What is Enterprise SEO?
Enterprise SEO is the process of managing and improving search visibility for large, complex websites. It focuses on aligning technical foundations, content strategy, and organizational workflows to drive consistent, scalable growth. Enterprise SEO ensures that the site structure, team resources, and strategic priorities of large brands all work together to capture demand and increase revenue.
The best SEOs know that with scale comes complexity. The longer timelines required for enterprise-level SEO often collide with the fast pace of organizational change. Fewer than 20% of Senior SEOs hold their positions beyond 2 years before changing jobs. Juxtapose this with the lengthy time it can take for SEO programs to be executed, and SEOs (and the organizations that employ them) are in a crunch.
For over 18 years, 97th Floor has partnered with forward-thinking CMOs and SEO leaders on some of the internet’s most challenging websites, including Adobe, Symantec, Oracle, and Zoom. From these experiences, we have seen the same core challenges surface again and again:
We understand these challenges because we face them every day. This playbook shares the methods, tools, and practices we use to overcome them, complete with templates, never-before-released resources, and actionable strategies to strengthen your enterprise SEO.
Enterprise SEO operates on a different scale than traditional SEO. While the principles are the same, the execution involves far more complexity. Large organizations manage thousands of pages, multiple content types, and often several teams or departments with their own priorities.
Normal SEO focuses on optimizing a single page or a small group of keywords. Enterprise SEO manages site architecture, coordinates with development, segments keyword tracking, and reports on performance across many different parts of the site. It builds systems that handle this scale, making every effort measurable and repeatable.
Understanding the differences between enterprise SEO and traditional SEO might help you choose the right SEO approach for your brand, but long-term success comes from following through on a clear, actionable plan.
We’ve crafted this playbook outlining the strategies and processes we use to help enterprise brands grow. Each section focuses on a core area of enterprise SEO, with specific actions you can take to strengthen your program and see measurable results.
James Clear famously says, "We fall to the level of our systems." When it comes to SEO at this scale, everything falls to the level of site architecture.
Our SEO experts offer three exploratory exercises.
You’ve undoubtedly run these before, but we strongly recommend a site architecture review on at least a quarterly basis.
Site segments or categories may seem obvious based on your product/service offering; in other cases, segmentation requires more brain power.
Topical or product splits are most common. In the case of Ancestry, they have a few diverse "products'' including DNA Testing and Ancestry Tree mapping. In addition, their "products" are databases. (The "Surname" database is so gargantuan that it requires its own crawl.)
Product offering alignment looks at the same products by their commonality. Under Armour may split its site by footwear vs. activewear or by sport.
In larger companies, we’ve seen organizational structures impact an SEO’s decision on segmentation. Each sub-organization may have entirely different marketing/dev teams handling their many offerings, perhaps due to acquisitions or the sheer size of the company. In these cases, it makes sense to segment accordingly to match each of those different departmental processes.
However you're currently segmenting your website, consider segmenting it even more to make crawling, indexing (and really everything else) easier to manage.
If you’ve segmented your site as described above, you’re ready to begin prioritizing audits.
It’s impossible to fully audit your website without the help of tools—and we use just about all of them. Tools like Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, Conductor, etc. provide the symptomatic data needed to dive deeper. That said, no tool can completely provide the context of what should be prioritized and what will move the needle. There needs to be a manual and investigative human touch to utilize the data, which is what we do at 97th Floor.
97th Floor uses a workflow for site audits, conforming the cadence of each audit to the business goals and site structure of each client.
No matter what site segment you begin in, we recommend that the first step in each audit is to find out if a site is being indexed. Without indexation, no SEO tactic can make your pages rank.
Once you’ve gone through your site with a fine-toothed comb, the last piece of the status quo puzzle is understanding how well it’s showing up on the SERPs.
As all SEO roads lead to (ideally the top of) the SERP, tracking your performance is essential for you to:
1. Assess the impact of your efforts and
2. Identify new opportunities and avenues for success.
To get the most out of your rank tracking, we recommend an expertly tailored keyword segmentation strategy.
Enterprise sites often involve hundreds of products, thousands of pages, and multiple locations. If you’re tracking hundreds of thousands of keywords without meaningful segmentation, you're facing torrents of data with no way to spot useful patterns and trends — you simply can't make sense of what you see.
