Dominating Enterprise SEO: An Interview With Sarvesh Bagla, CEO – Techmagnate
December 15, 2022
Prashant Shukla
This month, I had the opportunity to sit down with Sarvesh Bagla – CEO of Techmagnate, and discuss how the company has helped leading brands achieve transformational growth with Enterprise SEO. Since he has directly worked with companies from different industries and has first-hand experience, I leapt at the opportunity to ask him about the various aspects of Enterprise SEO.
What Does Enterprise SEO Mean to You?
Enterprise SEO is a niche offering that falls within the gamut of SEO Services. It is ideal for large websites, Enterprise businesses, or top brands looking to dominate the SERPs for the industry they operate in.
Enterprise SEO is a niche offering that falls within the gamut of SEO Services. It is ideal for large websites, Enterprise businesses, or top brands looking to dominate the SERPs for the industry they operate in. In the world of Enterprise SEO, you work on SCALE – with the entire universe of keywords relevant to your industry with the aim of dominating SERPs for the same.
Here, we need to be proficient at managing enterprise-scale SEO operations and with the client’s industry. This involves creating frameworks for industry research, website audits, technical SEO, onsite optimization, link building, content creation, content marketing, frequency of performance reviews and audits, the scale of reporting [no. of reports, the width of metrics covered, and the frequency of reports], task tracking, the number of resources deployed with specialized skill sets, etc.
That’s basically what enterprise SEO is all about – the essential ingredients remain the same, but the scale of SEO operations is massive, and so are the results.
What’s the First Thing You Want Brands to Know About Enterprise SEO?
There are only a few enterprises that understand and appreciate the power and importance of SEO and are willing to invest in the process. And only a few SEO agencies have genuine Enterprise SEO experience and expertise.
Most don’t know where to begin. For instance, identifying the universe an enterprise operates in, i.e., pulling out all the keywords and total search volume for the target industry, is the first crucial step.
The above slide shows the Search Volumes for the Healthcare Industry in India and how it has grown over the last 2 years.
Now when it comes to Enterprise SEO, we cannot think of demonstrating results only in the form of rankings of particular keywords. We need better metrics. For Enterprises, we talk about maximizing the share of voice in their targeted industry. Share of voice is the number of times you appear in the top 5 search results compared to the total searches.
SOV = Your brand’s measures (Search Volume your brand appears for) / Total market measures (Total Search Volume) x 100
Let’s say there are 1 lakh searches for the keyword “personal loans”. After working on improving the share of voice for your brand, you rank at the 3rd spot in SERPs. Now, every time a user searches for the keyword “personal loans”, the possibility of appearing in the top 5 results is 100%.
When we offer Enterprise SEO services to clients and try to demonstrate the results, we focus on improving the share of voice. This means we are moving an entire industry for them, which creates massive opportunities for growth, lead generation, brand awareness, and more.
What are the Classic Challenges Enterprises Face When Working on Enterprise SEO?
While discussing Enterprise SEO challenges, we realized these are multifaceted. I decided to expand upon this question.
What are the Bottlenecks in Scaling Operations?
Sheer scale of operations, involved stakeholders, proprietary systems, and aligning things under one ambit are some of the bottlenecks in scaling operations for Enterprise SEO.
Scaling operations can be overwhelming because of the sheer scale of keyword research, on-page optimizations, technical implementation, and thousands of web pages.
More importantly, many steps and stakeholders are involved who are responsible for web development, content production, digital PR, proprietary CMSes, and much more. This also includes aligning everyone across departments and multiple stages of approvals.
When it comes to scaling operations, you need a team of SEO experts, content managers, marketing experts, and decision-makers. However, beyond all these challenges lies transformational growth for your enterprise: the main driving force behind this strategy.
Why are Rank Tracking and Link Building a Challenge?
For Enterprise SEO, tracking the rank of thousands of keywords on both desktop and mobile is an expensive affair. If it were a few pages, you could do this step manually, but since the scale is so immense, you need enterprise-level tools for rank tracking.
Our clients who have availed Enterprise SEO services spend thousands of dollars every year for rank tracking (including daily rank tracking and desktop vs. mobile tracking).
The same is true for link-building activities, which means undertaking a large-scale campaign for target landing pages.
Here, we ought to focus on the quality and ensure the exercise will drive desired output, i.e., improvement in PA (Page Authority) of the target URLs, which in turn will help boost rankings.
For this, we again need advanced tools like MOZ and Ahrefs to track various link-building metrics.
What are Some Challenges in Content Production?
From the standpoint of content creation, enterprises have to produce a lot of unique content that educates, delights, and persuades readers. This includes content for on-page as well as off-page activities. Essentially, the ingredients are similar for content production, but the scale of operations is multiplied tenfold.
You need a team of qualified writers and editors to deal with content production activities. This also includes content marketing experts who will create strategies and market the content to the right audience, an outreach team for guest posting, blogger outreach, and building connections with top media sites for digital PR.
