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<title>Why SSR Alone Doesn’t Solve Enterprise SEO Problems</title>
<link>https://prerender.io/blog/ssr-enterprise-seo/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender Team]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:09:38 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=8039</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Discover why enterprise SEO still breaks after SSR adoption, and how to fix it with scalable JS rendering.]]></description>
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<p>Implementing SSR for enterprise SEO fixes many of the visibility issues caused by JavaScript, which is why it’s often treated as the go-to solution for large-scale websites. But rendering content on the server is only one piece of the puzzle, especially if your goal is to improve both search and AI discovery.</p>
<p>The limitations of SSR usually show up after deployment. As Googlebot scales its crawling, your origin server (now responsible for rendering every request in real time) starts to introduce latency. That slowdown becomes a signal: crawl rates drop, and pages that are technically correct get indexed less frequently, or not at all. At the same time, cache invalidation delays can prevent updated content from reaching Googlebot for hours or even days.</p>
<p>None of this means SSR was the wrong approach. It means it solves a specific problem, while enterprise SEO challenges extend beyond rendering. This article covers where those gaps appear, what causes them at the infrastructure level, and how dynamic rendering fills them without requiring changes to your SSR architecture.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">TL;DR – Why Enterprise SEO Can Still Break After SSR</h2>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>SSR fixes how your JavaScript pages are rendered, but it doesn’t fix how reliably crawlers find, index, and return to them at scale.</li>
<li>The bigger your site, the more crawler traffic competes with real user traffic — and the more your server overhead affects how often Googlebot shows up.</li>
<li>When content changes faster than your cache refreshes, Googlebot sees outdated pages. That’s a freshness problem, not a rendering problem.</li>
<li>Enterprise sites are rarely built on one uniform tech stack. Rendering inconsistencies on pages outside your core SSR setup are more common than most teams expect.</li>
<li>Not all AI crawlers execute JavaScript. Missing HTML content on any page is content that does not surface in AI-generated answers.</li>
<li>Dynamic rendering handles what crawlers see at the infrastructure level, independently of your SSR setup, without touching your application.</li>
</ul>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What SSR Fixes for Enterprise Sites (And the Visibility Gaps It Leaves Behind)</h2>
<p>To understand where SSR falls short, it helps to be precise about what it actually does.</p>
<p>SSR executes JavaScript on the server and delivers fully rendered HTML to the client on the initial HTTP response. The browser receives a complete document it can parse and display immediately, rather than a near-empty HTML shell that JavaScript then populates after load.</p>
<p>Before SSR, client-side rendering (CSR) was the default for JavaScript-heavy applications. Googlebot would arrive at a page, receive a shell with a single <code><mark style="background-color:#282a36" class="has-inline-color has-white-color"><code><div id="root"></code></mark></code> and a JavaScript bundle, and index whatever it found. For dynamic content loaded after JavaScript execution, that was often nothing.</p>
<p>Googlebot does execute JavaScript, but through a secondary rendering queue that can lag behind the initial crawl by days or weeks. <a href="https://www.onely.com/blog/google-needs-9x-more-time-to-crawl-js-than-html/" type="link" id="https://www.onely.com/blog/google-needs-9x-more-time-to-crawl-js-than-html/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Research by Onely</a> found that <strong>Google needs 9x more time to crawl JavaScript pages than plain HTML</strong>, a direct consequence of this rendering queue. This means that content that only exists after JavaScript rendering may not be indexed promptly, or at all (if Googlebot deprioritizes re-rendering).</p>
<p>SSR eliminates that lag. The rendered HTML is the initial response, and it behaves like a static document from the moment Googlebot arrives. For most dynamic sites, that fix is sufficient, but enterprise sites are on another level. At enterprise scale, SSR’s core assumptions break down in ways that often have nothing to do with rendering quality.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Where Enterprise Websites Break SSR’s Rendering Benefits</h2>
<p>SSR was designed for manageable page counts, moderate content change frequency, and an infrastructure that can absorb rendering load. Enterprise sites systematically violate all three. The result is three compounding failure modes.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Origin Server Overhead for SSR</h3>
<p>Every SSR request requires your origin server to render the page in real time. Under normal user traffic, this is manageable with cache-rendered output, set TTLs, and horizontal scaling. Search crawler traffic behavior breaks this model.</p>
<p>Googlebot crawls aggressively, ignores your traffic patterns, and can hit a large site hundreds of times per hour. Many of those requests land on uncached pages, each one triggering a full render cycle alongside your user traffic.</p>
<p>This creates two problems. First, your server slows down. Second, Googlebot notices. When response times degrade, Googlebot interprets that as a signal to back off and reduces its crawl rate. <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9679690" type="link" id="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9679690" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google’s own documentation confirms this directly</a>: if server response times are consistently slow, the crawl rate limit decreases to avoid overloading the server.</p>
<p>In documented cases, such as <a href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googlebot-crawl-slump-mueller-points-to-server-errors/553715/" type="link" id="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googlebot-crawl-slump-mueller-points-to-server-errors/553715/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">one reported by Search Engine Journal</a>, server-side errors have caused <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/1mnr03b/comment/n8n5eki/" type="link" id="https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/1mnr03b/comment/n8n5eki/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">crawl rates to drop by 90% within 24 hours</a> (see this Reddit post, for instance). Pages that would have rendered correctly never get indexed, not because of a rendering bug, but because the crawler stopped before reaching them.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="624" height="419" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Dropped-Googlebot-crawl-Reddit.jpg" alt="Dropped Googlebot crawl - Reddit" class="wp-image-8045" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Dropped-Googlebot-crawl-Reddit.jpg 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Dropped-Googlebot-crawl-Reddit-300x201.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure>
<p>You’re then stuck choosing between two bad options: throttle Googlebot to protect performance, or over-provision your website’s infrastructure specifically to absorb crawler load. Neither fixes why crawler traffic competes with user traffic in the first place.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Cache Invalidation Lag: Why Googlebot and AI Crawlers See Stale Content</h3>
<p>The practical response to SSR rendering overhead is caching: render each page once, store the output, and serve it for subsequent requests. The <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/caching-what-it-is-how-it-works-and-how-prerender-caches/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/caching-what-it-is-how-it-works-and-how-prerender-caches/">caching problem in JavaScript</a> surfaces when content changes.</p>
<p>Enterprise sites have dozens of content types sitting behind multiple caching layers in sequence: application cache, CDN edge, and reverse proxy. A content update has to invalidate all of them correctly.</p>
<p>For a single page edit, this is manageable. For a bulk catalog update that touches hundreds of thousands of URLs, it frequently isn’t. The database updates, but stale HTML persists at the CDN or reverse proxy because the invalidation signal did not fully propagate, or because a bulk update triggered partial invalidation that missed a subset of affected URLs.</p>
<p>Essentially, Googlebot crawls those pages and receives the old content. From its perspective, nothing changed. But for ecommerce, the gap between a pricing or availability update and Googlebot seeing it is a direct revenue problem. For news and media, where freshness influences rankings, cache staleness degrades indexation quality in ways that surface in traffic.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Rendering Inconsistencies Across Page Types</h3>
<p>Enterprise sites are rarely architecturally uniform. A large ecommerce site might have category pages in a React SSR setup, product pages on a different system with partial SSR coverage, editorial content on WordPress with a JavaScript frontend, and the localized versions of all of the above built by regional teams with different framework choices.</p>
<p>Pages outside the core SSR configuration fall back to client-side rendering. This affects more page types than most teams expect:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Legacy pages never converted during the SSR migration</li>
<li>Third-party embedded content where the vendor controls rendering</li>
<li>Localized pages built by teams with different technical standards</li>
<li>Campaign and landing pages built outside the main application</li>
<li>Faceted navigation and filtered listing pages, where dynamic URLs create rendering edge cases</li>
</ul>
<p>SSR coverage of 80% of page types does not solve 80% of the rendering problem. The pages that fall back to client-side rendering often represent a disproportionate share of strategically important content: high-intent landing pages, localized product catalogs, and faceted search results.</p>
<p>These three enterprise SEO SSR failure modes compound each other. But even on pages where SSR is working perfectly, there is a separate problem: <strong>the distinction between a page rendering correctly and a page actually getting indexed.</strong></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why Your Pages Are Still Not Indexed After SSR Implementation</h2>
<p>SSR ensures a page renders correctly when a crawler requests it. It does not ensure that Googlebot reaches the page, requests it at a useful frequency, or receives current content when it does. Rendering, crawling, and indexation are distinct processes.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Crawl Budget: The Allocation Problem</h3>
<p><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/white-papers/crawl-budget-guide/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/white-papers/crawl-budget-guide/">Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl on a given site within a given period.</a> Google allocates it based on historical crawl rate, server response times, content freshness, and signals about how valuable the site’s content is. A five-million-URL site will not have all five million pages crawled daily, because Googlebot prioritizes, and your infrastructure influences that prioritization with every request.</p>
<p><strong>Top tip:</strong> follow <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/crawl-budget-seo/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/crawl-budget-seo/">these tips to optimize your site for better crawl budget spend</a>.</p>
<p>Of all the infrastructure signals Google weighs, server response latency is the most punishing, as it directly degrades crawl budget. When SSR rendering overhead slows your origin server’s response, Googlebot observes that latency and reduces its crawl rate. Fewer pages get crawled per budget cycle.</p>
<p>Cache staleness compounds this. When Googlebot re-crawls a page and finds the same content it previously saw, it may reduce the page’s crawl frequency and reallocate budget elsewhere. The pages at the bottom of Googlebot’s priority list tend to be the ones that most need fresh indexation: long-tail product pages, localized variants, filtered category pages, and newly created content. These are also where ecommerce and publishing revenue are concentrated.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Content Freshness Problem: Why SSR SEO Doesn’t Solve it</h3>
<p>For frequently updated sites, the gap between a content update and Googlebot seeing it is a measurable SEO problem. In ecommerce, product pages showing outdated pricing or availability send poor quality signals to Googlebot, and pages that consistently show stale information can lose rankings relative to competitors with stronger freshness signals. In news and media, freshness is a direct ranking factor. Stories indexed promptly after publication rank better for time-sensitive queries than stories where indexation lags by hours.</p>
<p>SSR alone does not close the freshness gap if cache invalidation is unreliable. A page may render correctly on the next crawl, but if that crawl happens three days after the update, the freshness advantage is already gone.</p>
<p>Cache staleness and crawl budget are problems Googlebot can at least partially recover from over time. The indexation gaps affecting AI crawlers are permanent and growing in business impact as AI search becomes a primary discovery channel.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">SSR for AI Visibility: Solving the LLM Content Extraction Gap</h2>
<p>Enterprise SEO has historically centered on Googlebot. The current landscape is different, and the numbers are moving fast.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/from-googlebot-to-gptbot-whos-crawling-your-site-in-2025/" type="link" id="https://blog.cloudflare.com/from-googlebot-to-gptbot-whos-crawling-your-site-in-2025/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review</a>, AI bots now account for <a href="https://ppc.land/ai-crawlers-now-consume-4-2-of-web-traffic-as-internet-grows-19-in-2025/" type="link" id="https://ppc.land/ai-crawlers-now-consume-4-2-of-web-traffic-as-internet-grows-19-in-2025/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">4.2% of all HTML requests</a> across the web. GPTBot alone grew 305% in request volume between May 2024 and May 2025. Overall, AI and search crawler traffic grew 18% year-over-year. These crawlers are actively indexing your site right now, and most of them cannot execute JavaScript.</p>
<p>AI-powered search products from OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, Anthropic, and others now index and cite web content directly in generated answers. The crawlers behind these systems have fundamentally different technical characteristics than Googlebot, and SSR compatibility with them is not guaranteed.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Most AI Crawlers Cannot See Your JavaScript Content</h3>
<p>Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, and this detail is critical for SSR.</p>
<p>When Googlebot visits your site, it makes two passes: an initial crawl of the HTML response, then a secondary rendering pass where it executes JavaScript and indexes the resulting DOM. AI crawlers make one request. They send an HTTP GET request, receive the HTML response, extract the content, and move on. No secondary rendering pass, no JavaScript execution, no return visit.</p>
<p>What is in the initial HTML response is what gets extracted. What is not in the initial HTML response is invisible.</p>
<p>On pages where SSR is consistently implemented and delivers complete HTML in the initial response, AI crawlers see complete content. On pages where SSR is missing or inconsistent, they see whatever partial content the HTML shell contains, which may be very little.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">LLM Content Extraction and Structured Data</h3>
<p>LLM content extraction depends on clean, complete, well-structured HTML. This matters most for structured content: product specifications, pricing, ingredients, technical specifications, dates, and authorship.</p>
<p>If a product page delivers an empty <code><mark style="background-color:#282a36" class="has-inline-color has-white-color"><code><div class="product-specs"></code></mark></code> in the initial HTML and JavaScript populates that div after load, an AI crawler extracts a page with no product specifications. That product does not surface in AI answers for specification-related queries. A competitor whose specifications are present in the initial HTML does.</p>
<p>The same applies to schema.org markup in JSON-LD. If your structured data is injected by JavaScript rather than present in the server-delivered HTML, AI crawlers miss it entirely. This affects citation quality and contextual relevance in AI-generated answers, not just traditional rich results in Google Search.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Rendering Inconsistencies Hit AI Crawlers Harder</h3>
<p>The rendering inconsistencies described above have more severe consequences for AI crawler compatibility than for Googlebot compatibility.</p>
<p>Googlebot has a secondary rendering queue. The process is slow and imperfect, but partial recovery from rendering failures is possible. AI crawlers have no equivalent. A single request returns incomplete HTML, available content is extracted, and the page is not revisited. So rendering inconsistencies that Googlebot eventually works through are ones that AI crawlers never compensate for.</p>
<p>For enterprise sites with inconsistent SSR coverage across different tech stacks, teams, and markets, AI crawlers are building their understanding of your site from whatever incomplete HTML the first request returned. There is no correction pass.</p>
<p>The question is not whether SSR creates a visibility gap. It does. The question is what infrastructure layer can close it without requiring your teams to rebuild their SSR setup.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Prerender.io vs. Server Side Rendering (SSR)</h2>
<p>The Prerender.io vs. SSR debate is often framed as a choice between competing approaches, but they operate at different layers, solve different problems, and are designed to work together.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Dynamic Rendering vs. Server-Side Rendering: What Each Approach Does</h3>
<p>SSR is an application architecture decision made at the framework level. It determines how your application generates and delivers HTML, with downstream effects on Time to First Byte, client-side hydration, framework compatibility, developer experience, and infrastructure choices.</p>
<p>Prerender.io handles SEO rendering at the edge, intercepting requests by user agent and serving pre-rendered static HTML to crawlers before they reach your application’s pipeline. Human visitors continue through your normal application and receive the full dynamic experience. Crawlers receive complete HTML directly from Prerender’s cache.</p>
<p>The two coexist without conflict because they handle different parts of the same request flow. SSR owns the user experience layer. Prerender.io owns what crawlers see. Neither changes what the other does.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">How Prerender.io Closes the Enterprise SEO Gaps</h3>
<p><a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> addresses the specific failure modes that make SSR for enterprise SEO more complicated than a standard implementation.</p>
<p>Origin server overhead is eliminated for crawler traffic. Prerender.io serves pre-rendered pages from a CDN layer at an average of <strong>0.03 seconds per request</strong>, so Googlebot and AI crawlers receive responses without triggering rendering cycles on your origin servers. The performance comparison to the SSR origin rendering is not marginal.</p>
<p>Because responses come from Prerender’s cache rather than your application, cache freshness is also managed independently of your application stack. You can configure refresh intervals per URL pattern and trigger invalidation on content updates, without depending on your application’s cache invalidation working correctly across every layer. <a href="https://docs.prerender.io/docs/cache-expiration" type="link" id="https://docs.prerender.io/docs/cache-expiration">Learn more about cache management in Prerender.io.</a></p>
<p>Rendering consistency follows from the same architectural separation. Prerender.io operates at the HTTP request layer, not the application layer, so pages that fall back to client-side rendering receive complete HTML for crawlers regardless of whether they were built in React, Next.js, Vue, a legacy CMS, or a third-party platform.</p>
<p><strong>This is what makes Prerender.io a scalable JS rendering solution: coverage expands with your site without requiring framework-level changes.</strong></p>
<p>That consistency is what makes AI crawler compatibility structural rather than incidental. <a href="https://prerender.io/ai-search/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/ai-search/">Prerender serves complete pre-rendered HTML from the initial response, so AI crawlers receive complete content regardless of how the page was built.</a> Structured data, product specifications, prices, and any other JavaScript-populated content are present in the HTML they extract.</p>
<p>All of this compounds into crawl budget gains. Faster response times from Prerender.io’s CDN-served pages mean Googlebot observes better server performance across the board, which correlates directly with higher crawl budget allocation.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">How Prerender.io Helps Enterprise Websites Win the Google and AI Search</h3>
<p><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/popken-fashion-group/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/popken-fashion-group/">Popken Fashion Group</a>, a retailer running over 30 domains, saw approximately 15,000 additional pages indexed in a single market after reactivating Prerender.io following a brief outage. When the tool was turned off due to an internal technical issue, rankings dropped across markets almost immediately. When it was re-enabled, rankings recovered within a week. Prerender.io was not a supplementary tool in that scenario; it was load-bearing infrastructure.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="624" height="291" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Ulla-Popken-increased-the-indexing-rate-after-Prerender.io-adoption.png" alt="Ulla Popken increased the indexing rate after Prerender.io adoption" class="wp-image-8048" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Ulla-Popken-increased-the-indexing-rate-after-Prerender.io-adoption.png 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Ulla-Popken-increased-the-indexing-rate-after-Prerender.io-adoption-300x140.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure>
<p><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/improved-pagespeed-and-boosting-page-indexing-to-optimize-webshop/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/improved-pagespeed-and-boosting-page-indexing-to-optimize-webshop/">Haarshop</a>, with 35,000+ products across Dutch and German domains, went from struggling to surface products in SERPs to indexing 10,000 pages per day after implementation, with organic traffic improving by over 50%. <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/">Eldorado</a> saw an 80% traffic improvement after fixing SPA rendering issues through Prerender.</p>
<p>These results reflect a consistent pattern: the indexation gap between what a site publishes and what crawlers can see is a revenue gap. Closing that gap does not require rebuilding your SSR architecture. It requires infrastructure that operates at the crawler layer.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Scalable JS Rendering: Why In-House SSR Fails at Enterprise Scale</h2>
<p>The “Prerender.io vs. SSR” debate is often framed as a choice between two ways to do the same thing. Technically, that’s true: both deliver rendered HTML to a crawler. But the <strong>architectural cost</strong> of those two paths couldn’t be more different.</p>
<p>SSR is an application-level burden. It requires your developers to manage Node.js environments, handle complex hydration logic, and constantly patch rendering bugs as your frontend evolves. Prerender.io moves that entire responsibility to the infrastructure layer.</p>
