Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO, where the template is the page.
At scale you stop editing pages and start editing the rules that generate them, which means one decision is worth two hundred thousand pages and one mistake is too. The technical problems get more interesting and the real constraint moves elsewhere: what the platform team can ship this quarter.
Findings are cheap
The audit is not the hard part.
Large organisations are rarely short of findings. They are short of findings that survive contact with a roadmap, a legal review and a platform team with their own priorities. A recommendation nobody can ship is not a recommendation.
What stalls at enterprise scale
- A 400,000 row crawler export with no order of attack
- Recommendations with no implementation cost attached
- Tickets saying "good for SEO" that never get scheduled
- Three teams each owning part of one template
What moves
- The eleven issues that carry the revenue exposure
- A written specification a developer can implement unaided
- Crawl steered towards the pages that earn
- A number the finance side recognises as a number
- One owner named per template change
- Verification after release, not assumption
A short list that ships
Plenty of enterprise SEO engagements produce a large document and no change. We would rather deliver a short list that ships than a long one that does not, and the consequence is that some of what a crawler flags gets explicitly deprioritised with a note saying why. If that is uncomfortable to present internally, we will help you present it.
Scope
What enterprise SEO covers here.
Weighted towards the problems that only exist above a certain size.
Crawl efficiency
Where crawl is being spent, established from the logs. Parameters, facets and infinite archives brought under control so the pages that earn get visited.
Template level architecture
Decisions made once at the template and inherited by every page it generates, including the internal linking rules that decide what the site considers important.
Indexation at scale
Which URL patterns should exist, which should exist but not be indexed, and which should never have been generated. Usually the largest single win on a big site.
Specifications, not suggestions
Written so a developer who knows nothing about SEO can implement it correctly, with the acceptance criteria and the rollback path stated up front.
Structured data at volume
Entity modelling that validates across every page a template produces, well beyond the three URLs someone tested, and keeps validating after the next release.
Release verification
Checking what shipped against what was specified. A surprising amount of enterprise SEO loss happens in the gap between the ticket and the deployment.
Cost
What it costs.
Billed at £90 to £110 an hour, or the £95 blended rate where it crosses into development. Enterprise work is usually retained, seldom one off, because the value is in being available while things ship.
Enterprise audit
Scoped
Log analysis, crawl efficiency, template and indexation review, delivered as a ranked plan with implementation costs. You do not get a list of every instance found.
Programme, 16 hours a month
£1,520/month
Several workstreams running at once. Usually the smallest sensible retainer where a platform team is shipping continuously.
Competitive, 30 hours a month
£2,850/month
Contested national search with enough capacity to hold a roadmap, ship it, and absorb the week something breaks.
No account manager sits between you and the person doing the work, which is most of why these figures look the way they do.
FAQ
Questions clients ask
What makes enterprise SEO different from ordinary SEO?
Scale changes which problems matter. On a small site you decide what a page should say. On a large one you decide what a template should say, then it says it two hundred thousand times, and a mistake in that template is a site wide mistake before anyone notices.
The second difference is organisational. The blocker is rarely that nobody knows what to do. It is that the fix needs a developer sprint, a legal review and a platform team who have their own roadmap, so the work that ships is the work that fits through that process.
We have crawl budget problems. Is that real or a myth?
For most sites it is a myth worth ignoring. Above roughly a hundred thousand URLs it becomes real, and above a million it becomes one of the main constraints.
What it usually looks like in practice is not Google refusing to crawl, it is Google spending its crawling on faceted URL combinations, session parameters and paginated archives while the pages that make money get visited every few weeks. That is a controllable problem and the fix is mostly parameter handling, internal linking and accurate status codes, with a directive in robots.txt far down the list.
Do you work with in house teams or replace them?
Alongside them, always. An enterprise site already has people who know it better than any consultant will after a month. What they usually lack is uninterrupted time to diagnose something properly, or an outside view that can say a thing the internal politics make awkward to say.
The most useful shape is normally a specific diagnosis, a specification the platform team can implement, and then availability while it ships.
How do you prioritise on a site with thousands of issues?
By what it costs, not by how many URLs it affects. A crawler will report two hundred thousand instances of a missing meta description and eleven instances of a canonical pointing at a redirect chain, and the eleven are usually the ones worth the sprint.
Everything gets a rank based on revenue exposure, implementation cost and risk, and the items best left alone are marked as such, with nothing padded into the list.
Can you help build the business case internally?
That is often the actual deliverable. Enterprise SEO work fails more often for want of a defensible number than for want of a correct diagnosis, because a platform team cannot prioritise a ticket that says "good for SEO".
Sizing the exposure, framing it in terms the finance side recognises, and being available to defend it in the room is a legitimate use of the hours.
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