize
  • More content to create
  • More complex site structures
  • More potential for technical problems

You’ll need either significant investment in terms of money, time, and expertise, or automated workflows that make things more manageable.

What counts as a “large” website?

While there’s no precise definition, it’s useful to refer to Google’s documentation. Their article, Crawl Budget Management for Large Sites, defines “large” websites as having a million or more unique web pages.

However, it also mentions that “medium” and “larger” sites of 10,000 pages and up may also have to consider some of the same issues, particularly if they have content that changes on a daily basis.



Governance

Large organizations often have more people involved in website decisions, siloed teams, and departments with conflicting priorities.

Because there are so many team members all focused on different priorities at the enterprise level, aligning digital marketing and SEO efforts with best practices across the entire business can be a challenge.

Tech debt

Decisions made in the past can cause problems later. And once you’ve gone down a particular technical path, it can be hard to turn back. This is known as technical debt—and it often affects enterprise sites.

These sites are often built on custom or legacy CMS platforms. They may have outdated code, incorrect content structures, or bad markup.

There could even be multiple interconnected websites or subdomains with no unified approach.

Tech Debt

Buy-in

As large organizations often have multiple people involved in each decision, buy-in can be an issue with SEO.

SEOs may have to sell the benefits of changes they’re suggesting to in-house design, user experience (UX) and development teams, middle and upper management, and other stakeholders.

To get funding or time allocated to a project, you may need to estimate the potential return on investment (ROI).

Change management

Approval processes at enterprise businesses often require cutting through a great deal of red tape and satisfying multiple viewpoints that value different things. This can mean implementation takes longer than expected.

There may also be change freezes at certain times: during sale periods, when staffing levels are low, or just before a major project goes live. These freezes are another potential cause of delay.

International SEO complexities

Multinational organizations often have a network of interconnected websites. Or at least sections for different language and/or country combinations.

That all adds complexity, with extra pages and technical requirements. For example, geo-targeting needs to be correctly implemented via hreflang tags (more on this below).



Ensuring SEO performance across multilingual content is a challenge. It’s localization at scale. Brand messaging should be consistent, but keywords and content should be tailored to the market.

Managing SEO during structural change

Big, structural changes can be hard to manage at the best of times. But when it comes to enterprise sites, that complexity ramps up even further.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A), domain name changes, migrations from one website version or platform to another—each of these large-scale transitions comes with its own unique requirements.

Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up.

The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.

Start Free Trial
Get started with
Semrush One Logo

Strategic foundations for enterprise SEO

Setting a solid strategic foundation for your organization’s SEO is a great way to make sure you aren’t overwhelmed. And you don’t need to do everything at once—or on your own.

Build a robust SEO governance model

Governance is essential for enterprise SEO because there are so many moving parts and so many people involved across multiple internal and external teams.

What is SEO governance? Communicating, monitoring, and controlling the SEO processes and systems you have in place to ensure they’re consistently and effectively applied.

If communication is poor, you could spend time making SEO improvements on pages that are due to be replaced. Or siloed teams could focus on one small element of SEO, while no one considers the bigger picture.

Where to start?

  • Set up a meeting with relevant people across the business
  • Identify areas of poor communication where SEO needs to be better integrated into existing processes or where processes aren’t being followed
  • Formulate an action plan that focuses on the big picture
  • Ensure everyone knows their responsibilities and that there’s accountability in place
  • Build systems to ensure the right parties are responsible or aware of initiatives

Setting enterprise-level KPIs: beyond rankings and traffic

In terms of key performance indicators (KPIs), many SEOs focus on keyword rankings and organic traffic as metrics of success. But the stats you’re interested in aren’t necessarily the things higher-ups and stakeholders care about.

