Why Most Enterprise SEO Strategies Fail at Scale

Bigger isn’t always better with SEO. You might think that bigger, enterprise companies would automatically win thanks to large resources, teams, and budgets. But let me let you in on a secret: most enterprise SEO strategies fail at scale.

This isn’t down to lack of effort, if anything, they’re doing too much. They’re overcomplicating their strategies and losing sight of what they’re actually trying to achieve.

There are plenty of reasons why enterprise seo strategies can fail, so let’s take a look at them, and the lessons you can take away.

The Illusion of Control

First up, let’s make things clear: many things related to SEO are outside of your control. An enterprise SEO strategy has A LOT of moving parts. Your website could have thousands of pages, you could have multiple teams with different goals, and who knows how many stakeholders you need to keep happy. But if you try to micromanage everything on a granular level, you risk getting lost in the weeds.

You need to accept that SEO isn’t a perfect science. There’s no set playbook you can follow that will produce the same results every single time.

We don’t have any control over the changes a search engine makes to their systems that dictate how successful an SEO strategy might be. Search engines are constantly updating and changing their algorithms based on shifts in user behavior and new competitors. It’s all too easy to spend huge amounts of resources and time tailoring every aspect of your site, just to find all that time wasted when Google tweaks their algorithm.

Instead, enterprise SEO strategies need to have flexibility baked in. This doesn’t just make you more adaptable to algorithmic changes. It also allows you to experiment more with your approach and make adjustments on the fly. Your SEO strategy becomes a living thing that can evolve over time, rather than a static playbook you have to follow until it needs a complete rework that takes you back to square one.

The Silo Effect

The larger your organization, the more likely you are to have silos appear. As teams get bigger and new specialist roles appear, it gets more and more likely that they’ll wind up operating in their own bubbles. While you might want to keep things separate for certain projects, silos can be a huge barrier to success when it comes to a project that demands cross-functional collaboration, like SEO.

Effective SEO requires input and collaboration from multiple teams. The actual names of the teams might vary, but usually you need input from your:

• Content creation team: The people actually writing and producing the content that’s part of your SEO strategy. This will probably include your PR team as well. They’ll probably be focused on page SEO.
• Developers and web designers: The folks who build the actual architecture and UX of your site. They’ll need to be looking at the Technical SEO side of things and making sure your pages are properly optimized.
• Product and customer-facing teams: You need input from these teams to ensure you’re displaying your products and services properly, and that you’re responding to your customer’s actual needs.

There might be even more involved depending on your structure and business model. Regardless, you need strong cross-silo leadership to make sure the teams are collaborating and aligned toward the same goals. Your content team’s efforts in creating amazing, SEO’d blogs will be wasted if the dev team hasn’t optimized the site to support them. There’s no point in having a beautifully designed site that isn’t set up to be mobile-friendly.

Your teams need to be working together towards a shared goal, otherwise, your SEO strategy will wind up out of sync and fail to deliver the results you need.

You need to break down these silos and create cross-functional teams that work together on SEO. There needs to be open communication between your different teams and departments, and they need to be aware of how their individual roles intersect and contribute to the big picture.

The Keyword Obsession

There once was a time when keywords were the be-all and end-all of SEO. They’re still important, but not to the extent they once were. But their prevalence for so long means that many enterprises haven’t adapted and get so caught up in keyword research and optimization that they forget about the actual user.

Search engines are putting a lot more focus on search intent, which is basically looking at what users are actually trying to achieve when they make a search. If you search for something like ‘best chocolate cake recipe’, you’re looking for a really dang good recipe for chocolate cake, not a page that’s stuffed with that keyword.

Search engines are smart enough now to recognize this sort of thing. A page packed with keywords might rank high initially, but if users are leaving that page quickly because they aren’t finding what they’re looking for, it will drop down the SERP quickly. Your content needs to provide actual value to users and respond to the reasons why they might search for a certain term.

Keywords need to be an aspect of your SEO strategy, not your obsession. Instead, focus on getting to know your target audience, their search intent, and how you can respond to their needs. Develop content that responds to the different reasons someone could be searching for it.

