While all SEO campaigns have the same goal, the process differs from business to business. Successful enterprise-level corporate SEO strategies are more competition-driven, meticulously detailed, and adaptable than others. Ambitious corporate business leaders should read on to learn more about corporate SEO strategies and their potential impact on the overall marketing campaign. 

If SEO seems like something you would rather not be involved with, you can talk to one of our specialists today by visiting our corporate SEO services page!

What is Corporate SEO?

The term corporate SEO refers to the extensive digital marketing strategies used by enterprise-level companies to increase their visibility online while simultaneously increasing their organic traffic, conversion rates, and overall sales. 

The sense of freedom that comes from the term “world wide web” can be very deceiving. It is true that consumers can reach lots of active websites across the globe with internet access, but without a search engine to start their browsing, they will need to know the complete URL, or domain name exactly. Most often customers don’t know the entire address and only a portion doesn’t cut it. The amazingly resourceful search engines used today were created as a response.

Whether the business has five employees or more than 5,000, the ultimate objective for any digital marketing campaign should be to land a top spot on SERPs. Unfortunately, the fight for page 1 rankings has never been more fierce. This is notably bad for those late to the SEO game. Marketing professionals from every industry understand that the fastest and most effective way for multi-level organizations to make it to the top of SERPs is with a comprehensive SEO strategy. The importance and accuracy of this statement only grows in accordance with the size of the company. 

Why Prioritize Corporate SEO in Your Marketing Plan

With millions of active websites to sort through, search engines have become the translators for internet users to navigate and explore the digital world. In fact, search engines have become so popular that at least 68% of all trackable website traffic starts with a search engine entry. And what’s even more impressive is that 88% of those researchers chose to use Google. 

Younger, hungrier companies are being added to all digital platforms every day; companies more aware of the digital landscape starving for clicks and consumer attention. The continuous addition of these ambitious websites with optimized web pages and quality content only amplifies the struggle for search engines to decipher and index all the information quickly and accurately. 

Most people are unaware that when they use search engines like Google or DuckDuckGo their search results are populated by multiple data filters pertaining to content relevancy, website size and load speed, link accuracy, and more. So, to get in front of consumers, businesses must first convince search engines that they should be there. This is where search engine optimization, or SEO, comes into play.

Small Business vs. Corporate SEO

Corporate SEO strategies differ immensely from those of other smaller, more local businesses. Corporate, or enterprise, SEO strategies are made for brands with magnitude; companies with impressive customer awareness across multiple locations, as well as, national and international recognition. These campaigns adopt a much more defined and professional voice, as the number of eyes watching their every move is exponentially higher than that of the Stop-N-Go on the corner. 

When comparing small business SEO tactics with those of highly visible corporations, there are a few key details that stand apart from the rest. 

Extremely Detailed Plans

Corporate-level businesses call for extremely detailed marketing plans that also end up being extremely time-consuming. With vast differences in the number of investors, customers, website traffic, web pages, employees, and services, corporate SEO marketing plans deserve a little more time and attention than geo-local ones. Some smaller businesses may address each one of these areas, but it will not be to the same degree. 

Prioritized Professionalism 

Small businesses tend to make their way to the top by creating marketing plans based on authenticity, transparency, and depending on the industry, maybe even adding a little spunk. Enterprise corporations don’t usually do ‘spunk.’ Corporate SEO requires a little more tact or expertise due to their mass followings and the level of risk associated with each public action. At this level of visibility, one mistake can cost billions. To stay away from bad publicity, organizations of that size should strive to adopt a professional, educated, PR accepted voice for their marketing strategies. 

Aggressive and Adaptable Plans

While keyword research and search engine analytics dictate much of the corporate SEO strategy, corporate marketing plans are consistently more focused on their competitors’ standings rather than their own. A rise or fall in a predominant competitor’s rankings will immediately reflect upon all others in the industry, and at this level, the stakes are high. Search engine algorithms change daily and multi-level corporations need aggressive and resilient marketing plans that provide the ability to adapt and continuously build on a tumultuous ranking scale. 

Bigger Budgets

As important as SEO has become over the last decade, it may be surprising to find out that there is still a large percentage of small businesses that don’t use any SEO tactics in their marketing plans, 70% to be exact. This oversight can be caused by a lack of marketing knowledge, personnel, and time, but more often than not it can be attributed to smaller budgets. Small businesses tend to still be goal-focused but with strict parameters around strategy and resources due to a lack of funds. Corporate SEO strategies are able to put more emphasis on strategy due to their increased level of resources.

Continuous Communication

For some companies, more people can mean more problems, but this is only a reflection of their perspective and awareness. In all accuracy, more people should mean more solutions, and in the end, that’s what all businesses are looking for. Some corporate SEO plans can call for hundreds of cooks in the kitchen at all times, and while this may seem overwhelming, it’s imperative for marketing plans of this size. 

