Anti-swing control of bridge cranes has been widely studied to improve the efficiency of industrial transportation. However, in practice, the performance of bridge crane control methods is reduced by external disturbances and internal uncertainties. Therefore, an enhanced coupled nonlinear control strategy based on feedforward compensation has been proposed in this study. Appropriate composite signals were introduced to enhance the coupling between the system states and improve the transient performance of the controller. The design of the composite signal takes into account the characteristics of crane model. The unknown disturbance was then treated as a state variable, and the crane dynamic model was transformed accordingly. Finally, the state of the model was estimated by the extended state observer, and the disturbance estimate was compensated to improve the robustness of the control system. The stability of the controller was verified through a rigorous mathematical analysis. The simulation and experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.