Enterprise level SEO

Enterprise level SEO concerns are different from those of smaller companies. Smaller companies worry about building trust, creating enough content, and links. Enterprise level SEO or SEO for large companies is more about keeping everyone involved moving in the same direction and not unintentionally sabotaging the overall SEO effort. Here are some of the most common problems affecting large company SEO.

URL Structure

Having a large website means you’re going to have lots of URLs–in some cases, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of URLs. If no one has ever given any thought to structure and information architecture, this can be huge headache to try and fix. For small sites, using directories is optional; for larger sites, it’s a requirement. Directory structure should be as tight, compact, and simple as possible. There really is almost never a need for a directory tree to be more than four levels deep. For example:

Home > All Stores > State > City > Individual Store

Another common URL problem is having identical or nearly identical content on more than one URL. This is often the result of advertising or marketing needing special “one off” pages, ad hoc pages, or special events pages. The information gets duplicated when a similar event happens a second, third, or fourth time in the future. You need to have a plan to recycle these URLs or have an archiving strategy that lets people see/use the content but blocks it from the search engines.

Writing For People vs Search Engines

Most professional copywriters got into writing because they enjoyed writing. Using flowery, descriptive, and emotional language that touches someone is an art form to them. The thought of having to “dumb down” their art for a machine to “understand” is not only an alien concept, it’s almost committing an act of blasphemy. However, you need to “sell” to everyone who creates and publishes content for the website that they are writing for the people who use search engines, not for the machines. People have credit cards. People search for and buy stuff. Machines don’t. Depending on who is in charge of what departments and how entrenched and senior they are, this is often an uphill battle. The debate over writing good content and good titles for search engines has been going on for years and won’t go away any time soon.

Accessible Content

Lots of big organizations have a decent advertising budget and can produce flash or video content that is amazing. However, to a search engine, that type of content is a mystery box they can’t see inside of. I have heard more than one CEO say they want something on a website to sizzle, followed up by a slick flash production. Try telling them the 10k they spent creating that was “wasted” from a search engine perspective–they would have been better off spending $100 on having a well written page created instead.

IP Delivery and Language Specific Content

If you are working on a large website, chances are good it’s a multi-national corporation. How you address giving users the content they want is a complicated issue with lots of solutions and no clear “best practice.” Some companies use one domain and use sub domains or sub folders for different languages. Others use country specific TLD’s ie .ca for Canada, .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .de for Germany and so on. Other companies try to detect what country the user is coming from and redirect/serve content based on that information. However as an English speaking American, I can say that Google redirecting me to Google.mx and serving me the Spanish version of my Google calendar was less than helpful when I was on vacation in Cancun Mexico. So think carefully about the pros and cons of each solution.

Redesigns and Redirections

Every few years or so, a lot of large companies will “re-invent” or rebrand themselves. This usually involves a website redesign. If a website was designed properly with CSS (see CSS Zen Garden as an example of a properly designed CSS website), the redesign is a non issue. But that’s an ideal, best case scenario. The real world is usually a lot messier. A redesign can have a huge impact on SEO, rankings, and traffic if it’s not done properly.

In addition, during this re-invention, the website is often completely re-structured. The higher the percentage of URLs that move/change, the worse this is from an SEO perspective. In the real world, a redesign and restructure/redirection make sense. From an SEO perspective, it’s like living on the coast and learning a category 5 hurricane will make landfall in your backyard. It’s a huge problem and, if you don’t prepare for it, you could see your traffic plummet for weeks or months. If at all possible, break the project into two phases and address the redesign and restructure separately. Learn how to do 301 redirects, check to make sure that they are working, and try not to change too much at one time if at all possible.

If I had to define enterprise level SEO, it would be learning how to communicate and manage expectations of what search engines are looking for, understanding those limitations, and playing to them. Additionally, getting as many people (especially “C” level executives) to understand that they can’t work around these limitations by simply throwing more money at them will make working with large companies a lot easier and a lot less stressful for everyone.

photo credit: Shutterstock/61151038