If you’re in charge of SEO for a large organization, then it might become overwhelming as pages start to pile up. You want to make sure that each of these pages gets the chance to shine while not neglecting other pieces of content on your site. You might also want to try to find ways to maximize your results while taking care of outdated or unreactive content.
These are all things that start to get more complicated as your site grows. Having the right strategy is important, but you’ll have to deal with more moving parts and learn how to coordinate them. You also will need to be able to keep track of progress and make sure that stakeholders can too. Let’s take a look at a few things you’ll need to do to scale SEO in your enterprise.
Set Up a Budget
The first thing you’ll have to do is set up a clear budget for SEO. You’ll need to consider everything from the tools you’ll need to invest in outsourced experts you may need to bring in. You might even have to invest in new project management tools. This is because you will have to start integrating multiple parts of your organization such as product management, HR, web development, and marketing, and make sure that coordinated efforts are cohesive.
Next, calculate the ROI of your SEO efforts to justify your budget. Look at things such as your average order value and traffic, keywords, and conversion rate data. You also have to look at advanced metrics such as customer lifetime value. All of this will allow you to get an idea of how much revenue and new leads you can potentially get from your efforts. You’ll also be able to calculate acquisition costs better.
For example, focusing more on SEO could help you reduce your reliance on paid search. You want this to be in your SEO ROI calculations, as it can have a very important impact on budgets.
Getting the C-Suite to Buy in
You won’t get anywhere if you don’t get the C-Suite to buy-in. If you want to get their support, you have to make sure that you present them with clear and actionable objectives, not intangibles like brand awareness or impressions.
You want the ROI report to be as cut and dry as possible and simple for them to understand. You also want to let them know which main KPIs will be used to track results.
SEO can seem very abstract for someone with a traditional background, and this will help make things more concrete and transparent to them. This will not only make sure that they can track results, but the most refractory executives may start to see the value in SEO and be more supportive of future efforts.
Another thing you’ll need to do is educate the most impatient amongst them. Again, having clear reporting tools and KPIs can help them understand how short-term objectives are met. But you have to guide them through the next 6 to 12 months or years for them to understand the full picture. You’ll need to reassure them during the first months and let them know that it’s a slow process. You also have to keep reinforcing the potential savings on acquisition costs.
Use Automation
The next thing you have to do is use automation and make sure that your organization embraces it. You can forget scaling using manual methods. There is simply too much data to ingest and analyze for you to process it without some level of automation. It also will be much less time and resource extensive.
At the most basic level, automation allows you to save time on repetitive tasks, such as getting a list of new backlinks to your site or your rankings on specific keywords. If you want to get more advanced, there are AI tools that will analyze your content and give you recommendations on how you could optimize it. Without using some sort of AI tool, you will fall behind and eventually lose tons of opportunities in the process.
Have a Site Audit
There is no way to know where to stand and where you need to go unless you run a site audit. However, since we’re talking about a site that may have thousands of pages by now, you may need some more sophisticated tools.
Tools like Screaming Frog for desktop or server-based tools like DeepCrawl will crawl your entire site and help you find issues. However, it will go far beyond simply crawling. You’ll be able to check things such as duplicate content, XML maps, tags, indexing, technical issues, or page loading times.
Facilitate Collaboration
Your audit could show you how much of other departments can have an impact on your SEO efforts. Making sure that they’re on board and have a basic understanding of SEO will help PR and product development teams embed it into their own processes.
If you want collaboration to be easier, barriers have to be removed, and there needs to be as little bureaucracy involved. And the easiest way to do this is to make sure that they’re in on the strategy from day one. You want them to be involved in the strategy development and auditing process, so they can see the actual impact their efforts are having and could be having.
Look for Outside Help
No matter how many resources you have on hand, chances are you’ll need to outsource somewhere. Things like content creation, for instance, should not be led by a rookie intern, especially if you need it to be properly optimized. In this case, you might want to work with a team that is familiar with the type of content you need. You also want them to have as much talent in-house as possible, so that their team can get familiar with you as a client and make sure that your content doesn’t seem patched together.
Scaling SEO for an enterprise can be a challenge, but one any organization can surmount with the right mindset, plan, and process. Everyone needs to be on board, however, and you have to be ready to delegate if you want to keep your workload manageable.