Enterprise Link Building: Essential Tips for Link Building At Scale
By: Michael Johnson
Link building is a critical factor of SEO, designed to improve a website’s performance within the search engines. Few will contest that link building has its challenges: from unconventional editor expectations, to long turnaround times and broken links, it is no secret that SEO is a labor of love that isn’t always easy.
Conversely, link building for enterprise businesses also introduces unique opportunities that small businesses might not have at their disposal.
This article will discuss what separates enterprise link building from the rest, including unique challenges and best practices.
What is Enterprise Link Building?
Enterprise link building is different from the less well-known industries as it is all about scale and improving what already exists. For example, small websites struggle to improve rankings to their home pages, while enterprise-level businesses have no shortage of links. Instead, enterprises require deep links to key product verticals to help drive sales cycles.
To put it simply, enterprise link building utilizes a variety of strategies for promoting large-scale and complex websites. This is not something for your average small town business.
Due to the sheer amount of competition, enterprises must create dedicated strategies with scalability in mind. This helps them rank for highly competitive keywords.
The Unique Challenges of Enterprise Link Building
Enterprise-level businesses already have several advantages over small businesses. These advantages consist of name recognition, a larger working budget, outreach, and other resources. This does not mean enterprise link building is without its challenges.
Below, we will cover some of the challenges inherent in enterprise link building.
Competitive Markets
Think of T-Mobile and Verizon, or Microsoft and Apple as examples. These enterprise-level businesses might be large, but their competition is just as prominent. As brand mentions present link opportunities for these enterprises, they do the same for their competitors.
With intense competition and rival companies acquiring links at rapid rates, enterprise-level businesses need large-scale link building to stay up to speed. This requires a long-term link acquisition campaign, which relies on human effort, meaningful connections, and strategic marketing.
The Ease and Hindrance of Well Known Brand Names
Big brands within their respective industries will continue to gain links simply from the prominence of their names. Due to the value of these brand names, enterprises need to be sure that they are accurately represented. Enterprise-level businesses are going to be hyperconscious of anything that could harm their brand.
Big-name brands can be hesitant to have their names mentioned in promotional pieces. This can make things difficult from a link building perspective. If a campaign becomes hindered by corporate bureaucracy, valuable linking opportunities will be missed as SEO experts await approval from the enterprise’s PR team.
Effective brand assimilation is crucial to earning valuable links. Therefore, it is essential that SEO experts completely understand an enterprise’s brand, industry, and market position before representing them online.
Sheer Scale of Websites
Enterprise-level businesses already have high-authoritative websites with many sales, blogs, and landing pages. This makes it difficult for enterprises and SEO agencies to identify all the pages that can be influenced through link building.
When websites are so large, it can be hard to know where exactly to begin in a link building campaign. Often, it may be best to start small before expanding your efforts.
The best way to identify where to begin is through keyword research. This is critical to help enterprises find opportunities for non-branded search traffic, provides insight into what target audiences are actually searching for, and determines where brands are more likely to rank.
Scope of Projects are Huge but Results Take Time
Clients, higher-ups, or even enterprise leaders themselves naturally want to see immediate results. Due to the competitive landscape for enterprises, it could take hundreds of quality links to achieve the desired results. While overnight results might seem ideal, it isn’t sustainable. Generating hundreds of links in such a short timeframe can lead to spammy link building practices that negatively impact your rankings.
SEO is a game of patience, and securing genuine links from other websites takes time. It will often take several months to show real results.
Diverse Set of Ongoing Marketing Strategies
Enterprise-level businesses have several external factors that take part in their marketing efforts. This can make it difficult to integrate a link strategy into the company’s existing marketing plans. Additionally, it can be challenging to maintain collaboration with other departments and vendors.
With several people involved in decision-making processes, important decisions are often delayed. These delays slow down what should be an adaptable link campaign which makes the project less effective.
