Common Mistakes in Enterprise SEO and How to Avoid Them

Enterprise SEO is highly complex. You have a ton of moving parts, team members, tools, and so forth. It’s a lot to manage.

To help you manage this project, see the following 11 common mistakes so you’re able to avoid them. 

1. Navigating Team Structures

Simply put, managing an enterprise team is harder than a traditional SEO team. 

In an enterprise SEO team, you can have hundreds of different people. These people can come from PR, marketing, content, and even management teams. 

To ensure proper communication and collaboration between these teams, a system and hierarchical structure is required. 

Reference: An example of organisational structure by Venngage 

In an enterprise SEO campaign, teams must be structured in a way that encourages communication between departments. It should also be smooth to ensure minimal friction, ensuring work is synchronised. 

2. Securing Stakeholder Support 

Most of the time, stakeholders are unaware of the power of SEO. 

They look at it as a “slow” marketing channel, because there’s a long-time gap between strategy implementation and rewards. 

Due to their misunderstanding, it can sometimes be hard to get them to support SEO initiatives. 

As a leader of an SEO enterprise team, however, it’s your job to tie SEO goals directly to business outcomes. 

This will involve calculating more complex metrics like organic LTV, CAC, ROI, etc. Or, in other words, not showing them SEO-metrics like organic traffic, CTR, etc. 

They don’t care about these metrics. They care about the money. Therefore, give them what they want, as the “money-figures” will get them to support SEO. 

3. Effectively Prioritising 

When you’re dealing with an enterprise-sized website with thousands of pages, SEO prioritisation can be difficult. 

You have a million and one things to think about. You could fix mobile website speed, increase backlinks for a particular post, perform some PR, improve crawl depth on some pages, A/B split test meta tags, and much more. 

However, the thing is, no matter the size of the team you have, you can’t focus on all these areas. Plus, some areas aren’t even worth the time as they don’t provide a good ROI. 

Because of this, you need to start prioritising tasks. Many organisations use a colour system. Green for not important, orange for mid-importance, and red for very important. 

The importance will be based on the SEO value the change will bring, and, ultimately, the ROI of the action. 

For example, missing meta tags is a huge issue.

This deserves a red mark.

Duplicate content is another huge problem, red mark.

Page with thin content, orange mark. C

lean up local citations, green marks, etc. 

4. Dealing with Limited Resources

Understaffing and underfunding is also a huge challenge for enterprise SEO. 

One of the main reasons for either of these issues is, again, the justification of spending on SEO initiatives. This can be due to a lack of reporting or understanding of how to report SEO impact. 

Afterall, if the figures suggest a significant return, there shouldn't be any issue in getting the budget to employ or hire more team members. 

Perhaps understaffing and underfunding isn’t the issue. Perhaps it’s finding the right people. In fact, this is something 65% of businesses struggle with. 

If that’s the case, you need to develop proper learning and development courses.

5. Proactively Managing SEO Efforts

SEO problems occur. It’s just one of those unavoidable things that happen. However, teams need to be proactive in order to reduce the impact of these problems. 

One way to avoid this is via regular SEO audits.

Lots of people conduct audits yearly, every half a year, or quarterly. 

However, we’d argue that for a large website, a website with thousands of pages, these audits should be monthly or bi-monthly. 

When performing these audits, you can spot changes in your SEO performance. Changes that may not be instantly available on SEO tools, allowing you to proactively manage a change in user behaviour, algorithm updates, etc.

6. Tackling Technical SEO Issues at Scale

In the 2025 State of SEO report by Search Engine Journal, they discovered that 19.1% of respondents have a “low confidence” in deep technical SEO knowledge. 

Source: Search Engine Journal

We can argue that this figure is even higher for those trying to implement technical SEO at scale. 

Teams that are confronted with this issue have two solutions. Solution one, upskill your technical experts to make them feel confident in their implementation. Solution two, outsource your technical efforts to an agency focusing on technical SEO.

7. Building Clear and Effective SEO Reports

Enterprise SEO includes a lot of data. Not only this, a lot of data from several different tools, so it can get overwhelming pretty quick. 

Despite this, however, you need to create clear and effective SEO reports from this information. It won’t only help you understand your SEO efforts, but also your team, stakeholders, and others.

Because there is so much data, you want to avoid manual data input. You want it automated. It’ll be easier and also more accurate. 

Luckily, there are a lot of SEO reporting tools out there that allow for third-party integrations. For example, Looker Studio: 

Reference: Reports from Looker Studio 

This platform in particular offers over 1,000 integrations. These integrations range from all the Google tools to other platforms for CRM and SEO. 

8. Balancing New Content Creation with Optimisation

Creating content is a huge part of SEO. However, one area that constantly gets neglected is updating content. 

Both are equally as important. Updating content, in fact, may be a little bit more important, especially if it's evergreen content. 

For example, new content can help you rank for new keywords, reach new target audiences, and touch buyers at different parts of their purchasing journey. 

Updating content, however, can improve already ranking content. Even a change from positions four to two on the SERP can increase CTR by 7.4%. 

Source: Backlinko 

This is per-page, also. Imagine, doing this over 100 pages. That’s an over 700% increase in website traffic to the 100 pages. 

That’s why we shouldn’t only focus on creating content. We should also focus on already ranking content. 

Because, simply speaking, ranking new content on the SERPs is harder than increasing the ranking of already ranking content. 

9. Managing Duplicate Content Across Large Websites

Duplicate content is a huge SEO problem. It can affect SEO performance massively. 

On an enterprise’s website, however, duplicate content can accumulate, resulting in lower rankings and keyword cannibalisation. 

Luckily, we have tools like Siteliner. This tool can detect duplicate content, broken links, and more. But its duplicate content feature is particularly good. 

However, the best way to stop duplicate content is before it gets uploaded. And this can only be done if the content team is synchronised.

Because of this, whoever performs the quality control or uploads the content to the website, should check for duplicate content before uploading it.

You can do this using plagiarism tools, like Copyscape. 

10. Integrating SEO with Other Marketing Channels

SEO should never be treated like a separate entity. It should be aligned with your paid search, social media, etc. 

For example, you could use paid search to rank for keywords your organic content doesn’t currently rank for. You could use social to refer to social visits to your website, etc. 

The main issue with this is siloed teams. PPC, SEM, SEO, and social teams that work separately from each other. 

Instead of this, managers from each department should be communicating with each other, ensuring all marketing channels are working together to fulfil the business goal. 

11. Setting Clear Objectives and Measuring SEO Success

If you don’t have clear objectives, you can’t strategise. If you don’t have a strategy, you don’t know what KPIs to measure. 

To avoid this, set up SMART goals:

From creating a SMART goal like the above, “grow organic traffic by 20%”, you can now shape your entire strategy around this goal. This allows you to focus on one target, which eliminates a lot of the “noise”. 

Final Word

As you can see, there are a few common mistakes that can occur during an enterprise SEO campaign. Luckily, however, there’s always a way around these mistakes. 

If you’re strategizing for an enterprise SEO campaign, remember these mistakes. They’ll help you avoid a ton of issues along the way. Plus, you’ll get much better SEO results.