SEO
5 Ways You Can Really Steal Organic Clicks from Industry Giants
The giants of fairy-tales have three things going for them: strength, resources, and infamy.
In a similar way, our industry giants often dominate the searches due to the strength of their team, the resources of a large budget, and their brand fame.
A household name, a large team of experts, and a budget to rival the plunder of a fantasy kingdom, isn’t a luxury we all have as search marketers.
So how do you stand out from the crowd in a marketplace dominated by industry giants with resources out of your reach?
We are going to explore ways to win organic clicks and conversions away from the big, established players in your space while working with budgets a fraction of theirs.
In just five steps, I’m going to show you how you can prepare your website to bring down the giants.
1. Look for Their Weaknesses
The first step in competing against the dominant brands is assessing where they have weaknesses.
Content Gap Analysis
Start with a content audit. Using a tool like Ahrefs, you get an understanding of what keywords you are ranking for, which they are not.
In Ahrefs you can enter your domain and a couple of the sites of competitors who are also in the top 5 organic search results into the “Content Gap” feature and compare it with the number one player in your industry.
This will show you which keywords you and your competitors are ranking for which the giant is not. This gives you an idea of where your competitive edge is.
For example, I have chosen the industry “wooden sheds” and entered two websites and the brand I am keen on improving.
If the giant I’m wishing to take down is Homebase, a large home improvement and gardening store here in the UK, then I can see that the keywords they are not ranking for, but some or all of the smaller brands are.
This gives me an idea that I can compete more easily for terms such as “potting shed” and “playhouses”, both with a high monthly search volume but not something the giant is currently targeting.
Screenshot from Ahrefs’ “Content Gap” report
Content Format Gaps
The other aspect you should be looking at in your content gap analysis is the formats of content that are not being utilized by your heavyweight competitor.
Whatever your industry there is always the scope to go outside of the standard “text on a page” template for your site.
Diagrams, videos, and audio files all increase the ways your website can be found through search. You can easily use a crawler to search the code of a site for the indicators that it is using formats such as PDFs and even videos.
For more detail on how to use a web crawler and custom extraction to identify types of content on a page, such as YouTube iframes, take a look at Screaming Frog’s guide to web scraping and data extraction.
Once you have an idea of what content your competitors are not using you can start to take advantage of that gap.
For instance, producing video guides to explain how to set up the technical products you are both selling, or the audio explanation of complicated medical topics could give you that edge in usability and conversion.
Make a Display of Strength
Improving how your content is displayed in the search results can be an easy shot to take against a behemoth competitor.
Oftentimes, due to the sheer volume of products or pages on a site, they rely on templated page titles and descriptions rather than having the time or facility to craft them all by hand. Use that to your advantage.
Writing a compelling meta description to encourage click-through might seem like a fundamental of SEO.
Up against the likes of Amazon, however, whose inventory is in the millions, it can cause you to get the click even if you aren’t out-ranking them.
Mark up Your Unique Content
The best way to maximize the effectiveness of the content types you are utilizing that your competitors aren’t, is by using schema markup.
This will enable some search engines to pull through this information and display it in the SERPs in a more appealing way than a standard search result.
For example, if you choose to use videos on your site you can mark them up in such a way that Google can use them to populate the video carousel, a spot in the SERPs that is reserved purely for videos.
Even if your giant has great written copy that answers a user’s question it will not be able to outrank the video you created that visually answers their query.
Aim for Featured Snippets
The holy grail of search results, the featured snippet, evens the playing field when it comes to search rankings.
No matter if your site is not ranking in first position for a search query, you are still eligible to appear in the “position 0” placement if your content best answers the user’s search.
Studying the search results related to your industry can allow you to see when featured snippets are appearing and what is the content currently populating this area.
Google’s John Mueller has shared some details on how to rank for featured snippets.
Use Your Other Resources
If you are lucky enough to have access to paid search accounts for your brand then make sure you are using the data gathered from them. Analyze the converting terms that are relevant to the campaign you are running.
Larger brands may well find their teams working in silos, or even outsourcing elements of their campaigns to different agencies which means the cross-channel insight is harder to come by. Use this to your advantage.
2. Be Quick & Nimble
Juggernauts are intimidating, but they are also slow. The benefit of a small company or agency is the speed in which you can pivot.
If a campaign is not effective, getting sign-off to learn from it and try something new is not as much of a bureaucracy-laced endeavor as with a large brand.
