Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO is a different job. I've done it in-house, six times.
I've held in-house and embedded SEO leadership roles at the BBC, Hays, Superdry, Domino's, National Tyres and Getting Personal. Across all of them, the thing that mattered more than technical knowledge was making the case for SEO inside organisations where legal, product and engineering all have competing priorities - and where a recommendation that needs development time is nowhere near as simple as writing a ticket.
Enterprise SEO isn't harder than SME SEO, necessarily. But it's different in ways that matter. The scale changes what's possible. The organisational complexity changes what the job actually is. And the consequences of getting a large-scale technical decision wrong are proportionally larger.
In-house and embedded SEO leadership roles at major UK organisations
BBC, Hays, Superdry, Domino's, National Tyres, Getting PersonalWebsites across 33 countries managed as Product Owner for SEO at Hays
Hays via CTI DigitalCampaign budget managed at Domino's Pizza UK & Ireland
Domino's - 2022-23SEO function built from scratch at the BBC
BBC - 2017-2019The roadmap is the starting point, not the plan
In a large organisation, every piece of SEO work that needs development goes through sprint cycles, QA, staged deployment and sign-off from people who've never heard of canonical tags. The strategy has to account for that - prioritising the changes with the clearest commercial case, writing the brief in language that works for product managers and engineers, and accepting that a fix that takes two hours on a small site takes three months in an enterprise. Knowing which battles to fight and which to park is as important as knowing the right answer.
Stakeholder management is the job
Enterprise SEO means working across editorial teams used to deciding independently, product teams with their own roadmaps, legal teams worried about claims, and finance teams who want a clear ROI. At the BBC that meant producers, journalists, product directors and engineering leadership simultaneously. At Hays it meant aligning SEO with UX, CRO, BAs and development teams across multiple markets. The technical work is rarely the bottleneck. Getting the organisation aligned is.
The migration decision with the most at stake
The clearest example from my own track record: the BBC's plan to migrate every product from bbc.co.uk to bbc.com. Food had already moved and Bitesize was mid-flight when I made the case to stop, reverse and clean it up. The data showed what was at risk - Food alone carried a six-figure count of daily organic clicks on bbc.co.uk, sitting on decades of accumulated UK search authority that would not have transferred. If that migration had completed, the recovery would have been measured in years. Getting architecture right at enterprise scale isn't a technical task. It's a commercial and strategic one.
Building internal capability multiplies impact
At the BBC, the highest-leverage single intervention wasn't a technical fix. It was training around 300 journalists so every piece of content filed was better for search by default. When search literacy is embedded in how teams work, the compounding effect dwarfs what any central SEO team produces on its own.
The track record
BBC - Head of SEO, 2017-2019. Every BBC digital product. Built the SEO function from zero to five. Trained 300+ journalists. Stopped and reversed an organisation-wide domain migration. World Cup 2018: an additional 11 million organic sessions.
Hays - Product Owner for SEO, two years. A 35-plus site estate across 33 countries. The discovery audit surfaced broken canonical tags on roughly one in four pages of the flagship site, and thousands of broken internal links on a single sister property. Keep/Kill/Consolidate reviews across 9 markets in a multi-year migration programme.
Superdry - Head of SEO, 2023-24. Multi-market Salesforce Commerce Cloud migrations across UK, Ireland, Germany, France and global COM.
Domino's Pizza UK & Ireland - Contract Head of Digital Marketing, 2022-23. A 1,300-franchise operation, team of 6, £10m budget. Weekly organic sessions up 23.22% year on year.
National Tyres - Digital Marketing Manager, 2016-17. A £170m+ retailer, 230+ branches, 4 ecommerce sites. Two manual penalties removed, 50% organic uplift.
Getting Personal (Card Factory PLC) - Head of Marketing. A single pre-Christmas technical fix generated a around 20% uplift in organic traffic through peak trading.
The hard part of enterprise SEO isn't knowing the answer. It's getting a large organisation to ship it. That's the job I've done, in-house, at some of the most complex digital organisations in the UK - and it's a different skill to writing an audit.