After you’ve reviewed your site’s underlying architecture, evaluated its segmentation, conducted a thorough audit, and now have a laundry list of things to do, consider how to align your keyword tracking in a way that lets you monitor these individual efforts. For example:
Match your keyword segments to your site segments. If Under Armour is splitting their site by footwear vs. activewear, they should be grouping their keywords by footwear and activewear to assess the search visibility of these product categories separately.
Create segments for landing pages, subdomains, and other important URLs. If you’re rolling out new pages or setting up redirects, these segments will let you know if the right keywords are ranking for the right pages. If you’re fixing crawl issues or making substantial on-page changes, they’ll show you any resulting increases (or decreases) in rank.
Group keywords by location. Even if you’re not servicing brick-and-mortar businesses, tracking in and grouping keywords by different locations will help you understand the nuances in your various search markets.
Taking on an enterprise site is a huge endeavor, which is why you should have a rank tracker that can support large-scale SEO with ease. We use STAT Search Analytics as it helps us manage the tracking needs of multiple enterprise sites.
After a thorough study of your site and current rankings, your next quest is to find opportunities to boost organic traffic on your site. It’s not a question of whether you will find opportunities, it’s a matter of gathering all potential opportunities and learning to prioritize.
97th Floor has built a Ranking Potential Report tool that uncovers which of your URLs have the shortest ramp to traffic increases.
The Ranking Potential Report takes otherwise common keyword data and displays it in actionable and revealing ways. The process allows enterprise SEOs to readily see how many pages are on a site, how many keywords each page ranks for, what positions these keywords hold, and most importantly, where immediate opportunities are.
Possibly more important, the Ranking Potential Report displays opportunities in a way that key stakeholders can understand. It's a highly effective tool for leveraging support for leadership because they can see the vision and potential.
Curious about your site's potential? Go deeper than this enterprise SEO playbook and request a Ranking Potential Report here.
Ahrefs is another great tool for finding growth opportunities, particularly keywords. Here's how:
By now, you should have a manageably-sized and curated list of keywords.
Search individual keywords in the keyword explorer to find difficulty scoring and complete your search for keyword ideas.
Enterprise sites face the ultimate challenge when it comes to content— managing quality at scale. Both programmatic and non-programmatic pages need attention in different ways.
Programmatic content is created from a data source. For companies like Airbnb, this looks like programmatic pages with a series of data pulls from an index.
To succeed here, you must craft page structure so that newly created pages are consistent for end users. We’re not just talking about how it looks and where the image goes versus where the text goes. There are lots of page elements to consider, in addition to the user experience on a given page.
For templated pages, consider:
But how do you scale programmatic pages for a massive site? Projects of this size are near-impossible to scale and atrociously expensive.
AI-assisted content presents an alternative.
While we’re not suggesting that you let AI write for you, enterprise SEOs should be open to ways that AI tools can share the load.
AI can identify trends and keywords to focus on, generate topics, uncover what competitors are saying, and identify high-value content for your audiences. It can analyze tremendous amounts of data—even open-ended data—with speed and efficiency, delivering key insights to decision makers before a decision is made.
AI-assisted content is limited to smaller quantities and requires review by content teams. Still, consider where you might plug AI into programmatic content. Perhaps an outline—getting started can be so difficult—could speed up the writing process and put content hours ahead.
Non-programmatic pages will require more time and attention. Reserve these limited VIP spots for core pages—maybe starting with the top 100 or so. These pages deserve a manual review and in-depth optimizations.
And what’s the best way to generate non-programmatic content? The answer is a blend of two things that 97th Floor excels at: keyword data analysis and consumer personas.
97th Floor uses Palomar, a patent-pending software for analyzing contextual, semantic data in real-time. Palomar’s SERP Intelligence crawls through all competing web content and, after thorough analysis, will not only tell you what to speak about but also how to speak about it.
After semantic analysis and keyword research, marketers need to pair this data with in-depth persona research to ensure the content serves both crawlers and end users.
Most marketers have personas but never use them. Often, personas are old, assumptive, and too generalized to impact decision-making. 97th Floor has mastered the persona creation process, and this particular concerted effort has led to not only our most successful campaigns but also to our most creative and exciting campaigns to run.
