Enterprise Sites Are Where Technical SEO Shines

You’ll probably have to create a lot of reports for a lot of different teams and executives. Check out our guide on enterprise SEO metrics and reporting for some tips.

Organizational improvements

Most enterprise SEO teams go through similar stages of progression as they evolve. This is sometimes referred to as the SEO maturity model.

A lot of this progression depends on a leader who can be successful, visible, and sell SEO in the organization. They will likely spend as much, or more time promoting successes as they will doing the work.

They may have to create SEO forecasts, have lots of executive meetings to show results, train other teams, create those SOPs, send newsletters to keep others informed, etc.

For technical SEOs in particular, make sure you also promote the work of the developers and teams you work with. If you can get them visibility and a promotion, you’ll have an advocate for SEO who is bought in and will be more likely to work with you on future projects.

Professional development

There are two major paths you can take when it comes to enterprise technical SEO. The most common is an individual contributor (IC), or an individual who is part of a team. In enterprise environments, even IC roles may have a lot of autonomy because they’re considered subject matter experts (SMEs). Some people may also end up in people management.

If you want to transition to people management, what I would recommend is:

• Be visible on projects
• Be viewed as a leader
• Work on skilling up
• Help your team where you can
• Understand the bigger picture for the organization
• Build relationships
• Communicate effectively

A big part of technical SEO will be setting up your crawls and monitoring for issues. While it would be great if you could get everything technically perfect, it’s rarely realistic on enterprise websites.

One of the things I like about Ahrefs’ Site Audit is that you can choose to ignore issues that you don’t find important.

You can also add any custom issues that you want. We have every data point for the pages and links configurable as issues, as well as changes between dates. You can even change the prioritization level for each issue.

You might also want to break down issues by CMS or even by template so you know exactly which group each issue belongs to and can see when they resolve the issues. This can be done with segments in Site Audit.

You can help a lot of other teams with their data needs. You will likely be asked for things like checking for scripts or outdated file versions, words you’re not supposed to mention, extracting authors, publish dates, update dates, or other useful data.

In many crawlers, you’ll need to do this setup before crawling, but in Ahrefs Site Audit you can actually search within the HTML or text after the crawl has already happened.

For your crawling, you have a few options.

Normal crawls

The standard crawls in enterprise companies are usually once a month, or maybe once every week or two if you’re breaking the website into multiple sections. The downside here is that things might be broken for a while before a crawler flags an issue.

The ideal scenario is to catch issues before they launch.

In some environments, you may be able to set up unit tests to have automated checks for issues before they launch.

Catch any issues faster with crawl sampling

You don’t always need a full crawl of the website which can take weeks to run on an enterprise site. You just need enough to see if any important changes were made.

You could also run a smaller crawl on any section that made any new pushes to production.

The fastest way to catch changes: always-on crawling

This is a sneak peek at what we have coming that we’re calling always-on crawling.

The idea is to switch from scheduled crawls, which users tend to schedule weekly or monthly, to a prioritized crawling system that’s always on and notifies users of issues faster.

For sites using IndexNow and the new always-on option in Site Audit, we’ll be able to notify users of issues shortly after they make updates to their pages.

This is how that will look:

I can’t think of a system that would be better than this. A practically real-time monitoring and alerting system. As a technical SEO, this is a dream come true for me.

You have to prioritize tasks and focus on the most significant issues. I typically use an impact / effort matrix as a visual to help others understand what I consider the most important tasks. Here’s what that looks like:

You will likely have to work with any dev teams for a better effort prediction, but in my experience I’ve found they appreciate it if you take a first pass at estimating the effort involved. Then give them the opportunity to make adjustments based on how much effort they think it will take.

You may have major incidents and end up in what are sometimes called fire drills or war room situations where stakeholders are gathered to work through a problem. In this case, something likely went horribly wrong and is costing the company a lot of money. This will always override any other priorities.

I doubt there’s a major website that is technically perfect. If there was, I’d be concerned they were wasting resources on things that don’t matter over things that do.

What’s interesting about enterprise, is that sometimes you have to make decisions that aren’t necessarily ideal. For instance, you might have some pages or sections of the site with issues that never get fixed because doing so is more expensive than the work involved. The return on investment (ROI) just isn’t there.

