Enterprise SaaS SEO Guide – Strategies, Tactics, and Tips

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. 

Enterprise SEO or corporate SEO follows the same principles as traditional SEO; however, it requires a more tactical approach due to the size, complexity, and siloed structure of enterprise businesses. 

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:

• The impact of the website on brand reputation and revenue
• The level of collaboration and project management required to maintain the website
• The level of automation required to execute tasks across thousands of pages 

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.

Benefits of enterprise SaaS SEO 

SEO for enterprise companies delivers the following benefits:

1. Get to customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey

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:

• The enterprise SEO team uses the data to identify the best keywords.
• The content team develops content like web copy, blog posts, whitepapers, email campaigns, and landing pages based on these keywords. 

2. Improve your reputation

People perform branded searches at every stage of the buyer journey. Branded searches return a mix of results:

• Web properties like websites, social media pages, and microsites that companies can control
• Third-party review sites, news articles, and Wikipedia pages that companies cannot control

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:

• Focus on generating positive online reviews and media mentions. This increases revenue and improves brand reputation.
• Publish lots of high-quality content to signal to Google that you’re an industry expert and an authoritative source. 
• Read negative reviews and consider how you can address the concerns that customers have raised. Also, pass on any feedback about sluggish customer support to the relevant team.

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. 

3. Dominate your product category and industry

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:

1. Stiff competition

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. 

2. Conventional fixes don’t work

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.

3. Internal collaboration is critical

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:

1. Scalability and automation

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.

2. Multiple locations and teams

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. 

3. Multiple sites and subdomains

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. 

4. Reputation management

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.

Enterprise SEO can help large SaaS companies dominate organic search for their industry. But it is limited by the specific challenges of navigating a large organization. 

Some of the challenges that enterprise SaaS SEOs have to navigate in an enterprise environment are:

1. Complex technical challenges

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. 

2. Getting buy-in

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. 

3. Priority for the business

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. 

4. Tracking the effectiveness

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.

• Executives and product teams can learn about their market position through Share of Voice.
• Paid and product teams may want to know about the distribution of organic, paid, and no-click searches.

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. 

5. Budget for tools/help

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:

• Personas
• Problems

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:

1. Perform keyword research

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. 

Build customer persona

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:

• Demographics: age, gender, market segment, geo-specifics, job title, the company they work in
• Primary goal: What is the customer trying to accomplish? How is your product going to help them meet that goal(s)?
• Pain points/blockers: Are other solutions too time-consuming? Does their current tool lack some features? What things are preventing them from completing their work?

Also, consider the following questions:

• Which type of content is popular with your ideal audience?
• How does your ideal customer explore your website? Is their experience overwhelming because of site bloat?
• Does your ideal customer face any confusion when visiting your landing page, second page, and third page due to faults in navigation or lack of CTAs?

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:

• What questions are prospects asking the sales team?
• Which channels do prospects prefer – email, call, live chat, web form?
• Do prospects use certain terms or words? 
• Do prospects refer to certain content on the website when talking to sales personnel?
• Does the description of the ideal audience given by the sales team match that of persona(s) created by studying online behavior? 

Conduct surveys of past customers to get information on the following aspects:

• Relevant demographic details (to reinforce digital and offline customer personas)
• How did you specifically help the customer solve their problem?
• Through which channel do you like to communicate with the company?
• Is there a web resource on our site that you would use for help/reference later on?
• How would you rate our website based on user experience, navigability, content quality, and explanation?

Brainstorm and research keywords

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. 

Seed Keywords

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:

• Which topics are relevant to your SaaS product(s)? A topic may contain several seed keywords.
• What does your product do? What problems does it solve?
• How would you describe the product to someone?
• Who is the product for?
• What do you say when someone asks you about the benefits of using your SaaS product?

Keywords where competitors rank

Once you have a list of seed keywords ready, dig into your competitors’ data and check the keywords they’re currently ranking for.

• Use tools like SEMrush or BrightEdge Data Cube to see which of your competitors are ranking high on Google and which of their keywords are doing well.
• Analyze your competitors’ title tags to see if you can find more keyword opportunities.
• Conduct a keyword gap analysis to find the keywords that both you and your competitors are targeting and which keywords are unique to your competitors.
• You can also use your competitors as a keyword. E.g. competitor’s name + alternative.

Branded keywords that could impact brand reputation

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.

• Use Google Alerts to receive notifications whenever your brand is mentioned online.
• Use the search function on social media platforms to find an exact phrase, a specific term, or words in the same phrase.
• Use tools like SEMrush or SproutSocial to show search terms related to your brand.

