Webinar: Enterprise SEO Challenges & Solutions

September's webinar is for anyone working in enterprise SEO.

Doing SEO at enterprise level comes with a unique set of challenges relating to website scale, organizational complexity, stakeholder relationships and more.

In this webinar, our expert panel comprised of Seeker's Robert Lora and Enterprise Solutions Consultant (and well-known SEO) Petra Kis-Herczegh break down these challenges and share some brand new solutions to common problems.

Webinar recording

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Webinar transcript

Jojo Furnival:

Hi everyone. We are back with an extra special webinar today. You might have heard through the LinkedIn grapevine that Sitebulb has just launched a brand new free training course, and this one is especially for SEOs that are working in or for enterprise brands, and that is you guys and the main people that we worked with in order to bring you this course are here on our panel today. So I will introduce them in a sec, but first, my name's Jojo, some of you know me. I'm the marketing manager at Sitebulb, the lovely Miruna who is our customer support and success specialist. She is in the chat, so feel free to say hi to her and everyone else and tell us where you're joining from. If you aren't familiar with Sitebulb, I'll just quickly give you the lowdown.

So Sitebulb is a website auditing and crawling tool. In fact, we're the only crawler on the market to offer a desktop-based software and a web-based or cloud product. So that means our tool can help every SEO from solo freelancers all the way up to global enterprise brands. You're probably seeing the connection there. You can try our desktop crawler free people love its user-friendly interface and in-depth reports. Just head to sitebulb.com/download for the free trial. That link is pinned in the chat. And we also have Sitebulb Cloud, which is the new affordable enterprise cloud crawler on the block. If you want to find out more about that or to book a demo, head to sitebulb.com/cloud.

Okay, a couple of bits of housekeeping and then we can start. We always get asked this. We are recording the webinar and I will send the recording out tomorrow via email. You'll also all be signed up for free to this brand new enterprise SEO training course. So look out for the email about that tomorrow as well. And today we will hopefully have some time at the end of the webinar for your questions, comments, and enterprise SEO traumas. So please put them in the Q&A tab next to the chat. Don't put them actually in the chat box because in the Q&A tab you can also upvote other people's questions if you can't think of any yourself.

Okay. Our guests, first up, we have Petra Petra Kis-Herczegh. Many of you may know Petra. She's an established SEO and a familiar face in the women in tech SEO community. She's also spent considerable time working with and for enterprises and is now enterprise solutions consultant at Asana. So she is the fabulous trainer on our enterprise SEO course. The link for that is pinned in the chat as well by the way. And I apologise, I was giggling a bit there because I have been practising saying Petra's name.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

You did it perfectly.

Jojo Furnival:

Thank you. Then we have Robert Lora who is senior SEO strategist at Seeker Digital, who were our partners in this initiative. After eight plus years in SEO, he's learned what moves the needle. And as we discovered when putting together this course, he's also very skilled at creating the GPTs. You can find out more about the GPT and what it does in his recent article for Sitebulb, and I hope Miruna is going to put the link to that in the chat for me. Welcome guys. Thank you for joining us today.

Robert Lora:

Yeah, very excited to be here. Thank you for having us. Yeah.

Jojo Furnival:

Awesome. Thank you. Let's get into the questions. So I'll stop talking. Right. This is an obvious one to start with and we were kind of just talking about it before really, what is enterprise? Enterprise is a bit of an obscure word for a lot of people, but how would you define enterprise SEO? What makes it distinct from standard technical SEO, Petra?

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Yeah, sure. I think that's a really good question because a lot of the time people just interpret it as scale, but it's really where scale meets complexity. And if you've seen the course, you will know this. If you will watch the course, you will see this. I really define it as these three different elements of website scale, organisational complexity and brand authority, because all of these will increase complexity, approval processes, and essentially it's very different to try to do technical SEO or manage a sitemap for a website that has 300 pages versus one that has 3 million pages. So it's really the combination of scale and complexity, in my opinion.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah, yeah. Robert, does that chime with you and what do you think is-

Robert Lora:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jojo Furnival:

What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have about it?

Robert Lora:

Yeah, what I'd throw at it in addition to the misconception, I'd also just to add to that is it varies very much from the standard SEO, whereas an SEO oftentimes, or affiliate pages or smaller businesses, whatever you want to call it, startups, you have an issue that's affecting one page or a hundred pages. You find that certain tags are missing meta tags or canonical or whatever. But in an enterprise site, like she said, combining scale and complexity, you really find that when you find an issue, it's very likely affecting thousands of pages.

And then to fix those thousands of pages, it isn't just like, oh, let me go in there and make a little correction. No, it involves getting approval from a lot of people and just having to wait, get everybody or most people to agree and then pushing that through for weeks or months in some cases just to get that thing fixed. And I think that, and really what she was talking about the scale, it could be anywhere from geographic, money, the revenue of this company, how many countries it's based in, how many employees it has, just everything. What I will say then, going on to the misconception part of it, which this blends into it, is that a lot of people might assume that, okay, well, because it's an enterprise and because there's a lot of resources, no problem, you should be able to fix things easily. You have how many people on your SEO team.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah.

Robert Lora:

But in the end, more money, more problems because it just happens to be that when you want to fix something, if something small, if you don't have a lot of people champions as Petra calls them in the course, and as we've come to know them and you have potentially some blockers, it's just not going to get through. So that's, I think, maybe the main one that comes to mind, and maybe a second one is that to be a successful enterprise SEO, you really have to be at a certain level of knowledge or that you have to know everything. And that's like the table stakes.