The Budget is Large, but Often Planned Ahead of Time
While enterprises have more money to play with, it can be hard to justify allocating a part of the budget to a project that will not show immediate results. Decision-makers might be more willing to give larger portions of the budget to marketing projects that yield a high return on investment.
Investing in SEO is essential to an enterprise’s continual growth and success. However, large businesses tend to plan their budget ahead of time, which could limit their investments into their SEO needs.
How to Do Enterprise Link Building
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is a huge part of enterprise link building. Understanding what your competitors are doing helps identify gaps in project strategies and means of improvement. There are many ways to monitor the competitors to help guide your own link strategy.
Consider utilizing competitor analysis tools such as:
Aim for Low Hanging Fruit: Fresh Mentions
The easiest place for SEO agencies and internal teams to start is through unlinked mentions. Large-scale enterprises are being talked about more online due to their brand awareness. This notoriety leads to more link opportunities in the long term. When a website is already talking about an enterprise within their content, it can be easier to convince them to link back to your site.
Finding these mentions is only half the battle. While it may feel “earned,” the link was not given. To successfully secure these links, quality outreach is vital. Crafting personalized outreach can help these enterprises build positive relationships with other sites. This also helps companies generate valuable links for themselves.
Fresh mentions for brands tend to yield more results in terms of link acquisition. Since the site has already mentioned your brand, it makes your outreach far more relevant. Still, there is no reason to limit your mention monitoring to only branded terms.
Unbranded terms that could lead to mentions that result in links include:
- Prominent employees (CEOs, staff writers, etc)
- Corporate programs
- Proprietary images
- Company-specific products and/or services
- Prominent employees (CEOs, staff writers, etc)
- Corporate programs
- Proprietary images
- Company-specific products and/or services
Links with a 404 Status
Large enterprise websites are typically older and have gone through many transformations to stay relevant with ever-changing trends. Since these sites have been around for a long time, there are likely links leading to products or pages that no longer exist. These broken links create the dreaded 404 error.
Fixing these broken links not only helps improve overall SEO ratings, but it also helps site users have a positive experience. On the contrary, broken links on a competitor site can result in a unique opportunity for enterprises.
Any site that is linking to a competitor’s 404 page is providing a negative experience for their users. If enterprises have a similar service, product, or resource as the 404 link, it provides a creative outreaching opportunity. By reaching out to editors to let them know about the broken link, they can be convinced to replace the 404 link with a page to the enterprise’s site.
This process leads to new links and helps build positive relationships with site owners by helping improve their viewer experience.
PR Link Building
PR link building is the process of utilizing public relations techniques to route links back to your website. Enterprise-level businesses can use press releases, media pitching, and partnerships to create mutual link opportunities.
Enterprises can also use their brand names to reach out to journalists, media companies, and other big brands in their industry to secure editorial links back to their websites.
Guest Posting
Another way enterprises can earn valuable backlinks is to write guest posts for other websites. Guest blogging is a great way to show off your industry expertise through custom-made content. Through guest posting, enterprises can build natural backlinks to their site. This improves referral traffic, increases brand exposure, and earns attention from potential new clients.
Finding websites that are willing to accept guest posts can be tedious, but current advancements in AI have made the process easier. AI tools can create lists of sites within your niche to outreach, create content, and monitor your previous backlinks.
Create Useful, Linkable Content That Might Not Convert
When building content for an enterprise’s personal site, it is essential to ensure that the pages are useful and linkable. This remains true even if these specific pages aren’t expected to generate links. Still, adding internal links to this content is important.
Internally linking to informative pages within your content helps improve a website’s search engine rankings and organic traffic. It also ensures these websites demonstrate a high level of authority and trustworthiness.
Conclusion
While enterprises have a unique set of challenges, they also have a massive opportunity for link acquisition, making the payoff well worth it.
In order to succeed, enterprise-level businesses must prioritize developing a solid link building strategy that utilizes an adaptable, well-rounded approach. This includes a variety of factors such as monitoring competitors, collaborating with others, and creating informative content that benefits its readers.