International keywords

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. 

• Start with the English website and identify keywords that could work well in other languages or keywords that should be left out.
• Identify regional-specific issues and optimize for those keywords on one site only. 

New keyword search trends:

Voice search optimization will help you differentiate your enterprise SaaS brand from that of your competitors. 

• Search for relevant voice search terms like “[keyword] near me.”
• Select question-form or long-tail keywords as they’re more common with voice search.
• Use easily pronounceable keywords.

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. 

• Use GSC to see which keywords you’re already ranking for in the top 10 search results. 
• Check if any of these keywords generate a featured snippet. By optimizing your content for these keywords, you could rank for featured snippets.

People Also Ask Keywords

SEMrush found that People Also Ask answer boxes are six times more likely to appear than featured snippets within a SERP. 

• Queries that start with question words like Why, When, Where, How, What, and Who tend to trigger PAA boxes. 
• These keywords tend to have low monthly search volumes. 

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. 

Long-tail keywords

Find long-tail keyword variants with Google’s Autosuggest, Ahrefs, or KeywordTool.io. 

• Type your product category into Google’s search box and see what suggestions you get. 
• Long-tail keywords contain more terms and are more targeted toward what the prospect is searching for. E.g. “Healthcare CRM tool”

Map keywords to important pages

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. 

• Each topic should be mapped to relevant primary and secondary keywords, which will help you build your content strategy. 
• Ensure that the keywords you choose for different pages mirror the site structure.

Create a keyword research template in a spreadsheet with your target keywords in one column and your target pages in another. 

2. On-page SEO

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: 

• Heading/title – Your main keyword should be in the title with an H1 tag. Each page should have only one H1. The title should have less than 70 characters.
• Subheadings – Your subheadings should display a consistent information hierarchy – H2, H3, H4. Your title should always be your H1 and include the primary keyword, which is followed by H2 with keyword variations.
• URLs – Use short yet descriptive URLs with the primary keyword included
• Meta title and description – Include your main keyword in a short meta title and write a meta description that encourages a prospect to click on the link and read more. Meta descriptions show what lies beneath the site’s title tag in the SERPs. 
• Images – Compress your images, include ALT tags to match your main keyword or variations of it, and include your keyword in the title of the image. 
• Outgoing links – Include links that point to other pages on your site and external sites that support the main keyword of the page.
• Internal linking – Don’t forget to optimize internal links as well to make it easier for crawlers to find new pages and rank them. Internal links also increase dwell time by encouraging visitors to spend more time on your site. This boosts the site’s ranking in SERPs. 

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:

• On-page optimization along with your content strategy will generate 70% of your results.
• Internal linking, fixing broken links, and improving page load speeds will give 20% of the results.
• Backlink building and social media efforts will generate the remaining 10% of the results.

3. Technical SEO

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:

Brainstorm and research keywords

Google Search Console enables you to:

• monitor your website’s appearance 
• find and fix technical errors like soft 404s and 500 errors
• Identify AMP issues
• see structured data issues and crawl rates
• submit sitemaps

These issues should be checked periodically and fixed as soon as possible. 

Improve crawlability and user experience

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:

• Use 301 redirects when deleting old pages so that the old URLs point to their current location and visitors don’t see error signs.
• If your website does not have a sitemap, use an XML sitemap generating tool or work with the engineering team to develop one. 
• Review missing or incorrect robots.txt files with the engineering team to configure them correctly.
• Use canonical tags to ensure that the correct version of each page is indexed. 

Improve page speed and core web vitals

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. 

Make the website mobile-friendly

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:

• Update all metadata on your mobile site to be equivalent to the desktop site.
• Ensure that the correct hreflang code and links exist.
• Add structured data to your mobile pages and ensure URLs are updated to mobile URLs.

Use proper structured data and schema markups

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. 

• Identify opportunities to include structured data in your pages.
• Review your GSC reports regularly to ensure there are no issues with your structured data markup.
• Add schema markup, which is code that tells Google to display additional details above your meta description in SERPs. E.g. address, client ratings, opening hours, service areas

After the important technical aspects of enterprise SEO are sorted out, we turn to develop a content marketing strategy. 

4. 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:

Create brand content guidelines

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:

• Brand essence (voice, tone, personality)
• The value proposition of the brand
• Taglines/slogans
• Messaging pillars
• Image formats and specs 
• Color palette
• Logos and acceptable variations
• Typography and fonts
• Content types with unique features and CTAs
• Examples of acceptable and unacceptable content

Create a blog and Resource page

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. 