Quick to React to New Opportunities
Many enterprise businesses have several layers of authorization required to make the smallest change.
Being able to adapt quickly to a change in the market or capitalize on a new audience gives your SEO team the edge.
Keeping an eye on what is performing well on social media can help you to ride the wave of an emerging trend.
This kind of adaptation is often out of reach for larger brands who are beholden to strict marketing and content plans that cannot be deviated from easily.
Through your understanding of market trends and the ability to move swiftly, you can create content for digital PR purposes a lot quicker than a team that is on a strict content plan.
Make Changes Swiftly
An extensive development queue is frequently a barrier to getting changes implemented to a website quickly.
Often, there are other priority tasks your in-house or agency developers are focusing their time on. Multiply this delay by ten for an enterprise site.
Being able to talk to your developers and ask them about priorities is a huge benefit that comes from working in a smaller company.
You may still be outsourcing your development work, but chances are you have a direct dial to a member of their development team or your account manager rather than having to submit a request and escalate it through slower, more official channels.
Make sure you take advantage of this closer working relationship by:
- Discussing your needs with your development team.
- Educating them on the importance of SEO, if it’s an area they are not familiar with.
3. Identify Your Secret Weapon
Your secret weapon against strong competitors is likely going to come out of your ability to focus your time and efforts where they cannot.
Stay Local
In some instances, this could be within a local community.
If your business serves people from a physical location, you are far better placed to rank for queries with a local intent than a purely ecommerce site.
If your large competitors also have brick-and-mortar stores but not in a location near yours, then your niche will be your local area.
Your small business that is in the heart of a community will be able to gain relevant local links from charities, sports clubs and community events in that area far easier than a large multinational corporation.
If you have a handful of shops across a small area, you are more likely to be able to spend time building relationships with local contacts than a centralized SEO team for a company that has hundreds of locations to cover.
Highlight Skills & Expertise
Another great way of differentiating your client or your company from larger competitors is by using its staff to build authority for your site.
The chances of the CEO of a company that has 100 employees being open to working with you to secure local media coverage is higher than one who is overseeing a 10,000-strong company and not even resident in the country you are optimizing the site for.
Expertise within the brand you are trying to promote will be more accessible within a smaller organization than it would be within a massive one.
Get to know the experts within your brand and start looking for opportunities for them to contribute to digital PR efforts.
Data that has been produced through their research or their expert opinion on a topical subject will go far in promoting the website as a source of authoritative information within the industry.
Keep the Battle Small
One of the key points to remember in taking on a giant is that you are only going to be able to beat them in certain conditions.
For example, you have no hope (or need) to beat Amazon in the SERPs for “cheap pillow cases” if you are a retailer of luxury perfume.
It is key to look at the few pages within their site which are actually competing against your website and identify how you can outrank those.
It may be that you can earn better, more relevant links to your product pages than your big competitor can purely because they have more products so their team’s time will be spread more thinly than yours.
Be Bold
One weakness larger brands have is very tight brand guidelines and sign-off procedures that stop innovation from occurring.
As a smaller brand, you have the opportunity to be bolder in your marketing.
Whether this takes the form of irreverent calls to action in your meta descriptions or taking a swipe at the competitor through a comparison article, you have the option to make an impact where a larger brand is wrapped in red-tape.
4. Develop Your Battle Plan
The key to winning any fight in the SERPs is having a great strategy.
In the case of fighting industry giants, it is imperative that you are developing a battle plan that capitalizes on their weaknesses we’ve already discussed.
Add the Value They Can’t
In many cases, this includes answering the queries they are not. This will likely be long-tail searches that require in-depth research.
A great source of material to start your long-tail strategy off is user forums.
Subreddits can be a gold mine of information on the sorts of questions users want answers to but cannot find an answer to online.
Through sites like this, Quora and Answer The Public, it’s possible to build up a picture of what your target audience is interested in but don’t necessarily have access to.
Use this to create content that engages your target audience in a way that your competitors aren’t.
Bring the Fight to Your Battlefield
It might be that the players dominating the industry on Google are not as hot in other search engines, or indeed, are neglecting other channels altogether.
A key question to ask is, are you ranking in the right search engines?
For instance, it may be that due to their lack of video content that you identified through your content gap analysis they are not visible on YouTube at all.
Is this a channel that you can exploit further? Don’t fall into the trap of only fighting them on one front.
