A Guide To Enterprise Link Building For Complex Websites

Corporate giants often have a complex organizational structure, massive market influence, and global presence.

As a result, traditional link-building strategies might not work for them. Instead, they need to embrace enterprise link building, which allows them to:

🚀 Expand brand visibility

🚀 Uphold credibility and trust

🚀 Maintain global relevance

In this article, we’ll delve into the key strategies of enterprise link building so that you can use it to your business’s advantage.

What Is Enterprise Link Building?

Enterprise link building allows large businesses to set up link-building campaigns that cater to their complex organizational structures.

Enterprise link building is usually executed by a dedicated team within the company, and it aims to secure backlinks from authoritative sites.

It involves similar strategies to traditional link building, such as leveraging guest posting, content marketing, and outreach strategies.

Instead of trying to become known, they’re trying to solidify their brand and position themselves as the go-to company within their niche.

For example, the Coca-Cola Company is constantly producing content that creates link-building opportunities by leveraging its ubiquitous brand.

In December 2023, they released Christmas-themed short films that earned comments on YouTube like “very sweet, just like Coca-Cola.” Here’s the first one in their series:

High-quality domains, such as The Drum, published articles that linked to their short films:

Source: The Drum

Challenges of Enterprise Link Building

Enterprise link building benefits from large marketing budgets.

Large companies can afford to hire the best SEO talent, and they have extensive business connections and brand influence, which can be used to set up link-building partnerships.

However, the benefits that come with the scale of their organization also create problems.

The main challenges they face include:

1. Coordinating many different departments

As soon as different departments start running different parts of an enterprise’s website, things can get tricky.

For instance, Amazon is a huge company with many overlapping departments. This is shown in the diagram below.

Source: databhan

The departments responsible for the Books, Kindle, and Audible sections may each pursue different link-building initiatives.

A lack of proper coordination could lead to missed opportunities.

An industry giant like Amazon typically synchronizes their strategies and pools their resources to multiply their impact.

Enterprise link building needs to be properly overseen and coordinated, which means implementing rigorous management systems.

2. Managing complex websites

Once a business has reached the enterprise level, its website structure risks evolving into a complicated maze.

This is due to the diversity of its products, services, and content.

One way to understand this is by looking at the number of pages an enterprise website has. You can see this on their sitemap, which lists all its URLs.

Here’s an example of the sitemap on the Wells Fargo website:

Source: Wells Fargo

Independent teams managing so many pages could lead to an unbalanced link profile. One category may have extensive backlinks, while another might be empty.

This might raise red flags with search engines by making them think that you’re trying to manipulate rankings.

This is why it’s important to have a cohesive link-building strategy that applies to a website as a whole, rather than focusing on its individual sections.

3. Getting stakeholders on board

If link-building takes place across various departments, measuring and demonstrating the ROI on link building becomes difficult.

This makes it challenging to motivate a need for enterprise link-building to senior management. If they can’t immediately see its value, they might opt for more short-term marketing tactics.

You need to explain why it’s worth:

💰 Hiring SEO specialists to create long-term backlink relationships.

💰 Spending thousands of dollars on SEO management tools.

The head of your company may think that it’s more worthwhile to invest in short-term advertising campaigns or pay-per-click (PPC) initiatives.

You need to gather comprehensive metrics to prove the value of your link-building campaigns so that you can get stakeholders on board.

Another concern that they may have is how long it takes to see results.

One SEO company started enterprise link-building initiatives for one of their clients, and it took six months before they saw concrete results:

Source: Search Engine Journal

This difficulty in showing quick results can make it tough to get senior management on board. You need to explain that a bit of patience can lead to significant returns.

For example, the above efforts boosted organic traffic by 76% year-on-year. If your company started doing this today, it could see great ROI in the future.

Strategies to Consider for Enterprise Link Building

Once you start enterprise link building, you can explore the following strategies:

1. Create linkable content

Enterprises are often well-known, trusted brands. This means that their linkable content is more likely to gain traction and generate links. Linkable content is so valuable and so much better than anything produced by competitors that it naturally attracts links.

To create more link-building opportunities, consider the following content strategies:

✍️ Refresh content: There’s no reason to disregard the content that’s already on your website. By tasking an SEO writing team with refreshing this content, you can include better keywords and make it more relevant to reflect current industry developments.

