Technical SEO beats content development, traffic analysis and link building as the most important allocation of resources for SEO specialists working for enterprise-level businesses (500+ employees). That’s according to a recent study [download page] from seoClarity, North Star Inbound and BuzzStream.
The results are based on a survey of 240 SEO specialists, 100 of whom support enterprise companies either in-house or as agencies.
The findings indicate that for companies of all sizes, technical onsite optimization is the most effective SEO strategy used in the past year. User experience optimization and evergreen content were the next-most successful strategies for companies with more than 100 employees, while smaller companies found more success with blogging and link building.
Recent survey results from BrightEdge indicate that content and SEO are becoming more intertwined at enterprise companies: 54% believe that they are becoming more integrated and another 43% indicate that they are converging into a single function.
Meanwhile, link building is clearly seen as the most difficult SEO strategy to execute, though enterprise SEO specialists seem to be having slightly less trouble with this than smaller companies.
After link building, technical onsite optimization is the most difficult SEO strategy for enterprise SEOs, though smaller companies have relatively more trouble figuring out user experience optimization.
The following highlights some findings specific to SEO priorities.
Technical SEO
- Companies of all sizes monitor page speed more than any other technical SEO issue, with indexation and duplicate content also figuring prominently.
Content Development
- SEOs rely most on keyword research when determining which content to create or optimize. Search intent and volume are closely grouped as the most important factors when analyzing keywords for content strategy.
Traffic Analysis
- SEO specialists identify national level keywords as their top ranking factor to monitor, followed by local/regional keywords and mobile speed and responsiveness. Interestingly, though, while in-house SEOs easily give more weight to national level keywords, agencies slightly prioritize local/regional keywords.
Link-Building
- The vast majority of respondents across company sizes are either keeping their link building budgets steady or increasing them, likely due to the difficulty they’re finding with this activity.
- PR is perceived to be the most effective link-building tactic used in the past 12 months, particularly for enterprise SEOs. For the smallest companies, (1-100 employees), guests posts closely follow in effectiveness.
The full report, which contains a host more data, is available for download here.