When you're an enterprise SEO, you do have to know everything, but everyone else more or less is at that level. And really what gives you the leg up is psychology and being able to mix with everyone to coordinate, to explain things, complex topics in a way that people A, understand and B, care about. And I really do think that that's... Actually, I had to think about it. There was a poll and three or four years ago by little, it wasn't LinkedIn, so it's somewhere lost in there now, but talking about what makes up enterprise SEO problems.

It was 75% of them when you really put them all together, the issues were people problems. It's not a knowledge gap issue or anything. So yeah, I think that those are the two that I aim at. It's just because you have more resources doesn't mean it's easier and that it's a people business when you come down to it.

Jojo Furnival:

Right. The magical P word. So Petra, you hit on this people solidly in lesson one of the training. It's about people in politics in essence. Why is it that people in politics matter so much more when it comes to big organisations?

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Sure. I mean, because at the end of the day, no matter how much AI we have around us today, the decisions come from human beings. The people who write your content, who implement the code, they're human beings and you have to be able to work with them well. You have to understand the internal processes that get you the sign-offs, that get you the commitment from all of those teams to actually implement changes. I can see Simon's comments in the comments that says speed is also an enterprise factor where it's turning an oil tanker. And I love that comment that everything just takes ages to plan ahead because it has to go through those processes and those people. People add that complexity and you have to really learn how to navigate it if you actually want to get things done.

If you're just trying to promote your own agenda, no matter how good your data is, no matter how knowledgeable you are as an SEO, if it doesn't align with what the brand team is trying to do, if it doesn't align with what the product team is trying to do with the website, then it's just likely never going to get done. And it's going to be a really difficult push ahead as well. So you really have to see where those plans are, where those milestones are, and you do that through understanding the people who are both implementing the changes and both making those decisions as well.

Jojo Furnival:

Thank you, Simon. That's actually a really helpful analogy trying to turn an oil tanker around because I suppose it is, it's the size, but also if you think about, I mean, I'm not wildly familiar with oil tankers to be fair, but I imagine there is-

Robert Lora:

Not my specialty, yeah.

Jojo Furnival:

No. I imagine that there's a lot of different mechanics involved and machines and people. So I suppose being forewarned is to be forearmed, isn't it? So what are those obstacles or those key things that are getting in the way of implementation, I suppose, Robert, would you think?

Robert Lora:

Yeah, no, and just completely agree there with the analogy and with Petra, the truth is it is a people game like we were talking about. And knowing not just the individual people who own certain parts of, like she said, brand, messaging, product, the UX maybe, or especially engineers with the technical implementation of things, it's knowing those precise people and getting a feel for whether maybe they're champions or not, maybe they don't agree with what you have to say or not, and really just finding a way to communicate with them in a way that they care about.

And we'll maybe cover this a little bit more later, but really it is about being able to coordinate that way and plan and yeah, well, we can talk about this a little bit further down the line, but be able to get some sort of commitments, public commitments, etc. There's a lot of things that come into play, but yeah, ultimately it just like she says, no matter how much AI we get in here, it's still going to be people who make the decisions.

And if you have the best plan ever, the best plan ever, it doesn't matter because if somebody doesn't sign off and give you the resource and actually buy in, it's not going to happen. And in the end, it's a compounding issue too, because if you don't get the buy-in and you don't get to fix this thing that's actually hurting whatever, rankings, traffic, etc., next year it'll be harder to make your case for that year. So it's a compounding issue there too.

Jojo Furnival:

So that buy-in problem, yeah, like Petra, I think you coined the term or which is in essence, but not really without commitment. So how do you avoid, avoid having your decision makers or stakeholders sitting in a meeting nodding going, "Yes, yes, SEO is important," and then nothing changing, nothing happening. How do you avoid that?

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things you need to get comfortable with that are probably uncomfortable to start with. And the first part is rejection and hearing no for an answer and really actually seeking out no and seeking out obstacles and objections from people and hearing their concerns, which can be uncomfortable because you like to plan in your head and just want to hear from everyone how amazing your strategies, how much everyone is bought into it and they want to do it and they want to implement the tickets. And yes, of course they will get rid of redundant code in the templates and things like that, but at the end of the day, you really need to hear that rejection to really refine your plan and find where the issues are and why people are not willing to commit. So that's one part.

And then I would say the other really uncomfortable part is that, well, we really love hearing yes for an answer. We really push and we really what to be the one who ask those questions and really push for it. So instead, we have to go into it with a totally different mindset, and I think that can be very, very difficult.

So becoming comfortable with rejection and becoming comfortable with conflict as a result of that, we try to get yes, and we try to get nods, and we are really happy that we didn't get the hard questions because there wasn't any conflict, there wasn't any tension, but actually conflict is really helpful and it really helps you create a better plan, create results that are more likely to happen because you are aware of more scenarios. You really need to coordinate these things If you're going to, for example, again, to go back to the example that Simon mentioned around speed.

Yes, of course, in enterprise there are long-term plans, but if you're aware of those plans and if you know that there is something big coming up at a company like I worked for in-house brands, we went through a rebrand very shortly after I joined. So there was already this massive project ongoing with website changes, with code changes, with template changes. And if you're actually just able to align to those and put in bits where you can also help, then this is how the team, this was many years ago now, our HTTPS migration done because there was already a huge migration going on.

