An in-depth look at the growth of some of the most successful enterprise SaaS companies will reveal that their SEO strategy was a key differentiator.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the benefits and challenges of enterprise SaaS SEO, how it’s different from “normal” SEO, some strategies and tools to implement enterprise SEO for SaaS companies, and real-life examples of successful enterprise SEO strategies.
Enterprise SaaS SEO involves managing robust enterprise SEO strategies for SaaS companies with large websites and a wide range of products and services.
Organic search comprises 53.3% of all web traffic and it helps B2B companies generate 2X revenue as compared to any other channel. Thus, enterprise SEO focuses on improving the organic presence of large companies.
Specialist enterprise SEO teams manage the individual pages for each product. Compared to small business SEO, enterprise SaaS SEO focuses on short-tail, highly competitive keywords.
All enterprise SaaS sites have these common characteristics:
Typically, large brand names like Salesforce, Adobe, and Shopify with multiple departments and infrastructures use enterprise SaaS SEO software. They implement core SEO principles with advanced and time-intensive strategies that can significantly affect the number of conversions happening on the website.
Enterprise SaaS SEO also includes aligning SEO, content marketing, social, and PR with corporate goals, planning and strategizing, and managing stakeholder interests.
SEO for enterprise companies delivers the following benefits:
Enterprise SEO plans combine on-page SEO optimization, high-quality content, and targeted strategic outreach.
It presents the brand at every stage of the buyer journey: awareness, consideration, and decision with a SaaS content marketing strategy. This raises brand awareness and makes the brand a trustworthy resource for customers.
Here’s how it’s done:
People perform branded searches at every stage of the buyer journey. Branded searches return a mix of results:
Your brand image is influenced greatly by the results that you cannot control.
To control the online narrative and protect brand equity, enterprise SaaS SEO employs the following strategies:
The #1 result in Google’s organic search has an average CTR of 31.7%. No-click impressions also have the power to shape brand reputation as people skim through the search results before deciding which one to click.
While it is tempting to invest SaaS marketing dollars into product and category pages that directly drive revenue, doing so leaves you vulnerable to negative brand content that you cannot control, like third-party reviews. It also gives your competitors the opportunity to do exactly the same thing.
Instead, enterprise SEO focuses on building trust and dominating SERPs by developing top-of-the-funnel content for people at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. By providing useful and reliable information, you encourage prospects to move down your sales funnel and eventually choose your product or service when they’re ready to buy.
Enterprise SEO involves many challenges and problems that don’t arise in smaller companies.
For example, if you need to publish a piece of content, you’ll need to run it by product teams, brand teams, compliance teams, legal teams, and other relevant people.
If you need to fix a technical SEO issue, you’ll need to work with engineering, secure buy-in from stakeholders, and work out a specific solution–all of which could take several weeks.
Traditional SEO principles don’t quite work in the same way for SaaS enterprises as they do for smaller businesses for these reasons:
Enterprises face intense competition from other websites that employ sophisticated SEO techniques. They need SEO strategies that match the scale of their website. There are many more layers of complexity, and many internal stakeholders to consider.
Successful enterprise SEO strategies improve brand perception and edge out the competition in the particular category, but if the SEO campaign fails, it affects the online reputation and revenue of the SaaS company.
The fundamentals of SEO are not different at enterprises, but the processes are. The complexity of the issues makes obvious fixes not as easy as they look.
For example, if you want to replace legacy content with new pages, you’ll have to consider the effect of this change on inbound links and domain authority. A large number of pages, links, and technical issues have to be kept in mind.
Resources from the product, marketing, and IT teams, and SMEs will be required to execute the change.
You’ll also need to demonstrate the business case for the resources and time required to make the change. You’ll go through an approval process to get a sign-off by multiple stakeholders before you can make any changes.
Things work differently at SaaS enterprises than at smaller businesses.
To be successful, enterprise SEO requires cross-functional collaboration and seamless integration with other teams in a corporate environment. Stakeholders from purchasing to PR could be involved in signing off on ideas, resources, or content. Internal hierarchies have to be managed, and certain compromises made.
Thus, a collaborative and proactive approach is required.
