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Enterprise search

Enterprise SEO agency work. The hard part is shipping it.

At this size the recommendation is rarely the missing piece. You probably have three documents that say the right thing and a title-tag change that has been in a backlog since spring.

Nobody in that chain disagreed with it. It just never reached anyone with the standing to make it happen.

Book a 30-min callShould you hire me at all?
One title-tag change, start to finish98 days
  1. Recommendation writtenday 0
  2. Brand and legal review+21 days
  3. Ticket into the dev backlog+35 days
  4. Waits for the release train+28 days
  5. Live, on 1 of 9 templates+14 days

Illustrative, and recognisable. Nobody in this chain disagreed with the recommendation.

Before anything else

Sometimes the answer is a big agency, and I will say which.

Enterprise is the one word in marketing that makes everybody claim they can do it. I am one fractional operator, so here is the honest allocation before you spend any more time on this page.

  • Migrating 900,000 URLs onto a new platform next quarter

    Big agency

    You need implementation capacity and round-the-clock cover during cutover. That is headcount, and I do not have it.

  • Fourteen country sites, hreflang, and nobody owns the standard

    Big agency

    Genuine multi-market technical work at that scale is a team sport with a project manager. Buying it fractionally would be false economy.

  • The audits are excellent and nothing from them has shipped

    Fractional

    This is a prioritisation and internal-influence problem wearing a technical costume. It needs one accountable person inside your organisation, not another report.

  • Five teams each own part of the site and none owns search

    Fractional

    Someone has to hold the standard across all five and be senior enough to say no. That is a role, and it is the one I do.

  • You have the team and they are pointed at the wrong things

    Fractional

    Direction and a quality bar, bought without buying production you already have in house.

  • You have three specialists and a clear roadmap already

    Nobody

    Then you do not need to hire anything. Spend the budget on removing whatever is blocking the roadmap you have.

Two of the six say hire somebody else and one says hire nobody. If that costs me the enquiry, the alternative was going to cost you a quarter.

The gauntlet

Six gates, and none of them is search.

An enterprise SEO strategy that ignores the approval path is a document. Every gate below has a person behind it who is measured on something other than organic traffic, which is why arguing about rankings never moves them.

  • Brand

    Title and heading changes that alter approved wording

    Get a standing pattern approved once, not each page reviewed individually. Brand almost always agrees to a rule when they will not agree to a queue.

  • Legal

    Claims, comparison pages, anything naming a competitor

    Bring them in at the outline stage rather than the draft. Legal reviewing a finished page is a rewrite; legal reviewing a structure is a fifteen-minute conversation.

  • Engineering

    Template changes, rendering, redirects, anything in the build

    Stop filing tickets and start writing acceptance criteria that fit their sprint format. A ticket that is ready to pick up beats a document that is right.

  • Product

    Anything competing with the roadmap for the same sprint

    Attach the change to a number product already owns. An SEO ticket loses to a product ticket; a conversion ticket does not.

  • The other four teams

    Publishing straight past the standard because nobody told them

    SEO governance written as defaults in the CMS rather than as a policy document nobody reads. Make the correct thing the easy thing.

  • Nobody, officially

    The change everyone agrees with and no one is accountable for

    Name an owner and a date in writing, in front of the people who would be blamed. This is unglamorous and it is most of the job.

Read this before you sign anything

What an enterprise SEO agency cannot promise you.

At this tier the proposals get very confident and the timelines get very short, because the deal sizes justify a lot of optimism. An enterprise SEO agency has the same four constraints I do, and the difference is only whether they are stated before the contract or discovered during it.

  1. 01

    I am one person, and some of this needs a department.

    A nine-hundred-thousand-URL migration, fourteen international sites, or an in-house team that needs six specialists hired all want a large agency or real headcount. I will tell you that on the first call rather than three months in, and the table above says it before you have spoken to me at all.

  2. 02

    Nothing here goes faster than your slowest approval.

    If a title change takes ninety-eight days to reach production, no strategy fixes that in month one. The first quarter is often spent shortening that path rather than adding to the backlog, which looks like very little is happening and is the highest-value work available.

  3. 03

    Big-site search moves in quarters, not weeks.

    Recrawling and reassessment at scale is slow, and a template change touching thousands of pages takes time to be seen and longer to be believed. Anyone showing you a hockey stick inside a quarter on a large site is showing you seasonality or a reporting change.