So actually adding that on, obviously there were still lots of things, and my manager at the time did amazing work in terms of proving why that's important, but aligning to those teams were very important to get a huge project done for our website that's millions of pages trying to say that you're trying to implement a migration to HTTP to HTTPS could be a huge project that no one even wants to listen to start with. But if there are already projects going on, if you're listening to that, then you can get there. And I think to get that commitment, you have to have those uncomfortable conversations because you have to be ready to say, "This is what I want to do. Where do you might think this can go wrong? Or how much work does this mean for your team?"

And instead of people nodding along, and if people are nodding along, then really ask those questions of how does this fit into their roadmap? Really get that commitment because obviously they're just nodding along to kind of, "Okay, I'm ready for you to finish now and we can move on to the next agenda."

Robert Lora:

It's Friday there, I want to get out of here.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Exactly. When you ask that question of, "Okay, when do you think this will be implemented?" Or "Which sprint can you add this ticket to?" They won't be able to answer that because they haven't actually committed. So then you're starting a conversation. They say, "Oh, maybe next year." And then you can start a conversation, "Well, why? Why is it being pushed out? Why is this not a priority? Give an explanation."

But for that, you need to be able to listen and to address the concerns that are being mentioned. If they say there are other priorities, you shouldn't just be thinking about formulating the response of like, "Yes, but this is also a priority." If they're saying there are other priorities, really listen, why are there other priorities? Maybe there are regulatory changes that they just have to get in before a certain time. So they probably have really valid reasons to prioritise other things as well. But there might be that they're already doing a template change and actually sneaking in some of your SEO tickets there is an easy thing, but you need to do that thinking they want to do the thinking for you.

Robert Lora:

Yeah, that's actually a really awesome pro tip that Petra snuck in there within the whole thing, which is a really great point is that one of the ways, even to a circumvent the buy-in-ish thing is if you're able to get some of your even bigger projects mixed in with theirs, something that's already rolling along awesome, because now all of a sudden it's not, "Oh, I'm going to need you to build all these tickets and correct all these," and whatever, just, "Oh, this actually slots into the thing that you're already working on." And we can get into this later also, but if you're able to communicate in ways, like she said, also make those tickets for them or write in their ticketing language schedule according to sprints, and if you're able to mention it and talk about it in a way that's not, "Oh, we have this HTTP request issue and it's really bad for our rankings," but instead show it as like, okay, this is a website health issue and depending on who you're talking to, you present it in a certain way.

And if you're talking to the engineers, you present it that way. This is an issue that's causing tech net, it's a compounding issue, et cetera. And if you're able to, in addition to that, sneak it into one of the things that they're already doing, that's awesome. It gets things done. And I think maybe even just to add tiny bits or to reiterate what Petra was saying, I mean I think commitment is a big one. If you're able to, people in general, one of Cialdini's principles, a very old marketer from the '80s, but being able to get some commitment will get buy-in, give you a higher probability of getting buy-in.

If you get just a yes or several yeses also, it gets more yeses that oftentimes, but if you just get a no, what Petra was saying is great too, refine your message. And actually that's a little bit of a psychological tactic too, because if you come in with a really big request, what you want is under that, then getting a no can actually be a tactic to potentially getting yes for something, oh, we would like to do this, this, and this and that, when all you need is this, they'll say no, all of that.

And you go, "Oh, okay, well, how about this then? Is that cool?" So that's something I could get you across the line too. And then the very, very last thing I think, and Petra did touch on this, was setting a timeline and then getting them to confirm, yeah, that's awesome. But she mentioned, I think that makes a big difference because people will just not along, but otherwise, if you're able to inject some sort of solid, "Okay, so is eight sprints from now, is that good for you?" Or something like that, and get some sort of written commitment or just something recorded where other people, that'll at least get you a little further then just nodding along and everything.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

And just to add to this, because you already asked this question on people and politics, this is really a situation where you have to understand the politics. I've worked with different enterprise businesses where working for a fashion brand, it's really the brand and the marketing team who were driving a lot of the decisions. So you would think whenever it comes to the ecommerce side, the ecommerce team is making the decisions. Yes, of course, in terms of the process, but the brand team has a huge influence on everything because that brand was the essence of the company. It was really important to them.

So actually it didn't matter that everyone in the business who was in the digital team was saying, "Please don't put a video on the homepage that loads immediately and starts playing with sounds, everything." Brand really wanted to do it. It was very difficult to try to explain why that's not a good idea. And it's just some of those things where you have to understand the culture, you have to understand the politics, you have to understand who you have to align with because other companies, other retailers, other ecommerce or publisher, they might have a very product focused culture where actually who drives the key decisions are coming from the dev team or the product teams and the product managers and things like that. And brand is really a team that helps and supports. So it could be very different balances there. And I think understanding that is crucial.

Jojo Furnival:

So you just mentioned culture there like what if, and I think this is probably quite often the case, there might be an unhelpful culture, the culture of the organisation may be one of the obstacles that you have to, as an SEO, overcome. If that culture is filtering down from the top with an outdated C-suite that doesn't understand SEO or its value, have you seen any strategies that are particularly fruitful for re-educating leadership, Petra?

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Yeah, sure. I'll start, and I'm sure Robert has a lot to add to this as well. So probably the first point of advice is speaking their language, learning how they communicate. Every C-level, anytime you go into a company, you will be able to find brand guidelines, tone of voice, their internal documents on strategy, what's the language, what are those internal metrics that they measure for quarterly reviews, for yearly reviews? How do they speak when they report back to the business on performance? Use that language and explain how SEO supports that. If you start talking SEO jargon, it's not going to work. If you start showing them SEO metrics, no one's going to care. So you really have to look at what they are looking at day to day and what language they are speaking. That would probably be my first advice.

