Build & Scale Program for Enterprise SEO

Oftentimes in the SEO community and industries in general, the concept of “Enterprise SEO” is associated with website size rather than organization size. When in reality, Enterprise SEO is a large-scale, strategic approach to search in an organization. There is no hard-pressed rule where if you have X number of employees, you’ve now crossed over to the “Enterprise” band. Large corporations often have a global presence with customers and teams of employees around the world. When your business is operating at scale, your SEO should be, too.

A global enterprise insurance company with $30 billion in annual revenue may have over 30,000 employees in 20 countries, covering 10 industries with a website that totals 20K pages. Being able to grow and measure your search presence across all regional sub-directories or ccTLDs takes a strategic approach. When it comes to Enterprise SEO, one hurdle that stands in many businesses’ way is a strategic approach for international SEO.While global digital marketing has made it easy for brands to reach audiences around the globe, it takes more than just a website and access to Google Translate to be successful.

There is no shortage of articles on how to win at international SEO or a number of professionals who’ll tell you they’re your international SEO guru. Don’t worry, that’s not what this is: some quick fix that’ll solve all your problems. What follows is the outline of a strategic approach to face the real challenge of building an Enterprise SEO program that can scale globally.

A Scalable Program Built for Success

Moving the SEO needle for enterprise business with a global presence requires a sophisticated, fine-tuned, and scalable approach. This approach starts with building a program. For businesses spread out across the world, having a global SEO lead is the easiest way to get a program up and running. This person or small the team will work in close liaison with digital teams across the global org. They should also be responsible for providing training for regional digital teams, getting processes implemented, and (maybe most importantly) evangelizing SEO throughout the org.

A challenge that lies with having many digital teams around the world is they may take a different approach to SEO. One region may have a team of three members dedicated to search while others’ only resource is a manager of demand gen who juggles multiple channels. Teams in different countries may use different tools, vendors, or agencies, and have various levels of training. What should remain consistent are SEO principles and defined maturities.

Learn as Much as You Can

Before you start to define levels of SEO maturity, make sure you have insight into the current state of affairs in all your markets. Creating a survey to distribute to every team is an easy way to get most of the information you need without needing to schedule weeks of meetings.

Here’s a sample of some questions to include in the survey:

·  How do you currently measure SEO?

·  What tools does your team utilizes?

·  Describe your content creation process

·  What are your top SEO initiatives over the next 90 days?

·  What is the process for implementing technical fixes and recommendations?

Keep a record of all results and re-distribute the survey annually. Make sure to adjust the questions as needed over time.

 Defining levels of SEO maturity within a system of measurement is critical to achieving global success.

Maturity should be based around SEO principles consisting of three values: people, process, and platforms.

These will be the building blocks of your program, and how you measure maturity across markets.

People

To measure your “People”, define different maturity levels that describe personnel, executive engagement, and training.

For example, “Level 1” for training could be defined as “Little internal training, some materials available but not utilized”, while “Level 5” could be “Advanced training and certifications are available and a key component of professional development”.

Process

To measure “Process”, define different levels of KPIs, communication, and strategic direction.

A Level 1 KPI could be defined as “No KPIs exist for SEO, visibility of organic search performance is limited” while level 5 could be “KPIs are common language and shared globally”.

Platform

To measure “Platform”, define different levels of measurement/reporting, standardization, and technology integration.

“Level 1” standardization could be defined as “Teams use no tools/platforms or choose their own.

No standardization exists”, while “Level 5” could be “All necessary data integrated into tools/platforms. A holistic view of performance is leveraged.”