Instead of doing what is right, sometimes you’ll have to choose the least bad option. You won’t have control of everything. Just do the best you can and when you have the opportunity, make the most future-proof decisions you can.

Check indexing

Priority – high

First, check the Indexability report in Site Audit for “Noindex page” warnings.

Google can’t index pages with this warning, so it’s worth checking they’re not pages you want indexed.

You can also check the Site Structure report in Site Explorer for any pages with organic traffic that shouldn’t have traffic.

Recover links with link reclamation

Priority – high

In many cases, your old URLs have links from other websites. If they’re not redirected to the current pages, then those links are lost and may no longer count for your pages.

It’s not too late to do these redirects, and you can quickly reclaim any lost value and help your content rank better. I normally assign a dollar amount like $400 per referring domain in order to make a business case for this.

Here’s how to find those opportunities:

• Paste your domain into Site Explorer
• Go to the Best by links report
• Add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter

I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”

Even these links may be difficult to get in an enterprise environment. Sometimes different people are responsible for different sections of the website, which can make internal linking time-consuming and may require meetings and a lot of follow up to get internal linking done.

On top of the political hurdles, the process for internal linking can be a bit convoluted. You either have to know the site well and read through various pages looking for link opportunities, or you can follow a process that involves a lot of scraping and crawling to find opportunities.

At Ahrefs, we’ve made this simple, scalable and accessible so anyone can find these opportunities. The easiest way to see internal link opportunities is with the Internal Link Opportunities report in Site Audit. We look at what your pages are ranking for and suggest links from other pages on your site that talk about those things.

Add schema markup

Priority – high

Fix Page Experience

Priority – medium

While many of these aren’t necessarily going to move the needle for SEO, they are good for users and how they experience your website, so they’re worth working on.

We cover most of these in Site Audit. For example, we pull PageSpeed Insights data so you get actual Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) metrics for Core Web Vitals as well as Lighthouse metrics in Site Audit.

We also flag mobile SEO issues.

General website health / maintenance

Priority – low

These may not have much impact on SEO, but can be an important consideration for user experience.

You may want to check if any of the chains are too long. Look for this in the “Issues” tab in the Redirects report.

Fix Hreflang issues

Priority depends on the site

We flag a number of different hreflang issues in Site Audit.

There are also some nice visualizations to help you explain issues like this first-if-its-kind hreflang cluster visualization. It shows and tells you what is broken, making it much easier to explain to stakeholders than the typical spreadsheet.

Optimize crawl budget

Priority depends on the site

Optimize ecommerce pages

Specialized task

For enterprise sites, faceted navigation in particular can be tricky. Luckily we have a great guide on faceted navigation.

Fix JavaScript SEO issues

Specialized task

Migrate other websites

Specialized task

Keep traffic during mergers and acquisitions

Specialized task

Specialized task

I would typically consider this task firmly in the developer department, but it is something that technical SEOs may be asked to do at times. Logs can be expensive to store and analyze and they contain private information (PII) with IP addresses. Many companies won’t give SEOs log file access. I’d say in 99.9% of cases, the crawl stats report in Google Search Console will meet your needs instead of logs.

Specialized task

I wouldn’t expect every technical SEO to do this, and I usually consider working with APIs a job for a developer, but many technical SEOs do have the skills to help with this kind of thing. Typical use cases are data storage, report building, etc.

Specialized task

This definitely isn’t a requirement for technical SEOs, but there are many who take on machine learning projects and help with things like semantic analysis, redirect automation, keyword clustering, etc.

When submitting tickets to dev teams, you want to be thorough and concise. You need enough detail that they know what to do, but for the ticket to be short enough they’ll actually read it.

These are the elements I focus on:

• Detailed description of the problem.
• Acceptance criteria. What you need to see to consider this problem resolved.
• Any additional info. Uploads, steps to reproduce the issue, videos showing the issue.
• Priority and impact. How important is the issue? Try to equate any expected impact to cash if you can.

Do not waste the time of developers with menial tasks. I’ve seen lots of technical SEOs burn their bridges with dev teams by submitting tickets for lots of things that are high effort and little to no impact.

One final tip is that if you don’t seem to be making progress on projects, try to sell the changes you want to make as A/B testing. Many companies want to do more testing, and you can “test” your SEO changes to see the impact they have. With a measurable impact, you can argue for a more permanent fix, but in the meantime, it’s technically fixed.