While traditional SEO offers incremental value, enterprise SEO makes SaaS companies the market leader in organic search for a product category or industry. Enterprise SEO strategies need more planning and patience to implement and bear results than “normal” SEO.
Some of the salient differences are:
Anything from building links to setting up microdata for product listings on enterprise websites has to be done on a large scale. If the SaaS company has a new product launch or undergoes a merger or acquisition, the layer of complexity grows.
It is not feasible to manage thousands of web pages manually on spreadsheets or documents, even with specialized enterprise SEO teams. Automation is critical for scaling SEO.
You need proprietary enterprise SEO tools and platforms like JetOctopus, SEMrush, seoClarity, Conductor, and BrightEdge to stay on top of enterprise SEO, especially content performance and keyword research.
Enterprise SEO projects often involve additional complexity with multiple locations. You could be managing projects across countries and languages so there’s a requirement for large-scale international SEO campaigns.
Local SEO is important because large companies should have a presence in local markets to drive conversions. Gather information from Google My Business listings and Google reviews. Consider your search competition from smaller local companies apart from your main competitors. Identify content gaps or opportunities that you can address with your higher brand authority.
SaaS companies that have multiple branches or franchises should display location-specific content in SERPs in a manner that is consistent with the brand.
Enterprise SEOs may have to manage the competing demands of different sites and subdomains of the company. Without a holistic approach, issues like content inconsistency, duplicate content, and keyword cannibalization may occur.
The higher the brand authority, the greater the potential for negative PR. The impact of bad press is far-reaching for enterprise SaaS companies.
Branded searches can quickly become dominated by negative media mentions and articles. A sophisticated enterprise SEO strategy can help you control branded search results and control online negativity. It can also help you repair the damage caused by unfair or inaccurate claims.
Some of the challenges that enterprise SaaS SEOs have to navigate in an enterprise environment are:
Despite high-quality content, link authority, or brand recognition, an enterprise website will be eclipsed by its competitors if it does not focus on technical SEO. You need to consider aspects like JS implementation, pagination, generating robots.txt, using subdomains or subdirectories, pushing sitemaps.xml files, generating canonical tags, identifying pages that require or have noindex tags, infinite scrolling, and more.
Issues like duplicate titles, redirect chains, or JS issues will prevent the site from showing higher up in SERPs.
Due to the level of complexity involved, enterprises have separate engineering teams working on different features of the site and even on different platforms.
To work effectively in enterprises, you have to understand how the site is structured, how the engineering/development teams work, who are the multiple stakeholders, and what the role of SEO is in that framework.
Securing buy-in within a reasonable timeframe and justifying why your recommendations should be prioritized is one of the biggest challenges that enterprise SEO teams face in large companies.
Since SEO is often not viewed as a worthwhile investment, you have to educate stakeholders about the importance and benefits of your SEO strategy. Getting to know as many people as possible from the top down in the company helps you get organizational buy-in.
Demonstrating small improvements on a section of the website can also help you get decision-makers to sign off on your SEO strategies.
Even if large companies understand that SEO can impact organic search and revenue, they don’t understand it enough to make it a priority. Along with securing buy-in for enterprise SEO strategies, you also have to push to have SEO considered a priority for the business.
This can be done by demonstrating small wins to stakeholders and decision-makers in alignment with corporate goals. Again, getting to know people across teams and more stakeholders can help you become part of meetings where business priorities are discussed. You can present your business case to have SEO considered a part of major projects.
After securing buy-in and making it a priority to invest in SEO, they make the mistake of hiring dubious agencies who show fake monthly reports.
You need a specialized and reputed agency with enterprise SEO experience who understands the SaaS industry thoroughly and will track effective SEO KPIs and provide quarterly progress reports.
Different teams in a large corporation prefer different metrics.
Reporting in PowerPoint, dashboards, or internal tools is a time-consuming process at the enterprise level. But it is necessary to prove the effectiveness of SEO. You can leverage the success of a project in one group to promote a company-wide rollout.
It is challenging to get the support and budget required to handle SEO for enterprise companies because top management needs to be convinced of its importance. Enterprise SEO software and specialized enterprise SEO agencies come at a price.