• Each blog post should have CTAs in the body of the content.
• Link back to product pages and comparison pages within the blog post. This guides prospects to features, benefits, and use cases. 
• Use storytelling to make your content engaging and emotional.

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. 

Have an internal pillar/cluster content strategy

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. 

Create link-worthy content assets

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:

• Original research – Insights, facts, and statistics about your industry and the latest trends. E.g. research and reports by Salesforce
• Infographics – A visually engaging way to condense a lot of information into a digestible form. It includes quotes, images, and statistics. Well-performing blog posts can be repurposed into infographics to get more mileage out of the content. Salesforce does excellent infographics as well. 
• Online tools and resources – Useful tools that prospects can bookmark and use whenever required, such as HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator. 
• Guides and tutorials – They serve as a single comprehensive resource for prospects to learn about a topic. Include long-tail keywords and question keyword variations to generate more inbound links. E.g. Shopify’s guides and Adobe Creative Cloud’s tutorials 
• Rankings – A list of recommendations about tools, tactics, or resources backed by a clear rationale. 

Upgrade harmful content

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. 

5. Enterprise link building

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.

Building a community

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. 

Guest posting on reputed sites

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. 

Monitoring brand mentions

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

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. 

Leveraging influencer marketing

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. 

6. Teams and tools

Consider the following important aspects of planning an enterprise SEO strategy:

Use enterprise SEO tools

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. 

Have proper team structure

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. 

Outsource to a specialized agency

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. 

7. Measure, track, and report

Measuring, tracking, and reporting enterprise SEO KPIs provides three benefits:

• It reveals details about content performance, opportunities, and shortcomings
• It highlights which areas need focus and/or improvement.
• It demonstrates your success rate. 

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:

1. JetOctopus

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:

• Log Analyzer – enables you to track how Google bots and other search engine bots are handling your site and pages. You can point the Google bot to crawl your popular pages more often and reduce the crawling of irrelevant pages. It also identifies badly behaving bots that waste your server’s resources. 
• Google Search Console integration – You can connect your JetOctopus account to your GSC account and track the performance of your keywords every day. Visualizations provide information on which pages draw in the most traffic, which pages have up or down movement, and the general ranking positions for your keywords. 
• Link Report – provides two kinds of reports for links on your website: Internal Links and External Links. You can see the number of internal links and outbound links on your website. It helps you improve your internal linking strategy and your website’s linking structure.
• Compare Crawl – It runs a check of your website and identifies and reports on issues that could be causing problems for search engines. These issues include redirect issues, general indexing issues, and missing metadata. Its visualizations depict information by category, depth, status codes, and load times. The ability to compare two crawls from different time periods enables you to track your progress in site optimizations. 
• Content Analysis – provides a content report that highlights pages with thin content (less than 100 words) and pages with low content (less than 500 words). You can list pages that need updating and also identify pages with videos or bulky images that are increasing loading speeds. 

2. Botify

Botify is a top enterprise SEO software with three suites:

• Botify Analytics – enables you to see your website at every phase of search over a time period with a log file analyzer (LogAnalyzer), keyword tracker (RealKeywords), crawler (SiteCrawler), and enterprise SEO analytics integration (EngagementAnalytics). 
• Botify Intelligence – prioritizes high-impact opportunities and notifies you about critical SEO issues using machine learning
• Botify Activation – tools that enable you to perform optimizations quickly and without resource constraints

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.

3. Conductor

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.

• It is an activity news feed for customers that gives information about competitive changes, new content alerts, traffic changes, and so on. 
• It provides a detailed web crawl report so you know the crawlability of all the pages on your site. You can also evaluate internal and external links to improve your linking structure. 

Conductor generates results through a combination of organic marketing technologies and strategic digital services. 

4. seoClarity

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:

• Rank Intelligence – real-time enterprise keyword ranking insights 
• Actionable Insights algorithm – learns from thousands of data points and offers insights for enterprise SEO practices
• Clarity Audits – an enterprise SEO audit technology that includes unlimited crawl projects and technical health checks

5. BrightEdge

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:

• DataCube – A  proprietary keyword index of more than 3.5 billion topics that allows you to perform on-demand research and identify the area of focus that needs greater attention.
• BrightEdge Instant – provides real-time insights into rank, search volume, recommendations, competition, voice search opportunities, and page speed performance
• BrightEdge Recommendations – provides recommendations to improve your organic performance  
• ContentIQ – A technical site audit solution built into the platform

Let’s explore some examples of enterprise SaaS companies that have successfully implemented enterprise SEO strategies:

