What Enterprise SEO Taught Me About Systems Thinking
Managing SEO for large brands isn't about keywords — it's about building systems that scale. Lessons from working with 50+ clients and some of India's biggest brands.
When you manage SEO for a site with 50,000 pages, you can’t think about individual keywords anymore. You have to think in systems.
This took me years to learn. Early in my career at an agency managing 50+ clients, I was optimizing page by page, keyword by keyword. It worked for small sites. It absolutely does not scale.
The shift
Enterprise SEO is infrastructure work. You’re not writing title tags, you’re building templates that generate correct title tags for 10,000 product pages. You’re not fixing one broken link, you’re creating monitoring systems that catch broken links before they affect rankings.
The mindset shift is from craftsman to architect. Both are valuable. But at scale, architecture wins every time.
Three systems that changed everything
Automated technical monitoring: Instead of running crawls manually, we set up continuous monitoring that flags issues the moment they appear: new 404s, missing canonicals, Core Web Vitals regressions. The system tells us what’s wrong before we even look.
Template-based optimization: For large sites, the page template IS the optimization. Get the template right (heading structure, internal linking logic, schema markup) and every page that uses it inherits those improvements automatically.
Prioritization frameworks: With limited resources and thousands of opportunities, you need a way to rank what matters. We score every SEO opportunity by potential traffic impact × implementation effort × business value. Simple math that prevents you from spending weeks on something that moves the needle 0.1%.
This is one of the few work-related posts I’ll write here. The rest of this site is for everything else.
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