<p>If you are currently running an in-house SSR setup and still seeing indexation gaps, your SSR isn’t “failing”—it’s simply being asked to do something it wasn’t built for: <strong>managing massive crawler volume.</strong></p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>In-House SSR is Fragile:</strong> Every code change in your React or Next.js app risks breaking your SSR output. If a component fails to hydrate correctly on the server, Googlebot sees a broken page.</li>
<li><strong>In-House SSR is Expensive:</strong> Scaling an origin server to handle millions of uncached requests from Googlebot and a dozen different AI crawlers requires massive over-provisioning of resources.</li>
<li><strong>Prerender.io is Decoupled:</strong> Because Prerender handles rendering at the edge (the HTTP request layer), it doesn’t care how your application is built. It intercepts the crawler, renders the page in a dedicated headless browser, and serves a perfect HTML snapshot.</li>
</ul>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Before You Move From SSR to Prerender.io – An Enterprise Checklist</h2>
<p>If you’re ready to offload your SEO rendering from your internal team to a managed solution, follow these steps:</p>
<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Identify “SSR-Light” Areas:</strong> Audit your site for page types (like faceted search or legacy landing pages) where your in-house SSR coverage is spotty. These are your first wins.</li>
<li><strong>Audit AI Crawler Access:</strong> Verify that your current setup is delivering 100% of your structured data and product specs in the initial HTML. If it isn’t, AI search engines aren’t seeing you.</li>
<li><strong>Update Your Middleware:</strong> Prerender.io integrates at the CDN or Middleware layer. This means you can “turn it on” for specific user agents (Googlebot, GPTBot) while keeping your current setup for humans.</li>
<li><strong>Monitor Your Crawl Stats:</strong> Within 72 hours of shifting your crawler traffic to Prerender.io, check Google Search Console. You should see a sharp drop in “Average Response Time” and a corresponding lift in “Total Crawl Requests.”</li>
</ol>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Fix Your Enterprise SEO Discovery Issues with Prerender.io</h2>
<p>SSR SEO coverage solves the rendering problem it was designed to solve. The gaps covered in this article, origin server strain, cache invalidation failures, rendering inconsistencies across page types, and AI crawler invisibility, are infrastructure problems that live at a different layer. They do not go away by improving your SSR implementation. They go away by adding the right infrastructure alongside it.</p>
<p>Every day these gaps persist is a day Googlebot is crawling fewer pages than it should, AI crawlers are building an incomplete picture of your site, and content you have published is not reaching the audiences searching for it.</p>
<p>Prerender.io takes a few hours to install, integrates with any JavaScript framework and most CDN and backend configurations, and starts serving complete HTML to crawlers immediately. There is no code rewrite, no SSR migration, and no ongoing maintenance burden after setup.</p>
<p>The indexation gap between what your site publishes and what crawlers can see is a revenue gap. <a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Start your free trial at Prerender.io</a> today and close it.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">FAQs – Adopting SSR to Fix Enterprise SEO Problems</h2>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Are My Pages Not Being Indexed Even With SSR?</h3>
<p>Pages may not be indexed even with SSR because server latency reduces Googlebot’s crawl rate, cache invalidation delays lead to stale content, or certain page types still have rendering inconsistencies.</p>
<p>Check response times under crawler load, confirm cache updates propagate correctly, and audit whether all pages return complete HTML on the initial response.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Can’t AI See My JavaScript Content?</h3>
<p>AI can’t see your JavaScript content because AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript—they only extract what’s available in the initial HTML response. Any content rendered client-side, like product details, pricing, or structured data, simply isn’t visible to them.</p>
<p>The fix is to ensure all critical content is included in the server-delivered HTML on the first request. Solutions like Prerender.io handle this by serving fully pre-rendered HTML to AI crawlers without requiring changes to your existing architecture.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
</item>
<item>
<title>Industry Study: What 100M+ Pages Reveal About How AI Chooses Your Content</title>
<link>https://prerender.io/blog/industry-study-how-ai-retrieves-content/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:08:59 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Data and Studies]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[data]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[enterprise]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[studies]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[thought leadership]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=7545</guid>
<description><![CDATA[A study across 100M+ pages to surface AI crawler behavior, citation analysis, and what this means for your marketing.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>The brands winning in AI search aren’t always the ones with the best content. <strong>They’re the ones AI systems can actually read and trust.</strong></p>
<p>That’s the central finding from a study conducted by Prerender.io and OtterlyAI analyzing 100M+ pages across eight global enterprise brands. This article breaks down what the data shows, helping you pinpoint what content AI systems prefer, seven key findings to include in your content strategy, and the three structural changes that are moving the needle on AI search visibility.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Dataset: Eight Global Brands and 100M+ Pages</h2>
<p>To conduct this study, the Prerender.io team analyzed 100M+ pages across eight anonymized brands in Prerender.io’s database, pulling the URLs most frequently requested by ChatGPT over Q4 2025. These are real machine-to-site retrieval requests, as opposed to pageviews or rankings, which means every signal in this dataset reflects exactly what AI systems are actively looking for.</p>
<p>The brands were selected to represent a range of industries, company sizes, and geographies. Each brand averages a minimum of 75M+ page renders per year, ensuring the dataset is large enough to surface reliable patterns. The brands chosen span ecommerce, SaaS, automotive, sports, fashion, and government to evaluate a variety of industries.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-table"><table class="has-fixed-layout"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Brand</strong></td><td><strong>Industry</strong></td><td><strong>Most-Requested Page Types</strong></td></tr><tr><td>Brand 1</td><td>Multinational automotive company based in Europe</td><td>Informational blog posts, homepage</td></tr><tr><td>Brand 2</td><td>Leading jewelry brand headquartered in the US (ecommerce)</td><td>Homepage, FAQs, comparison guides, product blogs</td></tr><tr><td>Brand 3</td><td>International sports organization</td><td>Streaming pages, live event pages</td></tr><tr><td>Brand 4</td><td>Global athletic leisure brand in 50+ countries (ecommerce)</td><td>New collection pages, homepage, FAQs, discount pages</td></tr><tr><td>Brand 5</td><td>American department store (ecommerce)</td><td>Top-selling product pages, homepage</td></tr><tr><td>Brand 6 </td><td>Global API/SaaS platform headquartered in the US</td><td>Technical documentation (exclusively)</td></tr><tr><td>Brand 7</td><td>Government / legal entity based in Europe</td><td>Documentation, homepage</td></tr><tr><td>Brand 8</td><td>Global fashion retailer headquartered in Europe (ecommerce)</td><td>Homepages (US + international), store locator, product pages</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>
<p>The OtterlyAI team then supplemented this retrieval analysis with citation data, examining how these brands actually appear in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Seven findings emerged. Here’s what they show.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Finding #1: AI Systems Reward Easily Answerable Pages</h2>
<p>This is the clearest finding from the study across each brand. The most-retrieved URLs across all eight brands fall into a surprisingly narrow set of content types:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Evergreen editorial content and buying guides</strong></li>
<li><strong>FAQs and comparison pages</strong></li>
<li><strong>Technical documentation and API references</strong></li>
<li><strong>Category and collection pages</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>And these pages share a common characteristic. <strong>They answer a specific “what,” “how,” or “why” question without requiring the reader, or the AI crawler, to navigate anywhere else.</strong></p>
<p>This is a significant reframe for marketing teams accustomed to thinking about content in terms of the funnel or site hierarchy. AI visibility is not about where a page sits in your navigation.<strong> Instead, it’s about whether the page can reliably serve as an answer on its own. </strong>Whether it’s a blog article answering a specific question, a comparison page performing a this vs. that analysis, or a product category page, the pages that AI systems return to repeatedly are the ones that deliver complete and clearly structured answers. This also supports why AI systems seem to prefer knowledge base and help center content: they typically answer a single question. </p>
<p><strong>Key takeaway: </strong>write your content in a clear, question-answer format, focus on optimizing your knowledge base documentation, and ensure pages answer a specific “what,” “how,” or “why” question. </p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Finding #2: Address Questions Directly, Especially for Ecommerce Brands</h2>
<p>This analysis also surfaced differences in how AI crawlers and humans navigate pages—especially for ecommerce. For example, when humans shop, they browse product detail pages in detail. But when AI systems research products on ecommerce sites, that’s not always the case.</p>
<p>Instead, AI systems consistently prefer:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Category and collection pages to answer <em>“what are the best options?”</em></strong></li>
<li><strong>FAQ and sizing guides to answer <em>“what should I get?”</em></strong></li>
<li><strong>Store locators and availability pages to answer <em>“where can I buy this?”</em></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Individual product pages still matter, but far less than traditional SEO priorities suggest. The AI-driven shopping journey starts earlier and at a higher level of abstraction. Users receive AI-generated summaries before they ever visit a brand’s site, and those summaries are built from category-level and editorial content, not PDPs.</p>
<p>This means the pages most critical to AI visibility are often the ones least optimized for it. Category pages, FAQs, and buying guides tend to be JavaScript-heavy, dynamically loaded, and lower on the priority list for technical maintenance, precisely where AI systems are most likely to encounter incomplete or missing content.</p>
<p><strong>Key takeaway</strong>: prioritize your category pages, FAQs, and buying guides for both content completeness and technical rendering. These are the pages AI systems are currently using to build shopping summaries. Focus your efforts here, rather than on PDPs alone.</p>
<p><strong><em>Further reading: </em></strong><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/ai-indexing-benchmark-for-ecommerce/"><em>AI Indexing Benchmark Report for Ecommerce</em></a></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Finding #3: Third-Party Sites Matter For Citations </h2>
<p>This is the finding that should concern brand and growth leaders most. </p>
<p>In OtterlyAI’s analysis of one of the world’s top athletic brands, OtterlyAI looked at over 1,300 citations across 25 test queries. Here’s the breakdown of the share of citations per source:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Independent review sites: 8.6%</strong></li>
<li><strong>Reddit: 7.2%</strong></li>
<li><strong>YouTube: 4.6%</strong></li>
<li><strong>Brand’s own domain: 4.2%</strong></li>
</ul>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-149-1024x576.png" alt="" class="wp-image-7620" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-149-1024x576.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-149-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-149-768x432.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-149-1536x864.png 1536w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-149.png 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>
<p>Evidently, the brand’s own domain holds less weight than community platforms like G2, Reddit, or YouTube. And this isn’t an isolated case. Broader research from OtterlyAI across 1M+ citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews confirms the same pattern across industries: community platforms and third-party sources capture the majority of AI citations, regardless of how strong the brand’s owned content is.</p>
<p>AI systems are designed this way. They increasingly want to sound confident in their answers, and often <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/podcast-how-toggl-is-adapting-to-the-ai-era/">prioritize third-party validation and community consensus over brand-owned marketing content</a>. That’s a newer structural difference with LLMs, and your strategy has to account for this.</p>
<p><strong>Key takeaway:</strong> Build a deliberate third-party presence strategy. Identify the review sites, forums, and media outlets AI systems are already citing in your category, and prioritize earning coverage there.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Finding #4: Technical Accessibility Is Crucial for AI Visibility</h2>
<p>Across this dataset, one issue emerged as the most consistent barrier to AI visibility. Brands were inadvertently blocking AI crawlers with configurations originally written for traditional search engines.</p>
<p><strong>When AI crawlers can’t access your site, you’re not partially visible to AI systems—you’re completely invisible. </strong>This means no citations, no mentions, and no influence on AI-generated answers. This issue is more common now because AI crawlers are newer and less familiar to infrastructure teams than Googlebot, and they’re frequently caught by security policies that predate their existence.</p>
<p>Before any content or strategy work, confirm that your site is actually accessible to major AI crawlers. It’s the single highest-leverage action available to brands that have invested in content and are seeing no AI visibility, and it requires a conversation with your technical team, not a content brief.</p>
<p>For JavaScript-heavy sites specifically, the gap between what a human sees and what an <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-web-crawlers-traditional-ai">AI crawler can read</a> is often significant. Server-side rendering or prerendering (serving AI crawlers a fully rendered, stable version of each page) is often the most reliable fix.</p>
<p><strong>Key takeaway: </strong>have your technical SEO team evaluate your technical performance, particularly your JavaScript rendering and robots.txt.</p>
<p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong> <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/seo-audit-vs-geo-audit-for-site-health/">How to Conduct a GEO Audit on your Site</a></em></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Finding #5: Homepages Are Gateways, Not Destinations</h2>
<p>Homepages appear frequently among the top-requested URLs, and sometimes as the single most-retrieved page. But the retrieval pattern tells a specific story.</p>
<p>AI systems hit the homepage and then fan out immediately. The homepage appears to serve a defined function to confirm brand identity, establish authority, and act as a starting point for deeper retrieval. However, the sharp drop-off in retrieval volume after the homepage means that what happens next determines the majority of your AI visibility.<strong> A strong homepage paired with inaccessible supporting content is nearly as limiting as no homepage presence at all.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Key takeaway: </strong>treat your homepage as a crawl entry point, not a destination. The real AI visibility work happens on the supporting pages it leads to.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Finding #6: You Need a Different AI Search Strategy for Each AI Platform</h2>
<p>Not all AI platforms behave the same way, and this has direct implications for where marketing teams focus their energy. </p>
<p>Proprietary data from OtterlyAI shows the following:</p>
<figure class="wp-block-table"><table class="has-fixed-layout"><tbody><tr><td><strong>AI Platform</strong></td><td><strong>Citation Rate</strong></td></tr><tr><td>Perplexity</td><td>97% of responses include a citation</td></tr><tr><td>Google AI Overviews</td><td>34% of responses include a citation </td></tr><tr><td>ChatGPT</td><td>16% of responses include a citation </td></tr></tbody></table></figure>
<p>Perplexity has a near-universal citation rate, meaning that most answers include a citation, and that you have a higher chance of being cited in their response. This implies that, for a Perplexity-focused strategy, if you create comprehensive, well-structured content across all detail pages, it has a real chance of appearing. </p>
<p>However, this is not equally the same for other AI platforms: Google’s AI Overviews has a 34% citation rate, whereas ChatGPT only has 16%. This means that you may need to adapt your AI search strategy accordingly. For AI Overviews, focus on cornerstone content and domain authority. While for ChatGPT, prioritize page speed—it doesn’t like waiting around for slow-loading pages. </p>
<p><strong>A single “AI search strategy” will underperform, and it may need to change every few months. </strong>A brand might have strong Perplexity visibility today and near-zero ChatGPT presence tomorrow—not because of content differences, but because each platform has different technical and editorial preferences.</p>
<p><strong>Key takeaway: monitor AI visibility by platform, not in aggregate.</strong> A blended view of “AI traffic” will mask where you’re winning and where you’re invisible. You can use AI search analytics tools to do this.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-152-1024x576.png" alt="" class="wp-image-7623" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-152-1024x576.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-152-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-152-768x432.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-152-1536x864.png 1536w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-152.png 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Finding #7: International Brands Can Experience Greater Visibility Issues</h2>
<p>For brands operating across markets, AI systems don’t default to your primary locale. They actively retrieve language-specific URLs, country variants, and localized pages, and appear to match content language directly to the user’s query language.</p>
<p>A French user asking about your product in French will receive an answer drawn from your French-language content, not an English page.<strong> If your localized pages are incomplete, slow to load, or invisible to AI crawlers, that market segment is effectively unserved by AI search</strong>—regardless of how strong your primary-market presence is.</p>
<p><strong>Key takeaway:</strong> run an AI crawler accessibility check on your localized pages. Incomplete or slow-loading country variants may be entirely invisible to AI systems.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What Does This Mean for Revenue? A Note on Attribution</h2>
<p>The reality is that clean attribution between AI visibility and revenue doesn’t quite exist yet. For now, AI systems remain a black box for most analytics stacks, and click-through rates on AI answer engines are significantly lower than traditional search.</p>
<p>That said, the directional evidence is building. <a href="https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/consumer-reliance-on-ai-search-results-signals-new-era-of-marketing--bain--company-about-80-of-search-users-rely-on-ai-summaries-at-least-40-of-the-time-on-traditional-search-engines-about-60-of-searches-now-end-without-the-user-progressing-to-a/">Bain & Company’s February 2025 research</a> found that 80% of consumers now rely on AI-written results for at least 40% of their searches. A <a href="https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/agentic-ai-poised-to-disrupt-retail-even-with-50-of-consumers-cautious-of-fully-autonomous-purchasesbain--company/">separate Bain report from November 2025</a> found that 30–45% of US consumers already use AI specifically for product research and comparison, and that AI now accounts for up to 25% of referral traffic for some retailers. The research and purchase consideration stages are already happening inside AI platforms before buyers ever reach a brand’s site.</p>
<p>And in this specific dataset, the directional data continues: one ecommerce brand saw AI crawler requests more than double from Q1 to Q3 2025. Over the same period, publicly reported earnings increased by 109.7%, accounting for nearly $80M in additional revenue. We’re not claiming causation, but the parallel is consistent with a model where AI visibility amplifies demand rather than directly creating it.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-151-1024x576.png" alt="" class="wp-image-7622" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-151-1024x576.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-151-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-151-768x432.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-151-1536x864.png 1536w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-151.png 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>
<p><em>Data source: <a href="http://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> dashboard of a key enterprise client. </em></p>
<p>The more useful frame: think of AI visibility as revenue protection and a growing acquisition channel, even if it’s not entirely attributable yet. If AI systems retrieve your content incorrectly, partially, or not at all, your brand is excluded from the consideration set before the funnel begins. Buyers arrive at competitors already shaped by AI summaries your brand had no part in.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A Measurement Framework</h2>
<p>Given the current attribution gap, here’s a framework for how you can track AI visibility:</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Brand share of voice across AI platforms.</h3>
<p>Track how often your brand is mentioned across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot relative to competitors. This upstream signal predicts downstream revenue influence before it shows up in your analytics. OtterlyAI is the most practical tool we’ve seen for making this measurable.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Citation monitoring on owned pages. </h3>
<p>This tells you whether your content is being accurately represented. Being cited with incorrect pricing or outdated product details is actively damaging at the moment decisions are being formed. Use Screaming Frog to surface a full URL list, then audit your presence on third-party platforms like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. AI crawler behavior. </h3>
<p>Measuring AI crawler activity shows whether your site is being actively retrieved by AI systems at all. Growing retrieval volume—like the doubling observed in our ecommerce case—is a directional signal worth tracking alongside business outcomes. You can use a solution like Prerender.io to provide visibility into your AI bot behavior, particularly in comparison to search or social crawlers, and identify whether pages are being served to AI crawlers in a fully rendered state.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="380" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/prerender-dashboard-ai-crawler-behavior-1024x380.png" alt="" class="wp-image-7644" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/prerender-dashboard-ai-crawler-behavior-1024x380.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/prerender-dashboard-ai-crawler-behavior-300x111.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/prerender-dashboard-ai-crawler-behavior-768x285.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/prerender-dashboard-ai-crawler-behavior-1536x570.png 1536w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/prerender-dashboard-ai-crawler-behavior-2048x760.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>
