According to Growth Badger’s analysis of SimilarWeb data, the search continues to be the stalwart mainstay of digital marketing, driving around 50% of website traffic on average. However, the practice of SEO has become more complex, requiring more considerations than SEOs had in the “ten blue links” era.
Today, SEO encompasses everything from content marketing and distribution to user experience, and even the core job of gathering and interpreting search intelligence has become more difficult as search engines change how they display results and port them over to other media such as voice assistants. This is not to say that well-established SEO best practices should be abandoned. Even as the environment changes, keyword research, page-level analysis, backlink tracking and acquisition, and rank tracking remain critical.
SEO platforms provide a wide range of capabilities, including keyword research and rank-checking, backlink analysis and acquisition, competitive intelligence, social signal integration, and workflow rights and roles.
Enterprise-level platforms may also offer more comprehensive link and site audits, as well as for analytics with predictive scoring systems to identify potential opportunities to improve page performance or link authority. Vendors differentiate themselves by providing more frequent or detailed data updates, as well as content marketing features that may necessitate additional investment.
The section that follows goes over some of these capabilities as well as the key factors to consider when selecting an enterprise SEO platform.
Get the full Enterprise SEO Tools report here.
Link analysis and acquisition
Links remain one of the most important external or “off-the-page” signals that can aid a website’s ranking in search engines. As part of their base platforms, most enterprise SEO platforms include link analysis (i.e., what sites are linking to yours), link building or removal recommendations based on competitive analysis, and other reports that reveal opportunities for obtaining links (i.e., what sites should you solicit links from).
Keyword research/rank analysis
Knowing what terms people use to find your website, how your pages rank for various queries, and how you should use those terms in your copy has long been a pillar of effective SEO. Almost all enterprise SEO platforms include keyword research tools that enable marketers to learn how consumers search for content and which keywords are driving traffic to competitors.
However, vendors obtain this information in a variety of ways. Due to Google’s restrictions on scraped data in its terms of use and the percentage of search results that are “keyword (not provided),” some vendors license data from point solutions or ISPs. Other vendors create and manage their own database of keyword terms. As a result, trustworthy keyword data has become less common and more expensive.
It’s also worth noting that rank analysis has become more complex as Google has increased its use of more dynamic and visual SERPs. Marketers are no longer satisfied with a simple numeric designation of how their page ranks for a specific query; they want to know if it appears in a Carousel, a Knowledge Panel, with Sitelinks — or any of the other ways crawled content appears on the SERPs. Visibly, one of the newest entrants in this category, takes a very different approach to rank, going so far as to analyze all of the content on pages that rank for a specific keyword and then categorize those pages.
With all of this data, it aims to provide brands with a sense of how they’re appearing in search in general, even if the brand-related activity is taking place on third-party sites.
Search intent-based analysis
Google’s search algorithms are increasingly focusing on search intent rather than keyword matches. Recent algorithm updates, such as the addition of BERT, have decreased the importance of keywords in SEO. To compensate for a lack of keyword data, SEO platform vendors are developing more “search intent”-based tools that analyze search intent and predict or recommend the most relevant content that will meet the searcher’s needs.
Custom site crawls/audits
Site crawls or audits are important tools provided by enterprise SEO platform vendors, as content quality has become the lynchpin for many marketers’ SEO strategies. Some platforms provide optimization recommendations for keywords, page structures, and crawlability, as well as prioritizing and assigning scores for HTML title tags, body tags, and meta-tags.
Most SEO platforms offer daily site crawls, while others offer weekly crawls. Ideally, the tool should be able to crawl the entire site rather than just random pages, and it should also be capable of analyzing mobile-optimized and AMP pages. However, some enterprise sites are so large that expecting a tool to crawl them all is unrealistic.
Get the full Enterprise SEO Tools report here.
Social signal tracking and integration
Although social media activity isn’t directly factored into search engine ranking algorithms, highly shared pages benefit from increased traffic, and monitoring social activity can help inform content creation and distribution strategies. The majority of enterprise SEO platforms track, measure, and incorporate social signals into their analytics and dashboard reports.