‘Best chocolate cake recipe’ can mean many things. They could be looking for comparisons between different popular recipes. They could be looking for a story about what was considered the best chocolate cake in history. Or they might just be looking for the recipe for a really dang good chocolate cake. What they aren’t looking for is a page that says “best chocolate cake recipe” a lot.

The Scale Paradox

Scaling SEO sounds like a no-brainer. You post more content, you get more links, and it should drive more traffic, right? Well…

Quantity isn’t the path to success in SEO, it’s quality. You might be able to churn out hundreds of blog posts or build thousands of backlinks. Awesome, but are you doing all that strategically?

If quantity was the best way to go, the obvious thing to do would be to create a huge number of blog posts, each tailored towards all the different keywords related to your industry. It’s doable, in theory.

But unless you have a humongous content team who can all spend a long time working on individual blogs, you’re going to end up with a load of low-quality content that won’t rank or drive the traffic you actually want to your site.

While you still need a reasonable amount of content being published at a steady rate, the key to successfully scaling your SEO strategy is to focus on quality over quantity. Don’t spread yourself and your team too thin. Instead, identify the actions that are going to have the biggest impact and prioritize them.

Thus, you should focus on high-quality blogs with in-depth research and advice over keyword-packed slop, or focus your backlinking on high-authority sites. Sure, you might see the numbers go up for a short while, but is that really what you want?

The Data Dilemma

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that data is pretty important to your role and your organization. After all, data-driven decisions govern pretty much everything in many enterprises. But when it comes to SEO strategies, there is such a thing as being too data-driven.

Keeping track of SEO data can be messy. Mainly because there’s A LOT of metrics to track. There’s organic traffic, bounce rates, click-through rates, keyword rankings, and more. And different pages have different ways of tracking performance.

You can’t apply the usual metrics you might use to track performance on a blog to something like an online marketplace, a forum, or a directory. All these different data streams can make it easy to get overwhelmed and miss insights that can actually move the needle.

First and foremost, you need to identify the metrics that actually matter. Don’t try to track everything. Instead, choose the key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business goals.

Short-term Wins vs. Long-term Growth

We all love quick wins. Who doesn’t love being able to show off a big positive spike in traffic in your weekly meetings? It makes you feel good, it impresses your boss, and it helps stave off the dread that you might have to enter the pretty terrible marketing job market any time soon.

But if you’re just chasing quick wins with SEO, I’m sorry to say you’re doing it wrong. SEO isn’t a single project, or a limited-time campaign. It’s not something that’s ever ‘done’. SEO is about the long-term maintenance and growth of your brand.

This kind of sustained growth is especially important in enterprise SEO. You’re already an established brand, with a lot of moving parts and stakeholders. You neither need nor have the agility for the kind of flashy headline-grabbing, PR-style SEO that start-ups need to make themselves heard. What you need to focus on is ensuring your metrics consistently go up at a steady rate.

All stakeholders and team members need to be on board with and aware of the importance of sustained growth. That’s not to say you should ignore a quick win if the opportunity appears. After all, low-hanging fruit is still worth picking. But the quick wins you chase should work alongside your long-term SEO strategy, not be its entire foundation.

Forgetting Your Actual Audience

One of the easiest traps to fall into when it comes to SEO is to focus too much on trying to please search engines. But at the end of the day, your brand’s site is supposed to be visited by actual people, not search bots.

But when we focus on creating content that’s optimized for search engines but ignores what humans actually want, you’ll end up with a site that search engines love but people hate. A site that’s perfect from a technical SEO side, but has terrible UX is just going to drive people away. At the end of the day, search bots don’t buy products and services, people do.

If you focus on drilling right down into what people actually want with your content, your SEO success will follow. Don’t worry about going super niche with your SEO if you have to. It’s better to capture the attention of people in that niche, who are more inclined to become customers, than spreading yourself too thin trying to please Google.

Final Thoughts

Enterprise SEO is a tricky beast, just because there are so many moving parts and pitfalls to avoid. But when you scale with an awareness of these traps, you can avoid them.

Don’t just copy another playbook and hope it’s going to produce the same results. Develop a strategy that works for you and your brand. Stay flexible, stay focused, and always keep the end user as your top priority.