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When it comes to SEO, bigger isn’t always better — it’s just more complex.
Managing an enterprise website with thousands (or even millions) of pages means navigating technical challenges and coordinating content efforts across multiple teams — all while trying to prove SEO’s impact on revenue.
The stakes are high. Without a strong enterprise SEO strategy, you risk losing traffic and your competitive edge.
So, how do you optimize at scale and overcome roadblocks like internal red tape and technical debt to ensure SEO drives measurable business results?
In this guide, we’ll break down:
✔️ What enterprise SEO is and how it differs from traditional SEO
✔️ The biggest challenges enterprise SEOs face and how to solve them
✔️ Expert strategies for securing stakeholder buy-in, managing technical SEO and scaling content
Enterprise SEO, explained
Enterprise SEO focuses on optimising large websites with thousands or even millions of pages to ensure they remain visible in search engines and continue to attract organic traffic.
If this all sounds complex, that’s because it is. Just take a company like Apple. A Google site search (site:apple.com) reveals that the site has almost 2 billion pages indexed.
Keeping a website of that scale optimised for search engines is a whole different ballgame compared to managing a small business site.
But like traditional SEO, enterprise SEO comes down to three key areas:
➡️ Technical SEO: Ensuring your website is easy for search engines to crawl and index to fix issues that might hinder its performance.
➡️ Content: Managing vast amounts of content, ensuring relevance for different global audiences and maintaining SEO best practices.
➡️ Link building: Earning high-quality backlinks to your site’s authority and help it outrank competitors.
How is enterprise SEO different from traditional SEO?
Enterprise SEO and traditional SEO have the same end goal: bringing a website’s pages higher in the rankings, increasing organic traffic, and driving revenue.
But when you’re dealing with a massive site, the strategies that work for a small business website just won’t cut it.
Here’s how enterprise SEO differs from traditional SEO:
| Aspect | Enterprise SEO | Traditional SEO |
| Scale | Entails managing thousands or even millions of pages across different products, markets and regions. | Involves optimising smaller websites with fewer pages and a narrower target audience. |
| Content management | Requires a structured approach to handle huge amounts of content across multiple teams, regions and languages. | Content is typically created and managed by a small team or a single person. |
| Tools and resources | Uses advanced tools like BrightEdge, Conductor and SEO automation software to handle massive data sets. | Relies on off-the-shelf SEO platforms like Ahrefs, Semrush or Google Search Console. |
| Technical complexity | Tackles challenges like complex website structures, internal linking at scale, site migrations and international SEO. | More straightforward site structures with fewer technical roadblocks. |
| Collaboration | Involves multiple teams — like SEO, marketing, product, IT and legal — that all need to align on strategy. | Typically managed by a small team or individual with minimal cross-team collaboration required. |
| Budget | Requires significant investment in SEO services, tools, teams and ongoing optimization. | Lower budget needs, since fewer tools and team members are required. |
Enterprise SEO: Key challenges and how to solve them
The bigger your site, the more SEO challenges you’ll encounter. From navigating internal red tape to scaling technical fixes across thousands of pages, enterprise SEO teams have to think differently to drive results.
At Skale, we’ve worked with some of the world’s leading SaaS brands to solve these challenges for them. This section outlines the biggest roadblocks enterprise SEOs face, and more importantly, how to overcome them.
Getting buy-in from stakeholders
If you’ve ever tried to push an SEO initiative in a large organization, you know that red tape is real. Unlike smaller teams where decisions happen fast, enterprise SEO requires multiple teams to weigh in and give their approval — from marketing and product to IT, legal and even leadership.
In practice, this means a simple technical fix, like updating internal linking, might take weeks (or even months) because it requires approval from various teams that might not consider SEO a top priority. And if leadership doesn’t understand or see the value in SEO, good luck getting resources allocated for content production, technical improvements or link building.
The most common cause of this roadblock is that SEO isn’t always portrayed as a revenue-driving channel, at least not in the way paid marketing or sales efforts are.