<p><em>Prerender.io dashboard of an anonymized client</em></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Branded and direct traffic. </h3>
<p>This captures the indirect effect. Users who encounter your brand in AI-generated answers often don’t click through immediately—they find you later via direct or branded search. Correlating share of voice trends against branded traffic growth gives you a reasonable proxy for AI-driven influence, even without direct attribution.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-150-1024x576.png" alt="" class="wp-image-7621" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-150-1024x576.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-150-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-150-768x432.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-150-1536x864.png 1536w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-150.png 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Summing Up: Three Things That Impact Your Presence in AI Search </h2>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Technical retrievability is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. </h3>
<p>AI systems can only work with content they can access and read completely. For JavaScript-heavy sites, serving a fully rendered, stable version of each page to AI crawlers isn’t optional. It’s table stakes for everything else.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Content needs to answer, not just attract. </h3>
<p>The pages AI systems return to are self-contained, clearly structured, and genuinely useful. If a page can’t serve as a complete answer to a specific question on its own, it’s a weak candidate for AI retrieval.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Third-party presence isn’t optional.</h3>
<p>The majority of AI citations come from outside your owned properties. Brands that earn coverage in the review sites, community platforms, and media that AI systems trust will win disproportionate attribution—regardless of how strong their own content is. Influence without attribution still influences. But it’s more valuable when it’s yours. Ensure that you are prioritizing your third-party presence as a core foundation of your marketing strategy.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">FAQs</h2>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What types of pages does ChatGPT retrieve most often? </h3>
<p>Self-contained pages that answer a specific question without requiring additional navigation: FAQs, buying guides, technical documentation, category pages, and evergreen editorial content.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why is Reddit cited more than brand websites in AI search? </h3>
<p>AI systems are built to prioritize third-party validation and community consensus. Reddit provides peer-generated, question-and-answer content that maps directly onto how AI systems construct responses.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Does page speed affect AI search visibility? </h3>
<p>Yes, particularly for ChatGPT. Faster-loading pages are more likely to be included when an AI system has limited time to retrieve and render content.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What’s the biggest technical barrier to AI visibility? </h3>
<p>There are a few: bot-blocking configurations and JavaScript rendering. Many enterprise sites inadvertently block AI crawlers with security rules originally written for traditional search engines, resulting in complete invisibility. JavaScript-heavy sites also block AI crawlers from accessing your pages in the first place. Server-side rendering or prerendering with <a href="http://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> can be a solution here.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">How do I track whether AI systems are citing my brand? </h3>
<p>Monitor brand share of voice using an AI search analytics tool like <a href="https://otterly.ai/">OtterlyAI</a>. For citation accuracy, combine a Screaming Frog URL crawl with manual audits of third-party review platforms.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Does strong SEO automatically translate to strong AI search visibility? </h3>
<p>In many ways, yes, but this isn’t guaranteed. The brands winning in AI search aren’t always the ones with the strongest content, which is a core ranking factor for traditional SEO. They’re the ones whose pages are technically accessible, structured to serve as direct answers, and with a strong third-party presence.</p>
<p></p>
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<title>How Google Defines Quality Content for Indexing</title>
<link>https://prerender.io/blog/how-google-defines-quality-content/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:51:24 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=5263</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Discover what makes content 'high-quality' in Google's eyes and how to improve yours.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>The debate over what constitutes ‘quality’ content is never-ending. Many SEOs focus on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), but Google’s definition extends far beyond that.</p>
<p>If your content doesn’t meet Google’s expectations (factoring in the on-page and technical SEO scores, user experience, content uniqueness, and more), it may not get indexed, let alone rank well on search results.</p>
<p>To ensure that you produce content worthy of getting indexed, let’s break down Google’s definition of quality content and the factors influencing it. Plus, discover some tips on how to create content that meets Google’s content quality standards and its ranking systems.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What is Quality Content According to Google?</h2>
<p>So, how does Google define quality content?</p>
<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/#:~:text=Google%E2%80%99s%20mission%20is%20to%20organize%20the%20world%27s%20information,simple%2C%20like%20the%20height%20of%20the%20Eiffel%20Tower." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google’s core mission</a> is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Its ranking systems reflect this goal by prioritizing content that provides the best user experience while ensuring relevant and reliable information.</p>
<p>In the same vein, John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, has emphasized that quality content isn’t just about well-written text—it’s about the entire website experience and how it provides value to users. He explains (<a href="https://youtu.be/rTcLkRkfkPs">source</a>):</p>
<p>“<em>When it comes to the quality of the content, we don’t mean just the text of your articles. It’s really the quality of your overall website. And that includes layout, design, images, speed—all of these factors come into play</em>.”</p>
<p>To visualize this, think of your website like a restaurant: great food (your content) matters, but poor service, messy tables, or a noisy atmosphere can ruin the experience altogether. Similarly, Google evaluates content holistically, considering factors such as:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Helpful, reliable, and people-first content</strong> that genuinely meets user needs</li>
<li><strong>Clean, user-friendly design</strong> that makes navigation easy</li>
<li><strong>Fast load times and mobile responsiveness</strong> for accessibility</li>
<li><strong>High-quality visuals and multimedia</strong> that enhance understanding</li>
<li><strong>Secure browsing (HTTPS)</strong> to build trust</li>
</ul>
<p>This means that to meet Google’s standards, website owners must go beyond textual quality and adopt a holistic content strategy, balancing user experience, technical SEO and web performance, and valuable, trustworthy information.</p>
<p>This may sound like a lot, but with some smart techniques (which you’ll learn later in our helpful content guidelines), you can create content that meets Google’s quality content standards and ranking system.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why Google’s Definition of Quality Content Matters</h2>
<p>Well, Google’s standards for quality content determine whether your content gets indexed (or not) and how fast it will appear on SERPs. And we all know that without being indexed, your content won’t appear on the search results.</p>
<p>Of course, quality content isn’t the only factor that influences Google indexing. You should also pay attention to your <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/white-papers/crawl-budget-guide/">crawl budget</a>, PageSpeed Core Web Vital scores, and more.</p>
<p>Additionally, here are more reasons why understanding how Google defines quality content matters for your business and web performance.</p>
<p><strong>Related</strong>: Learn some <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/10-ways-to-get-your-website-indexed-faster/">tips on how to make Google index my content faster</a>.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Google Dominates Search Traffic</h3>
<p>Google controls <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">over 75% of the global search market</a>, making it the primary traffic source for most websites. This means most, if not all, of your search traffic comes from Google. Ignoring its guidelines means leaving potential visitors (and businesses) on the table.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="717" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-141-1024x717.png" alt="Google Dominates Search Traffic" class="wp-image-5264" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-141-1024x717.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-141-300x210.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-141-768x538.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-141-1536x1075.png 1536w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-141.png 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Ranking High on Google Means More Visibility and Traffic</h3>
<p>Every day, billions of searches are performed on Google. Your potential customers are among them. If your content doesn’t meet Google’s quality standards, it may struggle to be indexed or ranked, making it harder for people to find you. Low rankings mean fewer clicks, less traffic, and fewer conversions.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Ranking High on Google Adds More Credibility</h3>
<p>Achieving high rankings in Google search results significantly boosts user trust. Top-ranking content signals relevance and authority, enhancing your brand’s credibility and establishing your business and brand as an industry leader.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Google’s Algorithm Keeps Evolving</h3>
<p>The only constant in SEO is change. Google frequently updates its ranking systems to prioritize helpful, relevant, and people-focused content. If you follow its best practices and focus on genuine value for users, your site is future-proofed and more likely to remain visible on the SERPs, no matter how many updates roll out.</p>
<p>In short, aligning with Google’s quality standards ensures that your site is search engine optimized, valuable, visible, and authoritative. This, in turn, boosts your search rankings, organic traffic, and business growth.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How Does Google Determine Content Quality for Indexing and Ranking?</h2>
<p>Google uses automated algorithms, human quality raters, and various ranking signals to assess content quality and determine its indexing and ranking status. While the exact workings of its algorithms are not public information, several key factors play a role, including:</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Content Relevance to Search Intent</h3>
<p>Search intent is the ‘why’ behind a search query. Google’s primary goal is to deliver the most relevant and useful content for each query, ensuring users find what they’re looking for fast and accurately.</p>
<p>To determine relevance, Google evaluates whether your content aligns with the user’s intent—and if it does, it is likely to rank high.</p>
<p>If you check Google’s <a href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines</a>, section 12.7 emphasizes the importance of user intent and how to identify different intent types. Is it:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Informational (answering questions)?</li>
<li>Navigational (helping users find a site)?</li>
<li>Commercial (helping with comparisons before buying)?</li>
<li>Transactional (assisting with purchases)?</li>
</ul>
<p>Also, Google’s page explaining <a href="https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/ranking-results/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">how they rank results</a> confirms that intent is a critical ranking consideration. So, aligning your content to what searchers want or are looking for signals its relevance to Google.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-142-1024x576.png" alt="Content Quality and Google Ranking Systems" class="wp-image-5265" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-142-1024x576.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-142-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-142-768x432.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-142-1536x864.png 1536w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-142.png 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Content Originality and Uniqueness</h3>
<p>Google favors original, unique, and well-researched content over repetitive or AI-generated material.</p>
<p>In 2022, Google rolled out the <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide#helpful-content" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Helpful Content Update</a>, which rewards original, helpful content that is written for people, by people. At the same time, Google penalized sites with search engine-first content. This update has since evolved and is now integrated into Google’s ranking systems.</p>
<p>The system generates a site-wide quality signal that assesses the overall value of a website’s content. Websites with consistently valuable content are rewarded with higher rankings, while those with low-value or unhelpful content are demoted.</p>
<p>So, if your content offers something new, such as fresh research, unique perspectives, or firsthand experience, it has a better chance of ranking well in search results. In contrast, if your content is thin, generic, or heavily duplicated from other sources, it may struggle to rank. </p>
<p>Are you worried that your content suffers from duplication issues? This guide shows you <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-fix-duplicate-content-issues/">how to spot and solve duplicated content effectively</a>.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Domain Authority and Trustworthiness</h3>
<p>Google assesses content quality using the E-E-A-T framework:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Experience</strong>: Does the creator have firsthand experience with the topic?</li>
<li><strong>Expertise</strong>: Does the creator have relevant knowledge and skills in the subject matter?</li>
<li><strong>Authoritativeness</strong>: Is the creator the go-to source in this niche?</li>
<li><strong>Trustworthiness</strong>: How reliable and accurate is the content?</li>
</ul>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-143-1024x576.png" alt="Query Meanings and Google Ranking Systems" class="wp-image-5266" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-143-1024x576.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-143-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-143-768x432.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-143-1536x864.png 1536w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-143.png 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Query Meanings and Google Ranking Systems</figcaption></figure>
<p>This framework helps you create content that performs well with users and in Google’s search results. While E-E-A-T isn’t a direct ranking factor, it influences how Google evaluates content, especially for topics like health, finance, and legal information.</p>
<p>Generally, a high level of E-E-A-T increases your ranking potential and helps Google see your site as a reliable source.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Page Experience and Core Web Vitals (CWVs)</h3>
<p>The best thing you can do for quality is create a great user experience. Google’s <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">helpful content guidelines on creating people-first content</a> call for a smooth, user-friendly experience, which includes:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Mobile-friendliness</strong>: Your site should work well on all devices</li>
<li><strong>HTTPS security</strong>: A safe and secure website builds trust</li>
<li><strong>Clear navigation</strong>: Users (and search bots) should easily find information</li>
<li><strong>Minimal intrusive pop-ups</strong>: Avoid excessive interstitials</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-pass-core-web-vitals/">Core Web Vitals</a> (CWVs) further measure the quality of a user’s experience by evaluating:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)</strong>: How fast your page loads</li>
<li><strong>Interaction to Next Paint (INP)</strong>: How quickly users can interact with it</li>
<li><strong>Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)</strong>: How stable it feels as it loads</li>
</ul>
<p>If your page takes too long to load or the web page elements shift unexpectedly while a user interacts with them, they’ll leave and this signals poor quality to Google. On the other hand, a seamless, fast, and visually stable page is a strong indicator of quality and can positively influence your Google’s search ranking performance.</p>
<p>To check your site’s performance, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. It will analyze your site, generate a CWVs report, and include suggestions for improvement. We’ve created a detailed guide on <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/google-pagespeed-insights/">how to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights Score</a>, helping you achieve the almost perfect 90+ scores.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Website and Page Design</h3>
<p>As John Mueller stated, Google cares about how content is presented. This includes the website layout, design, and everything in between.</p>
<p>A well-structured page improves readability, navigation, and engagement, making it easier for Google to understand your content. A solid website design includes:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Clean layout</strong>: Organized, clutter-free pages improve readability</li>
<li><strong>Simple navigation</strong>: Users should find information quickly</li>
<li><strong>Logical structure</strong>: Headings, subheadings, and proper formatting aid comprehension</li>
<li><strong>Responsive design</strong>: Google prioritizes <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">mobile-first indexing</a>, so a site that doesn’t adapt to smaller screens will struggle in search rankings</li>
</ul>
<p>Also, using images, videos, and visual elements can improve engagement, but they must be optimized for fast loading to keep users happy. If not, a slow, poorly designed site can drive users away, signaling to Google that your content isn’t optimized.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How to Create Quality Content That Google Loves to Index and Rank</h2>
<p>Based on factors Google uses to define high-quality content and its ranking system, here are some best practices to help your content be indexed quickly and ranked high on SERPs.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="724" height="1024" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/how-to-create-high-quality-content-that-Google-indexes-and-ranks-Prerender.io_-724x1024.png" alt="how to create high-quality content that Google indexes and ranks - Prerender.io" class="wp-image-5267" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/how-to-create-high-quality-content-that-Google-indexes-and-ranks-Prerender.io_-724x1024.png 724w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/how-to-create-high-quality-content-that-Google-indexes-and-ranks-Prerender.io_-212x300.png 212w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/how-to-create-high-quality-content-that-Google-indexes-and-ranks-Prerender.io_-768x1086.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/how-to-create-high-quality-content-that-Google-indexes-and-ranks-Prerender.io_-1086x1536.png 1086w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/how-to-create-high-quality-content-that-Google-indexes-and-ranks-Prerender.io_.png 1414w" sizes="(max-width: 724px) 100vw, 724px" /></figure>
<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>User intent</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Research what your target audience is looking for and tailor your content to match their intent. Use tools like Google Search Console, <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google Trends</a>, and other keyword research tools to identify trending topics.</p>
<ol start="2" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Relevant keyword research</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Find relevant keywords that align with user queries and integrate them naturally throughout your content. Focus on primary keywords, long-tail variations, and related terms.</p>
<ol start="3" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Informative content</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Create original and valuable content that provides unique insights or expert analysis according to the search intent.</p>
<ol start="4" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>E-E-A-T optimization</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Optimize for E-E-A-T by showcasing your experience and backing up claims with reputable sources.</p>
<ol start="5" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>SEO formatting</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Write clearly and concisely and ensure proper content formatting (headings, bullet points, etc.) for better readability and SEO.</p>
<ol start="6" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Featured snippets optimization</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Provide direct answers to common questions, step-by-step lists, or structured summaries to optimize for “<em>Featured Snippets</em>” and “<em>People Also Ask</em>.”</p>
<ol start="7" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Visual content optimization</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Use relevant images, videos, infographics, or charts to enhance user experience and provide additional value.</p>
<ol start="8" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Mobile SEO optimization</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Optimize your content (and site) for mobile-friendliness, especially their layout, design, and responsiveness.</p>
<ol start="9" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Website performance optimization</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Compress images, leverage browser caching, and minimize code to ensure fast loading times.</p>
<ol start="10" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Technical SEO maintenance</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Implement structured data and SEO best practices to help Google understand your content better.</p>
<ol start="11" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Content freshness</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Regularly update your content to keep it fresh and relevant.</p>
<ol start="12" class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Google Search Console submission</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Help Google discover and index your content faster by manually submitting your URL to Google Search Console.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Avoid Google’s Indexing Delay and Other Issues with Prerender.io</h2>
<p>Even if your content checks all the right boxes—relevance, originality, E-E-A-T, page experience, and design—it’s smart not to rely on content quality to ensure your content gets indexed and appears on Google search results.</p>
