Enterprise SEO platform providers offer many capabilities. These range from keyword research and rank tracking to backlink analysis and acquisition, as well as competitive intelligence and content optimization.
Most of the vendors profiled in Enterprise SEO Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide offer the following core skills:
Enterprise-level platforms may also offer more extensive link and site audits or analytics that include predictive scoring systems to identify potential opportunities to improve page performance or link authority.
Vendors differentiate by offering more frequent or detailed data updates or content marketing features that sometimes require additional investment. These more advanced skills may include, but are not limited to:
Here are nine important features of enterprise SEO platforms.
1. Link analysis and acquisition
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Links continue to be one of the most important external or “off-page” signals that can help a website rise in search engine rankings.
Most enterprise SEO platforms offer link analysis (i.e. which sites are linking to yours), link building or removal recommendations via competitive analysis and other reports that show opportunities to get links (i.e. which pages you should request links to) as part of their base platforms.
2. Keyword research/rank analysis
Keyword research – knowing what terms people use to find your website, how your pages rank for different queries and how you should use those terms in your copy – is a pillar of effective SEO.
Virtually all enterprise SEO platforms offer keyword research tools that enable marketers to discover the ways consumers are searching for content, and which keywords are driving traffic for competitors.
Vendors source this data differently, however.
Some providers license data from point solutions or ISPs, due to Google’s restrictions on scraped data in its terms of use and the percentage of search results that contain the keyword “(not provided).” Other vendors develop and maintain a proprietary database of keyword terms.
As a result, reliable keyword data has become less of a commodity and more expensive.
It is also important to note that ranking analysis has grown increasingly complex as Google has increased its use of more dynamic and visual SERPs.
Marketers are no longer satisfied with a simple numerical designation of how their page ranks for a given query; they want to know if it’s displayed in a carousel, in a knowledge panel, with sitelinks – or one of the other ways crawled content is displayed on the SERPs.
Brands want a sense of how they are performing overall in search, even if brand-related activity occurs on third-party sites. That’s why providers come up with their own proprietary formulas for calculating “share of voice” in search
3. Search intent-based analysis
Google’s search algorithms, often powered by artificial intelligence, focus less on keyword matches and more on search intent.
To counter the lack of keyword data, SEO platform providers are developing more tools that analyze search intent and predict or recommend the most relevant content that meets the searcher’s needs.
4. Custom site crawls/audits
With content quality becoming the lynchpin for SEO strategies of many marketers, site crawls or audits are important tools of enterprise SEO platform providers.
Some platforms offer optimization recommendations for keywords, page structures and crawlability. They prioritize and often give scores for such factors as HTML title tags, body tags and meta tags.
Many enterprise SEO platforms offer daily site crawls; some feature real-time technical data, others offer updates on a weekly basis.
Ideally, the tool should be able to crawl the entire site, not just random pages. However, some enterprises are so large that it is unrealistic to expect a tool to cross it in its entirety.
5. Content marketing and analysis
SEO and content marketing have become closely aligned, as Google has raised the content quality bar through artificial intelligence as well as its regular algorithm updates. As a result, relevant, up-to-date content has become integral to SEO success.
Many vendors have upgraded the content optimization and content marketing capabilities of their enterprise SEO platforms and expanded the content marketing features of the tools. These include:
More advanced platforms perform analytics to help improve the depth and quality of content by performing topical analysis of content and comparing it to the competition to identify potentially important gaps and make recommendations for improvement.
One emerging area that vendors are investing in is the ability to automatically and proactively suggest topics that marketers should create content about – eliminating the need to spend a lot of time on analytics. Some even help to develop the type of content that will show up in queries for target keywords.
6. International search tracking
International search coverage has become a critical skill as the global economy drives more US-based businesses to do business online and offline in multiple countries and languages.
Virtually all enterprise SEO platforms profiled in this report offer a level of international search coverage that transcends borders, languages and alphabets.
Capabilities include international keyword research, the integration of global market and search volume data into the platform, as well as the integration of global CPC currency data.
7. Mobile/local analytics
Google’s search engine updates increasingly focus on improving the mobile/local search user experience.
While mobile-friendly sites are now tables in the SEO game, appearing in local listings has become more important in the COVID-19 era, which has increased e-commerce and digital communication between local retailers and restaurants, in part for demand. to take care of for BOPIS and curbside delivery.
8. Technical SEO crawling
Tools to identify technical issues that hinder ranking performance are very important because marketers rank technical SEO fixes as their number one priority. These include things like:
9. Cross-device attribution
Recognizing that SEO is only one aspect of a brand’s marketing efforts, and also that search traffic (especially on brand keywords) is influenced by paid media, some providers are developing capabilities that help marketers determine which marketing initiatives drive site visits or sales.
However, this is becoming increasingly difficult, as third-party cookies are no longer supported by many companies.
Get the full report on Enterprise SEO Tools here
Pamela Parker is Research Director at Third Door Media’s Content Studio, where she produces MarTech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketing in conjunction with Search Engine Land and MarTech. Prior to assuming this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager, Senior Editor and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its inception. She is a former managing editor of ClickZ and also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.