SEO
4 Signs Your Agency Is Ready To Take On Enterprise SEO
In your SEO career, there may come a time when you feel you’re doing a lot more coasting than you once did.
What made you start thinking that?
Was it optimizing your 600th local client and realizing it wasn’t that challenging anymore?
Or maybe you feel that your freelance business or agency has grown, hired, and matured to a point where you are no longer exercising your full potential.
If that’s you, then it just may be time to move upstream.
It might be time to move from traditional to enterprise SEO.
This is not a light decision by any means. It’s challenging stuff, to put it bluntly.
You had better have the staff, the skills, the sales ability, and the confidence in place to go out there and present yourself as a search optimizer for some of the largest brands on the Internet.
But let’s back up for a minute on that.
As I said, transitioning into enterprise SEO is a huge decision.
How will you know it’s really the right time for you?
Let me share some benchmarks you should be looking for to determine it’s time to shift your strategy upward.
But first, let’s be clear about the SEO differences that I’m discussing.
How Is Enterprise SEO Different?
Enterprise SEO strategies differ from traditional SEO primarily in their size and scale.
Whatever you do for a small SEO client, you do bigger for an enterprise client.
That’s painting enterprise SEO in pretty broad strokes, but for the most part, it proves true.
Let’s unpack this idea.
Say, for a traditional SEO account, you and your team need to crawl and optimize 200 URLs.
Depending on the size of your team, that isn’t too bad.
You’ll see what Screaming Frog has to show about the site and then divide up the work among your staff and get it done.
Think about an enterprise-level website, though.
How many URLs does it have?
100,000? 500,000?
A million?
The Challenges of Scale
If we hold to the idea that enterprise SEO is traditional SEO but larger, then those one million pages need the same SEO optimizations that a website of 100 pages would.
The difference will be in having the staff to implement them, knowing the site infrastructure well enough not to cause other site issues when you implement, and working with the client’s in-house SEO team to ensure everything goes smoothly.
For instance, I have worked in small Shopify stores where the theme caused category and collection pages to duplicate title tags.
When this happens on an ecommerce website of more than a million pages, you need a solution right away, whether that’s related to adding canonical tags or different custom coding.
That’s just how it rolls in enterprise SEO.
Big clients equal big responsibilities, and you need the know-how, the personnel, the tools, and the sheer ability to deliver on what these websites need.
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Reporting & Communicating at the Enterprise Level
On that last point, you can also expect many more check-ins from your enterprise clients than your smaller accounts.
The healthier retainers you can charge for large-scale SEO work come at the cost of providing your clients with more regular progress reports.
Say you need to implement a smart internal linking strategy on a 600,000-page ecommerce website.
You know it’s a colossal undertaking, and so does your client.
All they ask is that you update them with the work you’ve done over the last two weeks.
Be sure you have the staff to deliver that ongoing workflow and the ability to prove it biweekly.
Enterprise SEO, then, presents SEO agencies with issues of operations, staffing, morale, organization, time management, and reporting.
You have to think about how you approach all of these things before fully committing yourself to the enterprise route.
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So, how will you know it’s time to move from traditional SEO to enterprise SEO?
1. When You Can Handle The Page Volume
You’ll know you can transition to enterprise SEO when you can handle a significantly increased volume of pages to optimize.
As you can imagine, fixing duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, and content on a local lawyer’s website is quite different from doing it for the number two or three online shoe retailer in the country.
And I’m not just talking about having knowledgeable personnel to do the work physically.
If you’re scaling up, there is also the issue of the automation tools you’ll probably need to upgrade to crawl everything.
Sure, Screaming Frog has just the free version and one paid version, but if you use Semrush or Ahrefs, you may need to upgrade to the biggest and best plans.
That’s because, depending on the size of the client, you’ll need to be able to track 10,000 keywords rather than 5,000 and run more site audits every month.
If you look at pricing for those upper plans and determine you can afford them based on what you’ll be making, you may be in a good spot to make the changeover.
2. When Your Agency Is Mature Enough
The next benchmark to meet if you want to take on enterprise SEO clients is to be a mature agency.
Now, I mean that in both ways – that of acting mature and having developed efficient and effective work processes.
Let’s focus on the latter one.
To say that a company is mature is to say that it has all its pieces in place to continue growing at a steady pace and become a real heavy hitter in its industry.
If your agency came out of the startup phase, you might remember how things were different.
You probably had a skeleton crew with more than enough work to handle.