Solution: Demonstrate the business impact of SEO
To get leadership and other teams to buy-in, you need to speak their language. That means linking SEO efforts directly to business impact. Here’s how to do it:
✅ Connect SEO initiatives to revenue: Create concise reports to show how organic traffic translates into qualified leads, sales and customer growth. If leadership sees SEO as a direct revenue driver (and not just a traffic booster), they’ll be far more willing to invest.
✅ Tie SEO to larger business goals: Whether it’s market expansion, demand generation or customer acquisition, position SEO as a growth channel that supports broader company objectives, like scaling and expanding into other markets.
✅ Educate stakeholders on SEO’s value: Many teams don’t fully understand how SEO works or what benefits it brings. Run workshops, share case studies and highlight past successes to get everyone on the same page.
✅ Show real results (not vanity metrics): Instead of just reporting on rankings and traffic, run a case study to demonstrate measurable impact. Pick a handful of underperforming pages, optimize them and report back on the results. Think conversions, sign-ups and revenue gains to prove the value of SEO.
Managing technical SEO at scale
If technical SEO is tricky for a small website, imagine handling it for thousands — or even millions — of pages. That’s the reality enterprise SEO teams face.
At this scale, your crawl budget becomes a major issue. Search engines don’t have unlimited resources to crawl every page on your site, so failing to optimise technical SEO may mean important pages aren’t indexed.
Then there’s the challenge of website migrations. Many enterprise companies go through rebrands, CMS changes or mergers — each of which presents risks to SEO efforts. A poorly handled migration can wipe out years of organic growth gains.
Other headaches? Broken internal links, duplicate content, slow page speeds, JavaScript rendering issues, and the list goes on. When small fixes need to be rolled out across thousands of pages, even minor technical issues can snowball into major traffic losses.
So, how do you keep a massive website technically sound without getting buried in the sheer scale of technical fixes?
Solution: Conduct regular, in-depth technical SEO audits
For enterprise websites that have accumulated years of SEO issues, the best way to regain control is through a structured technical SEO audit. We asked one of our senior SEO managers how they would approach this for an enterprise client, and we break down the process below.
Step 1: Set up a dedicated audit environment and get organised before looking at any data. At Skale, this includes a Google Drive folder where we document every issue we find, track prioritise and outline next steps. Every audit goes through an internal review by our senior SEO experts to ensure findings align with business goals before sharing recommendations.
Step 2: Gather the right data by running a full-site crawl. We use advanced tools like Screaming Frog to uncover technical issues like duplicate content, broken links, slow-loading pages and crawl inefficiencies. We go beyond automated scans by analyzing server log files to see exactly how search engines interact with the site and spot where crawl budget is being wasted.
💡Key point: To double-check critical factors, we also manually review HTTPS/SSL setup, robots.txt configurations, XML sitemaps and Google Search Console insights for any indexing or performance anomalies.
Step 3: Uncover technical SEO issues and focus on the biggest roadblocks. We assess the site architecture and internal linking to ensure search engines can efficiently navigate and understand content. We dig into indexation, canonicalization and duplicate content problems, as well as Core Web Vitals, site speed and mobile responsiveness to improve both rankings and user experience.
💡Key point: Enterprise SEO is all about working smarter, not harder, so we use the ICE framework (Impact, Confidence, Ease) to prioritise the fixes that will make the biggest difference first.
Step 4: Assess UX by navigating the site as users do. We look at readability, navigation flow and engagement friction points. We also review content to ensure it’s clear, compelling and optimized for search intent. Finally, we check that the site is accessible and inclusive to ensure all users — including those with disabilities — can seamlessly navigate and interact with it.
Step 5: Take action and turn your findings into a structured roadmap. Break down issues into clear tasks with owners, deadlines and success metrics. We work closely with IT and development teams to implement fixes and track progress over time to ensure the site doesn’t just recover but continues to improve.
Tracking results
One of the biggest struggles for enterprise SEO teams is proving their impact and ROI. While metrics like rankings and traffic are useful, they don’t always translate into business value — and that’s what leadership cares about.