Robert Lora:

Yeah. Yeah, that's a big one. Yeah, a few things do come to mind. So yeah, just bouncing off of that, the first thing that comes to mind is when you're speaking to C-suite or other departments, other leads, it really matters what you say and how you say it. So she was talking about SEO terms, jargon is not something that speaks to other people. So it's not orphaned pages, it's just pages that are disconnected from the website or crawl budget, I don't know, come up with something else. Google's attention span or something. Just something else that doesn't have people's eyes glazing over.

Also, depending on who you're talking to. So if it's C-suite and you're presenting something, five slides, don't give them 40. They don't want that. And also making, if it's an email or something, something brief, bullet points, bold, speak revenue, speak things they care about, market share, competitors, now they're interested a little bit. So instead of like, "Oh, we have these soft fours." No, nobody's... For the technical engineers, if you can write in their language, again, talking about sprints or talking about, like I said, bugs, these are bugs on the website, these are website health issues. I think that that helps a bit.

And then one other thing I guess that comes to mind, what, and also if you're talking to product people, for example, user experience issue, not like, "Pagination issue, ah, it's bad for rankings." So I think that that helps. And then aside from that, I think as far as the education piece is concerned, if, and this is, again, what you're presenting now is what a lot of enterprise SEOs, and I know just from agency side that I've worked with many, it's a really uphill battle. It's just most cultures are not the dream scenario. And I've read about the dream scenario.

I think the first time probably was in product-led SEO, but then I also saw in the art of SEO, the dream scenario is, okay, your SEO team is not just 20 SEOs or whatever. There's a growth engineer and there's a hybrid product person, SEO that's in those meetings. And then you have somebody who's also in the marketing team and somebody who's in C suite, whatever. You have a whole like an Avengers sort of team. But that's not the real scenario. The other dream scenarios having is having SEO being built into the KPIs of other people. So like, okay, this doesn't pass QA, CI/CD. If there are issues, it shouldn't be me who catches it two months later that there are tags missing, canonical, whatever, that there's enormous images on the site. It shouldn't go live. If that's the case, there should be automated checks that don't pass QA if that happens.

That's also the dream scenario, but typically you don't have that. So if you have to fight the uphill battle, I think maybe having quarterly presentations on the state of SEO and how it's affecting our business, things like that, I think that also helps internal ones. If you can manage and find the time to do that, and hopefully on company time that you can put these things together because it'll not just slowly start to re-educate, well, just the coworkers in general, but it'll start to position you as an authority, another one of those Cialdini principles or whatever. But in the end, people like to listen to people who know things. And so it might not get you all the guesses or anything, but it might slightly turn the tides in your favour.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah, sort of trust that element of-

Robert Lora:

Yeah.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah, because Robert, you're just talking about different communication styles there. Robert has actually produced some email templates and an executive pitch deck that they're both resources in the course. Are there any other pointers that you can give us or do you think you've covered... Something that I actually just thought of then was, I don't know if I dreamt it or maybe I think the team at Gray Dot Co might have actually put together a dictionary, a dev, a sort of engineering research-

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

I think, yeah, they do a lot of that. Tory and Sam, they're great at that. Yeah.

Robert Lora:

They're awesome. Yeah.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

I think they might have in terms of how to speak with devs and how to speak their language, and I think that Robert's templates as well on, we've talked about this in requesting log files and things like that, whether that's because it's too technical or because it's too SEO removed language, both can be difficult for an SEO to master and speak those languages, but you have to develop a range to move into both directions.

And I would say one last point here, which is really make sure that you're connecting the dots and do that through storytelling. So understanding what metrics does the business look at. So to go back to the example where you could be working for a luxury fashion brand or a brand where, sorry, your company where brand is really important, brand image is really important. You will have to create stories that talk about that brand image.

And I had examples where I worked with fashion brands, and when you want to position something like local SEO or slow loading websites, you really want to talk about the customer who has this experience with the brand and how does that impact their experience if they are turning up to the store. And the brand team is so precious of the stores because it provides that brand image they're turning up, but it's got the wrong opening hours. They checked it obviously, but it was incorrect. And now that really impacts the brand image because they're learning that they can't trust the information online about this brand.

And that is if as soon as you then talk to decision makers through stories and to through explaining how does that impact something they really care about and connecting the dots that this part is actually what you can help with local SEO, that's the part where you can come in, you can do all of that without mentioning the word local SEO, without mentioning the word Google business profile, whatever. You can really explain that through a story and through explaining what the customer might be experiencing and what you're seeing from the numbers.

And that will be really helpful. So connect the dots because you talk about their metrics, but if you're forgetting to connect it like how you're coming in to help and how you're coming in to save the day, then it was all for nothing. So it's very important to do that as well.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah. So I mean, I want to get a little bit more technical in a sec, but I feel like just to finish off the sort of people conversation around enterprise SEO, and we've talked about speed as an issue. So I read a great article that's actually from way back in 2021 by a guy called Tony Wright who recalls how his SEO tickets was stuck in backlog for two years, and then the day that they got done just happened to be the day that he brought in donuts for the IT team. And I thought that that was... So it's like, yeah, sometimes maybe it's just about making friends with the right people.

Robert Lora:

Yeah.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Right.