Consider more industry-specific search engines, like TripAdvisor, is this a more level playing field for you to thrive in?
By looking outside of your primary search engine you can open up another line of attack that might not be where their efforts are focused.
5. If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them
Another option is that if your industry behemoth is actually a marketplace or reseller, like Amazon, it may be a good move for your brand to start selling through them.
This sort of decision is usually outside the purview of a digital marketer, especially if you are working within an agency, rather than in-house.
However, it may be within your remit to make recommendations and use the data you are gathering as part of your reports to encourage this to be considered.
For brands that aren’t ecommerce, another option is to piggyback off the success of your industry competitor and look at partnering with them.
Can you write for their blog so you are getting traffic through referrals from their site and raising your profile with their audience?
For instance, sites in the UK targeting medical information terms such as “eczema treatment” will likely find themselves outranked by the National Health Service (NHS). However, this site does link out to reputable, authoritative websites that may give more specialized advice than they do.
If you stop looking at links as only being there to boost your backlink profile and see them as avenues to raise your profile with your audience, then you could find traffic and engagement rising drastically.
Conclusion
It isn’t impossible to steal organic traffic from the big players in your industry. It’s just daunting.
Put together a robust plan of attack and you should be able to start chipping away at their organic traffic and building up your own.
Soon, you might find you start to level out in size.
More Resources:
Image Credits
All screenshots taken by author, August 2019
SEO
Enterprise Link Building & The Power Of Links
Enterprise link building is the process of acquiring links to a large, enterprise company’s website to improve its visibility and rankings in search engines.
Enterprise companies get a lot of links naturally. While they may have some challenges with link building, these companies also have a ton of opportunities because of who they are and how much money is at stake.
Links play a role in many of Google’s systems including Experience Expertise Authoritativeness Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). As Google says:
Google’s algorithms identify signals about pages that correlate with trustworthiness and authoritativeness. The best known of these signals is PageRank, which uses links on the web to understand authoritativeness.
Links are still an important ranking factor in Google. I ran a study to measure the impact of links and removed good links using the disavow tool. The pages lost both rankings and traffic.
Let’s look at what it takes to do link-building in an enterprise environment.
Most teams in enterprise companies face similar challenges. Being successful in large organizations requires more than just subject matter expertise. You also need to know politics, sales, and project management.
Getting buy-in and budget
Most companies I’ve worked with didn’t allow employees to represent the brand. That’s legal speak for “the employees aren’t allowed to do outreach.” That doesn’t mean you can’t get links, it just means you have to be creative and get them in other ways.
It’s not the same for every company. I know some that just don’t do link building, some have minimal link building programs where they can do a few tasks, some have fully developed programs, and many just offload link building to third-party vendors because that is likely the easiest option.
Your first step is to plan out what you want to do and figure out who you need to work with for approvals and to get the work done. I’ll cover this more in the next section.
Depending on the project, you may have to go through legal and compliance teams to get permission. In my experience this is where many projects die. If you’re required to go through legal, the chance you’ll be approved goes down by a lot.
The next challenge is getting a budget for the activities. My best tip is to equate the projects to revenue, or as close as you can get to it with some other value metric. For example, I’ve managed to get redirect projects off the ground by using a number like $400 for each referring domain recovered as the value.
Here’s how to find those opportunities in Ahrefs:
- Paste your domain into Site Explorer
- Go to the Best by links report
- Add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter
I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”
So for this example, let’s say I do 250 redirects that on average have 10 RDs. That’s 250 x 10 x $400 = $800,000 as a value I can use to pitch for the redirect project. It’s typically a large enough number for the project to get attention and resources.
Prioritization
Enterprise companies have a lot of products and services, and enterprise websites usually have a lot of pages. What teams do you work with? What pages do you prioritize building links to? These aren’t easy questions.
My best recommendation is to align to company or team goals. Most companies or teams have some products they prioritize or want to improve and that’s where you’re most likely to be able to get buy-in for link building projects. Someone’s bonus is likely tied to the success of these projects, and they’re willing to invest resources to make sure they hit their targets.
Coordination
At the enterprise level, a lot of link building is done by other teams, not necessarily the SEO team. Big companies have a lot of exposure and they’re doing a lot of different things that may result in them getting links.
You may see TV commercials, hear radio ads, have teams creating new content. Then there’s public relations, social media, paid advertising, content syndication, events, corporate partnerships, influencers, celebrity advertising, affiliate programs, and more.