To get support for SEO initiatives, you can demonstrate the benefits accruing from one aspect of SEO and highlight the potential growth in other areas.
Similarly, when a certain tool can help pull in billions in revenue, enterprise decision-makers will not object to spending a fraction of that amount on specialized tools.
Compared to SEO for other types of businesses, enterprise SaaS SEO strategy revolves around has two areas:
For successful growth, you should know your target personas and create strategies to show your product/site to these people. If your personas are not accurate or granular enough, people will consume your content but will not move further along the sales funnel.
Also, consider how people usually find software–they’re looking for a solution to their problem. You have to position your SaaS product as the answer to their problem.
An enterprise SaaS SEO strategy involves directing the right kind of people towards your site as the solution to their problem.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to developing an enterprise SaaS SEO strategy:
The most important part of enterprise SEO is research. Define your target customer personas. Find the keywords your target personas use in search queries to find software, and understand the search intent.
A customer persona is a representation of the type of customer who will benefit the most from your product. Creating personas takes time and a combination of enterprise SEO analytics data, surveys, customer interviews, and internal team discussion.
Customer personas for SaaS products depend on three aspects:
Also, consider the following questions:
Demographics Pro provides detailed insights into social media audiences, which will help you understand who is looking for your products.
You can also find audience information on Audiense, including the hashtags and words they use.
Next, conduct a meeting with representatives from the marketing team, sales team, leadership, and web development for answers to these:
Conduct surveys of past customers to get information on the following aspects:
A customer persona is a representation of the type of customer who will benefit the most from your product. Creating personas takes time and a combination of enterprise SEO analytics data, surveys, customer interviews, and internal team discussion.
Now that your target personas are ready, it’s time to brainstorm with your team about the different ways in which your customers are searching for you.
These keywords are the foundation of the actual keyword research. They are the starting point for finding specific search terms to target.
Create a list of keywords, synonyms, and keyword variants that you would search for if you were a customer.
Ask yourself these questions to help you find your seed keywords:
Once you have a list of seed keywords ready, dig into your competitors’ data and check the keywords they’re currently ranking for.
Branded keywords are phrases used by prospects to search for more information about your brand’s products and services. They are looking for alternatives after having done their research and are closer to the moment of conversion.
Your company needs to dominate the search results for your branded keywords so that you control the narrative around your brand and your competitors don’t snatch away space in your segment.
If the enterprise business spans multiple locations around the globe, you’ll need to optimize for international keywords.
Simple keyword translation will result in poor searchability because people do not use the direct translations of English words in searches. Also, an audience that speaks a different language may have a different way of relating to a product or service.
A professional native translator who also understands keyword research may be required to find the perfect localized equivalent of your keywords.
Voice search optimization will help you differentiate your enterprise SaaS brand from that of your competitors.
Featured Snippets are search results displayed in a box above Google’s organic search results that provide quick answers to the query. By understanding user intent and providing brief answers, you can claim that spot.
SEMrush found that People Also Ask answer boxes are six times more likely to appear than featured snippets within a SERP.
Read through the PAA questions to identify additional topics and keywords that you can use. You can also use this information to optimize for voice search.
Find long-tail keyword variants with Google’s Autosuggest, Ahrefs, or KeywordTool.io.
Now you have a list of target keywords and keyword variants, assign them to the right pages on which they will live.
A good understanding of your web pages is required to map keywords.
Create a keyword research template in a spreadsheet with your target keywords in one column and your target pages in another.
Do not overlook on-page SEO, which involves updating your pages to improve your SERP rankings and organic traffic.
Ensure the following actions are taken:
Since enterprise sites are massive, it is best to use a related posts widget to show similar web pages from your site. You can also add internal links within the body of the content on the page.
Execute the 70/20/10 rule, which involves:
Enterprise sites have complex architecture and multiple legacy systems. Various teams are involved in maintaining different aspects of the site so the technical and political environment is complicated.
Prioritization is important as there are multiple tasks involved in technical SEO.
Here’s a list of some “quick wins” that you should consider working on first:
Google Search Console enables you to:
These issues should be checked periodically and fixed as soon as possible.
Enterprise SEOs need to gain more control over crawlability because large websites are difficult for search engines to process unless the crawl budget is managed correctly.
