Survey Results: The State of Enterprise SEO in 2017

Written By: Chelsey DeBalsi, Agency Marketing Manager at Digital Operative in collaboration with North Star Inbound's Senior Creative Strategist, Andrea Pretorian

We came across this survey on enterprise SEO by North Star Inbound, seoClarity, and BuzzStream, including input from 240 SEO specialists across the country. The survey covers strategies that are working well for enterprise-level SEO teams, strategies that are NOT working well, and how companies are preparing for mobile-first search.

Some key takeaways from the survey include:

• The value of link-building is undisputed, but survey respondents overwhelmingly described it as the most difficult strategy to execute. They generally ranked it fourth – behind technical optimization, content development, and traffic analysis – in terms of priority. Despite the difficulty of earning links from high-authority sources, 85% of survey respondents said they are maintaining or increasing their link-building budgets this year.
• When it comes to link-building, most teams are relying on public relations – reaching out to journalists and influencers directly to promote content – and guest posts.
• Page speed and indexation are the top technical concerns for SEO teams, and 85.7% of our respondents said they’re hustling to be fully mobile-responsive before the rollout of Google’s mobile-first search index.
• Keywords are king when it comes to content planning. In fact, 96% use Keyword Research and Topic Importance as the two deciding factors, but agencies and in-house SEOs differ over whether to put more emphasis on national or local keywords. There's a lot of debate on how to balance national vs. local and so this is a super important point to hit on.

The survey was made up of 29 questions that covered every aspect of enterprise-level SEO, including content development, link-building, keyword research, and overall tactic and strategy. You can check out the complete survey, methodology, and results here.

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