Most links will probably happen without you, but you can help guide many of the teams in charge of these channels with best practices that can help you get more or better links. Take advantage of any internal training sessions where you may have the opportunity to present. Get on one of their weekly calls, create best practice documentation, internal courses, etc.
You’ll have more impact if you can make a lot of people or teams do a little bit better than you would have if you tried to do everything yourself.
You have a lot of different options for link building in an enterprise environment. If you’re not sure where to start, I’d check out the Links section in Opportunities report in Site Explorer. This report has shortcuts to other reports with filters applied, that help you with some common tasks.
Here are some of the things you might want to try.
Create linkable assets
In SEO, we use the terms “linkable asset” or “link bait” to refer to content that is strategically crafted to attract links. Such linkable assets can take on many different forms:
- Industry surveys
- Studies and research
- Online tools and calculators
- Awards and rankings
- How-to guides and tutorials
- Definitions and coined terms
- Infographics, GIFographics, and “Map-o-graphics”
You can also use any industry-famous employees or thought leaders you have to create interesting quotes that might be linked.
There’s also a phenomenon where high-ranking pages get linked to more over time. If your content is good enough to get you near the top, you’re more likely to get more links. Tim Soulo calls this the vicious circle of SEO.
For more ideas, check out our guide to enterprise content marketing.
Combine similar content to create a stronger page
Keyword cannibalization is when a search engine consistently swaps rankings between multiple pages or when multiple pages rank simultaneously for the same keyword but are similar enough to be consolidated. Consolidating similar content into comprehensive guides or pillar pages can improve your chances of ranking and earning links. To do that, you usually combine the content and redirect one page to the other.
Promote your content
The more visibility your content gets, the more links you are likely to get naturally. Leverage those other teams I talked about earlier to promote your content on social and maybe paid media. Use influencer relationships to amplify your reach. Use your PR teams for potential media coverage.
Keep in mind that these other teams are busy and have their own priorities as well. Be selective on what you ask them to promote. If you ask for them to promote everything, they’re likely to promote nothing.
Go after unlinked brand mentions
Unlinked brand mentions are online mentions (citations) of your brand—or anything directly related to your brand—that do not link back to your site.
Enterprise companies tend to get talked about a fair bit, and each one of those mentions offers a chance to get a link. Even if there’s not initially a link, it doesn’t hurt to ask for one. You can use Content Explorer to find these mentions on the web, and the inbuilt filter for highlighting unlinked domains to hone in on unlinked mentions.
You can also look for unlinked brand mentions of key employees, famous quotes of theirs, or statistics from your studies.
Recover links with link reclamation
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 those links are lost and may no longer count for your pages.
It’s not too late to do these redirects, and you can quickly reclaim any lost value and help your content rank better.
Here’s how to find those opportunities:
- Paste your domain into Site Explorer
- Go to the Best by links report
- Add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter
I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”
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 you.
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 analytics 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 tested 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 this.
Copy competitor links and strategies
There are a few different ways to do this. The usual recommendation for SEOs would be a link intersect report, which we have, but it’s pretty noisy for large sites.
What I would recommend instead is the Best by links report in Site Explorer.
This is going to show you the most linked pages on a website. For us, that’s our homepage, some of our free tools, and our blog and data studies.
Another option is the Site Structure report in Site Explorer sorted by Referring domains or Referring pages.
This lets me quickly see that things like our blog, free tools, glossary, and training academy videos are all well linked.
Build internal links
I’ve always found internal links to be a powerful way to help pages rank higher.
Even these links may be difficult to get in an enterprise environment. Sometimes different people are responsible for different sections of the website, which can make internal linking time-consuming and may require meetings and a lot of follow up to get internal linking done.
On top of the political hurdles, the process for internal linking can be a bit convoluted. You either have to know the site well and read through various pages looking for link opportunities, or you can follow a process that involves a lot of scraping and crawling to find opportunities.
At Ahrefs, we’ve made this simple, scalable and accessible so anyone can find these opportunities. The easiest way to see internal link opportunities is with the Internal Link Opportunities report in Site Audit. We look at what your pages are ranking for and suggest links from other pages on your site that talk about those things.
I’d also recommend watching out for opportunities to use better link anchor text. It’s common for page creators to overuse generic link anchor text such as ‘learn more,’ ‘read more,’ or ‘click here.’ You can look for usage of this kind of generic copy in the Internal anchors report in Site Explorer.
