Overcoming the Challenges of Building and Sustaining an Enterprise SEO Agency Partnership

Crafting and executing an SEO strategy for enterprise-level organizations comes with a myriad of potential roadblocks and complexities. Making an SEO agency-enterprise client partnership work requires specialized considerations and tactics.

Let’s explore some of the most common barriers to forging and maintaining a productive agency-client relationship and how to overcome them.

Bureaucracy and Slow Decision-Making

In smaller organizations, decisions are usually made relatively quickly. Often, a simple “OK” from the CEO or Head of Marketing is all that’s required to approve an SEO budget or launch a content optimization campaign.

Large enterprises, however, are renowned for their hierarchical structures and layers of internal complexity. This can stall decision-making for weeks or months, often making a long, uphill path to executing a successful SEO strategy.

“To speed decision-making and ensure the swift implementation of SEO programs, agencies and their enterprise clients need to prioritize agile decision-making. For this to work, agencies should be willing and able to regularly produce compelling data-driven insights to support their recommendations. For their part, enterprise clients must commit to acting on these suggestions promptly so SEO adjustments and improvements can be implemented flexibly and in real time,” says Henry.

Internal Silos and Turf Wars

Larger organizations typically comprise multiple departments, which can often create operational silos and even internal competition. Organizational barriers like these can complicate the task of managing SEO at an enterprise level.

For example, the copywriting, web development, and marketing teams may not be on the same page regarding SEO requirements. Each may want to “own” the SEO strategy and may even appoint their own SEO agencies to drive their own agenda. Not only does this waste time and effort, it also makes it impossible to set a clear SEO baseline and deploy a comprehensive strategy to advance toward the desired improvements.

Effective SEO requires effective communication among all involved departments and the agency to get everyone pulling in the same direction and avoid internal politics coming into play.

Ideally, you should set up regular, cross-functional SEO meetings to drive consensus and keep the strategy moving forward. Some companies find it helpful to establish an SEO Council comprising stakeholders from all affected departments—and the SEO agency—to establish a unified approach to SEO.

Years of SEO Neglect

Over the last decade, SEO has taken its rightful place at the top of the enterprise marketing agenda. However, it’s not uncommon for some large enterprises to have underinvested in or even completely overlooked SEO.

Years of insufficient SEO oversight can make the task of catching up and ultimately achieving SEO proficiency feel overwhelming for even the most seasoned internal marketing professionals.

“For enterprises with a legacy of SEO neglect, our first step is to conduct a comprehensive SEO audit to pinpoint where the gaps lie,” explains Henry. “Next, we prioritize these areas based on their potential impact on the client’s search rankings—and the degree of effort needed to fix them. We generally recommend starting by targeting the low-hanging fruit that can offer quick wins.”

Technical Barriers

It’s not uncommon for SEO agencies to encounter technical challenges when dealing with enterprise websites due to their age, size, or, as we mentioned previously, years of poor maintenance or neglect.

Common technical issues include broken links, outdated redirects, duplicate content, slow loading speeds, and other user experience (UX) issues.

“As part of our service, we typically perform a baseline website assessment to assess the general technical health of a client’s website and rate the level of user experience,” says Henry. “For example, what are the issues that might create frustration or mistrust for users when they come to a website and start to browse? How easy is it for people to find the information they’re looking for?

“We may also recommend clients rebuild and recode their website if it’s not properly optimized for mobile.”

Aside from being open to correcting basic “hygiene” issues such as these, enterprise organizations should help their agency navigate the following potential internal technical roadblocks to SEO success:

• Inability to mitigate technical SEO problems due to a lack of access to the client’s CMS.
• Compliance issues related to content and who is granted access and permissions to the website.
• The organization uses multiple domains that need to be merged.
• Internal resistance to the implementation of new brand wording or SEO keywords.
• Difficulty ensuring SEO efforts are seamlessly integrated with the client’s CRM to ensure MQLs and SQLs are tracked and nurtured effectively to drive a robust sales pipeline.
• Because SEO is deemed by development teams and back-end tech experts to be a low priority, they’re slow to implement required website changes, or they implement them incorrectly because they don’t understand why they’re required.

These headaches are often compounded in multinational enterprise organizations where development and implementation teams are based in a different country or region than the marketing or SEO departments.

Incorrect Prioritization

Henry stresses the importance of ensuring enterprises and their SEO agencies define and agree on the correct SEO priorities at the outset. “One mistake to avoid is focusing solely on creating net new content without considering ways to SEO optimize existing assets and web pages that talk to areas of strategic importance or have the potential to drive significant revenue.

“Often, applying SEO basics to existing content can drive significant value and result in quick wins. Once your base content is fully optimized, you can start addressing content gaps and backlogs.”

To ensure appropriate prioritization of time and resources, Henry recommends:

• Developing a prioritization framework that links SEO actions to overarching business objectives.
• Measuring the effects and outcomes using data-driven insights.

Focusing on areas that don’t generate a positive outcome can result in negative SEO performance and ROI over time.

Unrealistic Stakeholder Expectations

Even if all key enterprise stakeholders and their agencies are 100% committed to SEO, misunderstandings can arise. For example, enterprise stakeholders who have little knowledge of, or aren’t directly involved in, digital marketing may have unrealistic expectations of SEO or not grasp the limitations of an SEO strategy.

“That’s understandable,” says Henry. “CFO and CEOs will naturally be most interested in new leads and sales opportunities, and may expect a SEO strategy to tap into new revenue streams and deliver ROI immediately.

“Because enterprise brands are usually well-known in their marketplace, success is often about owning specific keywords, outranking competitors, and ranking the right page for the right SEO query.”

Henry says it’s therefore vital to:

• Refine how you communicate SEO results and ROI with C-level stakeholders within the client organization.
• Spend less time on the “what” of your SEO strategy and more on the “why” in these conversations.
• Continually educate stakeholders about the intricacies of the discipline of search engine optimization and what it can (and can’t) do.
• To provide the necessary insights, give key stakeholders access to quality resources like thought leadership white papers, eBooks, research reports, and on-demand webinars.