Learn Enterprise SEO

Understand how to get SEO results in an enterprise environment.

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What does enterprise SEO mean and how is it different to traditional SEO?

Imagine having friends over for dinner. You know their preferences and you are preparing a dish that you've made hundreds of times before. As the host, your goal is that everyone enjoys the evening; and with some planning, success is almost always guaranteed.

We can think of this as traditional SEO for an average sized business or website.

Now imagine hosting a 200-person wedding. Being an excellent chef goes a long way, but now you're juggling suppliers, dietary restrictions, and service, trying to ensure that every guest has a flawless experience. You have people working with you, but if guests complain it'll be your head on the chopping block.

This is the kind of scale and complexity that comes with enterprise SEO, differentiating it from small or medium-sized business SEO. 

What is the difference between enterprise SEO and local SEO?

Both enterprise SEO and local SEO can be thought of as subsets of SEO. Enterprise SEO really refers to SEO being conducted in an enterprise environment or for an enterprise business. 

Local SEO on the other hand is a specific type of SEO, such as on-page SEO or technical SEO; that is, doing the optimizations needed to ensure that a business appears in local search results. 

For this reason, it’s possible to do enterprise local SEO, i.e. the activities of local SEO for a multi-location enterprise business.

Enterprise SEO challenges

At enterprise scale, SEO challenges go beyond the technical basics. 

The main difficulties include:

• Organizational silos: Departments like dev, content, and product often chase different KPIs, slowing progress.

• Complexity at scale: What’s simple for a small site (e.g., ensuring crawlability) becomes vastly more complicated when you’re managing hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages. For enterprise SEOs, a desktop crawling tool isn’t going to cut it. You need to be using a robust cloud crawler to be able to crawl at scale.

• Global/local SEO challenges: Managing multiple languages, countries, and domains creates intricate decisions around hreflang, localization, and NAP data accuracy.

• Stakeholder management: As Petra Kis-Herczegh notes in our training course, “The biggest challenges you’ll face aren’t going to be technical ones. They’re about people and processes. Getting the technical stuff right is important, but it’s the human side that will make or break your success.”

Enterprise SEO best practices

Successful enterprise SEO starts with strategy and alignment, not just tactics:

Best practices include:

• Strategic alignment: Always tie SEO to broader business goals (e.g. international revenue growth).

• Prioritization and real buy-in: Avoid “fake buy-in” where stakeholders nod but never commit. Instead, push for real timelines, accountability, and budget.

• Stakeholder engagement: Petra advises that, “Making progress means breaking down silos, getting goals aligned, and yes, navigating emotions. These aren’t soft skills; they’re essential skills for getting anything done at enterprise level.”

• Storytelling with data: Use reporting to connect SEO outcomes to business impact: “Storytelling is your tool for turning data into something meaningful. It’s how you connect what you’re doing in SEO to real business value that people can understand and get behind.”

Enterprise SEO tools and workflows

Scaling enterprise SEO requires different systems than smaller sites. 

Enterprise SEO tools and workflows

Scaling enterprise SEO requires different systems than smaller sites. 

“Scaling technical SEO starts with really understanding your site architecture and how it’s built.”

Key workflow practices include:

• Template-based crawling: Group and analyze different page templates (product pages, listings, blogs) to efficiently spot and fix recurring issues.

• Smart crawl strategies: Instead of crawling everything, focus on regular samples from key templates, revenue pages, or high-impact sections. Barry Adams advocates this approach here:

• Audit alignment with business rhythms: Schedule around marketing campaigns, code deployments, or peak trading freezes (e.g. ecommerce around Black Friday).

• Integrated reporting: Combine SEO data with marketing and sales data to demonstrate value beyond traffic (e.g. pipeline generation or market penetration).