<p>One common indexing issue that many websites, especially JavaScript-heavy sites, face is the <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-avoid-discovered-currently-not-indexed/">‘discovered – currently not indexed’ Google indexing status</a>. This status means Google has identified your page’s URL but hasn’t processed it for indexing yet. This delay can happen for several reasons, including crawl budget limitations or JavaScript rendering issues.</p>
<p>Many modern JavaScript-based websites suffer from this because they rely on JS frameworks to create dynamic, interactive content. Unfortunately, Google’s crawlers don’t always execute JS efficiently, leading to indexing delays or even <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-avoid-missing-content-in-web-crawls/">missing content</a>.</p>
<p>Thankfully, <a href="http://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> solves this problem by generating static HTML snapshots of your JavaScript-heavy pages. Instead of waiting for Google to execute your JavaScript, Prerender serves a fully rendered version of your site in a split second, ensuring search crawlers can see your quality content for indexing.</p>
<p>Watch this demo video to learn more about Prerender.io JS indexing solution.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe title="Prerender Seamlessly Renders JavaScript for Faster Indexing" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kc20MvUvMM4?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Improve Your JS Content Indexation with Prerender.io</h2>
<p>We hope that this SEO blog has given you some clarity on what good quality content means in Google’s eyes and its relation to Google’s ranking system. That said, having high-quality content alone is often not enough to guarantee fast indexing, especially for JS-based content. To ensure that your content is easily crawled and indexed by Google, adopt Prerender.io.</p>
<p>With JS indexing fully optimized, Google can process your content more efficiently, reducing indexing delays and improving your chances of ranking competitively in search results. In fact, many of Prerender.io’s users have seen some significant improvements in their web performance: <strong>300x better crawling</strong> and <strong>260% faster indexing</strong>, leading to an <strong>80% increase in traffic</strong>. </p>
<p>Improve your JavaScript-heavy site’s Google ranking performance with Prerender. See the difference firsthand. <a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/">Sign up for Prerender.io today</a> and receive 1,000 free renders!</p>
]]></content:encoded>
</item>
<item>
<title>Large-Scale Sites: How to Approach SEO on 1,000,000+ Pages</title>
<link>https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-optimize-seo-for-large-scale-websites/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:16:49 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Technical SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[crawling]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[enterprise seo]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[indexing]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[technical seo]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=4260</guid>
<description><![CDATA[How to tackle SEO challenges unique to large-scale sites.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>Optimizing the SEO performance of a website with over a million pages, each containing hundreds of keywords, images, videos, and links, poses a significant challenge. Unlike smaller websites, large-scale sites demand a specialized approach to ensure they are indexed correctly and rank well in SERPs.</p>
<p>In this SEO tutorial, we’ll explore strategies specifically designed for optimizing massive websites, with a focus on JavaScript SEO performance. We’ll delve into technical SEO and site architecture. By mastering these essential SEO elements, you’ll be well-equipped to optimize your enterprise-scale website and significantly boost your organic search traffic.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The SEO Challenges of Large-Scale Websites</h2>
<p>Before diving into the strategies, it’s essential to understand the unique challenges large-scale sites face regarding SEO. When dealing with millions of pages, SEO becomes a game of scale. Unlike smaller websites, where you can meticulously optimize every page, large-scale sites require a strategic shift.</p>
<p>Here are a couple of challenges large-scale sites face regarding SEO: </p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Crawl Budget</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Search engine crawlers have limited resources, and crawling millions of pages can quickly exhaust their crawl budget. This means that many pages may not be or only partially crawled and indexed, reducing the site’s chance to rank high in SERPs.</p>
<p><strong>Related</strong>: What is crawl budget, and what role does it play in ensuring successful JavaScript indexing? Our <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/white-papers/crawl-budget-guide/">free ‘Crawl Budget’ whitepaper</a> can give you the answers.</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Site Architecture</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Large sites often have complex site architectures with numerous categories, subcategories, and nested pages. These make it challenging for both users and search engines to navigate and understand the site’s structure.</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Technical Optimization</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Enterprise-size websites often face greater technical SEO challenges, such as slow page load times, server response issues, and rendering problems. They can negatively impact both user experience and search engine crawling performance. </p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Content Management</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>With millions of pages, managing and optimizing content becomes a monumental task. Ensuring consistency, relevance, and uniqueness across a vast content landscape requires a well-defined strategy and robust processes.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">4 Key Areas for Optimizing Enterprise-Scale SEO</h2>
<p>Given the unique challenges large-scale websites face, a comprehensive and scalable approach is essential for optimizing their SEO health. Rather than focusing on individual elements, prioritizing the following four key areas can yield significant results.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Key-Areas-for-Optimizing-Enterprise-Scale-SEO-1024x576.png" alt="Key Areas for Optimizing Enterprise-Scale SEO" class="wp-image-5048" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Key-Areas-for-Optimizing-Enterprise-Scale-SEO-1024x576.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Key-Areas-for-Optimizing-Enterprise-Scale-SEO-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Key-Areas-for-Optimizing-Enterprise-Scale-SEO-768x432.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Key-Areas-for-Optimizing-Enterprise-Scale-SEO-1536x864.png 1536w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Key-Areas-for-Optimizing-Enterprise-Scale-SEO.png 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Content Quality</h3>
<p>Not all pages are created equal. With a million-page website, you can’t afford to spread yourself thin. Identifying and prioritizing your most valuable pages, such as product pages, informative guides, and high-traffic landing pages, is crucial for efficient SEO efforts.</p>
<p>To optimize a large-scale site for SEO, you need first to conduct a comprehensive content audit. Website crawling tools like Screaming Frog can analyze all your pages, helping you <strong>identify</strong> <strong>thin content, duplicate content, and irrelevant pages</strong> that might confuse search engines and waste your crawl budget.</p>
<p><strong>Related</strong>: Prefer not to use Screaming Frog? Visit our <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/screaming-frog-alternative/">10 Alternatives to Screaming Frog blog</a> to find excellent SEO auditing tools.</p>
<p>But more importantly, a content audit helps you pinpoint your high-value content. These gems, which generate organic traffic, conversions, user engagement and support your brand message, will then become the foundation of your SEO strategy.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Technical SEO</h3>
<p>Once you’ve completed a thorough content audit, it’s essential to address the technical SEO challenges that often hinder large-scale websites. A <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-conduct-a-technical-seo-audit/">comprehensive technical SEO audit</a> will help you identify and resolve issues that can impact your site’s crawlability, indexability, and overall Google search visibility.</p>
<p>To ensure optimal performance, focus on the following technical aspects:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Site speed optimization</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Large-scale sites can be notoriously slow due to the sheer volume of content and resources required to load pages. To combat this, you need to implement strategies such as caching mechanisms, image optimization, and code minification to improve site speed and reduce server response times. Learn more about <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/caching-what-it-is-how-it-works-and-how-prerender-caches/">caching and how it impacts your SEO health</a> here.</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Mobile-friendliness</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Given the increasing dominance of mobile devices in internet usage, ensuring your large-scale website is mobile-friendly is crucial for SEO success. Utilize <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/best-technical-seo-tools/">technical SEO tools</a> like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to identify and address any mobile usability issues, such as improper responsive design, unplayable content, or unreadable text. By optimizing for mobile-first indexing, you’ll provide a seamless user experience and improve your website’s search engine rankings. Visit our <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-make-a-website-mobile-friendly/">mobile optimization guide</a> to get started.</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Structured data and schema markup</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Structured data and schema markup will significantly improve your site’s visibility and click-through rates in search results. You have to implement schema markup consistently across your large-scale site, providing search engines with valuable information about your content, products, and services.</p>
<p><strong>Pro tip:</strong> Unsure what schema markup you should implement on your enterprise-scale website? This <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/5-types-of-schema-markup-dynamic-websites-should-implement-including-a-tutorial/">schema markup guide</a> can help.</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Crawl budget optimization</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>With millions of pages, it’s essential to optimize your crawl budget to ensure search engine crawlers can effectively crawl and index your site. This means you have to use strategies such as XML sitemaps, pagination, and canonical tags to prioritize your most important pages and prevent duplication.</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong> Improve JavaScript rendering </strong></li>
</ul>
<p>JavaScript presents a unique challenge for large-scale websites. When search engines crawl JavaScript-heavy pages, they must execute the code to see the content, which can significantly impact crawl efficiency and budget. This is particularly crucial for large websites where crawl budget optimization is essential. </p>
<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Pre-Rendering: How to Overcome Technical SEO Challenges with Prerender.io</h4>
<p>Large-scale websites often face SEO issues related to JavaScript, but <a href="http://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> provides an effective solution. This pre-rendering tool renders static HTML versions of JavaScript pages, improving both load times and indexing performance for users and search engine crawlers. Using a platform like Prerender is especially valuable for large e-commerce sites, content platforms, and enterprise websites with thousands of JavaScript-rendered pages.</p>
<p>By addressing common JavaScript SEO problems, Prerender.io helps optimize crawl budgets and enhances SEO indexing. Additionally, it can help with: improved Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores, a positive user experience, fewer costs compared to in-house server-side rendering, and the potential to mitigate sudden drops in traffic. </p>
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe title="Seeing A Sudden Drop In Traffic? This Technical SEO Issue Could Be Why" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ToGusQ8qqcE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>
<p>For real-time results, see how Prerender.io helped Haarshop, an ecommerce store,<strong> improve its indexing performance by 30% and increase its PageSpeed score to 99, leading to 50% more organic traffic</strong> coming to their large-scale online store. <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/improved-pagespeed-and-boosting-page-indexing-to-optimize-webshop/">Get the details of Haarshop’s success story here</a>.</p>
<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/improved-pagespeed-and-boosting-page-indexing-to-optimize-webshop/"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="630" height="300" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/how-Prerender.io-helped-Haarshop.png" alt="how Prerender.io helped Haarshop" class="wp-image-5050" style="width:630px;height:auto" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/how-Prerender.io-helped-Haarshop.png 630w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/how-Prerender.io-helped-Haarshop-300x143.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px" /></a></figure>
</div>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Site Architecture</h3>
<p>While site architecture for small websites is relatively simple, large-scale websites can become complex and confusing. Unclear navigation paths and cluttered hierarchies can hinder both search engines and users from understanding the relationships between pages, leading to inefficient crawling and indexing.</p>
<p>Once you’ve completed a thorough site audit and identified your most important pages, <strong>create a clear and logical hierarchy by organizing related content into well-defined categories and subcategories</strong>. This helps search engines understand the thematic relationships between pages and improves user navigation.</p>
<p>In addition, <strong>consider a flat architecture</strong>, which involves structuring your website with fewer hierarchical levels. This can make it easier for search engines to crawl and index all your content, ensuring that important pages have a minimal <a href="https://linkdoctor.io/click-depth-complete-guide/#:~:text=Click%20depth%2C%20also%20known%20as%20page%20depth%2C%20can%20be%20described%20as%20the%20number%20of%20clicks%20it%20takes%20a%20user%20to%20go%20from%20the%20home%20page%20to%20another%20page%20within%20the%20website.">click depth</a>.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Internal Linking</h3>
<p>Internal linking is a fundamental SEO strategy that becomes even more crucial for large-scale websites. While small websites can benefit from basic internal linking, large websites require a more strategic approach to maximize their impact.</p>
<p>By carefully <strong>identifying and linking to your most valuable pages</strong>, such as high-traffic landing pages, product pages, informative guides, or category pages, you can distribute link equity and boost their rankings. This ensures that your most important content is easily discoverable by both users and search engines.</p>
<p>To further optimize your internal linking strategy, <strong>incorporate keyword research</strong>. Use relevant keywords as anchor text when linking to high-value pages to send positive signals to search engines about the content and topic. <strong>Avoid keyword stuffing</strong> and create a natural and intuitive link structure that benefits both users and search engines.</p>
<p>Implementing these strategies will ultimately drive more organic traffic and engagement across your website, enhancing its overall search engine visibility.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Improve Your Enterprise Website’s SEO Health with Prerender.io</h2>
<p>Successfully optimizing the SEO of a large website with over a million pages requires a strategic approach. By prioritizing valuable content, ensuring optimal crawl ability, and building a strong backlink profile, you can effectively guide search engines in indexing your massive website and maximizing its visibility.</p>
<p>Here’s a quick rundown of how you should approach SEO for a website with hundreds of thousands of pages:</p>
<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li>Conduct an intensive <strong>content audit</strong> and prioritize your important pages.</li>
<li>Implementing comprehensive <strong>technical SEO optimizations</strong> and using Prerender.io to solve JavaScript SEO issues.</li>
<li>Develop a robust <strong>site architecture</strong> that’s easy for search engines and humans to understand. </li>
<li>Craft an intelligent <strong>internal linking strategy</strong>.</li>
</ol>
<p>Remember, SEO for large-scale sites is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process of analysis, optimization, and adaptation. By staying agile, data-driven, and focused on providing value to users and search engines, you can turn the challenge of managing millions of pages into a powerful competitive advantage.</p>
<p>Prerender.io is a solution that helps large websites optimize their performance in search results. Major search engines and <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-optimize-your-website-for-ai-crawlers/">AI crawlers</a> can’t render JavaScript well. Unless you use in-house SSR or a solution like Prerender.io, your pages likely won’t be featured in their results. </p>
<p>Prerender.io fixes this in record time with little ongoing maintenance required. <a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/">Create an account for free today!</a></p>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">How Does Crawl Budget Affect Large-Scale Website Performance?</h3>
<p>Crawl budget determines how many pages search engines will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. For large websites, efficient use of crawl budget is crucial as it affects how quickly new or updated content gets indexed and how thoroughly search engines can crawl your site.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Can Prerender.io Speed Up Indexing For Large Websites?</h3>
<p>Yes, absolutely! Prerender helps large websites get <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/10-ways-to-get-your-website-indexed-faster/">indexed faster</a> by serving pre-rendered HTML versions of your pages to search engines. This eliminates JavaScript processing time, reduces crawl time, and allows search engines to discover and index your content more efficiently. This is especially valuable for e-commerce sites, content platforms, and enterprise websites with thousands of pages.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What’s the ROI of Technical SEO Improvements for Enterprise Brands? </h3>
<p>Technical SEO improvements can offer significant revenue benefits for enterprise brands. To get a clearer number, we created a free ROI calculator to help you identify the tangible numbers of your technical SEO efforts. <a href="https://prerender.io/prerender-for-ecommerce/">Calculate your revenue potential here</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
</item>
<item>
<title>How to Find Pages That Deplete Your Crawl Budget (SEO Guide)</title>
<link>https://prerender.io/blog/enterprise-guide-to-finding-pages-that-deplete-your-crawl-budget/</link>
<comments>https://prerender.io/blog/enterprise-guide-to-finding-pages-that-deplete-your-crawl-budget/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Leo Rodriguez]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jan 2024 13:52:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Crawl Budget]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[crawl budget]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dynamic rendering]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[enterprise seo]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[technical seo]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=3132</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Learn about the types of pages depleting your crawl budget. ]]></description>
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<p></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Enterprise-level websites often struggle with crawl budget management, which hinders search engines like Google from timely indexing new content. Effective crawl budget optimization is, therefore, essential to ensure your pages appear in search results.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This crawl budget guide will teach you how to efficiently identify and optimize pages that consume a lot of crawl budget within your large-scale website. By pinpointing these resource-intensive pages, you can allocate a crawl budget more effectively and improve your website’s overall search engine visibility and SEO rankings.</span></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">5 Most Common Pages That Deplete Your Crawl Budget</h2>
<p></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Here are five types of pages that can easily drain your crawl budget.</span></p>
<p></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Soft-404 Errors</h3>
<p></p>
<p>Soft 404 errors occur when a page no longer exists (so it should be displaying a 404 not found error) but appear to exist because the server returns a 200-ok status code or it’s displaying content that shouldn’t be there anymore.</p>
<p></p>
<p>This error is a mismatch between what the search engine expected and what the server returns.</p>
<p></p>
<p>For example, another way it can happen is if the page is returning a 200 status code, but the content is blank, from which search engines would interpret it as actually a (soft) 404 error.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Finding these pages is actually quite simple because Google Search Console has a specific <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2010/06/crawl-errors-now-reports-soft-404s#:~:text=A%20soft%20404%20occurs%20when,of%20pages%20with%20unique%20content.">soft 404 error report.</a></p>
<p></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" style="width: 840px; height: 668px;" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/9jI8GyGB9u6bRkTwbEf6Z0QWjTvaJEjEb9fsxfisKYI-piPLGHJOx1shOPb9BLKExTrNACA2n_BFmucL-OX4xwiW1gr3uo9m9N52DZrB-Ol8Cj6iie5xfanc3iPkFVS7LKTJh9Xvudk6QdcxeEXXLug" alt="Why Pages Aren't Indexed" width="840" height="668" /></figure>
<p></p>
<p>Although crawlers will eventually stop crawling pages with a “Not found (404)” status code, soft 404 pages will keep wasting your crawl budget until the error is fixed.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> It’s a good idea to check your “Not found (404)” report and make sure that these pages are returning the correct status code, just to be sure.</p>
<p></p>
<p>For a more detailed step-by-step guide, follow our <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/soft-404/">tutorial on how to fix soft 404 errors</a>.</p>
<p></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Redirection Chains</h3>
<p></p>
<p>A redirection chain is created when Page A redirects to Page B, which then redirects to Page C, and Page C redirects to Page A, forming an infinite loop that traps Googlebot and depletes your crawl budget.</p>
<p></p>
<p>These chains usually happen during site migrations or large technical changes, so it’s more common than you might think.</p>
<p></p>
<p>To quickly find redirect chains on your site, crawl your site with Screaming Frog and export the redirect chain report.</p>
<p></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/T0s2CxgmuXq9-g7tHWEzUdss4byKYSJ9X0W_CmGb2vpqcs0Pmnfkx4sXJfyWVxpFy0bHD-cuUsfkNkgJvU6QoQp4uo87yQgdXUVkrDkS-oOtnXtWT-AtV6l1OXU7AoDN_jz0mdWZvku8rMxLcWXzGfk" alt="Screaming Frog Audit - Dashboard" /></figure>
<p></p>