John Mueller says on Google Webmaster Hangout, “URL duplication is an issue on larger sites as Google is likely to miss new content.”
Improve the crawlability and user experience of your site with these steps:
Page speed impacts user experience and enterprise SEO analytics. Google’s page experience update in 2021 includes Core Web Vitals metrics and a Page Experience report has been updated in GSC.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tracks website performance, notifies you about pages that are not optimized, and provides actionable suggestions to fix issues.
To fix slow page speed, you can try solutions like image compression and optimization, server response time improvement, browser caching improvement, and JS minifying.
GSC has a “Mobile Usability” report that tells you if the website displays properly on mobile devices.
To improve the mobile-friendliness of your site, follow these steps:
Structured data helps search engine crawlers to understand the content and data on a page. It appears in SERPs in the form of rich snippets, giving your listing a visual appeal.
After the important technical aspects of enterprise SEO are sorted out, we turn to develop a content marketing strategy.
Enterprise SaaS SEO success is dependent on creating great content that outranks competitors. Due to the size, scope, and compartmentalized structure of enterprise businesses, it helps to have a dedicated content marketing team.
Here are the steps to execute an enterprise content strategy:
Brand content guidelines are a comprehensive resource that explains how the brand is presented, which includes the tone of messaging, brand images, brand colors, fonts, and so on. It enables quality control and uniformity of content put out by the brand and offers a good user experience.
Brand content guidelines should include:
Determine the content types that are most suitable for your target audience. Written content such as ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, how-to guides, success stories is the most common form of content marketing assets that SaaS businesses create.
A blog strategy is crucial to increase brand awareness and drive conversions. Enterprise businesses can build stronger relationships with customers through high-quality, educational blog content.
A Resource page, also called a links page, houses knowledge resources like guides, ebooks, case studies, videos, podcasts, and webinars that prospects can use as a reference.
It also includes links to relevant articles published on other sites that you recommend to your community.
The role of the Resources page is to move prospects from being unaware of the problem to being aware of the solution.
Structure the blog using the topic cluster method or pillar-and-cluster technique wherein a content hub consists of a pillar page and cluster pages of content hyperlinked to it. These pages deal with an aspect of the content discussed in the pillar page.
The topic cluster model has a positive user experience by making it easy for prospects to find the information they want. So they stay longer on the site and revisit it when they need more references.
Link-worthy content may be informational, educational, inspiring, or entertaining. To get natural links or editorially-given links, create useful content that best answers the questions that your target audience asks.
Consider creating these types of content to get credible backlinks and boost organic visibility:
Since enterprise sites are massive and have multiple subdomains and subfolders, adding more pages will make the site unwieldy.
Use Deepcrawl’s content tool to comb through existing pages to identify thin, duplicate or underperforming content that can be either deleted or refreshed. This will increase ranking opportunities and boost the user experience.
Enterprise link-building is characterized by four key factors: scalability, broad and deep integration, quality and relevance over quantity, and developing relevant and action-oriented KPIs.
Enterprise link-building is characterized by four key factors: scalability, broad and deep integration, quality and relevance over quantity, and developing relevant and action-oriented KPIs.
Enterprise businesses can leverage community engagements like interviews, industry round-ups, contests/giveaways, HARO, and events for links. It adds more value to existing initiatives and supports brand building besides enterprise SEO.
Enterprise SaaS companies distribute their content as guest posts to reputed and authoritative industry blogs. Apart from building natural links indirectly, they also improve brand awareness, establish their expertise, drive traffic to their site, and generate leads.
BuzzSumo, Alexa, and BuzzStream can help you find suitable blogs to pitch your content to.
By monitoring the web for brand mentions, you can find link opportunities. Next comes quality outreach wherein you send a personalized request to link back to your site. Since your brand has been mentioned, a link is much more relevant.
Monitoring unbranded mentions, such as company-specific products or services, corporate programs, or prominent employees can also lead to links.
Use tools like Fresh Web Explorer and Mention to locate brand mentions. You can also search for your company’s proprietary images using Image Raider or TinEye and request citation links.