Metrics that could be tracked include:

  • Keyword rankings and visibility scores
  • Website traffic (sessions or users)
  • Engagement time
  • Proportion of engaged sessions
  • Backlink numbers, quality, and authority
  • Crawl rates
  • Pagespeed / core web vitals
  • Number of indexed pages
  • Sales and/or conversions
  • Revenue and return on investment (ROI)
  • Conversion rate
  • Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV or LTV)

The stats towards the bottom of the list are more likely to be of interest to stakeholders, but can be difficult to calculate.

Think carefully about which metrics to report to whom. You want your enterprise SEO strategy and marketing efforts as a whole to tell a cohesive story. Look beyond organic search and take a more holistic view of website performance and online presence.

Excluding branded search terms

Sometimes it’s better to exclude branded search terms from your organic data. The people running these searches already know you, and they’re more likely to convert. You’re probably more interested in how well you’re reaching your target audience, and so you need to focus on what new visitors you’ve earned and what those visitors were worth.

Filtering out branded searches isn’t always easy to do, particularly if your brand name is a generic term. And GA4 has little data on organic search terms these days.

Google Search Console is a good place to start. Go to “Performance” > “Queries” and click on the filter icon. Select “Does Not Contain,” type in your brand name, and click “DONE.” You’ll then see how much of your organic traffic is unbranded.

Gsc Queries Scaled

Connecting SEO to revenue and business goals

Raw stats are great, but analyze those results in relation to overarching business goals to demonstrate more value.

  • Are business goals being met?
  • Is SEO contributing to the marketing strategy, and by how much?
  • Is SEO generating a positive return on investment?

With ecommerce sites, these things should be easy to work out. With lead generation sites, it can be trickier.

Ideally, enterprise sites should have robust integrations between the website, analytics, CRM, and ERP systems, allowing you to truly understand the value of each conversion.

Demonstrating your value as an SEO makes your life easier in terms of buy-in, trust, and job security.

Plus, working with other teams towards shared goals can be a great way to foster cooperation—particularly if there’s a level of accountability.

Reporting to internal stakeholders

So, you have the data. Now, how best to communicate it? Regular reporting to internal stakeholders is essential.

Get ahead of board meetings you know are happening and make sure a relevant person has your data beforehand—plus the knowledge and understanding to present on your behalf.

If there’s no one who can do that, could you attend yourself? Or put together a team of people across the business to share progress and make plans?

Monthly vs. quarterly reports

In general, monthly reports are a snapshot of progress, whereas quarterly reports are an opportunity to look at things from a more top-level, strategic perspective.

Evaluating and planning activity over quarterly cycles is often a good approach for enterprise organizations, where it just wouldn’t be possible to turn things around more quickly. And those reports are probably the ones you’ll share with the C-suite.



The need for nuance and interpretation

Sometimes, stats go in seemingly the wrong direction. That’s okay.

Setting up a dashboard that allows the CEO to see key metrics in real time might seem like a great idea, but if they don’t have the context, it could do more harm than good.

For example, all of these metrics could seem bad if you only look at the raw data:

  • Cutting irrelevant or spammy traffic from the site
  • Filtering out low-quality conversions to focus on higher-quality leads
  • Adding a consent banner that allows users to reject analytics cookies

Even if the data is objectively bad, being able to explain what happened and what you intend to do about it is important. Ensure you have a good understanding of the business, its goals, and the SEO strategy that’s been put in place and frame the data in your reporting from this perspective.

SEO playbooks, training, and documentation

A key part of governance is making sure everyone’s following the same processes. You can’t achieve that without high-quality training and documentation.

Internal training should be consistent yet flexible enough to cater to the skills of the person concerned. And it should, itself, have a documented process (as far as possible).

Documentation could come in the form of an SEO playbook, knowledge base, or center of excellence. Here are some options:

  • Knowledge base in Monday.com, Clickup or similar tool
  • Employee intranet or internal website
  • Shared folder in Google Docs
  • Shared network drive

What’s important is a consistent format, clear walkthroughs and examples, and that people make use of it.



