Enterprise SEO Analytics: SEO Metrics and Strategy For Success
Enterprise SEO Analytics: Why Is It Important?
Enterprise SEO analytics is gathering data from your SEO efforts to see if they are working or not. It’s the process of defining the metrics and measuring how well they are performing. It may also tell you where your site is underperforming, so you can fix those issues as well.
Trying to optimise a sprawling website without enterprise SEO analytics is like trying to fix the electrical wiring system of a mansion without knowing where the frayed wires and shorted connections are.
It can be done. You might even see some good results.
However, it will take forever. And, we promise you, the results won’t be as good as they could be.
That’s why we definitely recommend doing it the right way. What’s more, we will be happy to help you get your website in shape for enterprise SEO success.
What Is an Enterprise-Level Site?
An enterprise site is a large website with many thousands of pages. If this was set up years ago and hasn’t been maintained, it means some pages might be redundant, while others have been removed. New product pages have replaced old ones, but the old pages are still floating around somewhere in the blogosphere.
It can be a giant mess, in short.
But, let’s say it is a new build. Even then, its scope makes an enterprise business website a completely different beast from a regular one (by which we mean one that has a few to a few hundred pages).
What Is Enterprise SEO?
So, using the above information, enterprise SEO can be defined as search engine optimisation for a large website.
And, because it’s not quite the same as regular optimisation, it requires a slightly different strategy.
A larger website needs to monitor more data.
Due to a large number of pages, managing the keywords, SEO titles and meta-descriptions can be a pain in the… ummm… well, a pain; because, remember, there shouldn’t be any keyword cannibalisation between pages.
Speaking of keywords, big corporate websites tend to have different keyword requirements than smaller ones. Smaller businesses with a proportionately sized digital presence tend to focus on long-tail keywords. These are less competitive.
Enterprise organisation websites, on the other hand, often focus on short-tail keywords, which can be very competitive.
Your backlink profile is also more varied. It requires more scrutiny to ensure the domains linking back are credible. It also needs more work to ensure there are no broken links.
Since there are a LOT of elements that need to be managed, gathering the right data for enterprise SEO becomes essential. Because, like we said, if you don’t know where the problems are in this sprawling network, you won’t be able to fix them. Enterprise SEO analytics helps you monitor how your large website is performing, tells you where you have issues, and the metrics might give indications as to how it can perform better.
In short, enterprise SEO analytics tells you if your SEO efforts are working or not, and how to invest your money strategically to get better returns from these efforts.
Even with no problems at all, you won’t know what’s working and where you need to invest more money without a detailed analysis.
Why Does Your Large Business Need SEO?
So, you have a large business website which has been plodding along just fine. Why do you now need enterprise SEO?
Here’s the thing…
Because of its sheer size, it’s easy for a massive website to do fairly well organically. It has loads of pages, some of which are products for sale. If you’ve been working on a successful marketing strategy, people will be looking for them.
But, if it does pretty okay without a proper SEO plan, how well would it do if you optimised it?
We’ll tell you exactly how well. Here goes…
Improving Customer Reach
SEO makes your website more visible in organic search. By investing in SEO management and reporting, you can find out where the site is lacking. And, devise strategies to overcome those issues.
And, if you plan your strategy well, you can attract customers at every stage of the buying cycle.
A well-defined SEO performance strategy can help you reach the top of the search ranking. It can improve brand awareness. Furthermore, it can help you reach out to potential customers before they are ready to buy, thereby increasing:
- Awareness and Discovery
- Commitment and Purchase
- Interest and Evaluation
Part of SEO is also making sure your website gets positive mentions by other relevant websites. With a clever backlink strategy, you can use virtual word-of-mouth to reach your customers.
Increasing Conversions
Here’s how analytics can help increase conversions. You know how people get to a certain page on your website and then just drop out instead of converting?
(You don’t? Yeah, you definitely need an SEO check! Book a call with a Geek and we’ll help you get sorted!)
An enterprise SEO audit will be able to tell you where such sales and conversion bottlenecks are. You may also find out how to fix them, using analytics.
Plus, understanding your website and SEO approach better will help you improve a few other factors that affect conversion, such as:
Brand Reputation
People buy from brands they can relate to, or find themselves aligned with. You can have the same values as your target customers but if they don’t know about what you stand for, they won’t buy from you.
To tailor your message and make sure your customers see it, you need SEO. To achieve the best results with your SEO, you need a strong strategy. To design a strong strategy, you need hard data to tell you where your strengths and weaknesses are.
Paid Advertising Success
Part of your B2B SEO strategy is paid advertising, which is heavily reliant on choosing the right keywords.