Robert Lora:

Actually, that brings to mind, I don't have an anecdote as good as that. I don't have the donut anecdote, but yeah. Yeah. So the reason I also I brought up these principles, my background's in psychology, so that's where my mind goes too. And that's also where I started the email templates, for example, the idea behind that or the spin to it, I suppose if you want to say is it's not that, "Oh, these are the emails you have to use," but just the idea was to weave in a few of these principles into the email to potentially increase chances of getting yes.

And so what that brings to mind for me is the reciprocity one, I scratch your back you scratch mine, and you wouldn't do it in a tit-for-tat way. But my thinking of it would be when you come into a company, really try to build relationships, build relationships before you need help and help people before you need it. You're not helping people so that you can, "Oh, well, I got them there, so in two months I got them. I'm going to request this big thing." No, yeah, there's just a lot of research to show that if you help someone, they're much more inclined to help you later in the future.

And also if they like you, that's actually ones the six or something principle. If they like you, they're bound to do it, and that makes sense. But it's one of those things where you're much more likely to accrue these champions if when you get there or however long you've been there or whatever. You try to just strike up friendships, commonalities, and just chat and be a person first, build relationships. And then when it comes time to talk shop, they're just going to be more likely to listen. Like, "Oh yeah, I'll help my friend over there," or "I'll help the person who brought donuts." But yeah, I think that that goes a long way. Yeah.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah. That's a great point. Petra, do you have anything to add or can we go a bit technical now?

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Yeah, we can absolutely go technical. I think Robert covered that really well.

Robert Lora:

Thanks.

Jojo Furnival:

Well, he very much did because know Sitebulb likes to go technical every now and again. And since we're talking about scale and website, enormous websites, millions of URLs is often a feature of enterprise websites and enterprise SEO. How do you approach auditing millions of URLs without drowning in data or crazy crawling costs, Petra?

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Yeah, so again, I think it's starting in lesson two when we start to talk about this. So it's very much you have to build a process where you prioritise different templates and you have to think templates and page types because to crawl millions of pages, that's sometimes not even feasible. Or if it's feasible, then you might have to crawl at URL limits that the company doesn't even allow you.

And again, I will give this tip every time that please always check with your IT team, like how many URLs you can crawl per second. You do not want to upset them. So when you have limits and a lot of the companies will have limits, then it would take you maybe a month to crawl the whole site or at least weeks. And how is that going to be helpful? You need to prioritise your page templates based on how often do they change, how important they are from a conversion point of view, and really create it because you might have a handful of pages or hundreds or a thousand pages that are your key, either revenue making or key conversion pages, the high impact pages that just have to be called every day, maybe like a thousand URLs is fine to crawl every day if they change every day.

If you really want to make sure that those changes are reflected and everything, then do that. There might be others that are changed with your sprint cycle, so you want to also align it with, whenever the code is going live, can you crawl some samples in the test environment before they go live to spot issues early? And I think these are really essential. So as you said, you're not drowning in data and also you're focusing on what's important and what will actually make a difference.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah.

Robert Lora:

That's right. No, and just to add to that, the key really is to find the... Because as we talked about before, in standard SEO might be a few thousand pages, but in enterprise SEO, you're usually talking about hundreds of thousands or millions or hundreds of millions. And all of those aren't unique, unique, unique pages. There's templates that'll affect many. So doing what Petra said, if you are auditing a thousand, if you find one issue, it's very likely that that issue is just going to be multiplied and you're just going to find it in another thousand to 2000 pages. Cool. And then you've got that sorted. So you don't have to be constantly monitoring these pages.

There may be a few things that you don't get. Obviously if you want to audit millions of pages, Sitebulb Cloud has got it. No, but in theory, that's definitely something you can do. But the first thing you want to do is what Petra said. You do have to check with your IT team because there are almost most likely some limits set. And if it's a sort of thing that you want to do once maybe to see the internal linking structure or something like that, that's something you can do. But generally you don't need to do that. If you find the issue somewhere, you're likely to just be able to find it everywhere else. And yeah, I guess that's about it.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah. Well, I was going to say, it was very sweet of you to do a Sitebulb Cloud plug there because I was going to say, actually, yes, you can audit tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of URLs, but also cloud makes it easy to just bulk those into just spot issues at template level. So sorry, just being a terrible marketing manager there, getting that in, so I wanted to-

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

You're great. You're getting other people to do the job for you.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah, I know. I didn't ask him to do that.

Robert Lora:

An air high five. Nice.

Jojo Furnival:

So we've also got issues of multiple regions and languages as well. I mean, without going into a whole webinar on international SEO, what are the biggest pitfalls that you've seen or for enterprise SEOs to avoid, or you've got any tips around that, Petra?

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting one, especially for websites who have huge scales, right? Because a lot of the time what international means for a company, not necessarily for the SEO, but a lot of the time SEOs are at fault for this as well, is that, okay, let's translate all this content. Let's put it on a subfolder or subdomain for a different country, and then it's all good. Or even with local, right? Let's create all those local pages or what we call programmatic SEO today. But I think the line between programmatic SEO and spammy pages is very, very fine.

So it's just one of those things where translation isn't internationalisation, basically. You have to understand regulations, cultural nuances, even just locational differences and specifics of that audience and what they are looking for before you launch these pages. Why do they need a replica of everything? Fair enough you can set up the hreflang, but is it actually needed? And also, even when you do the best implementation of hreflang, it's so easy to have issues there. I don't think I've ever seen a website that had perfect hreflang. It just seems to be something that no one can get absolutely right. It just always gets messed up.