1. Zapier

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:

• Using multiple landing pages to capture maximum intent – Zapier created three tiers of landing pages for every app in their ecosystem: a landing page for each app, a landing page for each app-to-app integration, and a landing page for each app-to-app workflow.
• Leveraging partner resources – Zapier encouraged app partners to write content for its landing pages and link to these pages after publication.
• Scaling content quickly – Zapier built 25,000 unique landing pages that rank in the top 100 of Google. It is difficult for competitors to mount a similar content strategy in the same space.
• Using context-specific CTAs to generate sign-ups – Zapier used CTAs specific to the integration that visitors were looking for. They made the sign-up flow direct and enabled users to quickly set up a functional integration. 

The landing pages helped drive Zapier’s early growth and currently account for approximately half of all search traffic to the website. 

2. Adobe

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.

3. Salesforce

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. 

4. Shopify

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:

• Domain authority – It has existing domain authority for drop shipping keywords and terms like “selling online,” “ecommerce,” “online sales,” and “online distribution.” 
• Keyword targeting – Shopify not only ranks well for keywords like “drop shipping” but also for variants like “drop shipping companies.” Specifically, chapter 7 of its Ultimate Guide to Dropshipping ranks for this keyword variation. 
• Link building – According to BuzzSumo, Shopify’s Ultimate Guide to Dropshipping has generated 965 external links since it was published. They have also implemented interlinking, generating 201 internal links. 

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. 

• It creates separate landing pages filled with keywords for every app it partners with. Many of these pages rank high in SERPs.
• These landing pages follow five steps for on-page optimization:
  1. A headline at the top with the name of the integration
  2. A summary of the integration within three bullet points
  3. A brief description of the integration
  4. The major features of the integration in bullet points
  5. Customer reviews

The integration partner provides the content for steps 2 to 4 and also links back to the landing page. 

5. Intuit

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:

• QuickBooks decided to delete 2,000 blog posts to combat declining organic traffic. These posts represented over 40% of the QuickBooks Resource Center. 
• Several blogs had been merged to create the Resource Center, so some of the content was outdated, had broken links, or had overlaps in topic coverage. 
• By deleting old content and creating new, high-quality content to fill in content gaps left by deleted posts, the company hoped to regain its lost traffic.
• Within a few weeks, traffic increased by 20%. During peak tax season (between January and May), traffic increased by 44%.
• The increase in organic traffic led to a 72% increase in sign-ups, too. 

6. Zoom

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: 

• Partnerships – It created a partner ecosystem with other B2B companies to integrate and offer its products through the distribution channels of its partners. It also built relationships with industry analysts to get organic growth.
• Paid ads – It experimented with various combinations to find the angle-audience fit for its Facebook ads. The company points its paid Facebook traffic to a dedicated landing page showing a Gartner report in which it is featured. 
• Blog – The Zoom blog has features product updates, event summaries, feature updates, and customer spotlights. With CTAs like “Request a Demo” and “Schedule a Demo,” it targets enterprise clients. 
• Help Center – Zoom’s help center provides extensive documentation and videos, which boosts its user experience and SEO. 
• Social media – Zoom uses Twitter to aggregate content from multiple platforms and highlight praise from customers. 

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:

• It requires strategic keyword selection.
• It focuses on technical SEO and content marketing.
• It demands an agile and iterative approach to completing tasks.
• It employs proprietary tools and processes to run enterprise SEO audits.
• It involves a complex environment of executive buy-in, approvals, and time delays. 

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. 

1. What is Enterprise SaaS SEO?

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.

2. Is Enterprise SaaS SEO necessary?

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. 

• Small businesses usually do not target highly competitive, short-tail keywords whereas large SaaS companies do. 
• Also, larger companies need a specialized SEO team to track and maintain organic rankings. Just brand authority or good content will not cause a website to automatically rank higher.

3. What is an Enterprise SaaS SEO agency?

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. 

• Small businesses usually do not target highly competitive, short-tail keywords whereas large SaaS companies do.
• Also, larger companies need a specialized SEO team to track and maintain organic rankings. Just brand authority or good content will not cause a website to automatically rank higher.

4. How do I succeed in Enterprise SaaS SEO?

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.

5. How does Enterprise SaaS SEO work?

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.

Image Sources – Alphametic, SlideShare, Jumpfactor, Mention, Interstellar, Supermetrics, Poptin,  Google Support, SEO Sydney, SEMrush, SEO Hacker, GetApp, Conductor, Terry Godier, Capterra, Credo, Instapage, Foundation Marketing, Wishpond.