97th Floor recently took on a client facing unfounded public criticism and negative press,
desperately in need of reputation management. We learned from Semantic Analysis in Palomar that a specific thought leader’s writing was negatively impacting public sentiment. We learned from SparkToro where specifically our audience was consuming this content. Our content teams knew that in order to rank on this issue and correct the misinformation, we had to debunk what was coming from these sources. Over the course of ten months, this research-backed content helped pull our client towards a positive public sentiment. Without this intelligence, our content could not have correctly identified and addressed the issues threatening our client.
Finally, SEOs need to consider various content types and where they will live on a site.
Manual, one-off link-building campaigns are essential for going after specific “money” pages and keywords, especially for long-tail keywords with less competition. Guest posting can help in these individual URL scenarios, but it won't boost overall domain authority.
Your best play for a massive site is to run large campaign-level link-building campaigns. We’re recommending full-funnel brand awareness campaigns that will earn organic links as you pull tons of visibility. But these aren't simple.
This kind of work is unpredictable and nuanced and requires skills not typical for enterprise SEO work.
These kinds of links require way more than technical consideration. There's no way to force these campaigns. They are highly situational. There's no formula for making these campaigns happen, but these principles put you in the best place for success:
Be curious. Ask yourself questions and go through the mental exercise of finding insights in data. These link building opportunities will not arrive pre-packaged. Be constantly exploring via Ahrefs' Content Explorer, Google Analytics, or any other source of valuable data. We recommend scheduling time daily or weekly to do this.
The heart of any successful marketing campaign is audience. You need a pure and dedicated understanding of your audience so that you know what they care most about and can create link building campaigns combining this persona knowledge with current events and opportunities. This is where all of our strongest brand and linking campaigns have come from, including this one for Revver (Formerly eFileCabinet.)
Revver is a document management software company that hired 97th Floor when they had no marketing team and were losing market share daily. Our campaigns were a success, but when Revver expressed that their trade show presence has been a little lackluster, we took that as a challenge.
The Rage Cage is an award winning full-funnel brand awareness campaign that drove the highest influx in MQLs in a single month, resulting in the following:
You need a group that understands the value of SEO that you can bounce ideas off of. This may include SEOs, but you can also extend this group to your PPC counterpart, to someone in development, or to a highly supportive leader.
Get everyone looking at the data, and exploring and refining opportunities.
Once you’ve run your site audit and uncovered growth opportunities, you’ve likely got a long list of projects. Lean on the RICE scoring model to prioritize these without bias.
Developed by business communications software company Intercom, RICE is a model for quantifying and prioritizing projects. RICE is an acronym for four evaluation factors:
You can then calculate a RICE score using this formula:
RICE Score = (Reach x Impact x Confidence)/Effort
Alternatively, you can throw your scores into our customizable RICE template and let a formula do the work for you.
Remember that RICE should not make prioritization decisions for you. It is just one of many tools for evaluating benefits against cost, empowering your team to grab impactful and realistic projects.
The final boss—literally. Getting leadership buy-in on the long game of enterprise SEO can be hard, especially when other channels are more quickly proven. Use these three quick tips to help you sell your strategy.
You’ll be a whole person ahead if you have someone in leadership who believes in the massive potential of SEO. Which decision maker seems the most interested in SEO? Who can be a voice for enterprise SEO in decision-making meetings?
Identify this stakeholder and then involve them in your SEO work. Consider pitching this executive first, or otherwise involving them in your strategy development. Communicate with them often and be sincere in your efforts to collaborate with them.
This individual’s enthusiasm for SEO, strengthened by their invested time with you in strategy, can make all the difference in prioritizing enterprise SEO projects and getting you budget.
A 97th Floor survey of SEOs revealed that "not enough leadership support" is the biggest challenge enterprise SEOs face in getting projects moving. The second biggest obstacle, "not enough budget", is often a byproduct of leadership support.
To increase the resources coming towards enterprise SEO efforts, you need to create urgency by showing the consequences of neglecting enterprise SEO—the opportunity cost.
What’s the best way to show leadership the lost potential (read: revenue) of failing to start? We recommend a story in which your company is the hero and enterprise SEO is the guide.
