A large website rarely loses search traffic because nobody knows what to do. It loses it because the fix sits in a developer backlog behind forty other tickets, three teams own different parts of the same template, and nobody can say what a change is worth in pounds. This page is for UK organisations with sites of that size and shape: tens of thousands of URLs or more, an in-house marketing team, and a release process that involves people who do not think about search.
What makes SEO on a large site different
On a fifty-page site you can fix a problem by editing the page. On a large site almost nothing is fixed one page at a time. A single change to a category template, a faceted search setting or a CMS default can improve or damage thousands of URLs at once, so the work is less about writing and more about finding the few decisions that affect everything else.
Scale also changes how Google treats you. It will not crawl every URL as often as you would like, and on a big site the gap between what you publish and what Google actually visits becomes a real limit. Managing your crawl budget matters here in a way it simply does not for a small business.
The third difference is people. Product owners, brand, legal, IT security and one or more agencies all touch the site. Good SEO advice that cannot get through that process is worth nothing, so a large part of my job is writing recommendations that a developer can estimate and a product manager can prioritise.
Who this suits, and who it does not
It suits organisations where organic search is a significant channel and the site is complex: large retailers and marketplaces, publishers, membership bodies, universities, financial services firms, travel companies and businesses that have grown through acquisition and now run several sites or brands on shared platforms. You will usually have an in-house marketing or digital team and developers, either your own or an agency’s.
I work alone, and I am open about what that means. I do not supply a team of writers or developers. I do the diagnosis, the prioritisation and the specification, and I work alongside your people while they build, write and release. If you need an agency to take over every task, I am the wrong fit. If you need someone who can make sense of the site, argue the case internally and keep the work on track, that is the role I take.
It is also not the right page if your site is mainly a set of branches. Getting each location found in local search is a separate job, covered by multi-location and franchise SEO.
What the work covers
Crawling, indexing and rendering at scale
I start by comparing three numbers: the URLs you intend to have indexed, the URLs Google has found, and the URLs it actually visits. Server logs show the last of these, and log file analysis is usually where large-site problems become obvious. Filter combinations, session parameters, internal search results and old archives often make up a large share of what Googlebot requests. Cutting that index bloat frees attention for the pages that earn money. Where pages depend on JavaScript to show content or links, I test what Google renders, because JavaScript SEO problems on one framework template repeat across every page built from it.
Templates, not individual pages
I group the site by template (product, category, article, location, listing) and audit each type once, properly. Titles, headings, internal links, structured data and indexing rules are specified as template logic with clear rules and exceptions, so the fix scales and survives the next content import. The detailed engineering side of this overlaps with my technical SEO service, which smaller sites can commission on its own.
One page per search intent, across many teams
When separate teams publish to the same domain, they often compete with each other. A product page, a help article, a blog post and a campaign landing page all target the same query, and Google picks one, not always the one you would choose. I map the site’s important topics to a single owning URL and fix the keyword cannibalisation that builds up without anyone noticing. Where new content is needed, the plan goes into a content strategy your writers can follow.
Releases, redesigns and migrations
Many sudden traffic losses on large sites trace back to a release: a new template that dropped internal links, a robots rule copied from staging, a domain consolidation without a complete redirect map. I help you add search checks to your release process, so problems are caught before they go live rather than discovered in next month’s report. If you are planning a platform change or merging sites, website migration SEO is the service that protects your existing visibility through the move.
Reporting people can act on
Senior stakeholders need to know whether search is growing, what it contributes and what is blocking it. I set up reporting by site section and page type rather than one sitewide traffic line, so you can see which template or team a change affected. Every recommendation carries an estimate of effort and a reasoned view of its likely effect, stated as judgement rather than a promise.
How I run an enterprise engagement
- Discovery. I meet the people who own the site: marketing, product, development and any agencies. I learn how changes get made, who signs them off and how long a ticket typically takes to reach production.
- Access and data. Google Search Console for every relevant property, analytics, a crawl of the site (or a representative sample if it is very large) and, ideally, server logs. I work with read-only access wherever your security policy requires it.
- Diagnosis by template and section. I find where the losses are and why, and separate the few issues that matter from the hundreds a crawler reports.
- Prioritised roadmap. Each item has a business case, an owner, an effort estimate and acceptance criteria your developers can test against.
- Delivery alongside your teams. I write tickets in your format, answer developer questions, review changes on staging and check them again after release.
- Review and reset. At agreed intervals we look at what shipped, what it did and what comes next.
Problems I see most often on large UK sites
- Faceted navigation and internal search creating millions of crawlable URLs, while new products or articles wait weeks to be found.
- Canonical tags, noindex rules and XML sitemaps that disagree with each other because different teams set them.
- Important pages left with few internal links after a redesign changed the navigation.
- Duplicate versions of the same content across brand sites, regional sections or old campaign microsites.
- Release processes with no search check, so the same mistakes return every few months.
- SEO tickets written as advice rather than requirements, which developers cannot estimate and product owners never prioritise.
What you receive
- A written diagnosis by template and site section, with the evidence behind each finding.
- A prioritised roadmap with effort, owner and acceptance criteria for every item.
- Developer-ready tickets, written to fit your backlog tool and conventions.
- A search checklist for your release and QA process.
- Reporting set up by section and page type, and a short regular summary for senior stakeholders.
- Direct access to me for questions from your marketing, product and development teams.
Next step
Send me the site, a sentence on what worries you, and how your releases are handled. I will tell you where I would look first and whether this is work I can genuinely help with. Book a call about your site and we can go through it together.