Sites with a high level of social sharing typically rank higher in organic search results. Capabilities include social signal tracking and correlations, as well as site traffic and conversions, social profile monitoring and sentiment analysis, and contact-relationship management.
While most vendors track organic traffic well, few tracks paid social activity.
Content marketing and analysis
SEO and content marketing have become increasingly inextricably linked as Google has raised the content quality bar through innovations such as BERT and RankBrain (Hummingbird), as well as its regular algorithm updates. As a result, current, relevant content has become critical to SEO success.
Many vendors have improved their enterprise SEO platforms’ content optimization and content marketing capabilities, as well as expanded the tools’ content marketing features. Page management tools or APIs to monitor on-page content and errors, reports on content performance and traffic trends, influencer identification and campaign management, and real-time content recommendations are examples of these.
More advanced platforms analyze content to help improve its depth and quality by performing topical analysis and comparing it to competition to identify potentially significant gaps and make recommendations for improvement.
One emerging area in which vendors are investing is the ability to automatically and proactively suggest topics on which marketers should create content, thereby eliminating the need for extensive analysis. Some even help with developing the type of content that will appear in searches for target keywords.
International search tracking
As the global economy forces more U.S.-based businesses to conduct business online and offline in multiple countries and languages, international search coverage has become a critical capability. Most enterprise SEO platforms provide some level of cross-border, language, and alphabet coverage. International keyword research is one of the capabilities, as is the integration of global market and search volume data into the platform, as well as the integration of global CPC currency data.
Mobile/local analytics
Google’s search engine updates are increasingly focused on improving the user experience for mobile/local searches. Marketers are demanding more and better mobile and local data and analytics to help them optimize their sites for mobile users and improve search engine rankings as mobile-friendly sites rise to the top of the SERPs. Many vendors provide mobile audits, rankings, and metrics by the device (i.e., desktop, tablet, iPhone, and Android) and location.
Technical SEO crawling
The growing importance of mobile traffic is also driving the development of tools to identify issues that may be slowing page load or negatively impacting mobile friendliness. This includes providing information about a site’s Core Web Vitals ranking.
Furthermore, technical schema markup implementation is required if a page is to be used in one of the featured snippets or other advanced displays. Many of today’s tools can detect schema errors and provide advice on how to fix them.
Cross-device attribution
Recognizing that SEO is only one component of a brand’s marketing efforts and that paid media influences search traffic (especially on brand keywords), some vendors are developing capabilities to assist marketers in determining which marketing initiative is driving site visits or sales. However, this is becoming increasingly difficult as many companies no longer support third-party cookies.
Get the full Enterprise SEO Tools report here.
The benefits of using SEO platforms
Enterprise SEO has become increasingly complicated and time-consuming, with hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of pages, sites, social conversations, images, and keywords to manage and optimize.
Using an SEO platform can boost efficiency and productivity while decreasing the time and errors associated with managing organic search campaigns. More specifically, managing SEO via an enterprise toolset can provide the following advantages:
- Many tools, one user interface. SEO platforms combine a variety of tasks into a single system. A comprehensive dashboard can assist your organization in tracking SERP rankings and trends, as well as how you compare to competitors and your share of voice. Task integration and prioritization, reporting, and user permissions can all provide significant benefits to enterprise-level SEO operations.
- Intentional insights Because of the increased emphasis on user intent by search engines, enterprise-level SEO tool vendors are developing machine learning models that analyze user behavior and site content to assist marketers in answering searchers’ questions.
- Management of global operations that is more efficient. On a global scale, enterprise SEO tools have built-in diagnostics that can be invaluable in identifying site-wide issues across languages, countries, or regions. These tools identify both macro and micro issues with pages, templates, and infrastructure.
- Keeping up with search engines. SEO software vendors have dedicated teams and engineers to monitor frequent search engine algorithm changes and their impact on enterprise SEO reporting.
- Reporting that is automated in order to provide data in near real-time. Many businesses end up attempting to manually update spreadsheets with a large amount of data. However, this does not provide a complete picture of the data. To make reporting faster and easier, most enterprise SEO platforms provide highly customized reporting capabilities that are widget- and wizard-driven. Many also allow data to be exported to business intelligence or other analytics software.
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