  4. 04

    The best work will be invisible in the traffic chart.

    Preventing a bad migration, stopping a redesign from dropping internal links, keeping a faceted-navigation change from swallowing the crawl your revenue templates depend on. None of it produces a line that goes up, and all of it is worth more than the work that does.

The uncomfortable version is that most of the first quarter goes on removing obstacles rather than adding work. It is also the only thing that makes the second quarter possible.

The work

Six workstreams, and the first one is not an audit.

You almost certainly do not need another document telling you what is wrong. Enterprise SEO services default to producing one because it is the deliverable that fits a proposal, and it is rarely the thing that was missing.

  1. 01

    Weeks 1–3

    Find out what is actually blocking you

    Not another technical seo audit. A map of every recommendation made in the last two years, what happened to it, and where it stopped. Most organisations at this size already know what to do and have three documents saying so.

    Last 24 recommendations5 shipped
    Shipped and live5
    Approved, in the backlog9
    Blocked on a review6
    Nobody remembers4

    The audit is rarely the missing artefact. The path to production is.

  2. 02

    Weeks 2–8

    Shorten the path to production

    Standing approvals instead of per-page reviews, acceptance criteria written in your engineers' format, and changes attached to numbers other teams already own. The goal is that the tenth change ships in days because the first one taught us where the gate is.

    Cycle time per change98 → 21 days
    Brand reviewstanding rule
    Legal reviewat outline
    Dev backlogsprint-ready
    Release trainunchanged

    Illustrative. One of these usually cannot be moved, and that is fine.

  3. 03

    Weeks 4–12

    Fix templates, not pages

    On large websites the unit of work is the template. One change to a product template reaches forty thousand URLs, and one bad change does the same. That is why the review and rollback discipline matters more here than the individual recommendation does.

    Template inventory9 templates
    Product · 41k URLspriority
    Category · 2.8k URLspriority
    Editorial · 900 URLslater
    Legacy · 12k URLsretire

    Ranked by URLs reached per change, not by how broken each one is.

  4. 04

    Ongoing

    Protect the crawl and the index

    At this size crawl budget stops being a theoretical concern. Faceted navigation, parameter sprawl, soft 404s and orphaned pages compete for attention that your revenue templates need. Most of this work is subtraction.

    index hygiene3 leaks
    facet params indexableleak
    soft 404s on filtersleak
    orphaned legacy URLsleak
    revenue templateshealthy

    Every leak here is attention taken from the templates that make money.

  5. 05

    Month 3+

    Make the standard survive me

    Defaults in the CMS, checks in the build pipeline, and a short written standard the other teams can follow without asking. If the only thing keeping the site correct is somebody remembering, it will stop being correct the month attention moves elsewhere.

    Guardrails in placeautomated
    Metadata defaults in the CMSlive
    Redirect check in CIlive
    Internal link audit, weeklylive
    Written standard, one pagelive

    The test is whether this holds for a quarter after I stop looking at it.

  6. 06

    Month 2+

    Report in the language of the business

    Executives at this level do not want rankings. They want to know which templates moved, what a change was worth, and what is currently blocked and by whom. The blocked list is the most useful slide in the deck, because it is the only one that asks them for something.

    Monthly readleading · business

    Leading

    Templates shipped, cycle time, index health

    Business

    Revenue-template sessions, assisted revenue

    Shape of a report, not a forecast. The blocked list sits next to it.

If your problem is which buyers to reach rather than how to ship, the B2B page covers that side.

The alternatives

Four ways to cover this. They are not substitutes.

An enterprise SEO company brings capacity. A platform brings monitoring. A senior hire brings permanence. An enterprise SEO consultant brings a plan. What none of them automatically brings is somebody accountable inside your organisation for whether anything ships.

busyless
Enterprise SEO agency
A platform licence
A senior hire
What the engagement produces
Changes in production, and a shorter path for the next ones
Audits, decks and a roadmap
Dashboards and alerts
Capacity, once you have hired it
Who chases the approvals
Me, by name, inside your organisation
An account manager, from outside it
Nobody
Your new hire, once they have the standing
Implementation capacity
Limited, and I say so. Big migrations want a bigger team
Substantial, and priced accordingly
None
Whatever you hire
Cost of being wrong
Month-to-month, so you stop
An annual contract
A renewal
A hiring mistake at director salary
What happens at the end
Defaults, checks and a written standard that hold without me
The knowledge leaves with the account team
The subscription ends
They stay, which is the point
Cost shape
$2,500 diagnosis, then from $5,000/mo
$10,000 to $40,000/mo, usually annual
$1,000 to $10,000/mo licence
$180k+ loaded, plus 3 to 6 months to hire

These combine well. The most common good arrangement at this size is a platform you already own, an in-house team you already have, and one accountable person holding the standard across both.