Yet again, analytics can help you with not only identifying the best keywords for you but also measuring the success of your paid SEO campaigns. That way, you get a better conversion rate.
Managing Search Engine Updates
In the digital marketing world, Google updates are generally received with a sense of mild dread. “How will this update affect my website’s ranking?” is the question everyone asks.
A lot of times, your first instinct in this situation is to make changes to your website. You hope that a change—any change—will help you manage the repercussions of the new search guidelines.
If that’s what you want to do, we recommend sitting back and taking a deep breath. Instead of “headless chicken” changes, we strongly recommend letting the update rollout. Then, use data to decide whether you even need to fix anything.
Because, chances are, unless there is something drastically wrong with your website, search engine updates will not kill your rankings. And, if there is, and a few of your pages start to tank, analytics will be able to pinpoint the pain points post-haste.
Are you seeing the pattern here?
Scoping Out the Competition
Your business doesn’t exist in isolation. It functions in a market where others are offering similar services or products. Part of your marketing strategy is to make sure you seem like the best option.
But, how can you design a better strategy when you don’t know what your competitors are doing? That’s where data helps; or, rather, that’s where SEO data tools can help.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just check out what is working for them and do it better.
Is there something they are doing, and you’re not, but you should be? Do they rank for keywords you could be ranking for, but they were never on your radar? Are they using a specific type of content to attract potential customers which you aren’t?
Competitor analysis is a part of SEO. It will give you a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t in your industry.
Streamlining Your Budget
Analytics for SEO is essential because you don’t want to be making decisions that are not backed by data. You don’t want to be throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping for some to stick.
You want to identify a clear problem. Then, you want to design a clear strategy to solve it.
That helps you find a clear path to success.
Because meandering paths are inefficient. Meandering paths mean a longer journey. Consequently, meandering paths cost more money.
With strong data comes strong evidence. And, strong evidence leads to a more confident strategy. No waffling, no guesses—just quick, efficient results.
As a bonus, SEO data reporting isn’t just for devising future strategies. It also tells you how well the strategies you have in place are performing. Nothing quite like data-backed validation, let us tell you!
Enterprise SEO Components
Right, so hopefully, you’d now be sold on the idea of measuring before taking action. That brings you to the next question: “What do I need to do for my enterprise SEO?”
You’ll be pleased to learn that your SEO plan can be broken down into three major parts. These are auditing, keywords, and automation.
Now, don’t get us wrong—it’s not just ticking three boxes.
Each part is vast, consisting of many, many components and processes. However, these are the three main categories your SEO will fall under.
Enterprise SEO Audit
An SEO audit is a massive undertaking. It covers a range of ranking factors and how well the website is optimised for them. Without going into too much detail, it can be broken down into:
- Content
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO and link-building
- Technical website factors
- Industry-specific standards
Auditing, especially if ongoing, gives you a wellness check of your website and what areas you need to improve.
For a small website, this can be easy to do. For an enterprise site, on the other hand, it can take days or weeks.
Keyword Research
It can be argued that keywords form the backbone of good SEO; without them, there would be no SEO. Whether you agree or not, you cannot deny that the right keywords are essential for SEO success.
That makes keyword research a key component of your enterprise SEO strategies.
Keywords are search queries that users enter into search engines like Google. They are used in technical SEO to describe the contents of the web page. They tell search engines what the page is about and the search terms for which it should be presented.
Your enterprise-level website’s keyword profile should have a healthy mix of:
- Branded keywords (keywords that mention your business or brand by name—e.g., “Geeky Tech SEO for tech companies” as opposed to “SEO for tech companies”, “how to fix my iPhone” instead of “how to fix my mobile phone”, etc.)
- Navigational keywords
- Non-branded keywords
- Long-tail keywords
- Short-tail keywords
- Informational keywords
- Transactional keywords
- LSI keywords
Automation
We’ve mentioned a few times now that the size of an enterprise-level website makes SEO management difficult. That is why automation needs to be an inherent part of your strategy. For example, you could automate your site analysis and keyword research, so you get monthly reports.
The findings from these can then be assessed by a human to design the strategy. This brings us to our next point—what metrics should you be looking at?
Enterprise SEO Metrics to Track in Your Analysis
Did you read through the previous section, and decide to go on a deep dive into the link there? Then you’d know how many different factors make up your overall SEO strategy.
Which of these factors should you focus on?
The answer, of course, is all of them. But, the good news is that you do have a few really important ones that you should be looking at. Here are the SEO measures that give you the best indications of your enterprise business site’s health.