For marketing agencies that provide services to corporate-level brands, it would be no surprise to have open lines of communications that are utilized continuously throughout the month. Since all successful marketing plans include input from individuals in each department, corporations should anticipate a little extra time to focus on streamlining communications within their company. Each phase of the corporate SEO campaign will most likely include more people in the decision-making process. Once this happens, marketing leaders should anticipate following up on increased communication efforts daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on their influence on the overall process. 

The Importance of Strategy in Your Corporate SEO Campaign 

Search engines are inherently made for consumers, developed to help them find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently. Analyzing everything from navigational links and copy, to animations and load speed, search engine crawlers assign the company’s SERP location based on their overall level of consumer support. Understanding what the web crawlers are looking for is the only way for corporate-level companies to build resilient, infallible marketing plans, and this is where strategy takes the lead.

With search algorithms as stringent as they are now, it’s hard to believe that making it to the top of SERPs didn’t require much strategy. Before the recent updates to Google’s algorithms and analytics, marketing leaders and content creators were able to manipulate the SERPs to their advantage with keywords alone. Because Google crawlers ranked pages by content quality, it would propel websites that include relevant content to the top of the SERPs. After identifying what keywords Google wanted to see in relevance to their industry or niche, marketers would flood the internet with cheap, irrelevant, substandard content. And while the content might have provided no real help to their consumers, they were still able to use it to fool Google’s web crawlers, landing themselves or their undeserving clients’ top positions on SERPs. 

This is no longer the case as Google has become privy to these deceitful black hat tactics, reprimanding all who take part in these ploys. White hat tactics, or Google-accepted SEO practices, are driven by quality, accuracy, and transparency. The best corporate SEO strategies uphold these qualities while focusing on other user experience, verbiage and tact, authenticity, voice consistency, content variation, PR, and competitor behaviors. 

In-House Corporate SEO vs Outsourced Corporate SEO

National and international organizations tend to thrive in the marketplace with larger, more diverse marketing teams that inspire creativity and innovation to flow freely from each member. Successful eCommerce corporations have millions of customers from all over the world experiencing their brand every year, each with higher expectations than the last. This fact alone exemplifies the need for a more all-inclusive SEO marketing campaign. The decision of whether to outsource a corporate SEO marketing team or hire in-house depends on the company’s desired level of involvement, campaign control, and budget. 

In-House SEO Teams

Having a team of corporate SEO experts in-house will encourage the voice and culture of the business to be expressed more naturally and authentically, as they are now a part of that brand identity. This option requires a much more hands-on approach for the hiring business owner and marketing leader. 

One of the challenges that business owners might face with hiring an in-house SEO team would be the price of employing the number of SEO experts necessary for an SEO campaign of that size. The challenge of trying to match and efficiently integrate the expertise level of each team member can be extremely hard for business owners who have never managed an SEO team, or marketing team in general. This task is only shadowed by the arduous process of finding their replacement without hindering the current progress of the campaign.

Outsourced SEO Teams 

Outsourcing an SEO agency may require a little more diligence with communication between companies but the overall level of involvement in creation, production, implementation, and management is much lower. An in-house SEO team may be able to have an insider look at how the company runs, but their proximity to the action doesn’t mean that they can aesthetically manifest or accurately exemplify the spirit of that company better than an outsider. 

Successful SEO agencies will have experience in many industries and will have developed proven methods to optimize any company’s marketing plan. Outsourced agencies are also able to look at a company through a third-party lens, which is extremely beneficial not only to their website optimization but to their overall marketing campaign. The experience and skill of the SEO team is much more important than their placement on or off of the company roster. 

Recognizing Enterprise Level SEO Strategies & Experience

While some may feel hiring an enterprise-level marketing professional is like grocery shopping blindfolded, it really doesn’t have to. Experienced corporate SEO professionals will not be hard to point out. With a little bit of background knowledge on what to listen for and tips on how to choose the best candidate, hiring a new corporate SEO professional will be a breeze. 

Key Questions for Hiring a New Corporate SEO Professional

As the potential in-house corporate SEO magician pleads their case, marketing leaders and hiring managers should ask applicants open-ended questions based on their previous work environments: The following questions will help hiring managers filter out inadequate candidates so they can focus on the best addition to their team. 

What size organizations have they worked for in the past?

While seemingly obvious, this question is one of the most important. Taking on corporate SEO responsibilities with less than adequate knowledge and experience will result in setbacks across all marketing efforts, stifling growth in SERPs and sales. It would be best for organizations of this size to hire individuals with ample experience in creating, implementing, and managing corporate SEO campaigns.

What industries have they worked in and to what degree? 

When hiring a new SEO strategist, it’s better that the individual already has an understanding of the industry and niche in which they plan to work. Corporate SEO is complex and time-consuming on its own. Adding the unnecessary task of explaining the culture within a given industry is wasteful and ill-advised.

Were they part of a marketing team or were they the sole provider of all marketing services? 

If they were part of a team, what were they specifically responsible for? 