Developing an enterprise-wide content strategy

Enterprise sites tend to produce more content more regularly than smaller ones. With more resources available, content marketing is likely to be a key part of your SEO strategy. But you’ll need to plan carefully to achieve the best results.

Content types

You may feel pressure to produce every kind of content. But just doing one of these things well can take significant time and effort:

  • Blog posts
  • Buyers guides
  • Ebooks
  • Emails
  • FAQs
  • Infographics
  • Interviews
  • Original research
  • Thought leadership
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Webinars
  • White papers

Prioritize. Determine what’s worked well in the past, and put your effort into producing the very best examples of that kind of content going forward.

That doesn’t mean never trying anything new, but be careful not to spread yourself too thin.

Existing vs. new content

Creating shiny new content is great for users and search engines. But don’t ignore what you already have.

Audit your existing content for content optimization opportunities:

As well as creating new content, look to improve old pieces that deserve it and cull ones that don’t.

Identifying keywords

Keyword research and content gap analysis are both great ways of identifying content opportunities.

There are a variety of keyword tools available, but there’s no substitute for getting into the head of your audience. Try to provide content that’s of interest to them and for prospects at various stages of the sales funnel.

And don’t just think about keywords in the context of a single piece. Develop clusters of content on a theme. This is great if you have content that’s already doing well because you know the format works.

For example, you might have a buyers guide on one type of product. Develop a whole series of guides and build a new section of your site to house them.



Content gap analysis

This isn’t just identifying things your competitors are doing that you aren’t. It’s also about identifying things no one else is doing.

Look at the search engine results pages.

  • Are the pages ranking on the first page comprehensive?
  • Is there something missing that your audience would want or need to know?

Create content that fills those gaps.

Leveraging expertise

Your organization has experts in every department. They may not be marketers themselves, but their knowledge is incredibly valuable.

Google likes high-quality, helpful content, backed up by expertise, experience, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T). Interview people from across the business, ask them for notes, and get their ideas for blog post topics.

Thought leadership pieces are particularly relevant here. They’re the epitome of E-E-A-T, and you’ll need help from your organization’s experts to write them. 

Promotion and syndication

The final step is to make sure you get your content out into the world.

Liaise with other teams across the business. You’ll want to share the content via:

  • Email marketing
  • PR (if appropriate)
  • Social media

You could also consider syndication for your most important or impactful pieces. This is where content is shared on a third-party site, often with a link back to the original. You can leverage the authority and traffic of the third-party site to drive more views and engagement to your own.

Crawl budget

One thing that’s particularly important for enterprise sites is crawl budget. Google has limited resources to explore your site. You want them to spend those resources looking at pages that matter.

Google needs to visit the pages of your site to find new content, detect changes, and generally keep the search results up to date. To do that, it uses crawlers such as Googlebot.



There are a few factors that affect the rate at which bots can crawl pages on a site:

  • The site’s server: Google doesn’t want to risk its crawlers overloading a site and taking it down
  • Google’s perception of your pages: URLs that get more traffic and that Google thinks are more important or higher quality may get crawled more often
  • Google’s overall resources: These are huge, but limited

Crawl budget management

As Google’s resources are limited, you’ll want to ensure Googlebot is regularly crawling your most important pages.

A good way of doing that is identifying what unimportant URLs are being crawled and stopping that from happening, often by adding a disallow line to your site’s robots.txt file. (A developer can do this for you.)

But how do you find those unimportant pages?

One way is looking at pages that aren’t indexed in Google Search Console (GSC). To do that, ensure you have the correct domain selected in the dropdown at the top left. Then go to “Indexing” > “Pages.”

Scroll down to the “Why pages aren’t indexed” section.

Gsc Indexing Pages Pages Not Indexed Scaled

If you click on a particular issue in the table, it displays a full list of the affected URLs.

It’s fine to allow Googlebot to look at 404 pages that no longer exist (or never existed to begin with). Google won’t revisit them very often. 

