Quality organic traffic to a website generates leads day and night. Every business that wants to continue generating revenue needs an online presence, and search engine optimization (SEO) is the key to online traffic.

However, as a business site grows from a small entity to an enterprise, something changes.

Traffic growth tends to stall when a site has thousands of pages, and it’s not because SEO no longer works. Instead, sites of these sizes become unmanageable and without transitioning to enterprise SEO, the rapid growth that optimizing offered will screech to a halt.

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What is enterprise SEO and why do you need to level up?

Enterprise SEO. Regular SEO. It’s all confusing. But you need to know the difference between the two because it will help you understand how bigger brands and enterprises approach optimization.

The key difference between your large brand and a small one is scale.

For example, your site may have:

• Thousands of pages
• Tens of thousands of products
• Hundreds of thousands of keywords
• Complex website structure
• Potentially dozens of smaller domains to manage
• Potentially multiple subsidiaries to manage

Small teams will fail when trying to manage an enterprise of this size if there’s not a transition to enterprise SEO.

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Just think about your team. If you’re at the enterprise stage, this means that you’ve:

• Grown to multiple internal teams
• Likely work with outside marketing and SEO teams
• Cooperate with writers
• Work with dozens or hundreds of vendors

So, what does this mean for your business? Transition.

You want to continue getting organic traffic from search engines and building your brand. That goal is possible with an enterprise approach that strengthens your business through:

1. Cohesion. Multiple teams working without a central strategy or plan in place can be counterintuitive and chaotic. Enterprise SEO introduces web governance to teams, or just a set of policies and rules to follow to ensure enterprise sites continue to grow. Without cohesion among teams, you can’t move forward to the next step.
2. Strategy. Once all stakeholders are on the “same page,” they can strategize together to help your business’s organic traffic continue growing.
3. Fine-tuning. You didn’t grow into an enterprise business without doing a lot of things right. Using an analytical and data-driven approach, an enterprise SEO expert will fine-tune what’s working and try identifying what isn’t working to maximize your business’s return on investment when investing in enterprise solutions.
4. Revenue. At the end of the day, once an enterprise strategy is in place, it will lead to higher revenue and leveraging the areas of your business where revenue can be stronger.

Enterprise solutions focus heavily on data, technical aspects of a site, managing teams the right way, and automating tasks when possible.

If you’re not transitioning from traditional to enterprise search engine optimization, your competitors may start to slowly capture your online market share and begin to outrank your website.

Related: 6 Free Tools That Help Optimize Your Website

When to level up your search engine game

Google updates its algorithm 500-600 times a year. You have to stay ahead of the game to continue to see results for your business. If you’re questioning whether you need an enterprise solution, you probably do.

Here are a few indicators that it’s time for your business to make the transition to enterprise SEO:

1. Traffic has stalled or is slow-growing after a period of great growth.
2. Multiple teams are working together on marketing and optimizing your brand.
3. Your site has grown into a massive collection of product pages, informative posts and more.
4. Teams are struggling to manage the tens of thousands of pages on the site properly.
5. You have or are planning on spinning up multiple sites in different niches to work together with your main brand.
6. Your enterprise has grown into multiple companies and brands that are difficult to manage properly.
7. Sales revenue from organic search is stagnant, receding or providing near-zero growth.
8. You want to take your revenue and site traffic to the next level.
9. The positive results you’re experiencing aren’t moving fast enough to meet the expectations of investors or to hit projections.

What’s worked in the past to grow a small business into an enterprise may not work once you are actually an enterprise. Management and creating cohesion among teams are just a few of the reasons enterprises level up their search engine game.

You’ve also collected a ton of data over the years. The enterprise professional with experience will be able to dissect this data and leverage it in ways that are overlooked using traditional SEO methods.

If it’s time to finally level up your business’ SEO game, you need to take crucial steps to reach the next stage of success. The following tips are a great way to get started with search engine optimization.

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5 quick tips to get started with enterprise SEO

Alright, maybe it’s time to get started with enterprise SEO and continue growing your business. Where do you begin?

1. Hire a team that has experience at the enterprise level to help leverage their expertise in the transition.
2. Keep your current team in place unless the enterprise provider you’re working with doesn’t feel that the other team is a good fit.
3. Gather data for the new team to use. The data can be on sales, organic traffic and any other data that the current SEO team can provide.
4. Allocate funds for the training and support aspect of the transition. Current teams will need some form of training to be caught up to speed on how new processes work and what’s expected of them.
5. Embrace change. Automation and change will be a part of the transition process, along with governance. Ensure all stakeholders are aware of the changes that are going to take place and why they’re crucial for the continued growth of your enterprise.

Businesses grow, evolve and change. Your marketing and online search engine optimization approach also needs to evolve and change. When traffic from Google and other search engines slows, it’s time to consider transitioning to enterprise SEO if your site has thousands of pages, products, multiple teams and even smaller sites to manage.

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