Return on Investment
Optimising an enterprise-level website can be expensive. That’s why you don’t want any unnecessary costs associated with it. If you’re spending a certain amount on SEO, you want to see proportionate returns.
SEO tools can help you measure exactly how much your marketing strategy is generating per channel and campaign. And, they will also tell you where and how you can improve.
Branded vs Non-Branded Keywords
People who search for your brand name are more likely to make a purchase from your website than people who visit it without knowing about your brand. If you can improve your website’s ranking for branded keywords, that can translate to more revenue.
An increase in non-branded keywords, on the other hand, demonstrates that your SEO efforts are working and customers are finding you organically.
Monitoring these can help you streamline your SEO efforts further, optimising the right keywords for each page. A healthy balance between the two is what you want.
Bounce Rate
An impression is when someone searches for a term and your page pops up in the organic search results. A click is if the searcher clicks on your page when it comes up.
The click starts a session, which is any interaction a user has with your website within a certain period. The user could visit a single page or multiple pages in a session.
If they land on your page from the search results page and peace out without looking at any other page on your website, that’s called a bounce.
Your bounce rate is the percentage of the number of people who only visited one page on your website to the total number of sessions (one-page sessions/all sessions*100=bounce rate).
Technically, the bounce rate is not a ranking factor, but it is a user experience (UX) signal. That bounce might mean they found the answer they were looking for right away and didn’t need to look further. Or, it could also mean they were not happy with what they saw and just left.
Knowing why people didn’t navigate to other pages will help you tweak your website for better conversion.
Backlink Profile
Backlinks can be seen as an endorsement from other people. And, just like real-life endorsements, they are more valuable when they come from a reputed source who has authority in the field.
Keeping track of your backlinks allows you to monitor the domain authority (DA) of the referring website. If the domain has low authority, you can disavow the link. If it’s high authority, it will add SEO value (or SEO juice) to your page.
What if your competitors are acquiring high DA backlinks and you aren’t? You need to find out what they are doing differently.
Alternatively, knowing where your audience “hangs out” gives you a better understanding of the domains to target for referrals.
Rankings
Your rankings are a measure of how successful your keywords are at driving qualified leads to your website. It’s important that you keep an eye out for what’s doing well and also if a keyword or page drops in rank. If there is a problem, fixing it quickly means you don’t lose too much traffic for any longer than necessary.
Indexed Pages
When your website has thousands upon thousands of pages, it’s not easy to keep track of whether they are all indexed or not. The problem is that if a page is not indexed, it won’t appear in search results.
So, no matter how well-optimised it is, people won’t be able to find it. Therefore, you need to make sure the relevant pages are indexed and ranking. Enterprise SEO reporting information will be able to tell you if a page is not indexed and not getting any traffic as a result.
Impressions and CTR
As we mentioned earlier, impressions are when your page shows up on the search engine results page (SERP) organically. The click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of the number of times it shows up against the number of times it is clicked.
Are you not getting enough impressions? It might indicate that Google doesn’t think your content is quite right for the keyword.
Analytics will tell you if a page has a poor CTR, and might even give you clues that tell you why.
It might tell you that your page doesn’t match the search intent of the query. Or, the title and meta description don’t accurately reflect what the page is about. Fix these issues, and you might see more traffic on your website.
Page Speed
Does your website have thousands of pages, possibly with videos and images of products? That can mean a slower loading time. However, if it’s too slow, you’ll find customers leaving because they can’t be bothered waiting.
Analytics tools can track how long your website takes to load. That means you can fix any issues that make it slower to load. It helps you ensure that your customers enjoy an optimised UX, encouraging them to come to you again and again.
Crawl Error
A Crawl error happens when search engine spiders cannot access a page on a website. It can happen for a few reasons: the page is blocked/noindexed, it has been removed, or redirected to another location.
The problem is that if there are too many crawl errors, Google will not show your website in search results as much. Running regular crawl checks and monitoring Google Search Console for crawl errors should help you keep these to a minimum.
Organic Traffic
The volume of organic search traffic your website receives is a measure of how well your SEO is working. It is essential to know if this traffic has increased or decreased after any site optimisation.
Keeping organic traffic numbers high means you are more likely to see a higher number of conversions.
Organic Conversion
A conversion isn’t always a sale; it can be any action that you want your website visitor to take. You may want them to subscribe to a newsletter, download a resource, or share an email address to receive information and updates.
If they take the action you want, you’ve got yourself a conversion.
Conversions are the most important measure of your marketing strategy. You should be tracking them.
Organic Landing Page Performance
Landing pages are generally pages that are highly optimised for a specific keyword. If your landing pages aren’t performing well, it might mean you need to tweak your optimisation strategy. It might also mean you need to rethink your keywords.