But yeah, sorry. So it is just that to kind of finish off that you don't want to create another problem in internationalisation, which if you're just thinking, right, we're just going to publish all these pages for all the other markets and create the localised content, you might just be creating an other huge technical issue for yourself with things like pro-budget and all of the other things we talked about prioritising your page templates and being able to audit them properly. So you don't want to be creating that additional issue.

So you really want to make sure that from your point of view, you've done your research, you've understood those markets, what needs to be done, how does the continent needs to be translated, that it's actually authentic, and it reflects that the cultural differences or the audience differences, it might be a totally different demographic who's shopping for your brand in that country. So all of these play into account, and sorry, Robert, you were also planning to chime in as well?

Robert Lora:

Yeah, yeah, no, just to touch on that, I didn't want to cut you off, but yeah, so I agree the translation, whenever I hear the, "Oh yeah, we're going to translate all the pages." I'm like, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, what?" Because yeah, that can lead... Yeah, I've seen clients like obviously massive enterprise clients where there's just an entire subfolder that Google is like, "Yeah, we crawled it, but no, this ain't new. This is the same thing." So that affects the whole, well, not region, but the whole language, but obviously the region, because it's tied to the language of that content that's just not finding it in Google so that when they search, they're getting another country's content. I've seen that.

And in enterprises often there's a lot of migrations, CMS, and then URL structures and this, and you might have several in a year. And so what happens there is what she was saying, it's not that no company will never have the hreflang tags perfect, but for them to be perfect across the entire site, across a long span of time. Because I've seen migrations too, where they carry everything across except the hreflang tags.

And as a matter of fact, I don't have a lot of personal experience with this. I've just heard it enough to know that knowing the CMS that you're going to makes a big difference to, because aside from the of course, and bringing Tory and Sam aside from the JavaScript considerations, whether it's a lot of React or Angular or whatever, that's a whole other thing. But know whether does that CMS support hreflang tags? It might not because there's some that or that they do, but it's a tricky, something that you can't do from the outset that's built into Oracle tags, etc.

Yeah. Yeah, because there's been issues with that too. I've seen in migrations where it translates everything over, and it should be simple. There were hreflang tags before and they should be there after, but of course they're not. And then that becomes the 40th ticket in some overworked like engineers backlog instead of it just being, oh, it should have just come over directly. So yeah, the translation in those hreflang tags are definitely tricky.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

And to add to this as well and why they get tricky, I think because obviously you have to think scale when you're working with a huge website. So you will probably have rules how these hreflang tags generate. And yes, maybe your product pages mean that actually every time a new product page is published, there is a version of it in every single language. So that's fine because the hreflang populates. But what happens when a product line launches specific to a country or what happens when you've set up this rule for the whole website, but actually you also have a blog sitting on the website and the blog content is only available in English and for the UK, but it's generating tonnes and tonnes of hreflang with 404 links that are broken pages that are leading nowhere because you're not actually translating that part of the website. And that can happen through different parts.

And I think that's why it's so difficult to get it right, because you're dealing with that skill and it's very likely that you are not translating, localising, creating all that content for every single market. So even though you're trying to put rules in place, a lot of the time what ends up happening, you have this one rule hreflang, every URL just has their different subfolder version for the different language, but those don't necessarily exist, and there are not these sort of processes to actually check if that page exists and if it actually needs that hreflang.

And obviously if you are Google or you're a crawler or anything, and you're going through this and what you're seeing is that 40% or 30% of the hreflang that you're giving them is rubbish, they're going to say, "Well, we're just going to ignore this. Why would we spend time trying to figure it out? Which pages did you publish and which pages that you didn't? We actually just going to read your website and we'll decide which one is going to which country, because we'll just decide based on what the users are actually visiting."

I just have to add in another pet peeve that is still happening with so many companies that companies love to put on the IP address based redirects that as soon as I'm in a different country going to the site, they're sending me to decided the country I'm in. But as someone who travels a lot, as someone who has homes in multiple different countries, I am very often in another country looking at the UK side, wanting to shop on a UK side before a few days before I'm coming back. And it's incredibly frustrating to try to, every time I load a new page, just asking me, "Do you want to go to the Hungarian site or do you want to go to the US site?" Or whatever, and I'm like, "No, I don't. Just please stop forcing me to do this."

And I think depending on how the redirect is set up, it might not impact crawlers as much, but it will frustrate your users. But actually the redirect could be set up in a way that it's even impacting the crawlers and even the crawlers are being sent. And Google, because I had this issue more than five, six years ago now, so that's a long time ago where because Google crawler comes from the US it would constantly be sent to the US site with that redirect, but actually it was a UK brand. So what ended up happening is that, and this was probably just part of a cascade of issues that the UK website ended up disappearing at some point, and the US website was ranking above everything, even in the UK. And this was something that we spotted from the log files that actually Google was being sent to the US side. So just be careful with those. They're not good for anyone. I just think get rid of those redirects. I hate that.

Jojo Furnival:

That's interesting. I was just thinking, I bet she's going's going to start talking about log files. I was expecting that to come up. And you talk about that a bit in the course too. So another one, I just want to talk about technical a little bit more. So tools, I don't know, reporting tools or AI features or have you found any tools or features that are helpful for turning those technical SEO outputs into something that is understandable for non SEO audiences that allows you to do that story or facilitates that storytelling for you? Either of you.