✍️ Write new content: Get experts at your company to comment on regularly searched topics and create outstanding content that will rank well in search engines. Look up what your competitors are doing and write articles that are ten times better.

✍️ Research content: As a large brand, you also have the opportunity to conduct primary research in your industry, which can further solidify your expertise and result in great linkable content.

You might be tempted to focus on content that converts because it has a direct link to boosting sales.

However, you also need to create content that will help your website rank well and earn quality links from other high-domain websites.

The way to do this is to create content that builds trust with your audience and displays your expertise.

Even if this doesn’t lead to new customers, it will contribute to the overall authority and visibility of your website.

2. Create collaboration opportunities

By encouraging collaborative testimonials or case studies that highlight positive experiences with your enterprise, you might secure high-quality links.

For example, a technology company may collaborate with a B2B client to create a joint success story, with both earning backlinks when they share it on their respective websites.

A real-world example is the collaboration between IBM and Cloudflare on security and performance solutions, which resulted in cross-linked content on both websites:

Source: Cloudflare

IBM has a domain authority (DA) of 93, while Cloudflare has a DA of 99. By organically linking to one another, they significantly boost both their websites.

If your enterprise owns several other businesses, having these brands collaborate can also result in new enterprise link-building opportunities.

For instance, consider the various businesses owned by Amazon, each presenting an opportunity for organic link building:

Source: SMB Compass

However, when you follow this approach, make sure that these backlinks are natural, as search engines quickly recognize attempts to add links solely for the sake of it.

Also, keep in mind that extensive link exchanges are against Google’s guidelines.

3. Build internal links

Although this is more of an SEO practice, enterprises need to excel at this alongside their link-building strategies.

Internal links allow search engines to better understand the structure and hierarchy of your content. Good internal linking helps new content get indexed and rank faster.

Big organizations may have several content development teams and each may have their own approach to building links internally.

Unfortunately, this decentralized approach can lead to inconsistencies and missed opportunities.

Different teams may inadvertently create silos within the website, which can make it harder for search engines to explore everything on the website.

You need to make sure that internal link building follows the same guidelines throughout your company.

It’s also a good idea to diversify the anchor text that’s chosen.

Many companies default to similar calls-to-action (CTAs), such as “read more,” “download now,” or “get started.”

For example, Apple is known for consistently using specific CTAs like “shop now,” “learn more,” and “buy”:

Source: Apple

This isn’t necessarily a bad practice. However, diversifying anchor text by adding descriptive phrases can provide additional context to search engines and improve user experience.

Following on the above example, Apple also employs more unique anchor text on its home page, such as “See what your device is worth”:

Source: Apple

Make sure you regularly run audits of your internal link structure to identify areas for improvement.

4. Partner with influencers

Older enterprises that are well-established may lose touch with new generations. This means they might attract fewer links from a younger, digitally savvy audience (and peers).

Partnering with influencers who resonate with this demographic may be one way for them to stay relevant.

In 2020, the Government Employees Insurance Company (GEICO) teamed up with TikTok influencers to help them connect with a younger audience.

An example of this collaboration is an influencer they partnered with, known online as a “Matcha Martini Mommy,” who was featured in a Moneywise article:

Source: Moneywise

GEICO essentially features as a car insurance expert who helped this influencer pay lower premiums. In the article, there’s a link that goes straight to their enterprise’s site:

Source: Moneywise

Partnering with influencers allows you to build relationships with them and their audience.

For example, as part of your collaboration, influencers could make a number of videos that mention your brand or link to your website on their blog.

Your collaboration could also spark interest from other website owners in your industry, who organically link to your website.

5. Unlinked brand mentions

When a brand is widely recognized, it often receives casual mentions across various websites, forums, and social media platforms.

However, these mentions may not always include hyperlinks to the brand's official website.

For example, Walmart recently announced that store managers will receive stock grants and ABC News wrote an article about it.

However, they didn’t link to Walmart anywhere in the piece:

Source: ABC News

This is an example of an easy opportunity to secure worthwhile backlinks. You simply need to set up a team that can reach out to the websites that your unlinked brand mentions appear on and request that they get hyperlinked.