Engagement

Find the blockage first. It is rarely where the audit says.

Two weeks tracing what happened to the last two years of recommendations tells you more than another crawl. If it turns out you need capacity rather than direction, that is what the diagnosis will say.

Start here

Discovery

$2,500one-off · two weeks

A map of every recommendation made recently and where each one stopped, the template inventory ranked by URLs reached per change, the index leaks worth closing, and a prioritised plan. Yours whether or not we carry on.

  • What happened to the last two years of recommendations
  • Template inventory, ranked by URLs reached per change
  • Crawl and index leaks, with the revenue templates separated out
  • A verdict on whether you need direction or capacity
Book the diagnosis

Most common

Ownership

From $5,000per month

One accountable person inside your organisation: prioritisation, the approval path, the standard the other teams publish against, and a monthly read that puts the blocked list next to the results.

  • Prioritisation at template level, not page level
  • Approval paths shortened, with standing rules instead of queues
  • Governance left as CMS defaults and pipeline checks
  • A blocked list in every report, naming owners and dates
Talk it through

If a large part of your estate is generated from structured data, the programmatic side has its own page.

Let's build

One call. Real plan, not a pitch.

30 minutes. We talk about what's already working, who owns content today, and whether a fractional Head of Content is actually the right move. If it isn't, I'll say so.

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One sentence on the bottleneck. I'll reply within 24h with a sharper next step.

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FAQ

Questions, ahead of time.

  • Can one fractional person really cover an enterprise site?+
    For the judgement, prioritisation and internal influence, yes, and that is usually what is missing. For implementation capacity across a very large estate, no. The decision table near the top of this page names the situations where a large team is the right answer, and I would rather lose the engagement there than take it and underdeliver.
  • We already have an SEO team. What would you actually do?+
    Almost certainly not more analysis. The common pattern at this size is a capable team whose recommendations sit in a backlog because nobody senior enough owns getting them shipped. The work is prioritising ruthlessly, shortening the approval path, and holding a standard across the teams that publish without asking anyone.
  • How is this different from your B2B page?+
    That one is about who buys: a committee of six, long cycles, and keywords worth more the less traffic they carry. This one is about what it takes to ship anything once nine templates, a brand review and a release train sit between the recommendation and production. A mid-market B2B company is the first without being the second, and a large consumer retailer is often the second without being the first.
  • Do you work with an enterprise SEO platform we already pay for?+
    Yes, and I would rather use what you have than add another licence. Those platforms are good at monitoring a large estate and poor at deciding what matters or getting it approved. If the tool is producing more issues than your team can action, the problem is prioritisation and the tool is already doing its job.
  • Can you run a replatform or a site migration?+
    I can own the search requirements, the redirect strategy, the pre-launch checks and the post-launch monitoring, and I have strong views about all four. What I cannot provide is a team on rotation through a cutover weekend for a very large estate. If that is the shape of the project, hire the capacity and use me to hold the standard, or hire an agency that does both.
  • How long before anything shows on a large site?+
    Cycle time improves first, often within six weeks, and that is the metric to watch early because everything else depends on it. Template changes take a quarter to be crawled, reassessed and believed at scale. Anything resembling a step change inside three months on a large estate is usually seasonality or a tracking change, and I will say so rather than take the credit.
  • What does this cost against a full enterprise engagement?+
    A two-week Discovery is $2,500 and produces the blocked-work map and a prioritised plan. Ongoing ownership starts at $5,000 a month. Large agency retainers at this tier commonly run several times that, which is correct when you need their capacity and poor value when what you actually needed was one accountable person.
  • Who owns the work if we stop?+
    You do, and that is designed in rather than promised. The standard is written down, the defaults live in your CMS, and the checks run in your build pipeline. The test I hold myself to is whether the site is still correct a quarter after nobody is being paid to look at it.