5 Questions To Ask When Evaluating Enterprise SEO Tools

When purchasing an enterprise SEO tool, there are various considerations for decision-makers to consider. It's been quite some time since evaluating SEO software decisions meant just looking at the number of keywords you want to track and the number of domains you have and picking the vendor that best matched those needs at the right price. Organic search now drives the majority of traffic to most websites and has transcended past its keyword roots. In a digital-first world, SEO "tools" aren't enough to fit the needs of enterprise SEO. Only an enterprise SEO platform with robust functionality can adequately support your business goals, growth strategy, and, most importantly, your website.

5 Questions To Ask When Evaluating Enterprise SEO Tools

If you're considering an SEO tool or platform, there are five core questions to ask about each solution to see how it can help your business grow.

1. Is the platform built to support a truly enterprise website?

When you have a large website - anything with more than a few thousand unique URLs - there is more at stake for organic search than for smaller sites. While smaller sites can avoid worrying about rendering solutions or localizing keywords, enterprise websites can't neglect these key SEO considerations. There's much more to "lose" when it comes to SEO for a large website, and a traditional strategy that heavily relies on content optimization isn't enough for two critical reasons:

1. Large sites are more likely than small ones to be limited by crawl budget or impacted by structural issues, and as a result, have content go un-indexed by search engines. When content isn't indexed, it means you can't receive traffic or revenue through organic search from those URLs.
2. Large sites are often significant investments with substantial traffic that can benefit more from analyzing their performance data than they can from looking at SERP rankings, the share of voice, or other traditional metrics that are primarily competitive.

In other words, the main challenge of a big website is unlocking its true potential, not necessarily competing with other websites in a zero-sum game.

How Botify Helps Enterprise Websites Grow

Botify was built with only one thing in mind: increasing conversions from organic traffic. Instead of looking at how other websites are ranking, the right enterprise platform should highlight how your site performs and bring to light technical and content optimizations you can directly control. After all, the goal of SEO should be to grow traffic that converts. If you're not doing that, other metrics simply don't matter.

2. Is the platform helping you track ROI and growth?

The status quo for linking SEO and organic search performance to business metrics and measurable ROI isn't good enough. Too many decision-makers rely on non-business metrics like SERP rankings, impressions, and "share of voice" to measure organic search. Too many practitioners fail to offer anything better or more concrete. As the importance of organic search as a customer acquisition channel continues to grow, along with the technical complexity of SEO for the largest websites, measurable ROI is no longer a "nice to have."

How Botify Helps Track Organic ROI

Botify knows the value of understanding actual user behavior is paramount to a robust SEO platform. That's why we include revenue & conversion data integrations with every Botify subscription, the ability to cross-index URL-level business data with crucial SEO and performance metrics, and EngagementAnalytics, a dedicated module for looking at all of your conversion data directly from Botify.

3. Is the tool providing you a robust, in-house solution?

One of the most important decisions at the enterprise level is what projects are strategically crucial to keep in-house versus outsourcing to a developer or agency. At Botify, we think that SEO technology itself isn't something brands with mission-critical web properties should build internally. It's simply too difficult and time-consuming to solve problems like dynamic rendering or to tap into the Google Search Console API when high-performance, highly configurable solutions like Botify exist.

However, the opposite is true when it comes to your organic search strategy itself. While it's tempting to take a fixed budget and outsource decisions to a well-known agency, the reality is that both the importance of search and the highly unique needs of a given, high-value web property make it essential to "own" your strategy. Today, brands that genuinely unlock their digital marketing potential focus on their goals, performance data, and processes instead of treating search solely as a risk to mitigate or a cost-center to minimize.

How Botify Helps Streamline Everyday Decisions In-House

For brands with mission-critical web properties, "owning" your organic search strategy requires a mastery of first-party data, highly customizable analysis, and automation that allows you to work at scale across millions of potential URLs. It also requires that data and analysis be easily shared and acted on in enterprise-level business intelligence tools and distributed to on-demand business and technology teams. This is precisely what Botify does, combining unmatched first-party data analysis, automation, and artificial intelligence with an API-first approach to integrations that allow even the most complex organizations to integrate organic search performance into their everyday dashboards.

For those who still need additional support from external resources, Botify has marketing, technology, and solution partners that know how to use Botify to create an impact on your business's bottom line.

4. Is the platform equipping you with the best data possible?

The "best data" is whatever best enables you and your business to exceed business objectives. While it's essential to keep a keen eye on what competitors in your industry are doing, you can't control their tactics or strategies. The only thing that you can control is your SEO program. An enterprise SEO platform should provide you a better way to look at your first-party data. The right tool will surface up actionable insights, monitor trends, and help you act on making optimizations to your website - not just monitoring what's happening in the competitive landscape.

Botify and First-Party Data

There is critical value in first-party data for any enterprise website. In order to make changes to improve your overall SEO program, it's crucial to have a complete insight into the whole organic search funnel that's currently happening on your website.

The importance of ROI is why Botify considers your business data to be a "first-class citizen" inside our unified data model. We believe that the business impact of your site should be no less relevant to your organic search strategy than page speed or keyword data.

5. Is the platform's ongoing R&D support the unpredictability of search?

With thousands of web pages created every minute, the internet and organic search continue to grow exponentially. It's not enough anymore to rank for just bottom-of-the-funnel keywords. In fact, for many websites, long-tail keywords are driving more traffic than ever before.

The advent in the last decade of voice search - from Siri to Alexa to even our refrigerators - has helped change the way we search semantically. Instead of searching "purple necklaces," we're searching for "16-inch purple butterfly choker necklace gold" or "What necklace did Blake Lively wear to the Grammy Awards?" The growth of long-tail keywords is unpredictable. While there may be volumetric fluctuations in how many times people search a core business search term, it's much more difficult to predict how often someone will explore a very detailed term. No longer is doing keyword research months in advance and tying that to a quarterly content strategy enough. You need to be able to monetize the unpredictable.

How Botify Helps Discoverability

At the core of Botify is a full-funnel approach to organic search - from crawling to conversions. For these stages to occur, you have to, above all else, be discovered by Google. If Google isn't finding your content, it can't rank, send traffic to your website, or convert. Not only does Botify focus on new features like SpeedWorkers (a dynamic rendering solution to help Google better understand and render the content of your pages), but it also is powered by your first-party data. This means that you're analyzing actual user behavior that occurred on your website, putting the ability to be discovered at your fingertips.

Final Thoughts

Choosing the right enterprise SEO platform is a big decision. Even with these core questions, there are even more to think about. Are you a global business looking to expand your footprint in multiple languages, or are you targeting one country specifically? Do you require the tool to provide various features for various business units in your business (marketing, content, web development, etc.), or do you only expect the SEO team to use the tool? Is your broader SEO strategy inclusive of all-too-important technical SEO tactics, or do you exclusively focus on appearing for targeted keywords? Above all else, do you have a clear sense of how your SEO program drives sustainable growth for your business?

If you're interested in learning more about the leading full-funnel enterprise SEO platform, Botify, please reach out to our team!