Broken link building or dead link building involves building backlinks by requesting publications to replace 404-page links pointing to competitor pages with your own pages.
Dead pages on competitor sites provide a bad user experience for their visitors. If you have a similar product or resource, you can send an outreach email requesting they replace the broken link with a live link from your website.
Tools like Screaming Frog, Deepcrawl, and Open Site Explorer help you find broken links.
Link building through influencer marketing involves researching specific bloggers, influencers, and publications in your industry and partnering with them to promote your content.
Tools like BuzzSumo help you find popular posts on topics related to your company or products, which helps you track which publications they’re featured in.
Consider the following important aspects of planning an enterprise SEO strategy:
To handle the size and complexity of massive enterprise sites, you need specialized enterprise SEO tools like JetOctopus, BrightEdge, and seoClarity.
Without automation, it is not feasible to manage the large volume of pages and keywords, especially if they are spread across multiple web properties.
The spending on proprietary tools can be justified by showing it as a team efficiency improvement KPI.
Enterprise SaaS businesses are typically not as nimble as smaller businesses. It helps to have a dedicated SEO team with clear roles and responsibilities to push enterprise SEO as part of corporate strategy.
No matter how good the in-house SEO team is, it is not practical to assume that they can handle all aspects of the enterprise’s sites. It makes business sense to outsource specific segments of SEO to a professional SaaS SEO agency for scalable and quick execution.
Measuring, tracking, and reporting enterprise SEO KPIs provides three benefits:
It can be tricky to report on KPIs because they do not directly relate to revenue.
With enterprise SEO platforms like Conductor or BrightEdge that offer multi-metric tracking functionality, you can leverage usage reports or dashboard access as a KPI.
Primary SEO KPIs you should track are organic traffic, number of pages driving traffic, Google Analytics goals, link profile growth, and the rate of site issues change.
Secondary SEO KPIs include repeat visits/branded visits and tangible results like demo requests, bookings, or inquiries from the organic channel.
Enterprise SaaS SEO tools make it easier to manage websites with thousands of pages and keywords. Some of the best enterprise SEO software are described here:
JetOctopus is an enterprise SaaS SEO log analyzer and site crawler that offers a comprehensive enterprise SEO audit by overlapping crawl report data with log insights and Google Search Console. It has a crawl rate of 200 pages per second and allows you to crawl multiple websites simultaneously.
Its key features are:
Botify is a top enterprise SEO software with three suites:
Botify works well for companies with large websites that want to increase ROI through organic search and for enterprise businesses with requirements like SLA, SSO, and adherence to search engine TOS.
Conductor is an enterprise SEO and content technology platform that generates real-time insights into what your customers are searching for and recommends actions you can take to improve visibility and revenue.
One of its key features, Insight Stream, analyzes websites to offer insights into content performance, competitive insights, keyword alerts, and optimization opportunities across different countries.
Conductor generates results through a combination of organic marketing technologies and strategic digital services.
seoClarity is an SEO enterprise software that provides all SEO data, metrics, and capabilities within a single integrated platform with no artificial limitations.
You can perform site audits and deep crawls to uncover technical SEO issues and duplicate content. It uses machine learning algorithms, patented analyses, years of historical data, keywords, and daily web crawls to provide actionable insights on content performance.
Some of its key features are:
BrightEdge is a global content marketing and enterprise SEO software that runs on artificial intelligence and provides real-time insights. Its capabilities include keyword research, enterprise keyword tracking, competitive analysis, technical SEO, content creation and optimization, technical SEO, backlink research, and reporting.
Some of its key features are:
Let’s explore some examples of enterprise SaaS companies that have successfully implemented enterprise SEO strategies:
Zapier is an app integration and automation platform that enables users to set up triggered workflows and actions between different applications. The site receives 6 million visits per month.
The key enterprise SEO strategies that helped Zapier reach this milestone are:
The landing pages helped drive Zapier’s early growth and currently account for approximately half of all search traffic to the website.
Adobe is a computer software company with 94,300 pages on its site. It would not be feasible to manually optimize individual pages, so the company has adopted several enterprise SEO strategies to pull in more organic traffic.
