Working with large organizations to improve their technical SEO is, in my opinion, the best and most enjoyable time to practice technical skills.
More often than not, you’re faced with complex systems and infrastructures, a host of legacy issues, and different teams responsible for different sections of the website.
This means you need to work with a number of teams and prove business cases, including “the why,” to multiple stakeholders to enact change.
For this, you need strong technical SEO knowledge, but you also need the ability to make multiple people (and teams) care about why something is an issue, and the reasons why they should be invested in fixing it.
Juggling complex technical issues and maintaining communications with multiple stakeholders, ranging from C-level through to brand, product, and engineering teams (in addition to your direct contacts), can be an overwhelming experience.
But it also provides great experience and allows you to develop key technical SEO skills outside of checklists and best practices. These are valuable experiences you can then apply to the run-of-the-mill technical projects.
Issue Communication At Scale
Enterprise brands have large teams, and you’ll need to coordinate and work with multiple teams to get things done.
Some companies have these teams operating as one beat, with known overlaps and free-flowing communications.
Others operate teams in silos, with the website (or websites) and/or regions being carved up into different teams. This can make it more challenging to show results in the more “traditional” way and can make getting buy-in for website-wide technical issues to be resolved more challenging.
Each team within the business has its own set of priorities – and often its own key performance indicators (KPIs).
While the marketing teams may be broken up, engineering teams are usually a single resource in the business, so you’re competing against the other marketing teams, brands, and products.
This means you not only need to make sure your main point of contact cares about the issue but also communicate to the wider teams how resolving the issue is also in their best interests.
The way to do this is through effective, multi-department reporting.
This doesn’t mean producing one big report for all departments to pick and choose what they look at, but using the data available to you to create multiple reports that are simple, clean, and digestible that communicate to each stakeholder group the metrics that matter to them and influence their ability to be successful.
These can be as simple as Looker Studio reports or, if you’re API savvy, your own reporting dashboards.
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
SOPs allow you to create a framework with the client to set benchmarks in consistency and scalability and document key changes, decisions, and implementations made.
Creating a knowledge center to document key changes is common practice, even outside of an enterprise, but developing SOPs that are reviewed and revised regularly goes one step further.
This also helps the client in onboarding new team members to bring them up to speed and smooth that process. It also provides frameworks for other client teams, reducing the risk or potential of them not adhering to an agreed best practice for the brand or experimenting with something they’ve read on a random blog or something that has been suggested by a large language model (LLM).
You can develop SOPs for all manner of scenarios, but from experience, there are three common SOPs that cover a range of basics and mitigate potential “SEO risk” from a technical SEO perspective:
Internal linking.
Image optimization.
URL structures.
Internal Linking
Internal links are crucial for SEO. Every content piece, except for landing pages, should include internal links where relevant. A simple SOP for this could be: