As global commerce increasingly moves toward a digital-first model, enterprise leaders are doubling down on their organic search investment. As a result, marketers of all functions are adopting an SEO-centric approach to their marketing strategy.
This requires constant leveraging of key SEO tactics that will in turn support your omnichannel marketing efforts.
Employ an SEO Lead
Enterprise-level SEO is impossible without a well-structured team. One dedicated team member doesn’t cut it. Instead employ a team lead or Head of SEO that can provide the strategic and practical knowledge to supervise each critical SEO task such as:
- On-page SEO: This is conducted by content creators who take an SEO-first approach to writing. They engage in keyword research, ensure primary and secondary keywords are included properly on new pages and meta descriptions and titles are optimized.
- Off page SEO: These technical SEOs are typically web developers and analysts that dive deep into the structure of sites to ensure the formatting is aligned with Google’s ranking factors. These activities often include site audits that crawl the entirety of the site to reveal the actual page count and discover what’s discoverable by Google.
These activities only touch the surface of what’s necessary to sustain a best-in-class SEO program. To ensure your strategy stays on track and you’re growing, not just maintaining rankings, it’s crucial to employ a Head of SEO in your enterprise.
Dive deep into SEO reports
Marketing leaders are also taking proactive approaches to SEO analysis by having a firm grasp of its various KPIs. These metrics include organic visibility, keyword position spread, winning and losing keywords, paid search rankings and URL performance. Each reveals a wealth of information that impacts the revenue of your enterprise.
The easiest method of accessing search engine data is having reports delivered to your inbox. Connect with your Head of SEO to implement a subscription to the reports he or she regularly creates. This ensures you have a stream of regular search data insights on hand to inform the full scope of your marketing program.
Alternatively, enterprise solutions have APIs that allow you to seamlessly connect to best-in-class business analytics tools like Excel, Power BI, Tableau, Google Data Studio and Amazon S3.
Conduct routine content audits
Ensure your SEO team has the bandwidth to conduct regular audits. This SEO task provides important information on the health of your site. It’s easy for a site’s content to get overrun with duplicate pages, improperly formatted URLs and other issues if not regularly crawled and analyzed.
Another key component of the audit is the content gap analysis.
“This involves evaluating existing content on a topic and discovering gaps within the coverage. It’s especially important if you have a number of writers crafting content. Some writers may be more skilled while others may need improvement. The feedback received will provide growth opportunities for both freelancers and in-house content creators,” says SEO writer Chuks Chukwuemeka in Using Content Audits to Revise Your Marketing Strategy.
Once you employ the previous tactics, you can turn your sights to the advanced metrics below.
Attribution model the SERP
The new market isn’t the business district or a high fashion shopping avenue. It’s the SERP (search engine results page). Enterprises with eCommerce success understand the value of the search page and how tying SEO KPIs into revenue metrics is the path to displaying sustainable ROI.
Typical SEO analysis metrics include organic search ranking and click-through rate. Those metrics don’t occur in a vacuum. They have real revenue implications.
The first organic search result on Google has an average CTR of around 35%. That number drops to around 14% for the second result and around 8% for the third-place result. These numbers fluctuate often due to the differences of search engine result pages, the number of ads and information boxes (called featured snippets). But the age old adage remains true: ranking high on the first page of Google for a given keyword drives the most customers to your site.
Work with your Head of SEO or visit Google Analytics yourself to discover what typical conversion rates are for your site. Once that math is determined for each product page you can determine what the traffic potential is for each placement on the SERP.
Examine the Traffic Index Potential
Your Head of SEO would understand that each product URL is tied to a number of keywords, each one having search volume that results in traffic. Understanding the traffic potential for a page moving to the top of the SERP is valuable information. This reveals whether it’s worth taking the effort to optimize the page or not.
Enterprise SEO platforms provide pre-calculated metrics such as the URL Traffic Index Potential. This can figure directly into your attribution model calculations.
“Although it’s a very unlikely story for a single website to rank position 1 for the entirety of their keyword portfolio, it can detail an overwhelming potential of inbound traffic that’s attainable through SEO. This can be inevitably intriguing for stakeholders, particularly when analyzing competitors to understand new product expansion or market entry,” said Head of SEO Petar Jovetic in Prove your worth: Using the Searchmetrics Suite to back up your SEO strategy.
Key Takeaway
These SEO tactics aren’t just for people on your team with “search” in their title. Running an SEO-centric operation requires a bottom-down strategy that begins with the leadership team. Regular site audits and reviews of key metrics is the best way to mitigate drops in rankings and chart a path toward sustainable site growth.
Need help building the ideal SEO structure for your enterprise marketing team? Set up a consultation.