Unfortunately, SEO attribution is messy. Unlike paid ads, where conversions are easy to track, SEO involves multiple stages of the customer journey. A prospect might land on an informational blog post, then leave and return days later through a product page — to only then convert via a demo request. Which touchpoint gets the credit?
On top of that, enterprise websites often deal with fragmented data across multiple teams, platforms and regions. Different departments track different KPIs, which makes it difficult to align SEO efforts with actual revenue impact.
How can you go beyond traffic reports to prove that SEO is driving real business results?
Solution: align SEO results with business objectives
Effective SEO reporting should directly link performance metrics to company goals to make it easy for leadership to see SEO’s impact.
For example, if your company’s goal is to increase ARR by 20%, SEO reporting should highlight how ranking improvements for high-intent, revenue-driving keywords contribute to increased conversions and sales.
Similarly, if your focus is on generating 500 new leads per month, reports should track organic traffic growth to lead capture pages and how that traffic translates into MQLs and SQLs.
By structuring reports around business priorities rather than SEO-specific metrics, leadership can quickly see SEO’s role in generating revenue and reaching the organisation’s objectives.
Inconsistent or duplicate content
Have you ever conducted a site search to find multiple pages that cover the exact same topic? That’s duplicate content — and for enterprise websites, it’s a massive SEO challenge.
The problem goes beyond duplication, as large enterprises also struggle with inconsistent content. At scale, these inconsistencies happen naturally due to:
- Siloed teams and fragmented workflows: Content creation across departments, regions and product lines leads to misalignment.
- Too many stakeholders: Content passes through many hands, causing shifts in tone, terminology and messaging.
- Poor localization practices: Instead of adapting content for different markets, brands often translate and duplicate pages across regions.
- Legacy content: Years of unchecked publishing result in outdated, overlapping pages.
As a result, it becomes harder for search engines to understand and rank your content effectively. This weakens your SEO performance as it becomes harder for search engines to understand and rank your content effectively.
Solution: implement scalable content processes
To understand how enterprise brands can tackle this challenge at scale, we spoke with Kate-Lyn Moore, Senior Editorial Lead at Skale. She explained that before teams can streamline production or introduce automation, they need to solve the root issues such as inconsistent workflows, poor knowledge sharing, and a lack of content governance.
Only once those foundations are in place can automation be used effectively to speed up repetitive tasks like research, briefing, content repurposing, and publishing — without sacrificing quality or consistency.
“To set up an effective content engine, first get your foundations in place. Slow down to start and you’ll be set to speed up down the line. That means you need to establish solid content governance.”
— Kate-Lyn Moore, Senior Editorial Lead at Skale
By getting these foundations right, enterprise brands can ensure the consistency, efficiency and scalability of their content. Here’s how:
| What? | Why? | How? |
| Establish content governance | Content governance defines who is responsible for content at every stage, what “quality” looks like for your organization, and where teams can find the resources to execute efficiently. It ensures that every piece of content aligns with your brand voice, SEO goals, and quality standards. | Define roles and workflows: Map out your content production process to establish clear ownership at each stage. Avoid involving too many stakeholders, which slows down processes. Standardize knowledge management: Maintain up-to-date editorial guidelines, SEO frameworks and tone of voice documentation so writers and editors have a single source of truth. Train your team: Regular workshops and onboarding sessions (recorded for future reference) help ensure consistency across in-house and freelance contributors. |
| Improve efficiency without sacrificing quality | Once governance is in place, focus on making content production more efficient without compromising quality. | Set benchmarks for production: Track how long different content tasks take to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies or training gaps. Create flexible scaling strategies: Build a network of freelance talent to supplement your in-house team, and define clear hiring triggers to expand your team as needed. Use structured templates: Develop detailed content briefs and templates to ensure consistency across multiple contributors and shorten revision cycles. |
| Leverage automation and AI | Automation can significantly speed up content production, but it’s only effective when governance is strong. Otherwise, you risk automating inconsistency at scale. | Use workflow automation tools: Platforms like ClickUp or Asana streamline content planning approvals and assignments. At Skale we use ClickUp to build one-click automations to power each step of our content operations and workflows. Implement AI for optimization: AI tools can help with keyword research, content briefs and even quality control to help you follow SEO best practices at scale. Reduce back-and-forth with automated templates: Predefined templates provide content teams with all necessary details upfront and minimize unnecessary revisions. |
Enterprise SEO content engines thrive on strong governance, efficient workflows, and strategic automation. By putting clear processes and documentation in place—and training teams to use them—you can eliminate inconsistency and duplication, laying the groundwork for content that’s scalable, high-quality, and aligned with SEO goals.