<p>However, crawling your entire site would require a lot of storage and resources from your machine to handle.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The best approach is to crawl your site using the sections you already created. This will take some of the pressure off your machine as well as reduce the amount of time it would take to crawl millions of URLs in one go.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> You have to remember that Screaming Frog will also crawl resources like JS files and CSS, taking more time and resources from your machine.</p>
<p></p>
<p>To submit a list for Screaming Frog to crawl, switch to List Mode.</p>
<p></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/Jg52q4g0VLdu-oTc1RVGuRIMvcyoYZVbrv6PqmbgkxfPXkYgzypYDRQrTQiXnuwgvm2WXPWC2No1talKZjW3RfO4chg9ez5EMLFCj5CDoJFNXDvnWLd0NGiyaUjyurMPBO7v8-q-izYU1Q17cWWY_xw" alt="Screaming Frog Crawl Data" /></figure>
<p></p>
<p>Follow our tutorial on <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/do-redirect-chains-hurt-seo/">fixing redirect chains</a> for clear step-by-step instructions.</p>
<p></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Duplicate Content</h3>
<p></p>
<p><a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/duplicate-content">According to Google</a>, “duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content in the same language or are appreciably similar.”</p>
<p></p>
<p>These pages can take many forms like faceted navigation, several URL versions being available, misimplemented Hreflang alternate URLs for localization, or just generic category templates showing almost the same content.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Because Google perceives them as essentially the same page, it will crawl all of these pages but won’t index them or treat them as spam and hurt your overall SEO scores.</p>
<p></p>
<p>In terms of crawl budget, all of these pages are taking resources away from the main pages on your site, wasting precious crawling time. This gets even worse if the pages flagged as duplicate content require JavaScript rendering, which will 9X the time needed to crawl them.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The best way to find duplicate pages is by checking Google Search Console’s “duplicate without user-selected canonical” report, which lists all the pages Google assumes are duplicated pages.</p>
<p></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/oeAXAIzy0nsSrXajbXf6UG-qNFmBR82cmivx6tbebH1u57_k5AnMlEHM6olk5mqNtHkTJCYS7X1Zmkk6rgv1MtUuUSyahub0NSsqhXYB8qvQgUdaMcU5pNeMuzQ4nqm9AxBb7LH93Y7xZ8OekivZZJQ" alt="Google Search Console Feedback " /></figure>
<p></p>
<p>You can contrast this information with Screaming Frog by crawling your site locally and then checking the “near duplicate” report.</p>
<p></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/P12GsWsrqGEDreIB0BSGd8FKAJvM6tp1vLU68EWOFgVC7TvdGaYas3chEb_WLrgxjFbZFxXXmgz8v_WzXr4E-6U4xAjQCGLXj4G6PokKM-vXQMc8u3BGNNyqNBYmbmRlqTAECiwKcPlNsT-nJs9d7kE" alt="Duplicate content audit in Screaming Frog" /></figure>
<p></p>
<p>Check our guide on <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-fix-duplicate-content-issues/">fixing duplicate content issues</a> for a step-by-step tutorial.</p>
<p></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Slow or Unresponsive URLs</h3>
<p></p>
<p>If we understand crawl budget as the number of HTTP requests Googlebot can send to your website (pages crawled) in a specific period of time (crawling session) without overwhelming your site (crawl capacity limit), then we have to assume page speed plays a big role in crawl budget efficiency.</p>
<p></p>
<p>From the moment Google requests your page to the moment it finally renders and processes the page, we can say it is still crawling that URL. The longer your page takes to render, the more crawl budget it consumes.</p>
<p></p>
<p>There are two main strategies that you can use to identify slow pages:</p>
<h4><span style="font-family: var( --e-global-typography-text-font-family ), Sans-serif; text-align: var(--text-align); font-size: 1rem;">A.) Connect PageSpeed Insights with Screaming Frog</span><span style="font-family: var( --e-global-typography-text-font-family ), Sans-serif; font-weight: var( --e-global-typography-text-font-weight ); text-align: var(--text-align); font-size: 1rem;"> </span></h4>
<p></p>
<p><!-- /wp:list --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Screaming Frog allows you to connect several SEO tools APIs to gather more information from the URLs you’re crawling.</p>
<p>Top tip: Not a fan of Screaming Frog? Discover <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/screaming-frog-alternative/">10 paid and free alternatives to Screaming Frog</a> to support your technical SEO auditing needs.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:image --></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/ch2KIkYymGYAWaRE9i6JrteP6rDC5jwxqZo0wExqXUDujgljBr25bsfMNeCeBiuygWcgPLS4wP1S_JPq1asQHtrOFZ0__m3giosRuZm9qe4MibllyDjJB6HZ6C13itoJSslQ6c621y4L2kTsyFxScYc" alt="PageSpeed Insights" /></figure>
<p><!-- /wp:image --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Connecting PageSpeed Insights will provide you with all the performance information at a larger scale and directly on the same crawl report.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>If you’ve already crawled your site section, don’t worry, <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/screaming-frog-tips/#:~:text=use%20the%20request%20data%20api%20function">Screaming Frog allows you to request data from the APIs you’ve connected retroactively</a>. Avoiding you the pain of crawling thousands of URLs again.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:image --></p>
<h4 class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/9nfMLPWelnJcJ8Yb9pOdvSzYp3jZHqDJVeavDPl71egZO8NSdfcaEtQm49nc6mdgXY1XAdE6dGbs1UCwJwwOluN9zki3KdfZrysMbSMwzyh0SFzxamdviMsu9oXQa4a0UlvO1C9RKVHpqpRxJHsYyvE" alt="Example of how to request API data in Screaming Frog" />B.) Identify slow pages through log file analysis</h4>
<p><!-- /wp:list-item --></p>
<p><!-- /wp:list --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Log files contain real-life data from your server activity, including the time it took for your server to deliver your page to search engines.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The two metrics you want to pay attention to are:</span></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Average Bytes</strong> – the average size in bytes of all log events for the URL.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Average Response Time (ms)</strong> – The length of time taken (measured in milliseconds) to download the URL on average.</span></li>
</ul>
<p><!-- /wp:list-item --></p>
<p><!-- /wp:list --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>As a benchmark, <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/page-speed-tips-and-statistics/">your pages should completely load in 2 seconds or less</a> for a good user experience, but Googlebot will stop crawling any URL with a server response longer than two seconds.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Here’s a <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/7-best-practices-for-creating-mobile-friendly-javascript-sites/">complete guide to page speed optimization for enterprise sites</a> you can follow to start improving your page performance on both mobile and desktop.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Pages with No Search Value in Your Sitemap</h3>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Your sitemap acts as a priority list for Google. This file is used to tell Google about the most important pages on your site that require its attention.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>However, in many cases, developers and SEOs tend to list all URLs within the sitemap, even those without any relevancy for search.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>It’s important to remember that your sitemap won’t replace a well-planned site structure. For example, sitemaps won’t solve issues like orphan pages (URLs without any internal links pointing to them).</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Also, just because a URL is in your sitemap doesn’t mean it’ll get crawled. So, you have to be mindful about what pages you’re adding to the file, or you could be taking resources away from your priority pages.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Here are the pages you want to identify and remove from your sitemap:</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:list --></p>
<ul>
<li style="list-style-type: none;">
<ul><!-- wp:list-item --></ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>I.) Pages Tagged as Noindex</h4>
<p><!-- /wp:list-item --></p>
<p><!-- /wp:list --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>This tag tells Google not to index the URL (it won’t show in search results), but Google will still use the crawl budget to request and render that page before dropping it due to the tag.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>If you’re adding this URL to your sitemap, you’re wasting crawl budget on pages that have no search relevance.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>To find them, you can crawl your site using Screaming Frog and go to the directive report:</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:image --></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/9UBGq-5wXt1ujzhz2ysK-D7urdZR6swO-_sQ9ubidrEgCfIDofqGBtnTd2n6oxsHESuBpePkoZrSMTenn4sawHkbhZw0H9u9ZpMgrpsT5G_4gn_wc_8-52gIaePBTvq0eSvmwGA0uuPeawU6TP0Hx5k" alt="Noindex report in Screaming Frog" /></figure>
<p><!-- /wp:image --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>You can also find these pages in the Search Console’s indexing report.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:image --></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/_mbXMWmcu5Zb-WoGbOqYlyeQxEaxBcubqB97ZWMJqPW4ggwcGbFMAycEo2yar98srIZGLF07CRwzJjKgAAap1dcntkqJ2YCcSwsxxpPRFNcuqRXeEvdYf_FqI1Wjtq3nWUlmzVbB5MhKX8bBRl_WSaw" alt="Page indexing feedback in Google Search Console" /></figure>
<p><!-- /wp:image --><!-- wp:list --></p>
<ul>
<li style="list-style-type: none;">
<ul><!-- wp:list-item --></ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>II.) Landing Pages and Content Without Ranking Potential</h4>
<p><!-- /wp:list-item --></p>
<p><!-- /wp:list --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>There are landing pages and content that just won’t rank, and from millions of URLs, you are bound to have a few of those.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>It doesn’t mean there’s no value in having them indexed. It just means there’s no value in having them discovered through the sitemap.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Your sitemap should be a curated list of highly valuable pages for search. Those that move the needle in traffic and conversions.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>A great way to find underperforming pages at scale is by connecting your Google Analytics and Search Console directly to Screaming Frog. This will allow you to spot pages with zero rankings quickly.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>You can also connect Ahrefs’ API to get backlink data on the URLs you’re analyzing.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:list --></p>
<ul>
<li style="list-style-type: none;">
<ul><!-- wp:list-item --></ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>III.) Error Pages, Faceted Navigation, and Session Identifiers</h4>
<p><!-- /wp:list-item --></p>
<p><!-- /wp:list --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>It goes without saying, but you also need to clean your sitemap from any page returning 4XX and 5XX status codes, URLs with filters, session identifiers, canonicalized URLs, etc.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> You don’t need to block canonicalized pages through the Robot.txt file.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>For example, adding the entire pagination of a product category is not valuable. You only need the first page, and Google will find the rest while crawling it.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>You’ve already found most of these pages in the previous steps. Now check if any of them are in your sitemap and get them out.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading --></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Challenges Crawl Budget Optimization for Enterprise Websites</h2>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Although enterprise sites must follow the same best practices as any other type of website, <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-enterprise-seo-with-suggested-tools-to-use/#:~:text=what%20makes%20enterprise%20seo%20different">enterprise sites represent a unique challenge</a> because of their large scale and complex structure. To ensure we’re on the same page, here are the three main challenges you’ll encounter during your enterprise crawl budget optimization process:</p>
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<h3>A High Number of URLs</h3>
<p>One common denominator among enterprise sites is their size. In most cases, enterprise websites have over 1M URLs, making it harder for any team to stay on top of each and every one of them. Plus, it also makes it easy for teams to overlook some URLs and make mistakes. </p>
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<h3>Deadlines and Resources</h3>
<p>Something that’s very common in this kind of project is having unrealistic deadlines with limited resources. These resources are both time, people, and tools. Crawl budget optimization is a highly technical and collaborative endeavor, and for teams to be able to manage it successfully, they need to automate certain tasks with tools, count with different experts like writers, SEOs, and developers, and have enough time to implement safely.</p>
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<h3>Implementation and Testing</h3>
<p>Connected to the previous point, teams usually don’t have enough time for testing, which can have terrible results if your teams have to rush through implementation. Because of the complex structure of your site, even a small change might affect hundreds or thousands of URLs, creating issues like rank drops.</p>
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<p>That said, making changes to your site shouldn’t be scary as long as you develop a solid plan, provide the right resources (including time, tools, and experts), and be conscious that testing is a necessary part of the process to avoid losing traffic and conversions.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">3 Tips to Plan Your Enterprise Crawl Budget Audit</h2>
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<p>Every plan has to be tailored-made to fit your own organization, business needs, and site structure, so there’s no one-fit-all strategy you can find online.</p>
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<p>Still, there are three simple tips you can use to make your crawl budget audit easier to manage and implement:</p>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Find a Logical Way to Break Down Your Site</h3>
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<p>You can group similar pages following your website structure (which is the hierarchical order pages are linked between each other in relation to the homepage), creating individual sections that are easier to understand and evaluate.</p>
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<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/NNdQ2djjXti2PicAkORf82wTwBxqgRpJCnT9_6dAJ5135_uM04tTie3oeyc_NV5F2lm5_YzIf2RINlXrqsq9MqseUnmfXZElQJmwpKPTk-qo3b3LT_yyGAj-LWsqLkqRknWS8jb71nQOyuMyr5d63fM" alt="Web Structure Example" /></figure>
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<p>Because every website has a unique structure, there isn’t a single best way to separate every site. Nevertheless, you can use any of the following ideas to get started:</p>
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<li><strong>Group your pages by type</strong>—not all pages are built equally, but there are groups of pages sharing a similar approach. For example, your main landing pages might use the same template across all categories, so evaluating these pages together will give you insights into a bigger portion of your site faster than analyzing them one by one.</li>
</ul>
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<ul>
<li><strong>Group your pages by cluster</strong>—another way to do this is to identify topic clusters. For example, you might have category pages, landing pages, and content pages talking about similar topics and, most likely, linking to each other, so it makes sense for a team to focus on the whole.</li>
</ul>
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<ul>
<li><strong>Group your pages by hierarchy—</strong>as you can see in the image above, your structure has a “natural” flow based on how you’ve structured your website. By building a graphical representation of your pages, you can separate the different sections of your pages based on this structure – however, for this to work, your website needs a clear structure, if it doesn’t, it’s better to go with any of the previous ideas.</li>
</ul>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Delegate Each Site Section to an SEO Team</h3>
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<p>Once you know how you want to divide your website, it’s time to get all URLs into a central spreadsheet and then allocate each site section to a particular team – you can copy all the URLs assigned to a team into a different spreadsheet.</p>
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<p>When we talk about teams, we don’t necessarily mean having three different experts per section of your page—although that would be ideal.</p>
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<p>Instead, you’ll want to have one SEO professional for each section of the site do the audit. These professionals will provide all the guidelines, assign tasks, and oversee the entire project.</p>
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<p>For technical optimization like page speed, you’ll want one or two dedicated developers. This will ensure that you’re not taking time away from the product.</p>
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<p>Lastly, you’ll want at least two writers to help you merge content where needed.</p>
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<p>By creating these teams, you can have a smoother process that doesn’t take resources from other marketing areas or engineering. Because they’ll focus solely on this project, it can be managed faster.</p>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Start Testing</h3>
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<p>You can use a project management tool like Asana or Trello to create a centralized operation that allows data to flow throughout the project.</p>
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<p>Once the first tasks are assigned (implementation tasks), it’s important to give a testing period to see how changes affect your rankings. In other words, instead of rolling all changes at the same time, it’s better to have a couple of months to take a small sample of URLs and make the changes.</p>
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<p>If the effects are negative, you’ll have the time to reverse the changes and study what happened without risking the entire site.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A Better Crawl Budget Management for Your Large-Scale Websites</h2>
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<p>Rendering has a direct impact on your crawl budget and is arguably the biggest. When Google finds a JS file within a page, it’ll need to add an additional rendering step to access the entire content of the URL.</p>
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<p>This rendering step makes the crawling process take 9x longer than HTML static pages and can deplete your crawl budget between just a few URLs, leaving the rest of your site undiscovered.</p>
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<p>Furthermore, many things can go wrong during the rendering process, like timeouts or partially rendered content, which create all sorts of SEO issues like missing meta tags, missing content, thin pages, or URLs getting ignored.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>To find these pages, you’ll need to identify all URLs using JS to inject or modify the pages’ content. Most commonly, these are pages showing dynamic data, product listings, and dynamically generated content.</p>
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<p>However, if your website is built using a JavaScript framework like React, Angular, or Vue, you’ll experience this rendering issue across the entire site.</p>
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<p>The good news is Prerender can solve all rendering issues from its root, increase crawl budget, and speed up the crawling process with a simple plug-and-play installation.</p>
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<p>Prerender crawls your pages and generates and caches a 100% index-ready snapshot – a completely rendered version – of your page.</p>
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<p>When a search engine requests your URL again, Prerender will deliver the snapshot in 0.03 seconds, taking the rendering process off Google’s shoulders and allowing it to crawl more pages faster.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Explore more about crawl budget optimization:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-googles-15mb-crawl-limit/">Understanding Google’s 15MB Crawl Limit</a></li>
<li><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-optimize-your-crawl-budget-with-internal-links/">4 Ways to Optimize Your Crawl Budget with Internal Links</a></li>
<li><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-optimize-your-crawl-budget-with-internal-links/">How to Avoid Missing Content in Web Crawls</a></li>
<li><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-use-log-file-analysis-to-optimize-your-crawl-budget/">5 Ways to Use Log File Analysis to Optimize Your Crawl Budget</a></li>
</ul>
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<title>Tips for Scaling Enterprise SEO Programmatically</title>
<link>https://prerender.io/blog/tips-for-scaling-enterprise-seo-programmatically/</link>
<comments>https://prerender.io/blog/tips-for-scaling-enterprise-seo-programmatically/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 14 Sep 2023 21:19:31 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Technical SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dynamic rendering]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=3121</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Tips for scaling content with programmatic SEO on JS-based websites. ]]></description>
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<p>Programmatic SEO is on the tip of many SEOs’ tongues. It’s a strategic approach that uses data and tools to create and optimize multiple web pages at scale. This enables businesses to target long-tail keywords, ultimately attracting more organic traffic.</p>
<p>However, it is important to note that it’s <strong>not</strong> for manipulating search engines or spamming the web with low-quality content. Instead, it’s about understanding your audience’s needs and providing content at scale.</p>
<p>In this article, we will provide you with information on what Programmatic SEO is and tips for scaling enterprise programmatic SEO as well as other valuable pieces of information.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What is Programmatic SEO?</h2>
<p>Programmatic SEO often targets search phrases with lower search volume, relying on keywords that indicate a higher intent to purchase or convert. Once these keywords are identified, template-based pages are created. These templates will look the same in design and structure, and the only thing that will change is the niche content. You will customize the information for the specific keyword or topic.</p>
<p>Now, during this process, you have to ensure that each page is unique in words but consistent in flow. You don’t want to be penalized with duplicate content, and you want to create content that adds value.</p>
<p>Here are a few benefits it can bring:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Increased scalability</strong>: it’s a highly efficient way of creating and optimizing a large number of pages; ideal for enterprise businesses with extensive product catalogs or services. This can also become quite a competitive advantage.</li>
<li><strong>Increased organic traffic</strong>: targeting a wider range of keywords—including long-tail keywords—can attract more qualified traffic to your site. This goes hand-in-hand with the increased scalability of your content.</li>