What do Companies Get Wrong About Enterprise SEO When Compared to Paid Media?
Enterprise SEO has the potential to unlock transformational growth for brands, yet it still remains a channel most enterprises often overlook. Brands have marketing budgets of crores of rupees which they typically spend on paid media because the output is quicker and easier to measure. But they won’t invest even 5% of their paid ad budgets on SEO, to begin with.
Later in their SEO journeys, brands promptly start injecting funds into Enterprise SEO when they realize the volume and quality of traffic (and leads) it can deliver. That too at a fraction of the cost!
When brands compare performance with Paid Media and realize that organic leads have a significantly higher conversion rate at a significantly lower cost per acquisition, they finally start appreciating the true power of SEO.
An example of increasing the targeted keywords from 317 to 333 for the 1st position and its effect on the traffic and leads.
From then on, the importance of SEO in the marketing mix increases. As an agency that has worked with top brands and leading enterprises across industries like BFSI, Healthcare, Education, etc., we have seen clients double or triple their SEO investments after seeing the results. They will then commit more time, money, and resources which further accelerates SEO performance leading to a virtuous cycle.
When you say significantly higher conversion rates, how much is significant? Can you give me an example?
We’ve seen a 3X-8X higher lead-to-sales conversion rate from Organic Leads compared to Paid Media.
Due to higher average ticket size and faster sales conversions from Organic leads, one of our enterprise BFSI clients scaled down their paid media spends. They even optimized their call center operations by reducing the number of salespersons as they were able to do more business with fewer leads, translating to crores in savings over the course of a financial year.
What is the Role of Automation in Enterprise SEO?
There’s great scope for automation when it comes to Enterprise SEO. Automation allows us to execute with speed and efficiency.
Instead of tracking rankings manually, we use tools to track thousands of keywords on a daily basis, on both desktop and mobile. Similarly, rather than optimizing content manually, we refer to tools that identify content gaps [keyword density, thin content, duplicate content, etc.] across thousands of pages.
Furthermore, tools are helpful for checking a website’s health when you have lakhs of pages on your enterprise site. Also, large sites are almost always undergoing regular product/technology enhancements on them, which means their SEO health [indexing, caching, website crashes, page speed, broken links, 404 errors, etc.] needs constant monitoring.
You cannot keep track of all these pages manually: it’s just not possible. This is why we use enterprise-grade SEO tools to monitor website health and have integrated it into a development dashboard that sends you active alerts.
We rely heavily on advanced dashboards with visual reporting capabilities on Google Data Studio to integrate data from various tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMRush and other custom sources. These automated reports need no manual intervention and are always updated and available when you need them.
From these examples, it is clear there’s an irreplaceable role for automation in Enterprise SEO.
Can You Share a Few Examples of the Results That Techmagnate Has Delivered Through Enterprise SEO?
We have helped the #1 NBFC in India dominate search for each line of business they operate in – personal loans, business loans, home loans, fixed deposits, credit cards, etc.
We have provided them with an 80%+ share of voice in the Top 3 search results for their Fixed Deposits and Personal Loans business. The improved share of voice in Google Search Results has resulted in the NBFC collecting hundreds of crores in fixed deposits and disbursing hundreds of crores in loans from SEO on a monthly basis.
Techmagnate has been a digital partner to the top private hospital chain in India and has helped generate thousands of organic leads [doctor appointments]. We’ve helped them achieve the top spot for hundreds of top searched keywords like best cardiologists, best hospitals, top oncologists, etc.
For our eCommerce clients, we have improved the share of voice on keywords like “washing machine” and “LED TV”. Here, we compete with names like Amazon and Flipkart and deliver results against these massive competitors.
I’ll encourage you to read a few case studies to get data-driven insights.
What Are The Benchmarks You Set as an Enterprise SEO Company?
Techmagnate has set some great benchmarks as we work with leading brands in the healthcare, finance, education, and eCommerce sectors. We have been working with these brands for the last decade and a half; and we have set robust processes for Enterprise SEO. Today, we have the largest team of SEO experts in the country and a combination of proprietary tools to enable seamless scaling of SEO activities and deliver data-driven results.
What are Some Final Thoughts You’d Like to Share With Brands?
I think many brands are reluctant to invest in Enterprise SEO due to the massive scale of the operations and lack of faith in SEO. Enterprises have a massive marketing budget, and SEO often takes a big backseat. Also, the cost of time can become a liability, which takes precedence over the money brands invest in Enterprise SEO.
Moreover, any hurdles in the operations and ill-implementation of strategies can affect everything you are doing. For instance, if the rankings get delayed, the actual loss in growth can amount to crores. This means the scope for error is very marginal.
But with the right partner and strategies, the results can be stupendously fruitful.
Today, we are actively working with many enterprises and use proprietary tools and successfully drive all the strategic implementations of Enterprise SEO. Techmagnate is assisting them in dominating an industry and directly generating revenue.
Click to learn more about Techmagnate’s Enterprise SEO Services.