Missing out on link building opportunities
Enterprise websites often don’t prioritise link building because a lot of it happens naturally. When you’re a well-known brand, backlinks come in without much effort: news outlets mention your company, partners link to your site and your content earns citations across the web.
The problem with relying solely on organic backlinks is that this approach can lead to stagnation. While your competitors are actively building links and expanding their authority, you risk falling behind. Lost mentions, outdated links and passive link acquisition mean your website might not be growing as fast as it could.
By proactively acquiring high-quality, relevant links, enterprise brands can:
✅ Strengthen domain authority and rank higher than competitors
✅ Expand visibility into new keyword areas to support growth goals
✅ Maintain rankings through algorithm updates to reduce risk
✅ Ensure brand mentions actually result in backlinks and avoid lost opportunities
“Quality backlinks are the backbone of an effective SEO strategy. While great and well-optimised content can rank without backlinks, enterprises should invest in link building in order to further improve their website’s visibility and expose their brand to a wider audience.”
– Stevan Milankovic, Head of Off-Page SEO at Skale
Solution: build competitive advantage through strategic link building
For enterprise websites, link building isn’t about chasing every possible backlink, but rather making the most of the opportunities already out there. Two of the most effective and low-effort link building strategies enterprises can use are link reclamation and unlinked brand mentions (which also help brands rank on LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity) .
These tactics allow you to capitalize on existing brand exposure and maintain a strong backlink profile without starting from scratch. To better understand how enterprises should approach link building, we spoke with Stevan Milankovic, Head of Off-Page SEO at Skale.
| What? | Why? | How? |
| Unlinked brand mentions | PR coverage, blog posts or industry news are already talking about your company. But not every mention includes a link to your website, making this a low-hanging fruit for enterprise link-building efforts. By converting these brand mentions into backlinks, you reinforce existing brand awareness while improving your domain authority. | Someone has already done the hard work of mentioning your brand. Now, all you have to do is reach out and ask for the link. A simple outreach message can go a long way: 💬 “Thanks for the mention! Would you consider adding a link to our website in case your readers want to learn more about us?” |
| Link reclamation | Link reclamation focuses on regaining links you once had but lost. Websites restructure, pages get deleted and backlinks disappear over time. Instead of letting this erode your SEO authority, a link reclamation strategy helps you recover lost equity. As Stevan explains, link reclamation is about “consistently maintaining the value of your backlink portfolio” while enhancing the visibility of your website. | The process is simple: Identify lost backlinks using enterprise SEO tools.Reach out to the site owner with the correct URL and a polite request to restore the link. |
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In this guide, we’ve covered:
✅ What enterprise SEO is and how it differs from traditional SEO
✅ The biggest challenges, from stakeholder buy-in to technical SEO at scale
✅ Proven strategies for content management, link building and performance tracking
Enterprise SEO requires deep technical expertise, cross-team collaboration and a data-driven strategy to make a real impact. Quick fixes won’t cut it, and success comes from consistent, scalable optimisation over time.
That’s where Skale comes in. We specialize in helping enterprise brands build high-impact SEO strategies that drive measurable growth. Whether you need support with content strategy and execution, technical SEO or link building, our team is here to help you turn SEO into a revenue engine.
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