<li><strong>Improved user experience</strong>: using data to create and optimize pages, you can ensure your content is relevant and valuable to your audience.</li>
<li><strong>Efficiency and cost-effectiveness</strong>: by automating the creation and optimization of pages saves time and resources, leading to lower costs and higher ROI for your SEO efforts.</li>
</ul>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tips for Scaling Enterprise Programmatic SEO</h2>
<p>Programmatic SEO can be fast … but when it comes to JavaScript-based content, you’re in for a challenge. While some elements of your pages will remain static, it’s the dynamic content that sets you back. In recent studies, we’ve seen that <a href="https://prerender.io/benefits/">Google takes 9X+ longer to rank JavaScript web pages compared to HTML</a>. Fortunately, Prerender eliminates that step through dynamic rendering. The tool generates and stores a static version of every web page and serves it to the search crawlers (bots).</p>
<p>Related: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-prerender-crawls-and-renders-javascript-websites/">How Prerender Renders JavaScript Websites</a></p>
<p>Here are additional ways to scale programmatic SEO on dynamic content.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Leverage Keywords with Modifiers</h3>
<p>Long-tail keywords are more specific than general keywords, meaning there’s less competition for them. This increases the likelihood of your site ranking high in search results. Additionally, long-tail keywords are often more relevant to users’ search intent, making them more likely to click on your website.</p>
<p>Keyword modifiers can be used to further refine your long-tail keyword strategy. These include:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Intent descriptors</strong>: modifiers like “best,” “buy,” “top,” “cheap,” and “free” indicate what the user is looking for.</li>
<li><strong>Product or service descriptors</strong>: modifiers like “for flat feet,” “online,” “men over 50,” and “black” provide more information about the product or service the user is seeking.</li>
<li><strong>Location descriptors</strong>: modifiers like “in the UK,” “in the US,” and “in Canada” indicate the user’s location.</li>
</ul>
<p>Remember to use a variety of keyword modifiers to target a wide range of long-tail keywords, and ensure that they are relevant to your target audience and describe your website’s content. </p>
<p>Additionally, try to build content that can hit multiple keywords at once. Not only will this increase traffic and make each page seem more popular (which Google likes), but it’ll also create more opportunities for internal linking.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Utilize Search Page Features</h3>
<p>One helpful search page feature is the “People Also Ask” box. This shows a list of questions frequently asked in conjunction with the search query you’re targeting. Understanding these questions can help you create content that directly addresses users’ needs and interests. But more importantly, it helps you understand what intent Google is assigning to a given query.</p>
<p>Remember to not rely on a single feature but rather all the features cohesively.</p>
<p>For instance, searching for “chocolate cake” will bring up related questions like “which chocolate cake is the best?”; however, the rest of the page clearly indicates that Google prioritizes recipes for chocolate cakes.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/fiq1e53WRXhhiyBB8bYJD23t6BghFKH7WSzd9UW3kPvXA6FXhHqus6MCmqIgcaD1w0MjRo-suiYBrx2zlILxdT_5IxphFMZ0DWuYp2HUXqEloQUOgt0D6qsJmHLdLMe33VDsVYtpfmOaRlDXwL7PPb8" alt="Example of search page features for content. " /></figure>
<p>Aside from “People Also Ask,” you can also use the following:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Related searches</strong>: this feature shows a list of related search queries that users have entered, helping you identify other keywords to target with your content.</li>
<li><strong>Autocomplete</strong>: this feature shows a list of suggested keywords as you type your search query, helping you identify keywords relevant to your target audience.</li>
<li><strong>Featured snippets</strong>: these short snippets of text appear at the top of search results for certain queries and are a great way to get your content in front of more users.</li>
</ul>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Respect Google’s Spam Policies</h3>
<p>When creating content programmatically, it’s easy to accidentally create duplicate, thin content, or content-stuffed keywords. Avoiding this should be a core focus when implementing programmatic SEO.</p>
<p>Duplicate/thin content and keyword stuffing are just two examples of <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies">Google’s spam policies</a>. Violating these can lead to penalties, leading to your dynamic content <strong>negatively</strong> impacting your SEO performance rather than scaling it.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Build Contextual Links</h3>
<p>Contextual links are another important strategy in programmatic SEO. These are links embedded within your content that provide additional information or resources <strong>related to the topic</strong>. Not only will this improve the user experience, it’ll boost your SEO performance and increase your site’s authority.</p>
<p>You’ll often see this principle implemented on company blogs linking to other relevant posts. For programmatic SEO, you can see it when webshops include a “customers also bought…” section. This also highlights how your SEO efforts can serve multiple functions at once, as showing someone other products based on previous purchases is an effective way to generate more revenue.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Customize Pages via User Input</h3>
<p>In addition to using templates to ensure consistency across your pages, you can also rely on user input to customize pages and make them unique. This can be done by:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Allowing users to leave reviews</strong>: reviews can provide valuable insights into your products or services and improve the user experience on your pages.</li>
<li><strong>Involving users in content creation</strong>: ask users to contribute content, such as images, videos, or blog posts. This can make your pages more engaging and informative.</li>
<li><strong>Personalizing content for each user</strong>: use data about your users to personalize the content they see on your pages.</li>
</ul>
<p>Companies like Amazon, Yelp, and YouTube use user input to customize pages, improving user experience and boosting SEO performance.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">6. Understand Your Crawl Budget</h3>
<p>Being aware of your <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/crawl-budget-seo/">crawl budget</a>—the number of pages that search engines can and want to crawl on your site within a certain period—is crucial when scaling your programmatic SEO efforts. Why? Well, the addition of hundreds or thousands of new pages can quickly consume your crawl budget.</p>
<p>Related: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/7-key-factors-that-influence-your-crawl-budget/">7 Key Factors that Influence Your Crawl Budget</a></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">7. Implement Prerendering</h3>
<p>Having to render JavaScript content is a surefire way of having your crawl budget used up quickly.</p>
<p>To avoid this, you may consider using <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/a-guide-to-prerender-process-and-benefits/">prerendering</a> to generate a static HTML version of your page, making it easier, quicker, and generally more efficient for search engines to crawl and index.</p>
<p>Dynamic rendering, or prerendering, is a cost-effective solution compared to other rendering models.</p>
<p>Related: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/when-you-should-consider-dynamic-rendering/">When You Should Consider Dynamic Rendering</a></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Balancing Quantity and Quality with Programmatic SEO</h2>
<p>While programmatic SEO allows businesses to create a large number of pages effortlessly (and fast), it’s not just about quantity. The quality of the pages created is more important. Whatever you put out there must align with Google’s Helpful algorithm or meet the standards/policies set by each search engine. I expect that these tips for scaling enterprise programmatic SEO will be very handy for you.</p>
<p>If you’re an enterprise looking to scale your content, you’ll most likely need to look at prerendering. On the surface, this may seem like a big undertaking and require modifications to your existing servers, but Prerender can be installed outside of your web server. It works with any tech stack; therefore, there is absolutely no impact on your existing infrastructure. Try it—<a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/">sign up and start with 1,000 free renders!</a></p>
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<title>Enterprise SEO Optimization: 6 Technical Areas to Improve for Better Search Visibility</title>
<link>https://prerender.io/blog/6-technical-seo-tasks-for-enterprise-organic-success/</link>
<comments>https://prerender.io/blog/6-technical-seo-tasks-for-enterprise-organic-success/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Leo Rodriguez]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jan 2023 12:05:44 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Technical SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dynamic rendering]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[enterprise seo]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[technical seo]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=2114</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Technical SEO optimizations are crucial for enterprise websites. Boost your reach with these high-impact tasks.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[ <div data-elementor-type="wp-post" data-elementor-id="2114" class="elementor elementor-2114" data-elementor-post-type="post">
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For enterprise websites, SEO optimization isn’t about chasing incremental ranking gains on Google SERPs or brand mention on ChatGPT results. It’s about making website visibility predictable at scale.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When a site spans millions of URLs, technical SEO and AEO optimization become infrastructure challenges. Take the JavaScript rendering issues, for instance. JS-heavy frontends and dynamic content mean search engines and AI crawlers can’t see and process the content instantly. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this guide, we break down six enterprise-grade SEO and AI visibility optimization elements that directly affect product discoverability across search engines and AI systems.</span></p>
<h2>1. Fix JavaScript SEO Rendering Issues in Enterprise SEO</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On enterprise websites, critical product information (product prices, availability, and promotions) is often hidden behind JavaScript. Consequently, search engines and AI tools struggle to see content that loads dynamically, especially on large sites where pages change constantly. This lack of visibility makes enterprise SEO optimization difficult, even for teams following SEO best practices.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That said, this is a common problem in enterprise SEO, especially for ecommerce, travel, and marketplace platforms with millions of pages and frequent updates that cover multiple languages. The outcome of this </span><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/common-javascript-seo-problems/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">JavaScript SEO challenge</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is costly and familiar:</span></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wrong prices or availability shown in Google search results</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Outdated product information used in AI-generated answers</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Visibility gaps across markets and catalogs</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The issue isn’t your enterprise SEO strategy, but your content isn’t fully visible to search crawlers when it matters. Without reliable JavaScript rendering, enterprise SEO optimization breaks down at scale.</span></p>
<h3>How Prerender.io Keeps Product Pages Visible in Search and AI</h3>
<p><a href="http://prerender.io"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Prerender.io</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> helps search engines and AI platforms keep up with frequent content updates by preparing your JavaScript pages in advance and serving them as simple, readable HTML.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Instead of relying on Google or AI tools to load and interpret JavaScript updates on their own (a process that can take days or even weeks), </span><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-be-successful-with-dynamic-rendering-and-seo/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Prerender.io’s dynamic rendering</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> delivers up-to-date versions of your pages immediately. On average, JavaScript websites using Prerender.io load for crawlers in </span><a href="https://prerender.io/benefits/"><b>0.05 seconds</b></a><b>, compared to 5.2 seconds without it.</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This ensures that search engines and AI systems always access the current state of the page, including prices, stocks, and promotions. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This also means that after using Prerender.io, enterprise websites can expect the following benefits:</span></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Google sees accurate, current product information</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rich results are generated from complete page content</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini use up-to-date data</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With Prerender.io’s help, as your product data changes, search engines and AI can keep pace, instead of falling behind.</span></p>
<p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-prerender-crawls-and-renders-javascript-websites/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learn how Prerender.io supports enterprise SEO and drives measurable revenue impact.</span></a></p>
<h3>Popken Boosted Product Visibility Across 32 Ecommerce Domains With Prerender.io</h3>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One enterprise customer using Prerender.io to solve JavaScript SEO challenges is Popken. As one of Europe’s largest plus-size fashion retailers, Popken operates 32 ecommerce domains across 16 countries. With millions of JavaScript-driven product and category pages, Popken struggled to keep product stocks, availability, and other information consistently visible in search.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After adopting Prerender.io, </span><b>the team stabilized rankings across markets, expanded indexation by thousands of pages, and ensured search engines and AI platforms always accessed accurate, up-to-date product information.</b></p> </div>
</div>
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<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="291" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-148.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-image-7185" alt="Popken visibility Improvement after implementing Prerender.io" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-148.png 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-148-300x140.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /> </div>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When Prerender.io was temporarily turned off, organic visibility dropped almost immediately. Once reactivated a week later, organic traffic bounced back up—clearly showing JavaScript rendering impact to enterprise SEO performance.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Beyond visibility, Popken reduced SEO-related engineering effort, cut tooling costs by </span><b>50%</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">, and projects </span><b>10% annual revenue growth</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> from improved search and AI discoverability. </span><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/popken-fashion-group/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Read Popken and Prerender.io’s success story.</span></a></p>
<p><strong><i>“When we reactivated Prerender.io, our domain visibility quickly started to increase within the week,” </i></strong>said <span style="font-weight: 400;">Christoph Hein, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Head of SEO at Popken Fashion Group.</span></p>
<p><a href="https://prerender.io/contact/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chat with our team to find out how Prerender.io can keep your product data accurate across search and AI.</span></a></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading --></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">2. Handle HTTP and Status Codes</h2>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>When it comes to status codes, there are two main things to work on:</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><strong>Serving HTTPS pages and handling error status codes.</strong></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><strong>Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS)</strong> has been confirmed as a ranking signal since 2014 when <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal">Google stated that they use HTTPS as a lightweight signal</a>. It offers an extra layer of encryption that traditional HTTP doesn’t provide, which is crucial for modern websites that handle sensitive information.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Furthermore, HTTPS is also used as a factor in a more impactful ranking signal: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-google-page-experience/">page experience</a>.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Just transitioning to HTTPS will give you extra points with Google, plus increase your customers’ sense of security – thus, increasing conversions. (<em><strong>Note:</strong> There’s also a chance your potential customers’ browsers and Google will block your HTTP pages.</em>) So, in saying that, if search engines nor users can access your content, what’s the point of it? And the second thing to monitor and manage is <strong>error codes.</strong></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Finding and fixing error codes</h3>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Error codes themselves are not actually harmful.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>They tell browsers and search engines the status of a page, and when set correctly, they can help you manage site chances without causing organic traffic drops (or keep them at a minimum).</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>For example, after removing a page, it’s ok to add a <em>404 not found</em> message</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><em>(<strong>Note:</strong> You’ll also want to add links to help crawlers and users navigate to relevant pages.)</em></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>However, problems like <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/soft-404/">soft 404 errors</a> – pages returning a 404 error message, but the content is still there – can cause indexation problems for your website. Users will be able to find your page on Google – because it can still index the content – but when they click, they’ll receive a 404 not found message.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>You can fix soft 404s by redirecting the URL to a working and relevant page on your domain.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Other errors you’ll want to handle as soon as possible are:</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:list --></p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li style="list-style-type: none;">
<ul class="wp-block-list"><!-- wp:list-item --></ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Redirect chains</strong> – these are chains of redirection where Page A redirects to Page B, which then redirects to Page C until finally arriving at the live page. These are a waste of crawl budget, lower your PageSpeed score, and harm page experience. Make all redirects a one-step redirect.</li>
<li><strong>Redirect loops</strong> – unlike chains; these don’t get anywhere. This happens when Page A redirects to Page B, which redirects back to Page A (of course, they can become as large as you let them), trapping crawlers in loops and making them timeout without crawling the rest of your website.</li>
<li><strong>4XX and 5XX errors </strong>– sometimes, pages break because of server issues or unwanted results from changes and migrations. In situations like these, you’ll want to handle all of these issues as soon as possible to avoid getting flagged as a low-quality website by search engines.</li>
<li><strong>Unnecessary redirects</strong> – when you merge content or create new pages covering older pages’ topics, redirecting is a great tool to pass beneficial signals. However, sometimes it doesn’t make sense to redirect, and it’s best just to set them as 404 pages.</li>
</ul>
<p><!-- /wp:list-item --></p>
<p><!-- /wp:list --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>You can use a tool such as Screaming Frog to imitate Googlebot and crawl your site. This tool will find all redirect chains, redirect loops, and 4XX and 5XX errors and organize them in easy-to-navigate reports. Also, it is advised that you look at Google Search Console reports for 404 pages under the Indexing tab.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:image --></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/zE2nZk8615VUKT7VyWgguYYiUXPXj6x14RR73pEKXtmqGpMJEiK96TTv4l_XCnT75WOdg8sHZqg3Ehl8u8oAcr_d6XDVDrLokWvxr_Qhx-Hl0wKR3L0vmDwGzMhxp7Ig1J96VOzVQdypnF-nzxEEakeylOAyPw-xo9n9oxPWKv7uztXR10LXb16TT9_SLA" alt="Screenshot of Google Search Console reporting tab " /></figure>
<p><!-- /wp:image --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Once you’ve arrived on the reports page, work your way through the list to fix them.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:separator --></p>
<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />
<p><!-- /wp:separator --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><strong>Is Your Enterprise Website’s SEO and AEO Healthy?</strong></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>For large websites, improving SEO and AI SEO performance isn’t just about creating new content; it’s also crucial to ensure your older, existing content still brings in visitors. When did you last check how well your entire website performs on SERPs and AI searches?</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><strong>Get a Free SEO Audit with Prerender.io</strong></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Find out how well your enterprise site’s SEO is doing with <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/site-audit-tool/">Prerender.io’s free site audit tool</a>. We’ll show you:</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:list --></p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li style="list-style-type: none;">
<ul class="wp-block-list"><!-- wp:list-item --></ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<ul>
<li>How easily your site can be found by Google, ChatGPT, and other AI search engines.<!-- /wp:list-item --><!-- wp:list-item --></li>
<li>Your page delivery speed.<!-- /wp:list-item --><!-- wp:list-item --></li>
<li>Guides to help you fix common technical SEO problems.</li>
</ul>
<p><!-- /wp:list-item --></p>
<p><!-- /wp:list --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Take control of your enterprise website’s SEO health today.</p>
<div class="hs-cta-embed hs-cta-simple-placeholder hs-cta-embed-230694382796" style="max-width: 100%; max-height: 100%; width: 600px; height: 200px;" data-hubspot-wrapper-cta-id="230694382796"><a href="https://cta-eu1.hubspot.com/web-interactives/public/v1/track/redirect?encryptedPayload=AVxigLJGVT75sigIFPqT8Jq%2F6z5TsO5d1gQk6ZFnkn1Vb4Tr6845n3VTzv8aFtKQcIl04jnw3jPvv8iticgjZev9%2B132r89DyWPqx1Ws8hhHjkIyfzNsN9csZL9HoNoV2FYPlUCKON9YGDiZfkBXV0MHO%2FktWixrzqM%2FIfqlwbwdn0NPqsMLJ6SXnw5%2B9uGG6PYJ9O%2F6%2BX4Lv1xmEeICGfAtVKfK&webInteractiveContentId=230694382796&portalId=25756777" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> <img decoding="async" style="height: 100%; width: 100%; object-fit: fill;" src="https://hubspot-no-cache-eu1-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/cta/default/25756777/interactive-230694382796.png" alt="Site Audit HS banner for blogs" /> </a></div>