Robert Lora:

Oh, yeah, yeah, no. So I'll just jump in. The first thing that came to mind for me was now that we're talking about the scale and the size of everything, of course, as long as you can make something more visual, because when you're just throwing jargon in words, like I said, people's eyes glaze over. And so the crawl visualisation map on Sitebulb is awesome for showing, look, these are orphan pages, they're not connected to anything, or this is a death or whatever. And if you have, actually, you know what? I'm going to tie it in. If you have some logs from the servers, you can show because that's actually something you can use to see how deep Google is crawling your website or where they're going.

And if you want to show that issue, instead of showing them a massive CSV or something, you can point at the visualisation crawl map and circle the area. It's like, "This is where stopping this is an issue or whatever." That's something that comes to mind. Screenshots and images, I mean, it's not a tool per se, but it just is screenshots. So screenshots comparing comparative screenshots of SERP results, comparative screenshots of competitors, and showing, "Okay, look, these trust signals here." I mean, I know that the words trust signals maybe don't mean anything, but this thing that you see all the time that when you're purchasing something, this is something we need on this product page or whatever and some other CRO thing.

But you can get a lot further if not only you comparing to competitors, but if you can show that that's something, the other thing that came to mind for paid speed, for example, just the sort of waterfall metrics, GT metrics or Chrome inspector, that's a bit more technical, so maybe that's not going to go towards the product person, but if you're talking to an engineer and you're like, "Okay, well, we have this hang up on this particular non-critical element that's rendering," whatever, and in the waterfall visualisation of it, you can just circle, "Look, this huge hold up here, 1.1 seconds, not cool, man." Whatever.

Obviously then describe it as a bug, then you put it in a ticket, et cetera, and you communicate to them in a way that matters. But visually, it's very nice to be able to see those things rather than just to see a block of text. And then I guess on the wilder side maybe is just using AI to mock things up. Some of the diffusion image models, the new Nano Banana one, that whatever the terminal has mean it's easy to mock something up. Just take a screenshot of your page and ask it to make this change just to show a sort of MVP version of, oh, what about this change? Would this be useful? Or this would be helpful because, and then studies show that this sort of change, increases conversion rates by X amount, whatever.

And then, but you can show, this is what we're thinking about. And even further down that scale, I suppose, is you could use Firecrawl to just get the code off your actual website, rebuild it as an HTML mockup, and then just have AI add the thing that you want to show and then just show them that, just show them the screenshot or whatever of that. That's a thing. And then otherwise, that's tools and I don't know, and we've talked about this a bunch, but the jargon, reducing that a little bit, I think that that helps.

And that particularly helps, I guess if you put all this together in dashboard, so Looker Studio, Tableau, whatever it is, if you're able to present things that don't just matter to SEO, so it's not just metrics that SEOs care about but that are relevant to the person you're speaking with, that'll go a long way, like I said. So not orphaned pages or internal link issues, but just pages that are not connected, things like that. Canonicals, yeah. Telling Google what page is most important or things like that. I think those are the tools, I suppose. And then maybe some features that come to mind.

Jojo Furnival:

Yeah. And I'll just read out because Simon has made a suggestion here in the chat, so this might be helpful for people who are watching the recording later. It's like dashboards, Looker Studio, Tableau, Qlik, spelled with a Q, Q-L-I-K. He says, "First page for C-suite, second page is in more depth for marketing, etc." So that might be a handy one for anyone too. Petra, have you got anything to add?

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Yeah, I think Robert really nicely covered it. Probably more just again, really make sure that you're using whatever your audience is using. Try not to show them your SEO tools if they are totally unfamiliar with it, take those metrics out then and put it in a format if you need to show SEO metrics. Let's say you want to show, I don't know, links or something metric to the digital PR team, then you might not want to show any sort of dashboard or any sort of metric that sits within a tool that you have, but you might want to take that out, put it in a branded slide deck that you have that they usually present to their teams.

Really make sure that you're using wherever they are already looking than trying to, first of all, get them to learn a new tool or learn how it works. You know that you can take that data out if your company uses an enterprise, often does, uses something like BigQuery or AWS or something where they store all the data and then they push that data into their different visualisation tools like Power BI, Tableau that's been mentioned, and any other visualisation. Then how can you get your SEO data to be also backed up? Like Google Search Console data can be backed up in BigQuery as well. How can you get that to them be pushed to the same dashboards and which metrics are you pulling there as well? I think that's really important.

Jojo Furnival:

Okay, that's awesome guys. I think we need to move to Q&A now because we've got a few that have come in. So this one is from Ryan. I've worked on an enterprise SEO project, and I always tried to adapt my message to my audience and their ways of working, but I never really understood the concept of a sprint. Does anyone want to help Ryan out with explaining the concept of a sprint?

Robert Lora:

Yeah, so I mean, I can jump in just in the sense that the most recent thing that comes to mind is a startup that I worked at, and they were mostly engineers, so they mostly worked in sprints. And really it's just the... I mean, I think it comes into play with the agile, project management framework, but the idea is that you're working within two week confined, well, it doesn't have to be two weeks, but I think generally it's two weeks. I don't know. But generally you work within two week timeframe, and obviously there's an overarching plan, so maybe quarterly or annually or whatever it is, but you work in two-week sprints to sort of speed to the... It keeps things more agile. So instead of it being, "Okay, we have a whole quarter to do this," no, it's like, "Okay, so a quarter is for this plan, but what are we going to get these done these two weeks?"