Build links from other websites you own
If your company owns multiple websites, you’ll want to add links between them where it makes sense. Ultimately you may want to consolidate the content into one site, but that’s not always feasible. Even if it is, it may not happen within a reasonable timeframe, so you may want to add links between the sites in the meantime.
This can be abused and goes into a gray area, but for the most part, if you’re linking naturally to relevant pages you’ll be fine.
Buy other companies websites
I wrote all about SEO for mergers and acquisitions. When you buy another company, you inherit their content and their links. This opens some nice options for consolidating content and links to stronger pages.
There are a lot of tools that can help you with enterprise-level link building including:
- Ahrefs’ Site Explorer – Shows you all links of any website or URL with an option to sort and filter them by many important SEO metrics.
- Ahrefs’ Content Explorer – A unique link prospecting tool, which helps you find thousands of relevant websites for link requests and guest posting. Also helps to discover linkable assets on any topic from all around the web.
- Ahrefs’ Web Explorer – Lets you search through our search engine’s (yep.com) entire database of pages, domains, and links using search operators.
- Ahrefs Alerts – Similar to Google Alerts but has more flexibility with SEO-related filters.
- Pitchbox / BuzzStream– Email outreach tools. There are many other tools that let you send personalized emails at scale, but these are popular with SEOs.
- Hunter.io / Voila Norbert – Email lookup services help you find contact details of websites at scale.
Also check out our guide to enterprise SEO tools.
Final thoughts
There’s so much at stake in enterprise SEO and so many opportunities. When a company and its people finally get behind SEO, they can dominate an industry.
If you have any tips, enterprise SEO experiences you’d like to share, or questions, let me know on X or LinkedIn.
SEO
WordPress Plugin Supply Chain Attacks Escalate
WordPress plugins continue to be under attack by hackers using stolen credentials (from other data breaches) to gain direct access to plugin code. What makes these attacks of particular concern is that these supply chain attacks can sneak in because the compromise appears to users as plugins with a normal update.
Supply Chain Attack
The most common vulnerability is when a software flaw allows an attacker to inject malicious code or to launch some other kind of attack, the flaw is in the code. But a supply chain attack is when the software itself or a component of that software (like a third party script used within the software) is directly altered with malicious code. This creates the situation where the software itself is delivering the malicious files.
The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) defines a supply chain attack (PDF):
“A software supply chain attack occurs when a cyber threat actor infiltrates a software vendor’s network and employs malicious code to compromise the software before the vendor sends it to their customers. The compromised software then compromises the customer’s data or system.
Newly acquired software may be compromised from the outset, or a compromise may occur through other means like a patch or hotfix. In these cases, the compromise still occurs prior to the patch or hotfix entering the customer’s network. These types of attacks affect all users of the compromised software and can have widespread consequences for government, critical infrastructure, and private sector software customers.”
For this specific attack on WordPress plugins, the attackers are using stolen password credentials to gain access to developer accounts that have direct access to plugin code to add malicious code to the plugins in order to create administrator level user accounts at every website that uses the compromised WordPress plugins.
Today, Wordfence announced that additional WordPress plugins have been identified as having been compromised. It may very well be the case that there will be more plugins that are or will be compromised. So it’s good to understand what is going on and to be proactive about protecting sites under your control.
More WordPress Plugins Attacked
Wordfence issued an advisory that more plugins were compromised, including a highly popular podcasting plugin called PowerPress Podcasting plugin by Blubrry.
These are the newly discovered compromised plugins announced by Wordfence:
- WP Server Health Stats (wp-server-stats): 1.7.6
Patched Version: 1.7.8
10,000 active installations - Ad Invalid Click Protector (AICP) (ad-invalid-click-protector): 1.2.9
Patched Version: 1.2.10
30,000+ active installations - PowerPress Podcasting plugin by Blubrry (powerpress): 11.9.3 – 11.9.4
Patched Version: 11.9.6
40,000+ active installations - Latest Infection – Seo Optimized Images (seo-optimized-images): 2.1.2
Patched Version: 2.1.4
10,000+ active installations - Latest Infection – Pods – Custom Content Types and Fields (pods): 3.2.2
Patched Version: No patched version needed currently.
100,000+ active installations - Latest Infection – Twenty20 Image Before-After (twenty20): 1.6.2, 1.6.3, 1.5.4
Patched Version: No patched version needed currently.
