As Google, Bing, Baidu, and other search engines continue to hone their algorithms, enterprises across industries are warring for the visibility on page one.
In a survey by HubSpot, 61 percent of marketers say improving their SEO and organic presence is their number one inbound marketing priority. Along with that, 57 percent of B2B marketers have reported that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative.
However, enterprise SEO comes with many challenges, and it’s vital that your CMS aids your efforts.
Enterprise SEO is the practice of optimizing a large website, which consists of thousands or even millions of web pages while navigating through the internal politics of an organization to make sure all stakeholders are happy.
According to Search Engine Land, enterprise SEO is less about the size of the company, and more to do with the number of pages, products or services on a website.
Take cell phone giant, T-Mobile as one example. According to Google, it has more than 40,000 pages indexed in their mobile phone and tablet support section. If your site has more than 1,000 or more pages, then consider it to be an enterprise site.
Besides size, an enterprise site will also have the following two differentiating characteristics:
Regarding fundamental SEO practices, enterprise SEO follows the same basic principles, including making sure your target keywords are in the appropriate places like the title tag, headline tags, meta tags, and URL, ensuring your web pages are packed with highly valuable and convertible content, and encouraging backlinks from high authority websites.
While implementing these fundamentals on a startup website, or a small site, is relatively straightforward, doing this all manually on a larger website is extremely arduous. Just imagine having to optimize 40,000+ pages, and all the content those pages contain.
Optimizing this sheer volume of content, without a capable content management system would be almost impossible.
Additionally, big name brands running multiple sites have to localize their content for different regions and languages. Plus, they have to meet speed and performance expectations from their those far-away consumers.
Further to optimizing your enterprise site at a scale, one significant challenge that arises when it comes to enterprise SEO is managing multiple stakeholders.
In an SME, there is usually a single SEO executive that is responsible for the entire website, including optimizing pages, content creation, and website code. In larger organizations, however, the SEO responsibilities are usually split among IT, development, marketing, and content creators—all of whom have different priorities and objectives.
For instance, content creators will be more focused on engaging their end-user, whereas marketing executives would be more concerned about the bounce rate and overall search engine performance. Having conflicting priorities between these different departments will lead to complicated internal processes, slowing down time-to-market as a result.
Much has been made of the technical elements of SEO (meta tags, HTML, and so forth), but in reality, SEO is merely the practice of improving the quantity and quality of your traffic to your website through optimizing the overall relevance of your site from the perspective of search engines.
Said more simply, Search Engine Optimization comes down to two things: Firstly, it’s about making your website friendlier for search engines to find and index content (we’ll be covering this in the next few pages) and secondly, producing quality content that encourages people to share and link to it on other highly ranked websites - thereby improving your “importance” or relevance in search queries performed on search engines. With these tips, here are some best practices for that piece of the puzzle:
Quantity is important. It’s true that, in general, Google prefers larger sites to smaller ones, so you always want a strong pipeline full of content.
However, quality content should always be the priority.
A worthy CMS focuses on helping you optimize your content and facilitate great content by providing an easy-to-use interface and a flexible workflow, which dotCMS facilitates through its NoCode Philosophy.
The practice of keyword stuffing is almost dead, but content writers still try their level best to mention key phrases as often as possible, even at the expense of readability; and that’s a big mistake.
Certainly, a high-density of keywords can help you rank higher for them—but if you focus too much on this, you’ll generate unreadable content. Here’s an example of two pieces of content targeting the keywords, “Java Software” and “Java”:
In theory, the first example would rank higher, as it includes more instances of the keyword. However, it contains little value and reads poorly. The second example is less focused on the keyword and is more focused on the message itself. Thus, it reads better.
By putting keywords before value and readability, you will ultimately drive your readership away. But with a focus on value, you will encourage your readers to share and link to your content.
No CMS on earth will make you a better copywriter, but a good platform should help you uncover issues like high bounce rates and low time spent on your web pages, both of which can be caused by poor copy. Additionally, your chosen CMS should offer integrations with third-party tools like Acrolinx—yet another MarTech tool that integrates with dotCMS—to support copywriters, keyword research, and SEO efforts in general.
Instead of listing out 300 keywords that you want to rank on page one for, start out with a more realistic target.
Conduct an SEO audit to see what keywords you already rank well for, and double-down on those. Then, outline a more modest number of keywords to target. That number should be in line with the amount of content you’re able to produce. Once you make progress on your first batch of keywords, you can start to broaden the list.
dotCMS has been built to serve non-technical marketers with content management, asset management, headless content distribution, and with SEO. Here are three key ways dotCMS facilitates enterprise SEO specifically.
dotCMS enables marketers and content writers to optimize content for search engines through optimized title tags on every page. Also, dotCMS auto-generates tags and titles for documents and assets that are optimized for search. For instance, titled are automatically truncated to less than 70 characters.
This also includes the ability to insert the “noindex” or other types of tags into specific pages. This can either be done manually, or automatically depending on your requirements.
Google pays close attention to the quality of your website’s HTML. So, ensuring that the CMS provides for full control over H1, H2 and other formatting tags (like meta description tags) is a crucial piece of any good content management solution. In the age of AI, dotCMS offers an integration with Amazon Rekognition that helps to automatically generate tags at scale for video and image assets using deep-learning technology.
dotCMS allows for full customization of URLs through:
Moreover, dotCMS prevents duplicate content being created, provides social media integrations, enables 301 redirects, produces XML sitemaps, and much more. You can learn about all these features through our whitepaper, “How dotCMS Facilitates Enterprise SEO”.
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