And typically in a lot of these engineer led companies, you'll have stand-ups every day, scrums, whatever you want to call it, and you'll talk about, "Okay, this is what I did yesterday, this is what I'm doing today, this is what's blocking me." And again, it just makes everything more agile. And so that by the end of that sprint, at the end of the two weeks on Friday or whatever, or Monday depending, you talk about what you were able to do, what you weren't able to do, what's still blocked, et cetera, and then you move to the next one. And typically that keeps things moving much more quickly. I mean, it's a bit tricky because then when you start mixing in other elements that naturally take more time, if you're doing a large audit or whatever and different things, it's going to take you longer than two weeks, then that gets a little tricky. Then you're just carrying things over. But yeah, it's generally just something to keep companies moving.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

And I would say probably the biggest difference is that previously maybe you think about work as it's something that has a start and then a finish, and then you just move on to another project, start to finish. But with sprints and with the agile workload, you're thinking cyclically. So you're grouping a subset of tasks into a sprint, a group of work that's going to be delivered, and then you're delivering that work and then you're giving feedback on it, and then you iterate and then you move into the next one.

And it's really this cycle instead of start to finish, throw it away, archive it, move on to the next one to be able to learn. So I think sprints are excellent for SEOs because you can go in, you can listen in on those daily stand-up on those scrum meetings, what's being discussed, the priorities. They will probably use things like the story points and things like that, which they give to the different tasks, well, the different stories in terms of what's going to go into the sprint, how they prioritise. So it can be difficult because it has, and I don't even know the full jargon, because I don't work in sprints anymore necessarily, I work with people who do, but I know the basics of it. So probably being part of those meetings where you hear all this jargon and don't be afraid to ask questions. If you don't know, just go to someone who seems friendly enough that they will explain to you what are all those things.

What are story points? How do they do it at the business? How do they calculate it? How do they prioritise? It will show that you're interested and it will help you to be able to align to those sprints. Likely then you will have to send your SEO tickets with some sort assumptions or an explanation of how much of a priority this is, because then they have to give the points and decide if it's going to go into the sprint and things like that. So it's a great opportunity basically, because there is always a learning and feedback curve, and you can actually become part of that. Yeah.

Jojo Furnival:

And I think too, from my experience, the definition of done as well is plays a prominent role in how you create a ticket that works well within a sprint because once it's... What is the definition of done? This is the thing that we achieve. And then you have the retrospective that you sort of review the work that was done and you discuss whether it was... Yeah. Hopefully, I mean, yeah, it is a bit of its own world, but that's a good bit of advice to listen in, ask questions, try and understand the world of the sprint, because that will help you to understand the world of the devs and the engineering team essentially. We've got another one here. So this is from Charlie. We're optimising site architecture at scale. How can you get buy-in from web developers? Buy-in. Often find that web devs can be reluctant to implement mass changes SEOs recommend or actively oppose recommendations with internal stakeholders.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Yeah, I mean, again, I think the first step you want to do is think with, I'm going to jump in here because I have experiences from all different sides of this puzzle, from in-house, from agency, from freelancer. I think you really want to think with the developers head first. When you mass changes to the template, that means it could break half of the size or more, and if it breaks the code on half of the site, they will be in trouble. They might even get fired. You are proposing things that are huge risks for the developers, so you have to consider that when you're considering massive changes and you have to be writing your business cases and your proposals in that way, explaining that, I don't know, this thing won't go in the header, so don't worry, it will be a part of the body copy because anything that goes in the header will be a bigger problem or a bigger risk per se.

So you really want to understand some of those things that probably first just ask developers when they make these massive changes, how would they go about it in theory? What are the risks they need to evaluate? They likely have staging environments and things like that that they play around in. So you have to understand what's the process that's involved. It's, first of all, a lot of work. It can break a lot of things. So you're asking a massive thing from them, so you really have to back that up. So I think, again, asking those questions first, understanding of the process will help you actually refine your suggestions.

So you're not just saying, "We just want to move the subfolder structure around completely." Okay, but that doesn't just involve a bunch of redirects, right? If one subfolder sits under a certain template, it might even sit under a different CMS in certain companies, right?

Robert Lora:

Mh-hmm.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Then you want to know the depth of that challenge because in your head it's just, well, we just need to create a redirect map. Well, probably not. Probably there is more there. So I would go and try to think with the developer's head and also asking them questions on the risks involved to really understand the amount of work that it will create for them.

Jojo Furnival:

Okay. We've actually hit time. I mean, Robert, unless you had anything super quick to add.

Robert Lora:

No, no, I mean, yeah, that pretty much covers everything from that perspective and I guess if just to do a tie into what we said earlier, not maybe for massive changes, but depending, I mean, for Petra work to get that sort of migration from the HTTP to HTTPS. If you're able to sneak your tickets in with their bigger projects, they're much more likely to happen. But yeah, everything that Petra said is right on the money.

Jojo Furnival:

Okay. Well, thank you so much everybody for attending and for your questions. I apologise there was one that we didn't get to do because I'm conscious of everyone's time. Don't forget to check your inboxes for the free enterprise SEO training course tomorrow. It should be in there. Let me know if it isn't. Huge. Thanks to Petra and Robert for giving up their time and expertise today. We will be emailing out the tomorrow, so don't worry if you missed the start. I'm always interested in hearing feedback on our webinars and ideas for topics, so please do email me at [email protected] if you want to tell me anything. Thanks again for watching everybody and we will see you in the next one. Bye.

Petra Kis-Herczegh:

Thank you so much.