20,000+ active installations
These are the first group of compromised plugins:
- Social Warfare
- Blaze Widget
- Wrapper Link Element
- Contact Form 7 Multi-Step Addon
- Simply Show Hooks
More information about the WordPress Plugin Supply Chain Attack here.
What To Do If Using A Compromised Plugin
Some of the plugins have been updated to fix the problem, but not all of them. Regardless of whether the compromised plugin has been patched to remove the malicious code and the developer password updated, site owners should check their database to make sure there are no rogue admin accounts that have been added to the WordPress website.
The attack creates administrator accounts with the user names of “Options” or “PluginAuth” so those are the user names to watch for. However, it’s probably a good idea to look for any new admin level user accounts that are unrecognized in case the attack has evolved and the hackers are using different administrator accounts.
Site owners that use the Wordfence free or Pro version of the Wordfence WordPress security plugin are notified if there’s a discovery of a compromised plugin. Pro level users of the plugin receive malware signatures for immediately detecting infected plugins.
The official Wordfence warning announcement about these new infected plugins advises:
“If you have any of these plugins installed, you should consider your installation compromised and immediately go into incident response mode. We recommend checking your WordPress administrative user accounts and deleting any that are unauthorized, along with running a complete malware scan with the Wordfence plugin or Wordfence CLI and removing any malicious code.
Wordfence Premium, Care, and Response users, as well as paid Wordfence CLI users, have malware signatures to detect this malware. Wordfence free users will receive the same detection after a 30 day delay on July 25th, 2024. If you are running a malicious version of one of the plugins, you will be notified by the Wordfence Vulnerability Scanner that you have a vulnerability on your site and you should update the plugin where available or remove it as soon as possible.”
Read more:
WordPress Plugins Compromised At The Source – Supply Chain Attack
3 More Plugins Infected in WordPress.org Supply Chain Attack Due to Compromised Developer Passwords
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Moksha Labs
SEO
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 shines. 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 potentially 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 hard on getting buy-in.
Working with others
You’re going to need to coordinate with many different teams to get anything done. Strong interpersonal skills 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 work.
You’ll want to find out how these teams work, their processes and tools, and opportunities you may have to interact with them like any project calls, team calls, or office hours you may be able to join. The more visible you are, the more likely they are to work with you.
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 bit.
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 products 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 shouldn’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 tips.
Organizational improvements
Most enterprise SEO teams go through similar stages of progression as they evolve. This is sometimes referred to as the SEO maturity model.
Many teams start off doing ad-hoc work, but eventually things start to centralize, you create standards and processes (SOPs), and eventually you start to get more buy-in by being more proactive and doing things like training other teams.
A lot of this progression depends on a leader who can be successful, visible, and sell SEO in the organization. They will likely spend as much, or more time promoting successes as they will doing the work.
They may have to create SEO forecasts, have lots of executive meetings to show results, train other teams, create those SOPs, send newsletters to keep others informed, etc.
For technical SEOs in particular, make sure you also promote the work of the developers and teams you work with. If you can get them visibility and a promotion, you’ll have an advocate for SEO who is bought in and will be more likely to work with you on future projects.
Professional development
There are two major paths you can take when it comes to enterprise technical SEO. The most common is an individual contributor (IC), or an individual who is part of a team. In enterprise environments, even IC roles may have a lot of autonomy because they’re considered subject matter experts (SMEs). Some people may also end up in people management.
If you want to transition to people management, what I would recommend is:
- Be visible on projects
- Be viewed as a leader
- Work on skilling up
- Help your team where you can
- Understand the bigger picture for the organization
- Build relationships
- Communicate effectively
Take advantage of any funds you’re given for SEO courses, conferences, etc. I highly recommend attending Ahrefs Evolve if you get a chance. If you want to be a manager, you may also look into managerial or leadership courses.
A big part of technical SEO will be setting up your crawls and monitoring for issues. While it would be great if you could get everything technically perfect, it’s rarely realistic on enterprise websites.
One of the things I like about Ahrefs’ Site Audit is that you can choose to ignore issues that you don’t find important.
You can also add any custom issues that you want. We have every data point for the pages and links configurable as issues, as well as changes between dates. You can even change the prioritization level for each issue.
You might also want to break down issues by CMS or even by template so you know exactly which group each issue belongs to and can see when they resolve the issues. This can be done with segments in Site Audit.
You can help a lot of other teams with their data needs. You will likely be asked for things like checking for scripts or outdated file versions, words you’re not supposed to mention, extracting authors, publish dates, update dates, or other useful data.