Some issues may even be fixable, such as “Soft 404” pages. These are often blank pages that look like they shouldn’t exist but don’t return a 404 code as they should. They can be removed from the site. And if there’s an appropriate alternative to that URL, redirect them.

Other issues on the list might indicate things that Google shouldn’t be allowed to crawl.

Common crawl budget issues

Some things that commonly waste crawl budget on enterprise sites:

  • Duplicate or thin content: Duplicates occur when the same content appears on multiple pages on the site. Thin content has limited value or a particularly low word count, usually under 300 words.
  • Product filters: These allow users to filter by size, color, style, and so on. They can become a problem for crawl budget if there are multiple layers that get added together in various combinations, resulting in a huge number of unnecessary URLs.
  • Other types of URL parameter: These appear as code on the end of the URL in the format ?this=1. Or if there’s more than one, ?this=1&that=2. Product filters are a common use case, but they’re also used for pagination, search queries, tracking code, and a host of other things.
  • Long redirect chains: Why redirect Googlebot from one URL to another and then to another, when you could simply redirect once to the intended page directly?
  • Slow-loading pages: These slow Googlebot down, as well as users (which increases the likelihood of the user bouncing back to the search results).


Crawl the site yourself

A good way to gauge how easy and efficient the site is to crawl is to do it yourself. Tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider explore the links on your site to produce an analysis of potential technical issues, plus an exportable spreadsheet of all the pages, meta data, and so on.

Simply running the crawl can be useful. Keep an eye on the progress bar at the bottom right. If you have a problem with product filters or other parameters combining to create a huge number of URLs, you might see the percentage complete number staying the same—or even decreasing—as new pages are found more quickly than they can be crawled.

Screamingfrog Sel Scaled


Don’t go too deep

Site architecture is another consideration, especially for large enterprise sites. Pages nearer the top of the hierarchy will get crawled more often. You don’t want an important page buried four or more clicks away from the homepage.

This is an important consideration for users, too.

Similarly, you don’t want important pages to be “orphaned.” Orphaned pages aren’t linked to at all and don’t appear in the navigation menus, which both makes them hard for Google to find and signals a lack of importance.

Many SEO tools will identify these pages for you by comparing what they find via crawling the site with the list of pages in your sitemap.

International and multilingual SEO

As well as tending to be larger, sites with international versions have unique technical SEO and content challenges.

Localized content

Ideally, you shouldn’t be serving the same content to users in different countries or who speak different languages. That means writing content for each place in the local language (or languages).

If you aren’t fluent in all the languages you need, you’ll need help from the wider in-house team or third-party translators.

Translating keywords isn’t necessarily as simple as using Google Translate. And certainly not the content itself.

For example, the direct Japanese translation of “streaming services” is “ストリーミング サービス” (sutorīmingu sābisu). But a better term for the market might be “見放題” (mihōdai), which means “unlimited viewing” or “all you can watch.”

Once the keywords are set and tracked, work on meta tags and body copy can begin. Across thousands of pages and multiple languages, that could be a huge task.

As AI translation improves, this becomes more and more of an option. However, be sure that it’s the starting point and not the final product. Nothing beats the quality of a human writer or translator.

Geo-targeting

Make sure Google knows which version is intended to be served where (and to speakers of which language). This is known as geo-targeting.

If the different versions each have their own ccTLD (.com, .co.uk, .de, etc.) that’s a clear signal to Google. But it shouldn’t be relied upon.

Redirecting people to the correct version of the site based on their IP address is another option, but make sure Googlebot can still access all versions of your site.

Hreflang tags

If you have multiple sites or site versions—particularly if they’re in the same language—there will inevitably be some duplication between them. Hreflang tags tell Google, “This is the American English version of the page; look here for British English.” And so on.

You can also set a default for users that don’t specifically have their own version.

Hreflang tags can be set up in the source code (HTML) of each page on the site. This is the most common way. But you can also use the sitemap.xml file or HTTP headers.

Here’s an HTML example from the free drawing app, Inkscape.

