The importance of content as a Google ranking factor is inarguable — enterprise SEO and content are inextricably linked, and you cannot rank a page without content.
But long gone are the days of slapping a page with the right keywords up and finding yourself at the top of the SERPs.
As customers have grown savvier and search engines have evolved, competition for online visibility has heated to the boiling point.
Average is not good enough. Today, it takes content of exceptional quality closely matched to each searcher’s intent to permeate the upper echelons of Google’s rankings on competitive terms.
Enterprise organizations face the additional content planning and production challenges of volume, consistency, and scale.
The developing world continues to come online and IDC predicts that 65% of the global GDP will be digitized by 2022. In their efforts to cut through the noise, brands have become publishers — and it’s a serious business.
The competition in search is stiff. How can your enterprise consistently show up with the most effective enterprise SEO content? These 4 tips will help.
1. Deploy Enterprise SEO Insights at the Speed of Google
Relying on monthly performance reports to inform content and SEO decisions just don’t cut it anymore. Not when 80% of customers now expect real-time personalization across the entirety of their experience with a brand.
When a searcher expresses their need in the Google search query box, the engine returns what the algorithms believe to be the most relevant answer in milliseconds.
As an extension of this real-time answer, site visitors expect the page to load instantly — Google reports that if page load increases from 1 to 3 seconds, bounce rate increases by 32%.
Enterprise SEO content technology delivers the next step in lightning-fast response to customers’ needs with real-time optimizations based on the customer’s experience at that moment.
Tapping into the insights delivered in real-time, on-demand search data informs more accurate keyword and topic research, an understanding of local and seasonal trends, and emerging opportunities, as well.
At the enterprise level, all of this is facilitated by machine learning. It’s no longer a nice to have but table stakes in a successful digital marketing program.
2. Dynamically Incorporate E-A-T
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) are the underpinning of Google’s perception of content quality. How can you demonstrate these qualities consistently at scale in all of your SEO content?
Understanding the intent of the search drives your ability to create relevant content, guiding the sort of E-A-T the reader seeks. SEO insights inform more accurate use of language across all content in every channel, from your blog and website to email, social, ads, and more.
Making sense of and activating these insights just isn’t possible at scale without the smart automation that artificial intelligence enables.
When your space involves millions of pages with savvy competitors making thousands of their own optimizations each week, having the technology to do the heavy lifting of analysis and prioritized recommendations at scale is essential.
Once you understand exactly what need searchers are looking to fulfill, you can focus on incorporating the elements that make for E-A-T-worthy content.
And while Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines have no direct impact on ranking, they do give us a line of sight into what Google is looking at as far as E-A-T is concerned:
- The expertise of the content creator.
- The authority of the content and domain as a whole as determined by links, citations, brand mentions, and other external signals.
- The trustworthiness of the content and brand as determined by specific sources such as the BBB.
Now, there’s no point in trying to cram every possible credential, award, and testimonial into a single piece of content.
This is where analysis of both the space as a whole and your searcher’s intent helps inform exactly which statistics, external validation, data, endorsements, and other information will propel your content from average to the best possible answer.
3. Embrace Intelligent Automation
We touched briefly on the necessity of automating content optimizations, both for the speed and comprehensiveness technology provides.
But digging deeper, there are several other ways intelligent automation with embedded AI facilitates SEO at scale, including:
- Prioritizing manual optimizations so your team can focus on the things that will drive the greatest impact in terms of customer experience and revenue.
- Reducing the time required for data extraction, manipulation, and analysis even while dramatically increasing capacity.
- Running more effective tests more often, removing the guesswork from your SEO to-do list.
- Analyzing the potential impacts of external forces and industry trends to keep your SEO strategy a step ahead of the competition.
- Integrating with PPC to ensure paid coverage where SERPs aren’t delivering an organic result above the fold.
- Curating content KPIs from multiple sources inside one dashboard for easy access to real-time and historic content performance metrics.
4. Make Multi-channel Make Sense for You and Your Enterprise
Too often, marketing channels are siloed when today, a holistic view of how content is delivered and where across the customer journey is key.
Search is one channel customers will return to again and again throughout their journey, from that initial discovery through learning about the brand and its offerings, comparing their options, and on to loyalty and leaving reviews.
That’s why it’s essential that each piece of content meets a specific customer need and is optimized so that purpose is clear to search engines.
Then, consider the channels your customers will use for each new need. Social media might be a part of your promotional journey. But you could have customers return there looking for new feature launches, product updates, customer support, and a community of other users to interact with, as well.
Email might be used for post-purchase support and blasting out promotions, and could be a good choice for sharing more in-depth consideration content, as well.
What matters most is that in each channel, with each new communication, you understand:
- Exactly who you’re trying to reach.
- What immediate need you’re solving for them.
- How your content provides the best answer.
- What they can do next, whether in that channel or another.
5. Consistently Re-evaluate and Make Improvements at Scale
Again, the enterprise faces unique challenges here. You may be dealing with a sizeable network of sites serving customers in different locations, an ecommerce site with thousands to millions of products, or one large entity with dozens or hundreds of divisions worldwide.
Enterprise sites can come with complex technical issues, language and localization needs, and more.
And when any change, internal or external, in the constantly evolving space that is your website and its place on the web, has the potential to impact revenue, it needs to be resolved — fast.
Automated SEO auditing is essential at the enterprise level.
While you and your team are focused on strategy and planning innovative campaigns, technology should be doing the work of scanning for:
- Site errors that can hinder search performance.
- Technical issues that can prevent crawling and indexing entirely.
- Opportunities to improve SEO and user experience with updates to site hierarchy, information organization, on-page SEO elements, and more.
- Potential barriers to accessing a page or completing an action.
It’s important that your site auditing solution can access and analyze all relevant types of site content, whether those are HTML pages, progressive web apps, JavaScript frameworks, etc.
Another element to look for is smart recommendations. Who needs another list of technical errors? Ideally, you’ll receive not only the output from AI-enabled analysis but recommendations on what to do with it, too.
Enterprise SEO Content Professionals Require Equal Parts Arts & Technology
The scale and scope of enterprise SEO call for marketing professionals with the creativity to dominate the most competitive spaces.
But alongside the art of creative marketing comes a technological savvy that enables top enterprise marketers to complement their efforts with AI, machine learning, and automation.
That’s what it takes to deliver at scale the kinds of top-quality, engaging, comprehensive content that Google and its searchers crave.
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