In many crawlers, you’ll need to do this setup before crawling, but in Ahrefs Site Audit you can actually search within the HTML or text after the crawl has already happened.
For your crawling, you have a few options.
Normal crawls
The standard crawls in enterprise companies are usually once a month, or maybe once every week or two if you’re breaking the website into multiple sections. The downside here is that things might be broken for a while before a crawler flags an issue.
Catch issues before they launch
The ideal scenario is to catch issues before they launch.
In some environments, you may be able to set up unit tests to have automated checks for issues before they launch.
You can also use Ahrefs’ Site Audit to crawl staging and dev environments to check for any issues before they’re launched to the public.
Catch any issues faster with crawl sampling
You don’t always need a full crawl of the website which can take weeks to run on an enterprise site. You just need enough to see if any important changes were made.
You can run Ahrefs’ Site Audit for a custom list of pages daily and get alerted to any changes. Using a sample across different templates or systems, you can find issues faster.
You could also run a smaller crawl on any section that made any new pushes to production.
The fastest way to catch changes: always-on crawling
This is a sneak peek at what we have coming that we’re calling always-on crawling.
The idea is to switch from scheduled crawls, which users tend to schedule weekly or monthly, to a prioritized crawling system that’s always on and notifies users of issues faster.
IndexNow is allowing us to add a real-time option, and at the same time we will be able to save resources for our users and ourselves.
For sites using IndexNow and the new always-on option in Site Audit, we’ll be able to notify users of issues shortly after they make updates to their pages.
This is how that will look:
I can’t think of a system that would be better than this. A practically real-time monitoring and alerting system. As a technical SEO, this is a dream come true for me.
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 like:
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 pass at estimating the effort involved. Then give them the opportunity to make adjustments based on how much effort they think it will take.
You may have major incidents and end up in what are sometimes called fire drills or war room situations where stakeholders are gathered to work through a problem. In this case, something likely went horribly 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 do.
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 there.
Instead of doing what is right, sometimes you’ll have to choose 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 can.
I wanted to cover some projects to help you get started with technical SEO in an enterprise. Of course you may want to start with a technical SEO audit first in order to identify the issues.
Check indexing
Priority – high
You probably have some pages indexed that shouldn’t be, and many pages noindexed that should 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 organic traffic that shouldn’t have traffic.
Recover links with link reclamation
Priority – high
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 those links are lost and may no longer count for your pages.
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 assign a dollar amount like $400 per referring domain in order to make a business case for this.
Here’s how to find those opportunities:
- Paste your domain into Site Explorer
- Go to the Best by links report
- Add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter
I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”
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 you.
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 analytics 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 tested 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 this.
Add internal links
Priority – high
I’ve always found internal links to be a powerful way to help pages rank higher.
Even these links may be difficult to get in an enterprise environment. Sometimes different people are responsible for different sections of the website, which can make internal linking time-consuming and may require meetings and a lot of follow up to get internal linking done.
On top of the political hurdles, the process for internal linking can be a bit convoluted. You either have to know the site well and read through various pages looking for link opportunities, or you can follow a process that involves a lot of scraping and crawling to find opportunities.
At Ahrefs, we’ve made this simple, scalable and accessible so anyone can find these opportunities. The easiest way to see internal link opportunities is with the Internal Link Opportunities report in Site Audit. We look at what your pages are ranking for and suggest links from other pages on your site that talk about those things.
Add schema markup
Priority – high
I’m a fan of schema markup as long as it gets you a search feature. Check out our guide to schema markup to see which ones you should be implementing. There are some cool tools now that can even suggest schema markup based on what is seen on the page.
Fix Page Experience
Priority – medium
While many of these aren’t necessarily going to move the needle for SEO, they are good for users and how they experience your website, so they’re worth working on.
- Core web vitals. This is how fast your pages load.
- HTTPS. You want your pages to be secure. A surprising number of sites, >6%, redirect HTTPS to HTTP.
- Mobile-friendliness. Are your pages usable on mobile?
- Interstitials. You don’t want intrusive interstitials, or those that take up a good chunk of the screen.
We cover most of these in Site Audit. For example, we pull PageSpeed Insights data so you get actual Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) metrics for Core Web Vitals as well as Lighthouse metrics in Site Audit.
We also flag mobile SEO issues.