Inkscape Page Source Scaled


As an example of how complex this can get, the Apple homepage currently has 137 language / location variations.



Flags for languages

While not an SEO concern as such, using flags to represent languages on a dropdown is a significant mistake for user experience. Is a Spanish speaker in the US meant to click the US flag or the Spanish one?

It’s just confusing. Better to use the name of the language and/or location in the target language.

Other technical SEO considerations at scale

Technical SEO is about making sure your site works efficiently. The result? Users and Googlebot can explore it easily, find new pages, and engage with your content.

Prioritize

Apart from crawl budget and internationalization, most technical SEO requirements are the same as those of smaller sites. But at enterprise scale, you’ll need to prioritize your SEO tasks.

Some things to consider:

  • Broken links
  • Duplication
  • HTTPS
  • Mobile friendliness
  • Navigation and site structure
  • Pagespeed and Core Web Vitals (things that affect perceived speed and user experience as the page loads)
  • Schema markup (structured data)
  • Server load and stability

You’ll want to audit and plan how to prioritize fixes to get the maximum impact.

For example, fixing a broken link in the header could affect all of your thousands or millions of pages. Better to fix that one link than fix 100 that affect only one page each.

Use tools to make the process easier

You can’t audit a million pages one by one. Thankfully, there are tools that make the process easier:

  • The “Experience” section of Google Search Console has data on “Core Web Vitals” and “HTTPS.”
  • Crawling tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Xenu Link Sleuth help identify broken links and other issues.
  • Most SEO packages feature some kind of technical audit, and there are some built with enterprise sites in mind. These tools crawl your website and flag a variety of errors for review, as well as incorporating automations to help you resolve those issues.


Collaboration and communication

In large organizations, you’ll need to work with a variety of different people to get things done. Here are some tips on how to do that more effectively.

Work with product managers, engineers, and executives

To work cross-functionally with people across the business, you’ll want to:

  • Educate
  • Reduce friction
  • See things from their point of view
  • Speak their language

You’ll make your life easier by teaching people the basics of SEO and showing them its impact. But be sure to frame requests without too much jargon.

An engineer for example, is likely busy and may not have much understanding of SEO concepts. By providing a clear-yet-concise brief that explains the benefits for users, you’re more likely to get what you need the first time around.

When pitching a new idea to higher-ups, highlight the benefits to the business, especially anything that involves return on investment.

Try to start conversations about SEO requirements early in the process. If a new section of the website is being developed, having input on the structure, sitemap, and navigation will mean fewer issues later on.

Build influence without authority

As an SEO, you may be an assistant or a middle manager. But that doesn’t mean you can’t influence decisions at the highest level.

You’ll want to:

  • Be solutions focused
  • Become a trusted advisor by developing your knowledge so you’re the go-to person for SEO queries
  • Get to know your colleagues—remember the names of their kids or pets, and build genuine relationships
  • Manage expectations and deliver work earlier than expected by setting realistic deadlines
  • Offer to help, but know when to say “no”
  • Share success stories with relevant stats

Structure SEO requests for enterprise roadmaps

Enterprise roadmaps can be large, complex, and time consuming to put together. To make sure your requests have the best chance for acceptance, put together a business case for each one.

The level of detail could vary, though. A simple request might just need a few notes in an email, while a request for an expensive tool might benefit from a more formal written document.

So, what does a business case involve?

  • Goal: what you’re trying to achieve (or the problem you’re trying to solve)
  • Options: and their pros and cons
  • Recommendations: what you think the solution is and why
  • Supporting evidence: in the form of relevant stats or predictions
  • Potential stumbling blocks: it’s best to be honest as over-selling could come back to bite you
  • Costs: in terms of money, time, or resources

Share SEO success stories

Sharing success stories is a great way to evangelize, build trust, demonstrate value, and educate others in the business.

Look for opportunities to do this: in whole-team meetings, internal communication channels, appraisals, and chats around the office.