Top Exit Pages
The page from which a user leaves your website is called an exit page. If you own an e-commerce website, you want your top exit page to be the “thank you” page after a sale. If your top exit pages are other ones on the website, you need to take a closer look at why they are driving potential customers away.
Top Converting Pages
It’s important to identify pages that are hurting your sales, but it’s equally important to know which pages are performing well. These pages obviously have something that your customers love. Analysing them can give you an idea of what you could change in the underperforming parts of your website.
New vs Returning Visitors
It’s great if your website is attracting new traffic, but is it also seeing returning visitors? If not, what’s keeping people from coming back? Is it because they couldn’t find what they were looking for? Or, are they unhappy with what they did get?
Competitor Analysis
As we mentioned earlier, knowing what your competitors are up to can help draft your own strategy. You can learn so much about the kind of content your target audience likes and which high-DA websites will link back to it.
Content Score
The best way to make your website valuable is to provide your audience with high-quality content. You can determine how valuable your content is through your content score.
Share of Voice
Remember how we discussed that you share the market with other businesses that might offer a similar (or the same) service or product as you? Share of voice (SOV) is a measure of your marketing presence.
Essentially, it’s an estimate of how many times your audience is likely to be exposed to your brand as opposed to your competitors.
Top Enterprise SEO Tools and Platforms
Tracking metrics and analysing your website’s performance requires certain tools. You can get these tools individually or as a part of a larger service. The thing is, while tools can be useful for a smaller website, enterprise sites need a more robust solution.
An SEO tool gives you all the data you require on a single dashboard. That means you don’t have to check multiple different result pages to get the data you need. Here are our top enterprise SEO solutions.
The best part?
Some of these solutions will let you “exchange” information between different tools.
You can also automate reports, so they are delivered to your inbox every month (or quarter).
Here are some of the best enterprise SEO tools. Each of the popular platforms has its own USP. Depending on what your priorities are, you can decide which one is going to be your new enterprise SEO dashboard.
Our Favourite SEO Tools and Platforms
BrightEdge brings together information from your website SEO, content performance, and social media data for the complete picture of your business SEO. It also provides intent signals and SEO recommendations for content.
seoClarity provides actionable insights using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and the platform now offers automated execution as well.
Conductor is a brilliant tool that gives you SEO insights for your enterprise website.
Semrush offers over 55 tools that help you manage your enterprise website’s SEO, content, market research, and social media.
Botify is a solution that is designed for enterprise SEO reporting and organic search management. It gives you all the SEO tools you need including the most powerful crawler in the market.
SearchMetrics is an all-in-one enterprise SEO tool that gives you data-driven insights to improve and enhance your content and organic search performance.
Deepcrawl (now called Lumar) provides you with all the tools required for your enterprise website’s technical health. It also offers automated QA testing that helps you catch issues before they go live.
Screaming Frog is a powerful tool for crawling websites. It helps you identify technical issues in your enterprise website through a comprehensive site audit. It also checks for content issues, like thin content or broken links.
Oncrawl is a site crawler and technical SEO audit tool which uses ML and data science to provide you with insights into your website’s technical SEO.
Ahrefs is a brilliant tool if your focus is on building a solid backlink profile, although it does offer keyword research and site audit tools as well.
Google Search Console provides you with a suite of tools, including Google Analytics, that tell you exactly how search engines see your website. Since it’s a free platform, you need this in your arsenal no matter which other platform you go for.
Moz Pro is a self-proclaimed all-rounder that helps you with ranking well, optimising, increasing qualified traffic and more.
Bing Webmaster Tools, provided by Microsoft, is powered by the second-most popular search engine. It is as essential to have as Google Search Console.
Yoast is an SEO plugin that helps you optimise your content, so it performs better.
Do You Need an Enterprise SEO Platform?
An enterprise SEO software platform is beneficial for an enterprise-level website. That’s because you want to monitor several different aspects of your website. And, many of the metrics require different tools to measure them.
So, instead of investing in a range of different SEO tools, it might be easier to invest in a solution that offers most, if not all, of them. And, in turn, you will get the following benefits:
- Multiple tools feeding into one interface
- Better insights into user search intent
- Better understanding and management of international operations
- Automated reporting of the factors that are important to you
- Keeping up with Google updates
What to Look For in an Enterprise SEO Tool
Determining which enterprise SEO tool is the right one for you depends on what features you value the most.
Maybe you need Ahrefs for its backlink profile analysis, or Screaming Frog because technical perfection is important for your website.