Hiring an SEO strategist at the corporate level requires candidates to have expert knowledge and high-visibility SEO experience. If the individual was the sole provider of all marketing services for their previous company it can be a blessing to some extent, but for an organization of this size, it’s most likely a curse. SEO has become an integral part of comprehensive marketing plans and deserves a specialist to fully expand on all optimization efforts.

Do they have any examples of content or copy that they created? 

Professional SEO strategists will be ready with portfolios full of previously successful projects, content, and campaigns. When looking over a candidate’s previous works, hiring managers and business owners need to look for things like grammatical errors and common branding mistakes like grammatical errors, clashing fonts, ignorant verbiage, muted colors, or sapless animations. It can be assumed that these characteristics will be carried over to the next company they represent. 

What do they perceive as the most important aspects of successful corporate-level SEO strategies?

Hiring managers should listen for mentions of competition tracking and market research above all else. While there are many strategies that hiring managers may not be aware of, it would be a good idea to steer clear of any applicants referencing strategies that include black hat SEO tactics similar to link farming, content cloaking, keyword stuffing. Search engines like Google have begun reprimanding websites that take part in these activities, sometimes even removing them from the search engine’s database altogether. 

The Scope of a Corporate SEO Retainer

Running a monthly SEO campaign can have many different paths you could take to reach success for a business, and the reasons to choose each path can only be found by research. Researching a client’s site, finding their top keywords and researching their top competitor sites for each, comparing backlinks, authority, domain ages, etc… It all adds up to a unique situation for each client. 

An SEO retainer is a favored practice in the industry. That is the practice of paying a predetermined fixed amount of money for each month and allowing your SEO representative to choose what the plan of action will best fit your scenario. This could mean an emphasis on strong authority guest posts on a key blog article one month, and a menagerie of lower authority insertions to your homepage the next. Giving your marketing team free rein on how to allocate the funds will give you the most flexible and varied plan allowing your unique business to thrive amongst its peers. 

Competition Research 

Smaller companies tend to have smaller budgets and focus more on creating a brand image to build upon rather than outshining others in their industry. Corporate-level SEO strategies, on the other hand, actually benefit from focusing on the competition. By actively researching and tracking their rivals and exploiting their weaknesses, corporations can gain more control over an industry in a matter of days. At this level of business, small shifts in the industry can cause major fluctuations in SERP rankings, visibility, customer traffic, and overall sales.

Popular Enterprise SEO Tools and Software  

As SEO has made its way to the forefront of all digital marketing tactics, resources have been created by the hundreds to help SEO professionals access every niche of SEO. Due to the depth of research necessary for creating proficient corporate-level SEO campaigns, marketing leaders within the company should invest in the most current SEO tools and software. These worthwhile and commonly free resources can help businesses with all facets of SEO ranging from keyword research, on-page SEO, backlink building and analytics, to technical SEO, name monitors, geo-local SEO, search engine algorithm tracking, past presentation trackers, and more. 

The following is a list of helpful resources that is far from all-encompassing, but it is a great start at a general understanding of the types of tools needed to fulfill great SEO strategies.

Keyword Research Tools

• • Ahrefs Keyword Generator – Supporting 171 countries with over 7 billion keywords that are updated and refreshed every month, the Ahrefs Keyword Explorers allows corporate professionals to discover thousands of keyword ideas, analyze their ranking and calculate potential traffic.
  • Answer the Public – Using the well-known who-what-when-where-why setup, this keyword research goldmine was created by collecting autocomplete data from search engines like Google and populating all possible phrases and questions that have been entered based around that topic.

Optimize On-Page Content

• • Rank Math – Rank Math is a WordPress SEO plugin with more than 15 analyzing modules that identify issues based on 30 known factors. These modules can be easily imported and customized based on individual requirements.
  • SERPsim – Targeting marketing professionals and website creators, SERPSsim is a SERP simulator that allows users to preview what their meta descriptions will look like when published by Google and gives them instant feedback on length, content, and other ranking factors.

Backlink Building

• • LinkMiner – This backlink building Chrome Extension, produced and supported by Mangools, has a database of over 9 trillion links to sort through, allowing users to find the most powerful backlinks for web pages of any kind.
  • SourceBottle – This tool provides content creators the opportunity to find unique links and information from sources all over the world that can build website authority, and, in turn, propel the web page higher on SERPs.  

GeoLocal SEO 

• • Google My Business – Free and personalized, this tool allows corporate marketing professionals the ability to control how people see their clients on Google Maps by creating a Business Profile for a specific storefront or area. 
  •  Whitespark Local Citation Finder – If a company has many locations, NAP citations are extremely important; and with this tool individuals can uncover new SEO opportunities by being aware of their existing listings and comparing them to the citations of their top-ranked competitors

Corporate Enterprise Search Engine Optimization with Flyrise

While it is impossible to know the exact intricacies of all search engine algorithms, here at Flyrise we are consistently improving our knowledge and strategies year after year to provide our clients with the most aggressive and advantageous SEO tactics. Depending on the size of your company, running a corporate SEO campaign can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 to $50,000 a month. If you’re interested in finding out more about our corporate SEO services contact us today to speak to one of our search engine experts!