General website health / maintenance
Priority – low
These may not have much impact on SEO, but can be an important consideration for user experience.
- Broken links. Find them and fix them.
- Redirect Chains. Google will follow up to 10 hops. I don’t worry until after 5 hops.
- Add sitemaps. I would make sure this is automated. If you are asked to manually create them, you can do it, but just know that if it’s manual these will rarely be kept up-to-date. If you’re creating them based on crawled pages, then it’s likely all search engines can crawl them anyway.
You may want to check if any of the chains are too long. Look for this in the “Issues” tab in the Redirects report.
Fix Hreflang issues
Priority depends on the site
Hreflang helps show the right page to the right user in search. This can be crucial for enterprise companies to get right as the dropoff from bad pathing or annoying users can cost you a lot of money.
We flag a number of different hreflang issues in Site Audit.
There are also some nice visualizations to help you explain issues like this first-if-its-kind hreflang cluster visualization. It shows and tells you what is broken, making it much easier to explain to stakeholders than the typical spreadsheet.
Optimize crawl budget
Priority depends on the site
Crawl budget can be a concern for larger sites with millions of pages or sites that are frequently updated. In general, if you have lots of pages not being crawled or updated as often as you’d like, then you may want to look into speeding up crawling.
Optimize ecommerce pages
Specialized task
Ecommerce SEO would be important for any sites selling products.
For enterprise sites, faceted navigation in particular can be tricky. Luckily we have a great guide on faceted navigation.
Fix JavaScript SEO issues
Specialized task
The bigger the site, the more likely you are to run into multiple tech stacks. Some of those may be JavaScript frameworks. These are relatively newer than CMSs and less understood by SEOs, so we have a guide on JavaScript SEO that covers many of the issues you’ll face and how to troubleshoot them, as well as how the rendering process works for Google.
Migrate other websites
Specialized task
A website migration is any significant change to a website’s domain, URLs, hosting, platform, or design. Big companies like to change these things and it creates havoc. Try to write any standards to keep things consistent and minimize the impact of changes.
Keep traffic during mergers and acquisitions
Specialized task
Enterprise companies buy other companies all the time. When I worked in enterprise SEO, I felt like I was constantly doing one website merger project or another. There’s a lot that can go wrong and a lot of money on the line. Check out our guide on SEO for mergers and acquisitions for more info.
Analyze log files
Specialized task
I would typically consider this task firmly in the developer department, but it is something that technical SEOs may be asked to do at times. Logs can be expensive to store and analyze and they contain private information (PII) with IP addresses. Many companies won’t give SEOs log file access. I’d say in 99.9% of cases, the crawl stats report in Google Search Console will meet your needs instead of logs.
Pull data from APIs
Specialized task
I wouldn’t expect every technical SEO to do this, and I usually consider working with APIs a job for a developer, but many technical SEOs do have the skills to help with this kind of thing. Typical use cases are data storage, report building, etc.
Machine learning tasks
Specialized task
This definitely isn’t a requirement for technical SEOs, but there are many who take on machine learning projects and help with things like semantic analysis, redirect automation, keyword clustering, etc.
When submitting tickets to dev teams, you want to be thorough and concise. You need enough detail that they know what to do, but for the ticket to be short enough they’ll actually read it.
These are the elements I focus on:
- Detailed description of the problem.
- Acceptance criteria. What you need to see to consider this problem resolved.
- Any additional info. Uploads, steps to reproduce the issue, videos showing the issue.
- Priority and impact. How important is the issue? Try to equate any expected impact to cash if you can.
Do not waste the time of developers with menial tasks. I’ve seen lots of technical SEOs burn their bridges with dev teams by submitting tickets for lots of things that are high effort and little to no impact.
There are a lot of tools that can help you with enterprise technical SEO including:
- Ahrefs’ Site Audit. It really is best-in-class. Check it out! We’re the most used cloud-based site audit tool. We crawl ~700 million pages a day.
- Google Search Console. It has several useful tools to check indexing, crawling, etc.
Also check out our guide to enterprise SEO tools.
Final thoughts
One final tip is that if you don’t seem to be making progress on projects, try to sell the changes you want to make as A/B testing. Many companies want to do more testing, and you can “test” your SEO changes to see the impact they have. With a measurable impact, you can argue for a more permanent fix, but in the meantime, it’s technically fixed.
If you have any tips, enterprise SEO experiences you’d like to share, or questions, let me know on X or LinkedIn.
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