Your processes from day to day might have been pretty scattered, with no preferred practices explicitly defined or followed.
You got things done, but maybe only after working 60 or more hours a week.
Mature companies have moved beyond that, though.
They have stabilized and accrued enough retained earnings to hire managers and teams and define processes for everything.
Everyone is doing what they are best at.
The company can forecast its finances and reasonably meet them in the time set.
And, perhaps most importantly, the staff at a mature company wants to be at the office (or home computer) every single day, doing this work, using their skills to satisfy and impress the company’s clients.
That can only come from client-focused and forward-thinking messaging from the top leadership.
That’s the type of environment where enterprise-level SEO success may happen.
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3. When You Have The Organizational Structure
You’ll know you’re ready to move into enterprise SEO when you have the organizational structure to handle the biggest clients.
I don’t just mean the number of bodies you have in seats.
That’s absolutely crucial, but whether you have 60 employees or 80 doesn’t matter as much to me as making sure every one of those employees is in the right seat and has subscribed to the overall company vision.
Everyone at your company should be doing what they are best at and following the goals set by the team leads and the executive management.
Since we are talking about team leads – middle managers, if you like – the best things they can do for the members of their teams are to:
- define goals clearly,
- empower them to help themselves,
- encourage their success,
- let them know they care about them,
- and always be there to help when necessary.
When employees feel appreciated and valued as a part of the overall undertaking, they tend to be happier in their roles.
And employees happy in their roles are more likely to be all-in on the company’s mission statement and give their best to delivering the best-darned enterprise SEO product on the planet.
4. When You Have The Revenue To Cover Further Growth Periods
Finally, let’s talk about revenue and how you’ll need it to grow into the enterprise SEO agency you want.
Say you’re a small to mid-sized SEO agency that wants to get into the enterprise game.
That period where you position yourself as an entity that can handle the big fish will probably have some bumps.
It won’t happen overnight, and while your sales team or subject-matter experts are working on closing leads, you will need more short-term gains to finance the comparative slowness of your enterprise growth.
But don’t minimize the importance of that other revenue.
Breaking into a new game takes time.
If you drop everything to focus on landing one or two big clients, you’re not going to have the resources to do anything that I have laid out here; certainly not to hire and grow your teams and processes.
While signing new clients will matter during this time, your top leadership should also be concerned with keeping attrition, or churn, to a relatively survivable 3% to 5%.
Hey, you’ve heard it for years: Retaining clients is as important as signing new ones, and it rings true here.
You’ve seen how much planning, work, and coordination are involved in executing enterprise SEO strategies for your clients.
You can’t afford to jeopardize any of your past successes now.
Define the vision and processes that will lead your client services managers to show real value to your clients, and they will want to stay with you for the duration.
See Through The Bumps In The Road
You probably already know that plans are one thing; doing what you planned is entirely different.
You’re going to hit some bumps in the road to becoming an enterprise SEO guru.
But I feel that you will know when it’s time to make the attempt.
It will probably be when you hit the benchmarks I laid out above.
The future is open and waiting for you to arrive.
All you need to do is take that first step.
More resources:
Featured Image: Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock
SEO
Google Rolls Out New ‘Web’ Filter For Search Results
Google is introducing a filter that allows you to view only text-based webpages in search results.
The “Web” filter, rolling out globally over the next two days, addresses demand from searchers who prefer a stripped-down, simplified view of search results.
Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, states in an announcement:
“We’ve added this after hearing from some that there are times when they’d prefer to just see links to web pages in their search results, such as if they’re looking for longer-form text documents, using a device with limited internet access, or those who just prefer text-based results shown separately from search features.”
We’ve added this after hearing from some that there are times when they’d prefer to just see links to web pages in their search results, such as if they’re looking for longer-form text documents, using a device with limited internet access, or those who just prefer text-based…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 14, 2024
The new functionality is a throwback to when search results were more straightforward. Now, they often combine rich media like images, videos, and shopping ads alongside the traditional list of web links.
How It Works
On mobile devices, the “Web” filter will be displayed alongside other filter options like “Images” and “News.”
If Google’s systems don’t automatically surface it based on the search query, desktop users may need to select “More” to access it.
Screenshot from: twitter.com/GoogleSearchLiaison, May 2024.More About Google Search Filters
Google’s search filters allow you to narrow results by type. The options displayed are dynamically generated based on your search query and what Google’s systems determine could be most relevant.
The “All Filters” option provides access to filters that are not shown automatically.