In his book Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, Donald Miller explains, "In stories, the hero is never the strongest character. Heroes are often ill-equipped and filled with self-doubt. The guide...has conquered the hero’s challenge in their own backstory."
Show that you understand company goals. Position enterprise SEO as a guide in your company's growth story. Communicate understanding of the leadership's concerns, and establish your own authority as an enterprise SEO expert who can help guide the company to greatness.
This authority can come from case studies, competitive research, and analysis of market share, and education in enterprise SEO.
A strong way to introduce this lost opportunity is with competitive research.
(We have found that competitive comparison, as quantified by market share, is one of the most effective ways of demonstrating the opportunity cost of neglecting enterprise SEO—market analysis is one of the most important jobs of top-level leadership.)
You can also demonstrate the opportunity cost in terms of savings.
Enterprise SEO is a long game. If you want to minimize the irritating “are we there yet” conversations, consider handing leadership a map.
Based on your strategy, identify what immediate wins (or signals) leadership can expect, and how long it will take for enterprise SEO efforts to reach the bottom line. Set expectations for reporting frequency and metrics.
Perhaps most importantly, acknowledge to leadership that enterprise SEO is impacted by many things that are not in an enterprise SEO's control.
It is imperative that you clarify the difference between branded and non-branded keywords. Distinguishing between the two will help you explain variation in traffic that is unrelated to your enterprise SEO work. Branded keywords are heavily dependent on external factors like PR, TV, and advertising. Non-branded keywords are in the scope of enterprise SEO, so try to delineate and report the traffic, keywords, and revenue for non-branded keywords.
By keeping goals specific, timelines clear, and confidently pitching enterprise SEO as an important strategy supported by your SEO stakeholder champion, you can win leadership favor and a signed check for your great work.
If you’re managing a massive site, you’re not new to SEO.
While you’ve got all the tools and experience to succeed, you cannot bring a small site mindset to a large site. Ironically, the larger the site, the narrower your enterprise SEO focus needs to be.
Using the tools in this enterprise SEO playbook, focus on the specific. Get into the details. Identify KPIs, set extremely specific baselines, and focus on making incremental changes for (eventually) explosive results.
When evaluating enterprise SEO services, look for a partner who can handle both strategy and execution at scale. They should understand large site structures, work across multiple teams, and find opportunities that deliver meaningful results.
A strong enterprise SEO partner will:
At 97th Floor, we’ve built enterprise SEO programs for some of the internet’s most complex websites. Our approach integrates directly with your organization, aligns with your goals, and delivers measurable growth over time. Let’s talk about how we can put our enterprise SEO solutions to work for you.
Successful SEO and development collaboration starts with understanding how your dev team works. Learn their processes, tools, timelines, and preferred ways to receive requests. Adjust your technical strategy so it fits their workflow. Speak their language by framing optimizations in familiar terms and using user stories that explain the functionality and benefit of each request. Be specific about scope to avoid delays, and provide clear examples — such as live links or gifs — so developers know exactly what you need.
Enterprise SEO is the process of managing and improving search visibility for large, complex websites. It aligns technical foundations, content strategy, and organizational workflows to drive scalable growth.
Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing a smaller set of pages and keywords. Enterprise SEO manages thousands of pages, multiple teams, and advanced site structures, requiring systems that can operate at scale.
Enterprise SEO services include technical audits, site architecture optimization, keyword segmentation and tracking, content strategy for large sites, link acquisition, and cross-department collaboration to move projects forward.
At 97th Floor, we integrate trusted industry platforms like STAT Search Analytics and Ahrefs with our proprietary Ranking Potential Report and proven enterprise workflows. This combination gives large brands the precision, scalability, and cross-team alignment needed to grow in competitive markets. Let’s design a unique enterprise SEO solution that fits your brand.
Enterprise SEO ensures that large websites can capture search demand, maintain visibility across markets, and turn complex site structures into a competitive advantage. Without it, opportunities are lost to better-organized competitors.
Common challenges in enterprise SEO include aligning with leadership goals, working effectively with development teams, maintaining site architecture at scale, producing high-quality content in volume, and building authority in competitive markets.
