Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits are very different. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me and I hope to write a few posts on this over the next year or so (yes I don’t blog a lot so we’ll see what happens)
I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:
- Understanding the addressable market & actual current marketshare
- When you address a whole market like a category of e-commerce it’s hard to figure out what the total volume of searches truly are to get the potential addressable market. Sometimes it’s hard to even find all the keywords (esp. if you don’t own your own search)
- Even when you know what the market size is it’s hard to know what % of the potential listings you have if you are looking across a million or more keywords. What sample size should you look at to understand your total market for example?
- Duplicate content issues
- Every large company I know has or has had huge duplicate content issues either with ?ref=’s and ?src=’s etc… etc… and often for valid reasons where folks want to track things properly or change the ordering of a search result.
- Getting deep links at scale to 100MM's of pages
- Self processing huge volumes of traffic data
- Again sites like Yahoo or Craigslist or others have such traffic volumes they can’t really afford existing web tracking products and the free versions don’t scale well plus often you want custom views to understand demographic of traffic by keyword and cross multiple visits etc… this seems inevitably to lead to some kind of in house processing of huge data files.
- optimizing 100MM’s of landing pages
- calculating the value of a given potential seo change
- often it’s a trade off of resources to make SEO changes but even the best SEO experts find it hard to put a precise value on kws in the URL vs the difference between 5 and 10% kw density and so on.
- The benefit of owning a huge media vehicle is you can calculate some of this… the detriment is you don’t have full control of the resources so may not get the chance to use them without a clear value of any change
- dealing with international
- wow, content localization especially around navigational terms like “shopping” when you even want to localize the URL can be tricky
So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.

Fantastic post. Bookmarked this site and emailed it to a few friends, your post was that great, keep it up.
Posted by: shoes wholesale | December 28, 2010 at 04:04 AM
I appreciate when I see well writen material. Your time isn't going to waste with your posts. Thanks so much and stick with it No doubt you will defintely reach your goals! have a great day!
Posted by: painting services | December 17, 2010 at 01:01 PM
I differ with most people here; I found this post I couldn't stop until , even though it wasn't just what I had been searching for, was indeed a great read though. I will instantly take your feed to stay in touch of future updates.
Posted by: computer support los angeles | December 15, 2010 at 05:22 AM
Anybody can cut prices, but it takes brains to make a better article. I appreciate when I see well written material. Your time isn't going to waste with your posts. Thanks so much and stick with it No doubt you will definitely reach your goals! have a great day!
Posted by: adidas skate shoes online | December 07, 2010 at 10:29 AM
Two great talkers will not travel far together. Every one has there own point of view and same goes to this one..
Posted by: adidas skateboarding shoes | December 07, 2010 at 10:27 AM
A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority. I was very pleased to find this site. I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post.
Posted by: adidas skateboarding | December 07, 2010 at 10:25 AM
Hi...
Nice post, I would like to request you to one more post about that ****
http://www.genericsmed.com
Keep it up
Posted by: simon | December 06, 2010 at 11:05 PM
Hi...
Nice post, I would like to request you to one more post about that ****
Keep it up
Posted by: Generic viagra | December 06, 2010 at 11:03 PM
Some time ago, I did need to buy a good car for my corporation but I did not earn enough money and couldn't purchase anything. Thank goodness my friend adviced to take the mortgage loans at creditors. Hence, I acted so and used to be happy with my small business loan.
Posted by: KleinQueen19 | December 05, 2010 at 12:17 PM
Fascinating thoughts makes me want to keep coming back for more.
Posted by: cheap new York moving | December 03, 2010 at 10:50 AM