Alongside filters, Google also displays “Topics” – suggested related terms that can further refine or expand a user’s original query into new areas of exploration.
For more about Google’s search filters, see its official help page.
Featured Image: egaranugrah/Shutterstock
SEO
Why Google Can’t Tell You About Every Ranking Drop
In a recent Twitter exchange, Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, provided insight into how the search engine handles algorithmic spam actions and ranking drops.
The discussion was sparked by a website owner’s complaint about a significant traffic loss and the inability to request a manual review.
Sullivan clarified that a site could be affected by an algorithmic spam action or simply not ranking well due to other factors.
He emphasized that many sites experiencing ranking drops mistakenly attribute it to an algorithmic spam action when that may not be the case.
“I’ve looked at many sites where people have complained about losing rankings and decide they have a algorithmic spam action against them, but they don’t. “
Sullivan’s full statement will help you understand Google’s transparency challenges.
Additionally, he explains why the desire for manual review to override automated rankings may be misguided.
Two different things. A site could have an algorithmic spam action. A site could be not ranking well because other systems that *are not about spam* just don’t see it as helpful.
I’ve looked at many sites where people have complained about losing rankings and decide they have a…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 13, 2024
Challenges In Transparency & Manual Intervention
Sullivan acknowledged the idea of providing more transparency in Search Console, potentially notifying site owners of algorithmic actions similar to manual actions.
However, he highlighted two key challenges:
- Revealing algorithmic spam indicators could allow bad actors to game the system.
- Algorithmic actions are not site-specific and cannot be manually lifted.
Sullivan expressed sympathy for the frustration of not knowing the cause of a traffic drop and the inability to communicate with someone about it.
However, he cautioned against the desire for a manual intervention to override the automated systems’ rankings.
Sullivan states:
“…you don’t really want to think “Oh, I just wish I had a manual action, that would be so much easier.” You really don’t want your individual site coming the attention of our spam analysts. First, it’s not like manual actions are somehow instantly processed. Second, it’s just something we know about a site going forward, especially if it says it has change but hasn’t really.”
Determining Content Helpfulness & Reliability
Moving beyond spam, Sullivan discussed various systems that assess the helpfulness, usefulness, and reliability of individual content and sites.
He acknowledged that these systems are imperfect and some high-quality sites may not be recognized as well as they should be.
“Some of them ranking really well. But they’ve moved down a bit in small positions enough that the traffic drop is notable. They assume they have fundamental issues but don’t, really — which is why we added a whole section about this to our debugging traffic drops page.”
Sullivan revealed ongoing discussions about providing more indicators in Search Console to help creators understand their content’s performance.
“Another thing I’ve been discussing, and I’m not alone in this, is could we do more in Search Console to show some of these indicators. This is all challenging similar to all the stuff I said about spam, about how not wanting to let the systems get gamed, and also how there’s then no button we would push that’s like “actually more useful than our automated systems think — rank it better!” But maybe there’s a way we can find to share more, in a way that helps everyone and coupled with better guidance, would help creators.”
Advocacy For Small Publishers & Positive Progress
In response to a suggestion from Brandon Saltalamacchia, founder of RetroDodo, about manually reviewing “good” sites and providing guidance, Sullivan shared his thoughts on potential solutions.
He mentioned exploring ideas such as self-declaration through structured data for small publishers and learning from that information to make positive changes.
“I have some thoughts I’ve been exploring and proposing on what we might do with small publishers and self-declaring with structured data and how we might learn from that and use that in various ways. Which is getting way ahead of myself and the usual no promises but yes, I think and hope for ways to move ahead more positively.”
Sullivan said he can’t make promises or implement changes overnight, but he expressed hope for finding ways to move forward positively.
Featured Image: Tero Vesalainen/Shutterstock
SEO
56 Google Search Statistics to Bookmark for 2024
If you’re curious about the state of Google search in 2024, look no further.
Each year we pick, vet, and categorize a list of up-to-date statistics to give you insights from trusted sources on Google search trends.