<div data-hubspot-wrapper-cta-id="230694382796"> </div>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">3. Optimize Site Architecture</h2>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Your website’s architecture is the hierarchical organization of the pages starting from the homepage.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph {"align":"center"} --></p>
<p class="has-text-align-center"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/7MqyE_jGu2YJkSub-YFoiOrN08PyNx4Yhhpsb2u6AK21rLZdm9mxcuIRWD_FLxDDZHHto8oTlVQ47zYizjazCstnM_1-Pxn7whnG0s7pijbSf42n_YHF9Vx-3rK0diXizr68x6wFQMbbHj1-V2oDjMihwoe2a74Cai2y6rKTex7OnunhAGZMlhpDFAMubw" width="624" height="315" /><br /><strong>Image source:</strong> <a href="https://www.bluehost.com/resources/website-structuring/" rel="nofollow">Bluehost</a></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>For small sites, architecture isn’t the first thing in mind, but for enterprise websites, a clear and easy-to-navigate structure will improve crawlability, indexation, usability from users’ perspective, and scalability.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>When you create a good site structure, your URLs will be easier to categorize and manage, thus making it easier for collaborators to create new pages without conflicting slugs or cannibalizing keywords.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Also, search engines will have more cohesive internal linking signals, which will help build thematic authority and find deeper pages within your domain – <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/orphan-pages/">reducing the chance of orphan pages</a>.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading --></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">4. Improve Mobile Performance and Friendliness</h2>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Mobile traffic has increased exponentially in recent years. With more technologies making it easier for users to search for information, make transactions, and share content, this trend is not slowing down.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>If your site is not mobile-friendly in terms of both performance and responsiveness, search engines and users will start to ignore your pages. In fact, mobile friendliness is such an important ranking factor Google has created unique tools to measure mobile performance and responsiveness, as well as introduced mobile-first indexing.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>To <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/7-best-practices-for-creating-mobile-friendly-javascript-sites/">improve your mobile performance</a>, you’ll need to pay attention to your JavaScript, as mobile processors aren’t as powerful as desktop computers. Using code splitting, async or defer attributes, and browser catching are good starting points to optimize your JS for mobile devices.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>To <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-make-a-website-mobile-friendly/">optimize your mobile site’s responsiveness and design</a>, focus on creating a layout that reacts to the users’ screens (e.g., using media queries and viewport meta tags), simplify forms and buttons, and test your pages on different devices to ensure compatibility.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><em>(<strong>Note:</strong> You can find a deeper explanation of mobile optimization in the links above.)</em></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:image {"id":5723,"sizeSlug":"full","linkDestination":"none"} --></p>
<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" class="wp-image-5723" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-146.png" alt="10 ways to make your site mobile-friendly - Prerender.io" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-146.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-146-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/image-146-768x432.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure>
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<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading --></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">5. Optimize Your XML Sitemaps and Keep Them Updated</h2>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Your XML sitemap is a great tool to tell Google which pages to prioritize, help Googlebot find new pages faster, and create a structured way to provide Hreflang metadata.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>To begin with, clean all unnecessary and broken pages from the sitemap. For example, you don’t want paginated pages on your sitemap, as in most cases, you don’t want them to rank higher on Google.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Also, including redirected or broken pages will signal to Google that your sitemap isn’t optimized and could make Googlebot ignore your sitemap altogether because it can see it as an unreliable resource.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>You only want to include pages that you want Google to find and rank on the SERPs – including category pages – and leave out pages with no SEO value. This will improve crawlability and make indexation much faster.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>On the other hand, enterprise websites tend to have several localized versions of their pages. If that’s your case, you can use the following structure to specify all your Hreflang tags from within the sitemap:</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:table {"hasFixedLayout":false} --></p>
<figure class="wp-block-table">
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><url> <loc>https://prerender.io/react/</loc> <xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=”https://prerender.io/deutsch/react/”/> <xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de-ch” href=”https://prerender.io/schweiz-deutsch/react/”/> <xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”https://prerender.io/react/”/></url></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</figure>
<p><!-- /wp:table --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>This system will help you <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/fix-hreflang-tag-issues/">avoid common Hreflang issues</a> that can truly harm your organic performance.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading --></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">6. Set Your Robot Directives Correctly and Robot.txt File</h2>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>When traffic drops, one of the most common issues we’ve encountered are unoptimized Robot.txt files blocking resources, pages, or entire folders or with on-page robot directives.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Fix robot.txt directives</h3>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>After website migrations, redesigns, or site architecture changes, developers and web admins commonly miss pages with <em>NoFollow</em> and <em>NoIndex</em> directives on the head section. When you have a NoFollow meta tag on your page, you’re telling Google not to follow any of the links it finds within the page. For example, if this page is the only one linking to subtopic pages, the subtopic pages won’t be discovered by Google.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>NoIndex tags, on the other hand, tells Google to leave the page out of their index, so even if crawlers discover the page, they won’t add it to Google’s index. Changing these directives to <em>Follow, Index</em> tags are a quick way to fix indexation problems and gain more real estate on the SERPs.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Optimize your Robot.txt Files</h3>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Your Robot.txt file is the central place to control what bots and user agents can access. This makes it a powerful tool to avoid wasting crawl budget on pages you don’t want ranking on the SERP or not even indexed at all. It’s also more efficient for blocking entire directories. But that’s also the main problem.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Because you can block entire directories without proper planning, you can block crucial pages that break your site architecture and block important pages from being crawled. For example, if you block pages that link to large amounts of content, Google won’t be able to discover those links, thus creating indexation issues and harming your site’s organic traffic.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>It’s also common for some webmasters to block resources like CSS and JavaScript files to increase crawl budget. Still, without them, there’s no way for search engines to properly render your pages, hurting your site’s page experience or having a large number of pages tagged as thin content.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>In many cases, large websites can also benefit from blocking unnecessary pages from crawlers, especially to optimize crawl budget.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p><em><strong>(Note:</strong> It’s also a best practice to add your sitemap on your Robot.txt file because bots will always check this file before crawling the website.)</em></p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>We’ve created an entire <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/robots-txt-and-seo/">Robot.txt file optimization guide</a> you can consult for a better implementation.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Optimizing meta descriptions and titles are usually some of the first tasks technical SEOs tend to focus on, but in most cases is due to how easy of a fix it is, not because it’s the most impactful.</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:heading --></p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Improve Your Enterprise Site’s Technical SEO for Improved Visibility</h2>
<p><!-- /wp:heading --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>These six tasks will create a solid foundation for your SEO campaign/s and increase your chances of ranking higher. Each task will solve many technical SEO issues at once and allow your content to shine!</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>To help you improve your site’s indexing speed and performance, adopt Prerender.io. We ensure all your content and its SEO elements are easily found by search engine crawlers and users. No more incorrect content showing up on SERPs, or your product hidden from AI searches. Try Prerender.io today!</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --></p>
<p>Looking for more technical SEO optimization tips to get more traffic from Google and AI search platforms? These guides can help:</p>
<p><!-- /wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:list --></p>
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<li style="list-style-type: none;">
<ul class="wp-block-list"><!-- wp:list-item --></ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/lumar-alternatives/">Lumar Alternatives for Enterprises: Technical SEO Solutions</a><!-- /wp:list-item --><!-- wp:list-item --></li>
<li><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/tips-for-scaling-enterprise-seo-programmatically/">Tips for Scaling Enterprise SEO Programmatically</a><!-- /wp:list-item --><!-- wp:list-item --></li>
<li><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-optimize-your-website-for-ai-crawlers/">How to Easily Optimize Your Website for AI Crawlers</a></li>
</ul>
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<title>What is Enterprise SEO? (With Tools to Use!)</title>
<link>https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-enterprise-seo-with-suggested-tools-to-use/</link>
<comments>https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-enterprise-seo-with-suggested-tools-to-use/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2022 12:17:56 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[enterprise seo]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[prerendering]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[technical seo]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=2103</guid>
<description><![CDATA[SEO for hundreds of thousands of pages requires a unique set of tools. Here are our recommendations.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>Enterprise SEO is the practice of improving rankings and online brand recognition of large organizations’ websites – usually in the hundreds of thousands of pages – with scalable strategies and automation.</p>
<p>Although SEO best practices still apply on these types of sites (enterprise websites), because of their impact on revenue, complex development processes, and scale, there’s a need for a shift in mindset. </p>
<p>Now, the focus is not only on growing search rankings but also on allowing the website (and thus, the company’s online presence) to grow sustainably without compromising its scalability. So, this brings a few unique challenges that smaller websites don’t often face (or, at least, face in smaller ways). </p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What Makes Enterprise SEO Different to “Normal” SEO?</h2>
<p>When it comes to enterprise SEO, there isn’t a concrete definition of what an enterprise website is. </p>
<p>Some people talk about its size, or the team needed to manage it. Other times, people talk about the size of the organization and the value the website for the company. No matter the definition, there are some unique characteristics these websites share that influence how SEO needs to be managed:</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Work needs to be done for and at scale</h3>
<p>SEO is a multidisciplinary marketing channel. It needs content, link building, development, design, content distribution, etc., to be successful. All of these need to be done for an enterprise site but multiplied exponentially. Every task needs to be done at a larger scale than a regular site.</p>
<p>Just think about page optimization: it’s not just about optimizing a couple of pages, but thousands. Also, changes and strategies need to scale. For example, content production needs to be more aggressive (hitting even 20 – 30 new pages a month), but it also needs to be high-quality and pass several controls.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Handling multiple sites or subdomains</h3>
<p>As enterprise businesses grow, they’ll expand to new territories, create content on different domains, and evolve their offerings rapidly. In most cases, all this content and its variations can’t be held under one single domain, so the entire brand will depend on several properties that need to be managed.</p>
<p>Every location might have its own domain/subdomain, and different content for different audiences might be grouped into subdomains. Keeping every property on-brand, avoiding duplicate issues, and growing each property’s rankings without stepping on each other’s toes, is a big part of an enterprise strategy.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. There are more opportunities for link building, but also more work</h3>
<p>Brand reputation has a significant influence on backlinks.</p>
<p>SEOs can use their company’s brand reputation to scale and take advantage of opportunities small sites can’t profit from.</p>
<p>Unique statistics, studies, or stories from a recognized brand can open the door to generating organic links in large numbers, and unliked mentions can scale to the hundreds per month with the right tool.</p>
<p>However, enterprise sites are also competing against other companies in their market, so just a couple of monthly links aren’t enough. For enterprise sites to rank and stay on top of the competition, link building work multiplies, and there’s also more pressure on the kind of stories and sites SEOs form alliances with.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. More brand recognition, more need to incorporate reputation management</h3>
<p>Although your brand brings a lot of opportunities for link building, it also increases the chances of bad PR. When unfair claims start to fill the SERPs, you’ll need a team to change the narrative through content, community building, and technical SEO, to curate the SERPs and mitigate potential harm. </p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Handling and optimizing a massive number of pages</h3>
<p>We must mention how daunting a spreadsheet with millions of URLs waiting to be optimized looks.</p>
<p>A high number of pages can be a good thing for many reasons, but it also makes making decisions much harder. Low-quality pages, thin content, duplicate content, and technical issues are really common on projects at this scale, and strategies like content pruning need to be done more delicately.</p>
<p>Just removing one page could mean hundreds of broken internal links. Deleting the wrong page? You can hurt site authority. Also, optimization requires a more thoughtful approach and, in most cases, requires a certain level of automation to make the process manageable.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">6. Selling SEO to teams and stakeholders</h3>
<p>Because of their size, enterprise sites require a lot of collaboration across teams.</p>
<p>However, SEO requires a lot of input from other departments like content, social media, developers, etc. Ask around, and you’ll find more than one story on selling SEO changes to the development team.</p>
<p>This is normal and expected, so SEOs must become great communicators and negotiators to find the help they need promptly. Still, changes require approval from different stakeholders. For example, if you’re about to change one element on a template, it can implicate thousands of pages. </p>
<p>This means that every small or big change requires a thorough evaluation before taking action.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">7. Automation is a must for efficiency</h3>
<p>Tools are always an essential part of SEO teams to work efficiently. </p>
<p>Enterprise sites take this to another level because without automation, there’s no way to manage a site as complex and big – not well, at least. Several technical SEO tools offer custom plans and unique features, while others specialize in these sites with unique functionalities designed for scaling. </p>
<p>Solutions to automate internal linking, do keyword research at a larger scale, or even custom tools like custom-built <a href="http://scraperapi.com/">scrapers to monitor brand reputation</a> are some solutions enterprise SEOs will need to manage these websites.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">5 Enterprise SEO Tools Worth Considering</h2>
<p>Another important distinction between regular SEO and enterprise SEO is the tools. </p>
<p>You’ll need more robust solutions to handle the workload effectively. </p>
<p>In our experience, these are five enterprise tools you should consider:</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Seobility – best for on-page SEO and content optimization</h3>
<p>Generating high-quality and optimized content is crucial for your SEO success. Seobility is a great tool to help speed up the process and handle big workloads without lowering the quality of optimizations.</p>
<p>For starters, <a href="https://www.seobility.net/en/website-audit/">Seobility’s enterprise website audit tool</a> can extensively find and solve technical errors and on-page SEO issues to improve your ranks. The tool will check more than 300 SEO-relevant factors, resulting in 50+ analyses that are grouped into three main categories:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Technical and meta: crawling issues, problematic meta tags and URLs, etc.</li>
<li>Structure: internal linkings, anchor text, site hierarchy, etc.</li>
<li>Content: content relevancy and duplicate content</li>
</ul>
<p>They also offer other SEO optimization products that are robust to handle your enterprise-scale website, including backlink analysis, keyword research, and text/content optimization (TF*IDF).</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Prerender.io – best to improve crawl budget and rendering</h3>
<p>Although it’s not unique to enterprise websites, handling JavaScript and dynamic content for hundreds of thousands of URLs is a different breed of challenge.</p>
<p>The biggest problem with JavaScript and large websites is <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/7-key-factors-that-influence-your-crawl-budget/">crawl budget</a>. Small websites have more than enough crawl budget to spare on Google’s renderer, so with a well-planned strategy, they should be ok.</p>
<p>However, for websites reaching 10 – 100k+ URLs, it’s not such an easy process. As Google takes more resources and time to fetch all files and render the content, it can quickly start a chain reaction of partially rendered pages. By this, we mean pages taking weeks and months before they’re finally crawled, and deep pages (pages 3 – 5 clicks away from the homepage) not getting discovered at all.</p>
<p>Not only that, but it’ll also affect your PageSpeed Insights score (including core web vitals), ultimately translating into poor rankings. To combat all these issues quickly and affordably – without investing in setting and maintaining your own servers and infrastructure – you can use Prerender.</p>
<p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-prerender-crawls-and-renders-javascript-websites/">Prerender</a> will generate a fully rendered snapshot of your JavaScript pages and serve them as static HTML to search engine bots on demand. Instead of having Google do all the work on your crawl budget expenses, Prerender will take the rending task away and provide your content ready for crawling and indexing, increasing Page Speed scores and improving crawl budget efficiency.</p>
<p>If you’re using <a href="https://prerender.io/framework/">Angular, React, or Vue to build and scale your site</a>, Prerender can reduce your team’s workload and help them rank your site faster without almost no input from their end. </p>
<p>All that’s needed is <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-install-prerender/">installing Prerender middleware</a>.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Lumar.io – best for technical SEO</h3>
<p>Screaming Frog (SF) is the defacto solution for crawling websites for technical SEO. However, in the case of enterprise websites, it can be harder to use. Not only because analyzing all the data from SF at this scale will require a lot of time and knowledge but because it will also require better hardware to handle the crawl process and store the data efficiently.</p>
<p>For these larger websites, it’s better to take part of this burden out of your machines and use a tool that’ll take care of the process and – to some extent – analysis. A tool that standout for this application is <a href="https://www.lumar.io/" rel="nofollow">Lumar</a> (formerly DeepCrawl).</p>
<p>Lumar is a cloud-based crawler that provides highly accurate technical SEO reports and supplementary data, allowing your team to automate audits, crawl sites and analyze data faster and at a bigger scale.</p>
<p>A feature most enterprise websites will appreciate is <a href="https://www.lumar.io/use-case/website-monitoring/" rel="nofollow">site monitoring</a> to manually or automatically generate alerts when website updates can harm your site and find negative trends before they become critical issues – like drops in page speed.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Keyword.com – best for rank tracking at scale</h3>
<p>Enterprise websites rank for thousands of keywords, a number that will only continue to expand over time. So much data is overwhelming for SEO teams that need to consider several variables for each keyword they’re trying to compete for.</p>
<p>Even after succeeding in getting the first spots, the next important battle is keeping those ranks.</p>
<p>Keyword.com is a <a href="https://keyword.com/">keyword position and rank tracker</a> that provides accurate data on keyword rankings and SERPs. Keyword.com is different from other rank tracker tools in this niche because it has features that <a href="https://keyword.com/enterprise-rank-tracking/">enterprise teams need to track their SEO performance</a> without the noise that comes with traditional solutions.</p>
<p>Besides tracking lists of keywords, you can also group keywords and get an overall performance report for clusters, providing insights into how your site performs for specific topics. As part of reporting, it’s easy to set up daily updates to the teams’ inbox and automatically generate reports for stakeholders, providing all the relevant information they need and reducing reporting time from the team.</p>