Again, be sure to tailor the story to the audience. Rather than focusing on a keyword position improving or an increase in organic traffic, tell them about how a campaign won a big new client or generated revenue.

SEO is always changing. By staying ahead of upcoming trends, you can future-proof your work.

How AI is changing SEO

AI is affecting everything, from execution to governance. It’s affecting how users behave and the tools you have available to do your job.

AI has been part of Google’s algorithms for years in the form of BERT, Rankbrain, and other systems. They used to call it “machine learning.” What’s really new is the use of generative AI and large language models (LLMs).

For SEOs, it’s both a threat and an opportunity.

AI tools

New AI-based tools can analyze your website, write or optimize content, and generally make life easier. For enterprise sites, that can save a huge amount of time.

Those tools should be used critically. It’s best to have some human input in everything you produce. But AI can help you prioritize, speed up repetitive tasks, and carry out audits with ease.

Google’s AI Overviews

This is a feature where generative AI produces content that fits the user’s query. It appears at the top of the search results, pushing other listings down. This is resulting in more “clickless” searches, where users get their answer in the search results and never click through to another site.



It’s likely we’ll see AI Overviews in a wider range of searches over time. At the moment, they mostly appear for informational queries.

To have a better chance of getting cited in an AI Overview, high-quality content based on questions is a good strategy.

You no longer have to search with words. You can open Google Lens and take a photo, or upload a picture to your favorite generative AI platform. 

To take advantage of visual search, high-quality images are a must.

But you can also use technical SEO techniques to help. Schema markup, descriptive filenames, and image alt text are good examples.

And although he was talking about Google’s image search results, John Mueller’s comments on image context are likely to be important here as well.



The move away from Google

Search is becoming increasingly fragmented. Google is likely to be important for some time yet, but you’ll want to be aware of other platforms, too.

For example, there’s now a ChatGPT Search Chrome plugin that lets users use the AI platform as their default search engine.

Fortunately, regardless of platform, the basics still apply. If you produce high-quality content that appeals to your audience and adheres to SEO best practices, much of that will carry over.

One difference with generative AI platforms, though, is that they may put more stock in mentions of your brand, regardless of whether there’s a link or not.

The rise of searchless discovery

Increasingly, users are seeing content without even searching.

Take Netflix for example. How often do you actually search for something? You don’t need to, because algorithms get to know what you like and make suggestions.

It’s the same with YouTube, TikTok, and other social media platforms.

See the complete picture of your search visibility.

Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform.

Start Free Trial
Get started with
Semrush One Logo

It isn’t crazy to imagine a future where a wearable smart device could realize you’re dehydrated and direct you to the nearest smoothie shop.

In the here and now, Reddit might be a good platform to explore. It pushes posts on relevant topics to users via notifications. And Reddit’s SEO importance has recently grown thanks to a licensing deal with Google.

SEO as a product function, not just marketing

“Marketing” implies getting the word out about something after it’s been built. But truly effective SEO is baked into your website, products, and services from the beginning.

If you’re able to get your team to see SEO as a product function, you could see better collaboration and better outcomes across the board.

Enterprise SEO next steps

SEO is massively important in helping enterprise organizations meet their goals.

Not sure what to do next? Run some audits and prioritize the most urgent areas to work on:

  • Are your KPIs, dashboards, and reports demonstrating value?
  • Are your training processes clear and well documented?
  • Do you have the right content strategy in place?
  • Are you using your crawl budget effectively?
  • Are your hreflang tags correct?
  • Is your technical SEO on point?

And if you want to be prepared for the future, find out more about how AI is reshaping SEO.


Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.

About the Author

Russell Welch

Russell Welch is the founder of The Robin's Egg, a digital marketing consultancy that strives to make a difference. Russell supports sustainable businesses, charities, non-profits... anyone who's making a positive impact on the world. With well over a decade of agency-side experience, there's not a lot they don't know about SEO, Google Ads, analytics and more.