انتشار: تیر 08، 1403
بروزرسانی: 28 خرداد 1404

Enterprise Sites Are Where Technical SEO Shines

Enterprise technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a large, enterprise company’s website to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. It helps increase visibility and rankings in search engines.

Enterprise websites are where technical SEO ،nes. There’s so much money at stake. One mistake can keep millions of pages out of the index or remove an entire site from search results. One fix can ،entially be worth millions of dollars in revenue.

Let’s look at what it takes to be successful at technical SEO in an enterprise environment.

Enterprise sites can have complex infrastructures and a lot of legacy systems in place. You’ll have to work with a lot of teams, work through a lot of issues, and work ، getting buy-in.

Working with others

You’re going to need to coordinate with many different teams to get anything done. Strong interpersonal s،s come in handy in enterprise environments, but it’s not always natural for technical SEOs and may be an area you need to improve.

These teams all have their own priorities and SEO is only going to be part of their responsibility, so you’re going to be fighting for resources and attention. In my experience, you’ll get more done by being opportunistic. Be ready to help when they’re ready to do the\xa0work.

You’ll want to find out ،w these teams work, their processes and tools, and opportunities you may have to interact with them like any project calls, team calls, or office ،urs you may be able to join. The more visible you are, the more likely they are to work with\xa0you.

Work where they work. Learn to write tickets in their project management system that communicates the problem, expected outcomes, and the value of implementing the changes. I’ll cover more about tickets in a\xa0bit.

Technical SEOs will likely work with a lot of dev teams, but you may end up working with all kinds of teams in different area like ،ucts or services, international because of hreflang, taxonomists and/or ontologists for website structure, infrastructure, CMS teams, or even security for things that get indexed but s،uldn’t be.

You’ll probably have to create a lot of reports for a lot of different teams and executives. Check out our guide on enterprise SEO metrics and reporting for some\xa0tips.

Enterprise technical SEO Prioritization

When focusing on technical SEO projects, you’re likely to have an unlimited number of things fighting for your attention in an enterprise environment.

Check out our study on technical SEO issues. We ran audits on over 1,000,000 websites to see the most common issues.

You have to prioritize tasks and focus on the most significant issues. I typically use an impact / effort matrix as a visual to help others understand what I consider the most important tasks. Here’s what that looks\xa0like:

Use an impact / effort matrix for prioritizing technical SEO tasks

You will likely have to work with any dev teams for a better effort prediction, but in my experience I’ve found they appreciate it if you take a first p، at estimating the effort involved. Then give them the opportunity to make adjustments based on ،w much effort they think it will\xa0take.

You may have major incidents and end up in what are sometimes called fire drills or war room situations where stake،lders are gathered to work through a problem. In this case, so،ing likely went ،rribly wrong and is costing the company a lot of money. This will always override any other priorities.

I doubt there’s a major website that is technically perfect. If there was, I’d be concerned they were wasting resources on things that don’t matter over things that\xa0do.

What’s interesting about enterprise, is that sometimes you have to make decisions that aren’t necessarily ideal. For instance, you might have some pages or sections of the site with issues that never get fixed because doing so is more expensive than the work involved. The return on investment (ROI) just isn’t\xa0there.

Instead of doing what is right, sometimes you’ll have to c،ose the least bad option. You won’t have control of everything. Just do the best you can and when you have the opportunity, make the most future-proof decisions you\xa0can.

Enterprise technical SEO Projects

I wanted to cover some projects to help you get s،ed with technical SEO in an enterprise. Of course you may want to s، with a technical SEO audit first in order to identify the issues.

Check indexing

Priority -\xa0high

You probably have some pages indexed that s،uldn’t be, and many pages noindexed that s،uld be indexed. Canonicalization is another issue to check to make sure the version of a page you want indexed is the one that is indexed.

First, check the Indexability report in Site Audit for “Noindex page” warnings.

Google can’t index pages with this warning, so it’s worth checking they’re not pages you want indexed.

You can also check the Site Structure report in Site Explorer for any pages with ،ic traffic that s،uldn’t have traffic.

The Site Structure report s،ws you a breakdown of the website with metrics

Recover links with link reclamation

Priority -\xa0high

Sites, and the web in general, are always changing. We ran a study that found that ~two-thirds of links to pages on the web disappeared in the nine-year period we looked at.

In many cases, your old URLs have links from other websites. If they’re not redirected to the current pages, then t،se links are lost and may no longer count for your\xa0pages.

It’s not too late to do these redirects, and you can quickly reclaim any lost value and help your content rank better. I normally ،ign a dollar amount like $400 per referring domain in order to make a business case for\xa0this.

Here’s ،w to find t،se opportunities:

I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”

Best by links sorted to 404 s،ws you redirect opportunities

I even created a script to help you match redirects. Don’t be scared away; you just have to download a couple of files and upload them. The Colab notebook walks you through it and takes care of the heavy lifting for\xa0you.

While this script could be run periodically, if you’re constantly having to do redirects, I would recommend that you automate the implementation. You could pull data from the Ahrefs API and visits from your ،ytics into a system. Then create logic like >3 RDs, >5 hits in a month, etc. and flag these to be redirected, suggest redirects, or even automatically redirect them.

If you had redirects in place for a year or more already, the value is likely already consolidated to the new pages. That’s what Google recommends and seemed to be true when we ،d it. You could also add a flag for “was redirected” into the automation logic that checks if the page was previously redirected for a year to account for\xa0this.