Big brands approach SEO with larger teams, higher domain authority, and systems built for scale. They have dedicated teams for technical SEO, content, and link building. But a small business might have one person handling everything.

Here at Plugins Electronix, we’ve worked with enterprise businesses and small teams across Australia to improve their search engine rankings. This experience helps us understand what actually works at different stages of growth.

In this article, we’ll walk you through:

• What makes enterprise SEO different from small business SEO
• What enterprise SEO includes
• The biggest challenges enterprise SEO teams face
• How enterprise brands get backlinks from mentions

Read on to learn how SEO changes as businesses grow in size and complexity.

What Makes Enterprise SEO Different From Small Business SEO?

Enterprise SEO is different from small business SEO because it operates at scale, relies on higher domain authority, and depends on coordinated enterprise SEO teams. They also need strong alignment with marketing teams to manage technical SEO, content, and approvals.

Over time, this complexity affects how teams plan their SEO efforts. Let’s look deeper into the differences.

Scale and Resource Demands

Believe it or not, enterprise sites might have over ten million indexed pages. To put that into perspective, a small business might have only 50 pages. That means an enterprise site has entire sections bigger than most websites.

And when you have that many pages, you can’t manually check each one for issues. That’s why enterprise SEO teams use automation and project management tools to handle things like meta tags, internal linking, and content audits.

To sum it up, small businesses can get away with one person managing everything. But at enterprise scale, you need dedicated teams for technical SEO, content, and analytics.

Pro tip: Standardise URL patterns across teams to avoid duplication caused by inconsistent naming.

High Domain Authority as a Ranking Advantage

High domain authority lets enterprise brands rank faster for competitive terms. For example, companies like Amazon and Nike don’t need to fight for authority because they’ve built it over the years through thousands of backlinks.

This head start means enterprise businesses can go after keywords that smaller sites have no chance of winning. For example, if you’re running a local shoe shop in Brisbane, it’s nearly impossible for you to rank for “running shoes”. Why? Nike takes that spot because search engines already trust their domain.

Instead, smaller businesses should focus on long-tail keywords like “women’s running shoes Brisbane” or “custom laptop repair near me”. They’re easier to rank for without built-in authority.

Marketing Teams and Cross-Department Coordination

Have you ever tried getting five departments to agree on one URL change? If you work in enterprise SEO, you know this pain all too well. Even small updates require coordination between marketing teams, developers, legal, and leadership.

We’ve worked with large retail clients where a simple redirect sat in approval queues for three weeks. When in-house teams work together on SEO strategy, things move quickly. Otherwise, your recommendations collect dust in someone’s inbox.

Small businesses skip this issue entirely and make decisions on the spot. It’s often the biggest change people notice when stepping into enterprise-level work.

What Does Enterprise SEO Include?

Enterprise SEO includes crawl budget management and content governance. They also have competitor tracking, international SEO, and automation. You need these elements to keep a large site visible in search engines.

Here’s a closer look at the most important aspects of enterprise SEO:

• Crawl Budget Management: Google allocates limited crawl budgets to each website. However, enterprise sites burn through it quickly, so clean site architecture helps search engines focus on your most valuable pages first.
• Keyword Research at Scale: Enterprise brands target competitive keywords because they have the domain strength to win them. That’s why you need to build keyword maps across thousands of pages with serious data analysis.
• Content Governance: When dozens of writers produce content across multiple locations, things go sideways fast. We suggest applying strict guidelines to prevent duplicate content, inconsistent messaging, and pages competing against each other.
• Competitor Tracking: Enterprise SEO teams often monitor hundreds of direct and indirect competitors. That’s where competitive analysis reports help you find out gaps in content and backlink profiles. It creates opportunities that give you an advantage over your competition.
• Multi-Domain and International SEO: Global brands often run several websites across different regions and languages, so each one needs its own local approach. This is because search behaviours and language vary from market to market.
• Automation and Tooling: Unfortunately, manual SEO tasks are impossible at enterprise scale. The solution is automation, which handles internal links, meta tags, and technical audits across thousands of pages.

Even enterprise-level websites will struggle to maintain visibility at scale without these systems in place.

What Are the Biggest Challenges in Enterprise SEO?

The biggest challenges in enterprise SEO are getting approval from stakeholders and dealing with old technical issues. You can have the best SEO strategy in the world, but it means nothing if you can’t implement it.

Let’s get into more detail about the challenges in SEO for large companies.

Stakeholder Buy-In and Approval Processes

What happens when your SEO fix needs sign-off from six departments? It waits, sometimes for weeks. That’s because corporate-level SEO efforts need approval from marketing, development, legal, and leadership (layers within layers).

The problem is, each team has its own priorities, and SEO is rarely at the top of the priority list.

Now, getting buy-in means showing how your recommendations tie back to business goals. From our experience, the SEO managers who actually get things done are the ones who learn to speak the language of other departments.

Reminder: When approvals take too long, your organic traffic will most definitely start to decline.

Legacy Systems and Technical Debt

If you fix your technical issues early, it helps you avoid bigger SEO problems later. However, many enterprise websites were not built for SEO and still run on custom CMS platforms from years ago. Honestly, it makes even simple changes like updating URLs difficult.

What’s more, technical SEO issues pile up when legacy systems block these simple fixes. Plus, when you want to fix old problems, you have to compete with new marketing projects for budget and developer time. Worst of all, leadership usually picks the shiny new thing over older issues.

How Do Enterprise Brands Get Backlinks From Mentions?

Enterprise brands convert unlinked mentions by reaching out and requesting links. It sounds simple, but most businesses overlook this entirely.

The truth is, big brands get mentioned online constantly. For instance, news articles, blog posts, industry roundups, and social discussions reference them without linking back. Enterprise brands might get hundreds of these unlinked mentions every month.

And if you want to find these isolated mentions, it’s a simple process. Just use tools like Brand24, Alerts by Ahrefs, and Google Alerts to find where your brand is mentioned without a link. Then you reach out and ask the site owner to add a mention.

This tactic gives enterprise businesses a competitive edge in link building. In comparison, smaller companies might find five unlinked mentions a month.

Bottom line: Enterprise brands have a pipeline of opportunities landing in their lap. All it takes is a system to track them and someone to send the emails. That’s it.

Next Steps for Your Enterprise SEO Strategy

You’ve reached the end of our guide on how big brands approach SEO differently. You now know that enterprise SEO comes down to scale, authority, and coordination. These factors change how you plan, execute, and measure everything.

If you’re running a large site with thousands of pages, focus on crawl budget, automation, and getting buy-in from other teams. If you’re a smaller business looking to grow, build your domain authority first and target long-tail keywords where you can win.

We at Plugins Electronix have helped small Australian businesses with SEO since day one. If you need help scaling your SEO efforts, get in touch with our team today.