<p>However, the following three features make Keyword a great enterprise tool for us:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>It provides granular data for each keyword</strong> – you can get SERP data for each keyword from a specific location (country and city level), from mobile or desktop and even store snapshots of the SERPs to keep track of positions (not estimates).</li>
<li><strong>It monitors your competitors’ ranking changes</strong> – keeping an eye on your competitors and how they’re moving on the SERPs is crucial to prevent outranks. Setting an alert when a competitor is closer to surpassing your page can make a big difference.</li>
<li><strong>It offers unlimited API calls</strong> – data is not locked into its platform, allowing you to use YOUR data wherever you want without upgrading your plan. You can use this data to build your own dashboards or integrate this data with a more extensive set, keeping everything in one place.</li>
</ul>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SparkToro.com – best for audience research</h3>
<p>Data is vital for your SEO campaign, but finding accurate, relevant data to inform your marketing and content strategy can get tricky and expensive.</p>
<p>As your offerings grow, you’ll need to battle new competitors and understand new audiences’ needs and interests. SparkToro is an audience research platform that allows you to gather audience information through a query.</p>
<p>SparkToro will provide:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Age, gender, education, and interests information</li>
<li>Websites your audience visits</li>
<li>Social accounts they follow</li>
<li>Podcasts they subscribe to</li>
<li>Language in their content (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube comments, etc.)</li>
</ul>
<p>With all this information, your team will be able to establish partnerships with relevant influencers and publications, know the kind of content that attracts their target audience and build data-driven customer personas.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Lighting Round [Bonus]</h3>
<p>While the tools above will help your team to manage some of the unique challenges enterprise websites face, we want to quickly mention three more tools that’ll help your team cover more ground:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.semrush.com/" rel="nofollow">SEMrush</a> is a comprehensive SEO platform that provides many tools to manage your website in a single place.</p>
<p><strong>Note: </strong>These features can’t match the capabilities of specialized tools. For example, SEMrush can perform technical audits, but Lumar reports and constant monitoring are a better solution.</p>
<p>This tool excels especially for link data. It has a robust and ever-growing backlink index, allowing you to find toxic links and generate disallow files, find the best links from your competitors and find backlink opportunities fairly quickly.</p>
<p>However, when it comes to competitor research, <a href="https://www.spyfu.com/" rel="nofollow">SpyFu</a> has no comparison. Although SpyFu is more targeted to PPC, it can also help you monitor your competitors’ backlinks based on keywords and keep track of their overall performance.</p>
<p>The best part is that its UI is simple and clean, so there’s no clutter on the way of getting the data.</p>
<p>The last honorable mention is for <a href="https://brand24.com/" rel="nofollow">Brand24</a>. As said previously, online reputation is more critical for enterprise-level brands, so having systems to automate this process is vital for success.</p>
<p>Brand24 monitors the web for mentions of your brand, automating sentiment analysis and alerting you when things are going wrong. You can also use the tool to find unlinked mentions to gain new backlinks and engage with your audience on relevant discussions across the web.</p>
<p>Enterprise SEO has unique challenges and thus requires a different mindset, strategies, and tools. With the right enterprise SEO strategies, you’ll be able to secure new rankings while setting your website for sustainable growth.</p>
<p>If you’re the owner or part of a team managing an enterprise site, we would love to know the hardest challenge you’ve overcome so far and why. <a href="https://twitter.com/prerender?s=20&t=9ajTSMeFs_-IR6VfNHGKtQ">Find us on Twitter</a>, and share your experience.</p>
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<title>How to Build and Manage An All-Star SEO Team</title>
<link>https://prerender.io/blog/seo-team/</link>
<comments>https://prerender.io/blog/seo-team/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 13 Oct 2021 06:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=1463</guid>
<description><![CDATA[SEO is one of the most important investments your business can make. But it all depends on who you bring on.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>Search engine optimization, commonly known as <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-starter-guide">SEO</a>, is one of the most important investments your business can make.<a href="https://cta-eu1.hubspot.com/web-interactives/public/v1/track/redirect?encryptedPayload=AVxigLIwE9gEfbfqi%2FunxJaC%2BxB2kHDkXwthriRb4oDSNbs8gOHptb0aS5Q%2FrBXbAGpDUsh5HLJe1Hq7lef0D2BPRjf38d79szqc5SjgbgFyPY6B1pRWeYvKyFWfTPJ%2F2j7HSE0%2FhNCN8szXNFG%2BUMhjI0tMXCHDvZid%2BsLQzbtLnTjHYEb%2BI3LcxdEYV0zPS7KATvXBZjNys6JbTxyAuA4kLnDm&webInteractiveContentId=230694382796&portalId=25756777" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a><a href="https://cta-eu1.hubspot.com/web-interactives/public/v1/track/redirect?encryptedPayload=AVxigLKCDwSpZ0GFIne2OENDnPrEhA8mdmOnXA5ebCGfh%2B1Cpc1Dgkzdc2JgYZSW6tVWXqr5jjmbfVxm9dYBp1MHQD4B%2BGXzs4unkxN4V1dXsEbtLLk%2BHh0nZpc%2FGdkSLlZRnGFJ3BZ0wqxE%2FstmMucXL6rryswjQsnfXtWxP%2FbP1%2F0ZecnbNb%2FSPO0T5FWvqR781DXX75O%2Fsifd46rJ6kObcWSa&webInteractiveContentId=238975177973&portalId=25756777" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a><a href="https://cta-eu1.hubspot.com/web-interactives/public/v1/track/redirect?encryptedPayload=AVxigLKJcs4lL0y%2FbIKjfQhwbSCsFnWHMSRJKntzG%2F%2Bs5joW9aZCq4f%2Br4nD7AHw%2BivDhfvFOn0V5NMz2gRG2wNSXTVZfG8qbUKfGzliWUOVKnfQHeMB5gGZS%2BXX6EW%2FWMkoubOGV0OXibkpX5qqXzmeBwFweuXoVBvuBNB0U6OsEiQQ3ylr8LRxVmljg3PERhSdCeOE%2BQUxxR0qEYyK6F0jpnQx&webInteractiveContentId=238518924482&portalId=25756777" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a></p>
<p>Done right, SEO is a marketing channel that can produce months or years of sustainable and expanding ROI. </p>
<p>A successful SEO campaign requires a lot of careful planning and execution. It isn’t the kind of thing you can hand over to just anyone, which is why it’s a skillset in such high demand.</p>
<p>SEO experts are competent, knowledgeable, efficient, and capable of distilling the bigger picture into its component parts. The ideal SEO manager takes ownership of his or her work, is accountable for mistakes, and shows, step-by-step, how to achieve the best possible results.</p>
<p>Having these capabilities in-house can be a huge advantage for your company.</p>
<p>When you onboard your own <a href="https://www.globalmediainsight.com/seo-dubai">SEO team</a> to support your marketing department, you can carefully pick and choose the right people to help you. You no longer need to rely on agencies that can’t guarantee results or freelancers who are noncommittal or use questionable methods.</p>
<p>Naturally, there is a significant upfront cost to recruit, train, and fully onboard SEO professionals—but it’s well worth the risk and effort if done right.</p>
<p>Here are the benefits of moving your SEO in-house, the skills to look for in your new hires, key positions to fill, how to structure your team, and how to manage your SEO A-Team once it is assembled.</p>
<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide has-media-on-the-right is-stacked-on-mobile is-vertically-aligned-top" style="grid-template-columns:auto 45%"><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Why Move Your SEO In-House?</strong></h2>
<p>We get it. Building and training your own SEO team can take months, far longer than just hiring an agency with turnkey services. On the surface, achieving an ROI with SEO can appear daunting. But here are some of the long-term reasons that make it worthwhile.</p>
</div><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="774" height="454" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/why-inhouse-seo.jpg" alt="Why Move Your SEO In-House?" class="wp-image-1464 size-full" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/why-inhouse-seo.jpg 774w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/why-inhouse-seo-300x176.jpg 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/why-inhouse-seo-768x450.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 774px) 100vw, 774px" /></figure></div>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Familiarity With Your Business</strong></h3>
<p>You know your product or service better than anyone.</p>
<p>Hiring an agency still involves onboarding and training. Even though you have the team, it will take time for the SEO experts to become familiar with your processes. Moving your SEO in-house allows you to fill your SEO bench with people already knowledgeable about your product or service.</p>
<p>An in-house SEO expert also knows your specific business needs in ways that an agency or an independent contractor doesn’t. Your in-house expert can therefore tailor your SEO strategy accordingly.</p>
<p>Hiring an agency or a freelancer can quickly turn into a headache. When you hire your own SEO personnel, you know exactly what you’re getting and are fully in control.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>You Get A Dedicated SEO Team</strong></h3>
<p>An SEO agency has to balance your priorities and needs with those of dozens of other clients. They can’t always be there for you when you need them.</p>
<p>An in-house SEO team, on the other hand, will work around the clock for you <em>and only you.</em></p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Faster Execution </strong></h3>
<p>Using an SEO agency can mean a slow turnaround while they are familiarizing themselves with your product or service. They need to get acquainted with the ins and outs of your website and make an appropriate SEO strategy for it.</p>
<p>With an in-house team, a quick Zoom call or huddle in the conference room is usually enough to get the ball rolling. Flowing from ideation to execution is much more streamlined—and there are far fewer communication barriers.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Cost-Efficient In the Long Run</strong></h3>
<p>An SEO agency might excel at fast, on-the-spot results or provide ongoing website maintenance, but it will typically cost thousands of dollars a month.</p>
<p>When you move your SEO efforts in-house, you get the most value for your investment. Everyone on the team is dedicating his or her time and resources to the overall business. Moreover, it’s easier for them to collaborate with your content, social media and pay-per-click (PPC) teams, maximizing the value of your SEO efforts and investments.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Hire People You Trust</strong></h3>
<p>SEO agencies can be a mixed bag. It’s possible they may use dishonest business practices and some may even employ SEO that’s ineffective, at best, and black hat, at worst. Horror stories of offshore SEO efforts are all too common, with agencies providing low-quality links that can be counterproductive to your overall strategy.</p>
<p>Hiring in-house SEO gives you full control over the people who work for you. You can hand-pick SEO professionals with verifiable skills and qualifications.</p>
<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide has-media-on-the-right is-stacked-on-mobile is-vertically-aligned-top" style="grid-template-columns:auto 55%"><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Skills an SEO Team Needs</strong></h2>
<p>Here are a few skill sets that your SEO team is going to need for them to get the job done.</p>
</div><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="774" height="383" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/seo-team-skills.jpg" alt="Skills an SEO Team Needs" class="wp-image-1465 size-full" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/seo-team-skills.jpg 774w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/seo-team-skills-300x148.jpg 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/seo-team-skills-768x380.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 774px) 100vw, 774px" /></figure></div>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Web Development</strong></h3>
<p>It’s an SEO expert’s role to instruct web developers on how to make websites better. Every SEO professional should be familiar with <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/frontend-vs-backend-should-i-start-with-the-front-end-or-back-end-of-my-web-app/">front-end web development</a> languages, like HTML and CSS. They don’t have to be web developers themselves, but they need to know enough to look at a website’s source code so they can identify <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/common-javascript-seo-problems/">problems and solutions</a>. Ideally, you should have at least one SEO professional with a formalized background in web development.</p>
<p>SEO experts should have an eye for bloated or unused code, render-blocking styles and scripts, and unnecessary or unused pages or widgets that bog down your web pages or divert organic traffic. You want your SEO team to point visitors to pages that give your business a positive ROI.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Content Creation</strong></h3>
<p>SEO and content marketing should be working together to complete an inbound marketing cycle that attracts, engages, converts and delights.</p>
<p>Content strategy needs to be informed by keyword research. Your customer’s first digital touchpoint with your brand will likely be the top-of-funnel content that’s optimized for the long-tail SEO keywords you’re trying to target.</p>
<p>Have at least one person on your team who’s a skilled content writer.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Public Relations/Digital PR</strong></h3>
<p>Job titles related to digital PR usually refer to link building—reaching out to webmasters and editors and convincing them to link back to your website.</p>
<p>Link building is the most effective way you can make your website rank for your target keywords and bring traffic and authority over time. It’s also highly difficult because it’s an off-page SEO metric you don’t control.</p>
<p>Link building requires more than just a creative spirit (content creation) or an analytical mindset (web development or technical SEO). Expert link builders need to have thick skin, high levels of self-confidence, extremely strong interpersonal skills, and high levels of emotional intelligence. Finding this mix of personality traits and skills isn’t easy.</p>
<p>At least one person on your team should have a background in PR. Someone with prior experience in sales or journalism could be a good fit for this role, too.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Marketing Analysis and Data Science</strong></h3>
<p>SEO is notoriously hard to quantify. But at some point, the head of your SEO team is going to have to walk into a boardroom and convince a panel of business executives that what you’re doing is making them money.</p>
<p>For this reason, at least one person on your team should be good with numbers. Consider adding a team member with a background in data science or statistics.</p>
<p>You need someone who can communicate the ROI value of your marketing campaign. That person should be able to set up your conversion tracking and make sure your <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-google-page-experience/">Google Analytics account is configured properly</a>. Ideally, he or she will also be able to set up your analytics dashboards and put together some charts and graphs to prove that what you’re doing is working.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>How To Structure Your SEO Team And Fill Key Positions </strong></h2>
<p>Broadly speaking, your in-house SEO team structure should be arranged into three departments: marketing strategy, technical, and content. You can also add a project manager.</p>
<p>Marketing strategists can make sure the ship is sailing in the right direction. Marketers with a propensity for analytics and a solid technical understanding help your SEO team keep its shape. You’ll also need creatives to help with the content side of your efforts. </p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Strategy</strong></h3>
<p>This is the head of the operation. Common team lead job titles in this department include: Senior Digital Marketing Director, Director of SEO, Head of SEO, or even SEO Lead.</p>
<p>This leader is the person who communicates with the c-suite or company leadership on the SEO team’s behalf. He or she is the person in charge of putting together the “broad-strokes” SEO strategy and overseeing its execution, as well as picking which keywords to target.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Technical SEO</strong></h3>
<p>The technical SEO staff are the ones who construct the details of your website. Key positions here include Head of Technical SEO and Director of Technical SEO. SEO analysts are the junior technical SEO experts who report to the team lead.</p>
<p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/technical-seo-experts-to-follow/">Technical SEO experts</a> spend their days looking at speed tests, comparing diagnostic reports, and looking through screens of code to make your website run fractions of a second faster. They do <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-conduct-a-technical-seo-audit/">routine website site audits</a> and monitor any crawl errors or ranking drops that can occur as a result of an algorithm update. They also make recommendations to the web developers on how to optimize the website, write documentation to support their conclusions, and continually test improvements to make sure they’re working as intended.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Content</strong></h3>
<p>The content group of your SEO team could be its own branch within the marketing department or a sub-branch of the SEO team. Key positions are Head of Content, Director of Content Marketing, and Lead Content Marketing Strategist. Content writers and content marketing consultants report to the leaders of this group.</p>
<p>The content team does the creative side of SEO. They write your company blog and optimize it for search engines by taking the keyword lists given to them by the strategy branch and churning out content pieces.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Project Manager</strong></h3>
<p>SEO team members have to work side-by-side with web developers and software engineers.</p>
<p>Marketers and engineers are known for butting heads in firms large and small. The project manager serves as the liaison between the developers and the marketing team. The project manager’s job is to make sure the SEO team and the web devs get along, work together, and complete projects on time. They communicate the SEO team’s recommendations to the developers and web designers. </p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>How to Manage Your New SEO Team</strong></h2>
<p>After you’ve assembled your in-house superstar SEO team, you will need to manage them. Here are some guidelines for getting started.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Set Objective-First ‘SMART’ Goals And Communicate Them Frequently</strong></h3>
<p>Effective marketing strategies need to have action-oriented “SMART” goals prioritized in an objective-first framework. Start your campaign with a clear definition of what you consider to be success. What keywords do you want to rank for? How much organic traffic do you need to produce a positive ROI? What pages do you ultimately want to rank on the top of the SERPs for your given keywords?</p>
<p>SMART stands for:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Smart</strong></li>
<li><strong>Measurable</strong></li>
<li><strong>Actionable</strong></li>
<li><strong>Relevant</strong></li>
<li><strong>Time-Bound</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Have weekly SEO team meetings to make sure your team stays on schedule and proactively addresses any problems. Make meeting objectives clear and on-topic. Limit them to 30 minutes, if possible.</p>
<p>At your SEO meetings, give an overview of SEO initiatives and go around the group so that team leads can keep you updated on their progress. Conclude your meetings with action items for the next meeting.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Delegate and Empower</strong></h3>
<p>Your team members are smart. In most cases, they’ll usually figure out what to do on their own.</p>
<p>Experienced SEO professions have to be smart and capable and dedicated to get to where they are. They don’t need micromanaging. Provide broad, but well-defined, expectations and trust your team members to execute them.</p>
<p>However, even the best SEO squad will need occasional guidance. Offer yourself as a resource if they run into problems, issues, or need clarification.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>The Right Tools for the Job</strong></h3>
<p>The best SEO teams will have a working knowledge of a lot of specialized tools. Your SEO team needs those tools to be good at their jobs.</p>
<p>Here are a few tools you’ll need to have:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/"><strong>Screaming Frog</strong></a>: an SEO spider and website crawler that lets you see websites the way a search engine does. It also lets you diagnose and solve metadata issues, like truncated title tags, identify 4xx error codes, and <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/do-redirect-chains-hurt-seo/">301 redirect chains</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://ahrefs.com/"><strong>AHRefs</strong></a>: AHRefs is possibly the best backlink analysis tool on the market. With this tool, you can reverse-engineer your competitor’s link-building strategies and help define your content strategy.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.semrush.com/"><strong>SEMRush</strong></a>: Your SEO team is going to work very closely with PPC advertisers, so they’re going to need SEMRush, a tool specifically made for SEM marketing. It’ll also help you track keywords rankings over time.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.canirank.com/"><strong>CanIRank</strong></a>: CanIRank is the unsung hero of keyword research tools. This AI-powered software will give you a breakdown of how likely you are to rank for a given keyword. It also gives you a whole host of analytics to validate your SEO strategies with thorough keyword research and it gives you an action-item list of recommendations to implement.</li>
</ul>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Give Credit and Lead by Example</strong></h3>
<p>It’s one thing to say that you have a positive work culture, but you need actual systems and processes to make your business a fun, collaborative, and rewarding place to work.</p>
<p>Open a channel in your team Slack where people can give each other shout-outs for their achievements.</p>
<p>Did a recent optimization make it to “Page 1” for a target keyword? Way to go! The digital PR specialist just scored the website a sweet backlink. Nice!</p>
<p>You can also start using <a href="https://bonus.ly/bonuses">Bonusly</a> to let your team give each other points for good work. Bonusly points can be exchanged for gift cards or PayPal rewards.</p>
<p>Working in a positive work environment makes work fun. A little validation can go a long way towards making your SEO team feel seen and appreciated.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>You’re Good to Go</strong></h2>
<p>By now you should have the right people, the right structure, and the right management style to take your website into SEO success! To recap, here’s an overview of the top-level steps for building and managing an SEO team:</p>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Fill in key positions for SEO strategy, <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-hire-a-technical-seo-consultant/">technical SEO</a>, content, and project management.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Hire people with a mix of web development, content creation, digital PR and analytics, and/or data science skills.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Make objectives clear, set weekly meetings, invest in a suite of SEO tools and build a positive work environment.</strong></li>
</ul>
<p></p>
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