- Google has a web index of “about 400 billion documents”. (The Capitol Forum)
- Google’s search index is over 100 million gigabytes in size. (Google)
- There are an estimated 3.5 billion searches on Google each day. (Internet Live Stats)
- 61.5% of desktop searches and 34.4% of mobile searches result in no clicks. (SparkToro)
- 15% of all Google searches have never been searched before. (Google)
- 94.74% of keywords get 10 monthly searches or fewer. (Ahrefs)
- The most searched keyword in the US and globally is “YouTube,” and youtube.com gets the most traffic from Google. (Ahrefs)
- 96.55% of all pages get zero search traffic from Google. (Ahrefs)
- 50-65% of all number-one spots are dominated by featured snippets. (Authority Hacker)
- Reddit is the most popular domain for product review queries. (Detailed)
- Google is the most used search engine in the world, with a mobile market share of 95.32% and a desktop market share of 81.95%. (Statista)
- Google.com generated 84.2 billion visits a month in 2023. (Statista)
- Google generated $307.4 billion in revenue in 2023. (Alphabet Investor Relations)
- 63.41% of all US web traffic referrals come from Google. (SparkToro)
- 92.96% of global traffic comes from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps. (SparkToro)
- Only 49% of Gen Z women use Google as their search engine. The rest use TikTok. (Search Engine Land)
- 58.67% of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile phones. (Statista)
- 57% of local search queries are submitted using a mobile device or tablet. (ReviewTrackers)
- 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their smartphones. (Think With Google)
- 54% of smartphone users search for business hours, and 53% search for directions to local stores. (Think With Google)
- 18% of local searches on smartphones lead to a purchase within a day vs. 7% of non-local searches. (Think With Google)
- 56% of in-store shoppers used their smartphones to shop or research items while they were in-store. (Think With Google)
- 60% of smartphone users have contacted a business directly using the search results (e.g., “click to call” option). (Think With Google)
- 63.6% of consumers say they are likely to check reviews on Google before visiting a business location. (ReviewTrackers)
- 88% of consumers would use a business that replies to all of its reviews. (BrightLocal)
- Customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable if they find a complete Business Profile on Google Search and Maps. (Google)
- Customers are 70% more likely to visit and 50% more likely to consider purchasing from businesses with a complete Business Profile. (Google)
- 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day. (Think With Google)
- 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase. (Think With Google)
- Mobile searches for “store open near me” (such as, “grocery store open near me” have grown by over 250% in the last two years. (Think With Google)
- People use Google Lens for 12 billion visual searches a month. (Google)
- 50% of online shoppers say images helped them decide what to buy. (Think With Google)
- There are an estimated 136 billion indexed images on Google Image Search. (Photutorial)
- 15.8% of Google SERPs show images. (Moz)
- People click on 3D images almost 50% more than static ones. (Google)
- More than 800 million people use Google Discover monthly to stay updated on their interests. (Google)
- 46% of Google Discover URLs are news sites, 44% e-commerce, 7% entertainment, and 2% travel. (Search Engine Journal)
- Even though news sites accounted for under 50% of Google Discover URLs, they received 99% of Discover clicks. (Search Engine Journal)
- Most Google Discover URLs only receive traffic for three to four days, with most of that traffic occurring one to two days after publishing. (Search Engine Journal)
- The clickthrough rate (CTR) for Google Discover is 11%. (Search Engine Journal)
- 91.45% of search volumes in Google Ads Keyword Planner are overestimates. (Ahrefs)
- For every $1 a business spends on Google Ads, they receive $8 in profit through Google Search and Ads. (Google)
- Google removed 5.5 billion ads, suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts, restricted over 6.9 billion ads, and restricted ads from showing up on 2.1 billion publisher pages in 2023. (Google)
- The average shopping click-through rate (CTR) across all industries is 0.86% for Google Ads. (Wordstream)
- The average shopping cost per click (CPC) across all industries is $0.66 for Google Ads. (Wordstream)
- The average shopping conversion rate (CVR) across all industries is 1.91% for Google Ads. (Wordstream)
- 58% of consumers ages 25-34 use voice search daily. (UpCity)
- 16% of people use voice search for local “near me” searches. (UpCity)
- 67% of consumers say they’re very likely to use voice search when seeking information. (UpCity)
- Active users of the Google Assistant grew 4X over the past year, as of 2019. (Think With Google)
- Google Assistant hit 1 billion app installs. (Android Police)
- AI-generated answers from SGE were available for 91% of entertainment queries but only 17% of healthcare queries. (Statista)
- The AI-generated answers in Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) do not match any links from the top 10 Google organic search results 93.8% of the time. (Search Engine Journal)
- Google displays a Search Generative element for 86.8% of all search queries. (Authoritas)
- 62% of generative links came from sources outside the top 10 ranking organic domains. Only 20.1% of generative URLs directly match an organic URL ranking on page one. (Authoritas)
- 70% of SEOs said that they were worried about the impact of SGE on organic search (Aira)
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