Alternatively, Yoast could give you a better optimisation for your pages, while Google Webmaster Tools could give you a clearer overall picture of your website’s health.
Of course, you can always use more than one software, budget permitting. However, regardless of what specific tools you want, certain features are a must for enterprise SEO.
Key Features You Require in Your Enterprise SEO Software
Determining which enterprise-level SEO platform is the right one for you depends on what features you value the most.
Maybe you need Ahrefs for its backlink profile analysis, or Screaming Frog because technical perfection is important for your website.
Alternatively, Yoast could give you a better optimisation for your pages, while Google Webmaster Tools could give you a clearer overall picture of your website’s health.
Of course, you can always use more than one software, budget permitting. However, regardless of what specific tools you want, certain features are a must for enterprise SEO.
Breadth
The platform should have a wide variety of tools to fulfil most, if not all, of your SEO analysis needs.
Ease of Use
Too many features might make for a confusing experience. The SEO solution needs to be easy to use.
Scalability
An enterprise level business website is defined by its size. As such, it requires tools that can handle a website of that scope.
Cohesion
While an enterprise SEO platform offers a variety of tools, these tools should be able to integrate for better usability.
Configuration
Your SEO and analytics solution should offer configuration and segmentation to allow you to analyse the whole website as well as parts of it, as per your needs.
International SEO
If your website functions across several countries, you need your enterprise-level SEO platform to give you data across all locations. Read more about international B2B SEO.
Integrations
As we mentioned earlier, you should be able to use more than one tool if a single one doesn’t meet all of your needs. In that case, the ability to integrate the two also becomes an essential feature to reach your global audience.
Insights
AI has become more sophisticated. Because of that, certain enterprise SEO tools have begun offering more than just data in the form of reports. They can also offer insights into the information. It depends on your business if this is a feature you need or if you’d rather get the reports and have humans analyse them.
Updates
The field of SEO is constantly evolving. To keep up, you want an enterprise SEO platform that keeps abreast of the latest technology and algorithm updates.
Support
As with any online tool, it is important to get proper support. That includes guides and tutorials as well as an online community which can answer any questions you might have.
And, if you do experience a problem, they should have a 24/7 support service, whether by chat, email, or phone.
Pricing
Managing and optimising an enterprise-level website can be expensive, so you’re probably already looking for ways to trim the fat. You definitely don’t want an overpriced SEO tool on top of it.
Of course, you would want it to have all the features you need, and pay for them. However, you still want something that is not over your budget but still has everything you need.
Custom Reporting
The benefit of an SEO platform is that it gives you all the data you need on a single dashboard. However, you do want the ability to filter out and customise this information in your reports.
Reporting: How to Present Data
Enterprise analytics is not just different from regular website SEO in scope. The difference is also for whom the information is relevant. For a small business with a small website, the SEO manager might present the report to the owner, or co-owners.
For an enterprise-level website, it might be an external B2B SEO agency presenting these reports to the C-suite. So, the reports need to follow certain guidelines.
The reports should:
- Align with corporate standards
- Provide a visual representation of data for easier understanding
- Measure the right factors to minimise bloated reports
- Present clear evidence and highlight urgent issues
- Have a strong conclusion which also includes a clear strategy and plan of action
How Much Does Enterprise SEO Cost?
It is not always all that straightforward to calculate how much you’d be spending on an enterprise-level website’s SEO. If you hire an in-house team to do it, it will cost you more.
Why?
First, it’s not a one-person job. You’d need a team of experts. Second, you would then need to buy the various tools for your audits and reporting.
If you hire an agency to do it for you, the cost would depend on their team’s quality and expertise. You could probably find “budget” options, but in that case, you will get what you pay. We’re not saying go for the most expensive option. What we’re saying is don’t skimp on your enterprise SEO.
Vet the B2B internet marketing agency carefully and take a look at the results they’ve got for other clients. If they can prove their ability to deliver good results, then they’re worth the price.
Get the Right Information From Your Enterprise SEO With Geeky Tech
So, now that you know why you need SEO Analytics for your enterprise website. It’s probably time you started looking for an SEO agency that could help you with it.
At Geeky Tech, we have the experience. Over the years, we’ve worked with enterprise clients, and we know what it takes for your website to succeed.
Our Geeks have the tools (and the brains to use them the right way) to give you SEO information and reporting that make sense for your business—‘coz we don’t do generic.
Our SEO team can identify the important metrics you should be measuring. We can tell you the right tools and platforms that will work best for your business. And, we will create reports that will help you make the best decisions for your enterprise website.
Get in touch with us for your free enterprise website audit, and we can take it from there!
