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Enterprise SEO Insights From 200+ Digital Leaders [SURVEY RESULTS]

Enterprise SEO research & data points — insights from 200+ website leaders on how they manage SEO for their extra large websites.

Lumar surveyed 200+ marketing, engineering, and other digital leaders working on large-scale websites (sites with 10,000 or more URLs) to learn more about how they manage SEO and website health.

Here’s what we found:

 

What are the biggest challenges for enterprise-scale websites?

We asked 204 digital leaders whose business websites surpassed 10,000 URLs what their most pressing SEO and website health issues were. The top two issues for enterprise websites were executing SEO changes at scale across their very large sites and managing SEO responsibilities across multiple departments within their organizations. 

Here’s the full breakdown of enterprise SEO challenges:

survey research data - biggest enterprise website SEO challenges
  • 60% struggled with executing SEO improvements and monitoring at scale across a large website
  • 53%  struggled with managing SEO tasks across multiple departments
  • 46%  struggled with improving website speed and UX
  • 45%  struggled with creating more efficient internal processes for SEO
  • 42%  struggled with staying up-to-date with the latest developments and best practices in SEO
  • 34%  struggled with general fixes to existing website SEO problems – for example: broken links, title tags, sitemap updates, etc.
  • 32%  struggled with creating SEO-friendly website content
  • 14%  struggled with monitoring website security issues
  • 14%  struggled with improving website accessibility

Note: If your own team is struggling to monitor a large site and execute SEO at an enterprise scale, you may want to consider the tools in your tech stack. Some SEO and website intelligence tools work great on smaller-scale websites but fall short at an enterprise level due to slow crawl speeds, limited reporting and customization options, or limited platform integrations. 

Lumar’s own website crawler, the foundation of our wider website intelligence platform, was built specifically to handle large-scale sites, offering crawl speeds of up to 450 URLs / second for non-rendered content and 350 URLs / second for rendered content — that’s fast! 

For those looking to improve their cross-team website efforts, you may want to consider taking a comprehensive Digital Ops approach for better collaboration. 

 

66% of enterprise-scale digital teams employ 6 or more in-house SEOs

For businesses with large websites, 66% of respondents reported that they employed at least 6 in-house employees who worked on SEO. 

Here’s the full breakdown of the in-house enterprise SEO team sizes across respondents:

enterprise seo research report - typical size of enterprise size SEO teams
  • 35% had SEO teams comprised of 6-10 people.
  • 31% had SEO teams comprised of 10+ people.
  • 28% had SEO teams comprised of 3-4 people.
  • 3% had SEO teams comprised of just 1-2 people.
  • Only 2% of respondents had no dedicated team member in-house who worked on SEO. 

Learn more about what resources you’ll need to execute a strong SEO strategy:

library of website content educational articles

Required Resources for SEO

 

The vast majority of businesses with enterprise websites engage at least 1 external agency relating to their website or SEO. 

93% of survey respondents who work on very large websites said they use at least one website- or SEO-related agency.

Which types of external agencies are enterprise website teams employing to bolster their in-house resources? Here’s the breakdown:

enterprise SEO survey data research - chart showing what types of external agencies enterprise SEO teams use
  • SEO-Focused Content Agencies: Used by 61% of respondents
  • Technical SEO Agencies: Used by 58% of respondents
  • Website Management Agencies: Used by 54% of respondents
  • Link-Building Agencies; Used by 31% of respondents
  • No external SEO Agencies Used: 7% of respondents
 

Who is responsible for SEO on enterprise websites?

Interestingly, marketing and engineering leaders often cited their own department as the team responsible for SEO on their large-scale websites. 

  • 78% of Marketing Leaders said Marketing owns SEO at their company
  • 72% of Development Leaders said Engineering owns SEO at their company
  • 45% of ‘Other’ Leaders said another Digital team owns SEO at their company

Combined responses (across all segments/roles):

enterprise SEO survey data - chart showing which team owns SEO for large scale websites
  • 35% of all respondents said a separate ‘Digital’ team (not marketing, engineering, or ops) owns SEO at their company
  • 25% of all respondents said ‘Engineering’ owns SEO at their company
  • 17% of all respondents said ‘Marketing’ owns SEO at their company
  • 12% of all respondents said ‘Operations’ owns SEO at their company
  • 5% of all respondents said ‘Product’ owns SEO at their company
  • 6% of all respondents said ‘Other’ owns SEO at their company
 

The website intelligence tech stack features most desired by enterprise website teams

Four platform features stood out as the most highly desired by enterprise website teams, by virtue of their appearing most frequently in respondents’ “top 3 desired features” lists. 

The features that ranked most often among respondents’ top 3 desired tech stack tools:

  1. Website Performance Analytics (39% ranked this in their top 3 desired features)
  2. Website Security Analytics (38% ranked this in their top 3 desired features)
  3. (tie) SEO Analytics (37% ranked this in their top 3 desired features)
  4. (tie) Actionable Insights (37% ranked this in their top 3 desired features)

And appearing in the respondents’ number 1 spot, the website intelligence features with the most ‘number 1’ votes were:

  1. SEO Analytics (17% of respondents said this was the most important feature to have)
  2. Expert Guidance / Customized Advice (14% said this was the most important feature to have)
  3. (tie) Website Security Analytics (13% said this was the most important feature)
  4. (tie) Business Impact Dashboard (13% said this was the most important feature)

Looking for an enterprise SEO solution?

Explore Lumar’s website intelligence & technical SEO platform — built for enterprise-scale websites.


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Avatar image for Sharon McClintic
Sharon McClintic

Senior Content Lead at Lumar

Sharon is Lumar's Senior Content Lead. With a background that bridges both business strategy and creative writing, she’s enthusiastic about bringing an editorial mindset to B2B communications. She holds an MBA in marketing, an MA in creative writing, and undergraduate degrees in journalism and literature and brings 12+ years of experience in marketing and writing to her current role. When not writing or editing work by an excellent team of contributors, she’s often listening to (and making) podcasts, reading, or re-watching old episodes of Poirot. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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