Adobe created separate landing pages for each of its features. In one year, its organic traffic increased from 6.3 million to 9 million. It ranks for 19, 467 keywords on the first page of Google.
Salesforce is a leading CRM platform with 58,900 pages on its site. It’s impossible to manually optimize each one of them. So the company runs its website on a content management platform that performs bulk functions on its pages.
Salesforce began with an enterprise website SEO audit to identify and fix technical SEO issues. Next, they worked on earning relevant backlinks from authoritative websites.
The result: Salesforce ranks for nearly 81, 417 keywords on Google’s page one, and the website’s traffic increased by one million in a year.
Shopify is a leading ecommerce platform for online stores and retail POS systems. As of 2021, it posted a revenue of $1.12 billion, an increase of 46% y-o-y.
Shopify’s SEO strategy hinges on three factors:
Shopify also worked on driving external links to reputed sites with high DA, such as Mashable.
The company also uses a five-step SEO integration technique to build brand awareness for high-volume keywords.
The integration partner provides the content for steps 2 to 4 and also links back to the landing page.
Intuit is a global financial platform that generates more than $6 billion in revenue. Their portfolio of products includes QuickBooks (suite of business tools), TurboTax (tax preparation software), and Mint (personal finance improvement tool).
As of 2020, they have a customer base of 50 million.
Here’s an account of how QuickBooks used a content pruning strategy to boost traffic:
Zoom Video Communications is a SaaS video conferencing company. In its fiscal 2020 earnings report, the company announced that its customer base had expanded to 81,900 firms, an increase of 61% since the previous year.
Most of Zoom’s top-ranking keywords are branded keywords, thus it appears that most visitors are aware of the brand.
The key channels that Zoom used to drive its growth are:
The more pages your website has, the more visibility you have, and the more problems arise. Consequently, it becomes more complex and challenging to maintain your SEO.
An enterprise SEO strategy is different from a “traditional” SEO strategy in that it poses unique challenges:
Enterprise SEO teams focus on enhancing content, getting backlinks and protecting them, and resolving technical SEO issues.
Success in enterprise SaaS SEO requires communication and collaboration with the understanding that you’re a cog in the wheel of a giant machine.
Enterprise SaaS SEO refers to the process of implementing SEO strategies to improve the organic presence and revenue for large SaaS companies. The size of the company is typically defined by the number of pages on its website, and not necessarily the number of employees. These SEO strategies should be scalable so that the enterprise SaaS company can maintain its rankings in SERPs.
Yes, enterprise SaaS SEO is necessary and isn’t just a fancy term to market to larger companies.
Strategies that work for small businesses or mid-market SaaS companies with a small number of pages do not necessarily work for larger SaaS companies with thousands of pages.
An enterprise SaaS SEO agency offers enterprise SaaS SEO services, also called corporate SEO services, to enterprise SaaS companies. It involves implementing large-scale SEO strategies that target keywords with higher search volume and competition and also maintaining or improving existing rankings.
Experienced enterprise SaaS SEO agencies like Growfusely don’t simply rely on conventional fixes because they understand how enterprise SEO needs additional work. They also know that the level of audience engagement at a larger company is higher than that at smaller ones.
Good agencies typically have a dedicated technical SEO manager who is present at meetings between engineering and other verticals across the SaaS company.
To succeed in enterprise SaaS SEO, you need to be able to work together with multiple stakeholders and teams in the company. Good communication and an understanding of the big picture will help you get into the enterprise mindset.
When you understand that you’re part of a much bigger environment with many moving parts, you can appreciate the challenges and priorities of other stakeholders. You should also be willing to take feedback.
The key is to have everyone on the same page and work with them instead of against them.
Enterprises need a team of experienced SEO experts to protect existing brand authority and backlinks while updating and refreshing content on thousands of pages.
For the enterprise SEO strategies to be successful, SEO team members and organizational stakeholders should work together. The SEO team should be able to seamlessly integrate with other teams at the enterprise business. An SEO team typically consists of a developer, an SEO analyst, a content writer, and a project manager.
It isn’t unusual to have PR teams, legal teams, purchasing teams, brand teams, and product teams involved in signing off on approvals. Being proactive and collaborative is key to success in enterprise SEO.
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