How to Do Technical SEO for a Huge Website

Why is technical SEO important for corporate websites?

For larger businesses, a robust online presence is crucial for corporate success. Technical SEO plays a pivotal role in ensuring that your website not only attracts but retains user attention by providing a seamless browsing experience.

As these websites serve as the digital backbone of major corporations, unresolved technical SEO issues can have consequences not only for your search engine rankings but overall business operations and brand reputation.

Learn more about how to succeed in enterprise SEO.

How technical SEO differs for enterprise companies

Managing a small website with around 30 web pages can seem relatively simple. You're more likely to have direct control over each element and relatively quick adaptations to SEO practices.

But what happens when you're overseeing a site with 1000 pages or more?

With enterprise SEO, the scale dramatically shifts, introducing a web of complexities that often stem from the following factors:

1. Legacy systems & technical debt

Many enterprise companies operate on legacy systems which often struggle to keep pace with newer advancements. This technical debt can result in slower site updates, difficulty in implementing modern SEO strategies, and, ultimately, a decline in site performance and user experience.

2. Complex tracking & reporting

Enterprise websites typically require sophisticated tracking and reporting to measure performance across various departments and geographies. Technical SEO ensures these systems work harmoniously without impacting page load speeds or the user experience.

3. Large website migrations

For enterprises, the stakes are often higher when it comes to maintaining SEO equity and ensuring minimal disruption during a large-scale website migration.

It’s critical for technical SEO experts to carefully plan and execute to prevent common pitfalls such as lost traffic and dropped rankings.

7 common technical SEO issues for enterprise websites

As mentioned previously, large corporate websites face unique challenges that can differ drastically from those faced by smaller sites.

But what exactly do you need to look out for?

Based on our experience doing SEO for corporate websites, here are 7 all-too-common issues large websites fall victim to.

1. Slow page load times

In an era where speed is king, slow page load times can be a death knell for any corporate website.

Large images, complex scripts, and unoptimised databases are often culprits that need addressing to boost site speed. Amplify these issues across a larger-scale site, and you'll see a heavy toll on your SEO performance and page speed metrics.

2. Non-responsive web design

With a growing preference for browsing via mobile devices, having a non-responsive website is no longer viable. Mobile-first indexing dominates search engine strategies and enterprise companies need to ensure their sites are fully optimised for all devices.

This optimisation extends beyond simple responsiveness. It involves designing mobile sites that offer a seamless user experience comparable to desktop versions. This not only caters to user preferences but also meets the technical requirements of search engines.

An enterprise-level mobile site must feature streamlined navigation, fast-loading images, and accessible content to ensure they meet both user expectations and SEO standards.

3. Poor site architecture

Users always value a smooth experience when navigating through a website. It facilitates easy access to information and can be the difference between overall satisfaction or frustration. Organising your site with clear internal links and a logical flow across multiple pages enhances the user journey, making it near-effortless to find what they are looking for.

An intuitive, well-structured website architecture is not just beneficial for user navigation but also essential for search engines. Poor site architecture can lead to inefficiencies from search engine crawlers and content indexing issues, which in turn can dilute your SEO efforts.

4. No hreflang

A global enterprise will likely need to cater to diverse audiences worldwide. Hreflang tags are crucial for your website, telling search engines which version or language of your page should be served to visitors based on their geographic location. Neglecting the management of these multiple versions can harm your global reach and user engagement.

Understanding and implementing hreflang tags properly can be challenging. They require detailed knowledge of language and regional URL configurations, which can lead to errors.

This complexity often leads businesses to overlook hreflang altogether, a major enterprise SEO mistake that can hinder your SEO strategy on a global scale.

5. Lack of schema markup

Schema markup, a form of structured data markup, enables search engines to crawl, interpret, and display a website's content more effectively on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

It comes in various forms, including reviews, events, and products; each enhancing the visibility of specific types of content directly in the search results. For instance, product schema can display price and availability, while review schema may show star ratings, significantly enriching the user's search experience.

Schema markup significantly boosts a website's SEO by helping search engines understand the content and its context. Without it, enterprise sites miss out on opportunities to improve visibility and click-through rates across multiple pages.

6. Non-indexed pages

Search engines allocate a certain amount of resources they are willing to spend crawling a site, known as the crawl budget. For bigger sites, this means not all pages might be regularly crawled or updated, making efficient management of this budget a priority.

Otherwise, critical content could be overlooked by search engines due to non-indexation, a common yet grave issue. Ensuring all important pages are indexed is fundamental for maintaining an effective online presence and is a core focus of any in-depth SEO audit.

7. Broken links

Broken links are common on any website, often resulting from changes in page structure, outdated content, or no longer existing external pages.

With most enterprise companies' vast number of pages and frequent updates, the potential for broken links multiplies exponentially. This can greatly complicate site maintenance and negatively impact user experience.

Broken links not only create a poor user experience but also send negative signals to search engines about the health of your website. Regular audits are essential to identify and fix broken links across an extensive enterprise site.