This involves:

👀 Actively looking for places where your brand is mentioned but not linked to. You can use Google’s advanced search modifiers, such as “site:” to help narrow down your search.

💌 Reaching out to the people who own the website and asking them to add a link to your brand. More often than not, they won’t mind obliging you.

This not only helps more people find you online but also ensures that your brand is correctly acknowledged online.

6. Broken link building

An effective way to get high-quality links is to fix broken links. These are links that are no longer functioning and lead to 404 pages.

Fixing broken links is particularly advantageous for enterprise websites, thanks to their:

📌 Abundant resources: Enterprises have large resources, making it feasible to assign tasks such as identifying broken links to interns or dedicated personnel.

📌 Extensive page inventory: With so many target pages that can be linked to, it’s easy to find an appropriate alternative to a broken link. Your SEO team can reach out to the sources of broken links and suggest alternatives for them to link to.

📌 Brand reputation: Having a recognized and respected brand holds weight in convincing site owners to link to you.

Software like Ahrefs and Check My Links have tools that can scan websites for broken links, allowing you to spot opportunities more efficiently.

This can significantly improve the efficiency of your link-building campaign.

Best Practices for an Enterprise Link Building Campaign

Now that we understand the unique challenges of enterprise websites and we know which strategies you can employ, let’s have a look at the best practices you should follow:

1. Establish a link-building foundation

Before you start building links, you need to set up your resources so that they can effectively handle the scale of enterprise-level initiatives.

There are three steps you need to take to prepare your foundation:

🤝 Set up a link-building team: If you have a dedicated team to build links, you can feel confident that your link-building efforts are being coordinated. They will be able to oversee and synchronize link-building activities across departments.

🛠️ Get the right tools and software: It’s difficult to manually pull off link building at scale. You need to invest in tools and software that streamline these tasks across your enterprise-size website. Have a look at the following link-building tools.

📋 Establish standard procedures: Your SEO team needs to create standard procedures for link building that are followed across the company. This will help you build relevant links and lead to a coherent backlink profile.

Once your foundation is in place, you can start working on your link-building campaign, knowing that your team, tools, and procedures are aligned.

2. Audit and set up link-building goals

Your first action should be to review your current backlinks profile.

Get your link-building team to conduct an in-depth analysis of your existing links to determine your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

For example, you could use tools like Ahrefs or Moz to do a thorough backlink audit and determine the quality and relevance of your current link portfolio.

Once you’ve done this, set link-building goals, such as:

🎯 Increase domain authority

🎯 Diversify anchor text

🎯 Build partnerships

🎯 Improve relevance

🎯 Create new content

The goals you choose should align with your enterprise's overall goals.

Make sure to present these to the rest of the company to ensure everyone is aligned and that there aren’t clashes with other marketing initiatives.

Lastly, at a massive enterprise, it might help to segment your website so that it becomes more manageable to assign specific link-building strategies.

This ensures that each part of your enterprise contributes to the overall link-building goals.

3. Implement strategies and monitor search engines

Now that everything is set up, and you know what you want to achieve, you can start tackling the strategies we went through earlier in this article.

Perhaps you decide to focus on creating linkable content to boost your domain authority, or maybe you want to build partnerships with influencers to appeal to a younger generation.

Whatever strategies you choose, make sure you implement them consistently and monitor their performance.

Keep an eye on key metrics, such as average domain ranking and website traffic growth, so that you can see whether your enterprise link-building efforts are successful.

Once everything has been set up and is operational, explore opportunities to automate tasks. For example, Respona offers automated email outreach and Hunter.io automatically scrapes the web for contact details of potential link-building partners.

Automation becomes increasingly important as your business expands, as it means that more pages, URLs, and websites need to be monitored.

You Can Outsource Enterprise Link Building

If you work for an enterprise-level company, it might be worthwhile to partner with a dedicated link building agency, especially given the complex nature of building links for enterprise

At Linkbuilder, we use powerful link building strategies to keep businesses–both big and small–at the top of search engines.

Our goal is to ensure that complex websites maintain their brand integrity and remain competitive among their peers.

With our expertise, you can confidently resume your daily responsibilities, knowing that your enterprise's link building is in capable hands.

Reach out to us to get started today.