SEO

4 Signs Your Agency Is Ready To Take On Enterprise SEO

Published

12 months ago

March 31, 2022

Entireweb News Bot

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.

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Featured Image: Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock

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Should Congress Investigate Big Tech Platforms?

Published

5 hours ago

March 22, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

Should Congress Investigate Big Tech Platforms?

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a full committee hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew to discuss how the platform handles users’ data, its effect on kids, and its relationship with ByteDance, its Chinese parent company.

This hearing is part of an ongoing investigation to determine whether TikTok should be banned in the United States or forced to split from ByteDance.

A ban on TikTok would affect over 150 million Americans who use TikTok for education, entertainment, and income generation.

It would also affect the five million U.S. businesses using TikTok to reach customers.

Is TikTok The Only Risk To National Security?

According to a memo released by the Tech Oversight Project, TikTok is not the only tech platform that poses risks to national security, mental health, and children.

As Congress scrutinizes TikTok, the Tech Oversight Project also strongly urges an investigation of risks posed by tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Google.

These platforms have a documented history of serving content harmful to younger audiences and adversarial to U.S. interests. They have also failed on many occasions to protect users’ private data.

Many Big Tech companies have seen TikTok’s success and tried to emulate some of its features to encourage users to spend as much time within their platforms’ ecosystems as possible. Academics, activists, non-governmental organizations, and others have long raised concerns about these platforms’ risks.

To truly reduce Big Rech’s risks to our society, Congress must look beyond TikTok and hold other companies accountable for the same dangers they pose to national security, mental health, and private data.

Risks Posed By Big Tech Companies

The following are examples of the risks Big Tech companies pose to U.S. users.

Amazon

Amazon has made several controversial moves, including a partnership with a state propaganda agency to launch a China books portal and offering AWS services to Chinese companies, including a banned surveillance firm with ties to the military.

Apple

Independent research found that Apple collects detailed information about its users, even when users choose not to allow tracking by apps from the App Store. Over half of the top 200 suppliers for Apple operate factories in China.

Google

The FTC fined Google and YouTube $170 million for collecting children’s data without parental consent. YouTube also changed its algorithm to make it more addictive, increasing users’ time watching videos and consuming ads.

TikTok

TikTok employees confirmed that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is involved in decision-making and has access to TikTok’s user data. While testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Vanessa Pappas, TikTok COO, would not confirm whether ByteDance would give TikTok user data to the Chinese government.

Conclusion

While the dangers posed by TikTok are undeniable, it’s clear that Congress should also address the risks posed throughout the tech industry. By holding all major offenders accountable, we can create a safe, secure, and responsible digital landscape for everyone.

Featured Image: Koshiro K/Shutterstock

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SEO

The 29 Best WordPress Plugins (Organized by Category)

Published

6 hours ago

March 22, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

WordPress plugins make your life easier by allowing you to add features to your website without learning to code or hire a developer.

However, over 60,000 WordPress plugins are available, and more are released every day. Plus, installing too many plugins can cause slow website loading speeds, so you want to avoid adding too many of these plugins.

To help you limit your installed plugins to only the most worthy, I’ve compiled this list of the 29 best WordPress plugins categorized by what they’re good for.

This list comes from my more than 12 years of experience building WordPress websites and working closely with my WordPress developer.

First up, we have some plugins to help you design and add specific functionalities to your WordPress website.

Elementor

Cost: Free ($59/year for premium)

Useful for:

Building a website theme with drag-and-drop editing
Easily creating custom landing pages

Elementor is awesome for anyone who wants a custom-looking website without learning how to code or being limited to a pre-built theme. But it also has pre-built themes you can customize to streamline the process.

Be aware that using any kind of drag-and-drop editor like this will slow down your site.

WooCommerce

Cost: Free

Useful for: Turning your WordPress website into an e-commerce store

WooCommerce is the best plugin to start an e-commerce business on your WordPress website. It allows you to easily create product pages and collections.

You can combine it with WooCommerce Payments to easily collect customer payment information.

Advanced Custom Fields Pro

Cost: $49/year for a single site

Useful for: Creating custom widgets to use anywhere on your site

If you know how to code, Advanced Custom Fields Pro allows you to take full control over your WordPress edit screens and custom field data.

WPCode

Cost: Free ($49–$399/year for premium)

Useful for: Inserting code into your headers and footers

Formerly called Insert Headers and Footers, WPCode is the easiest way for non-developers to add code snippets anywhere on their website.

For example, you may have to add a code snippet to your website’s header to connect it with Google Analytics or to add the Facebook Remarketing Pixel.

WPForms

Cost: $49.50/year

Useful for:

Creating forms for contact pages, newsletter sign-ups, and more
Building surveys for your site visitors

WPForms is a drag-and-drop WordPress form editor. It’s super intuitive and easy to use.

TranslatePress

Cost: €89/year (~USD 95)

Useful for: Translating your website into other languages

TranslatePress makes it easy to create translated versions of your website in other languages. It also automatically adds the hreflang tags for each language, so it’s also good for SEO.

Formilla

Cost: Free (varying premium plans starting at $19.99/month)

Useful for: Adding a live chat feature to your site

Formilla is a live chat plugin for WordPress. You can offer live chat support or use it to answer visitors’ questions automatically using a bot—although that may annoy them.

Next up, we’ve got a whole suite of plugins that help you make your website more secure and easier to manage. WordPress sites are often vulnerable to hacking, so these are important.

Wordfence

Cost: Free ($119/year for premium)

Useful for: Keeping your website safe from hackers and malware

Wordfence adds a robust firewall and malware scanner to protect your site from hackers and malicious software. You can also use it to add two-factor login authentication, have rate limiting, and run security diagnostics on your site—to name a few of the features.

UpdraftPlus

Cost: Free ($119/year for premium)

Useful for: Backing up your WordPress website

It’s important to back up your website every so often to avoid losing your content in the event of a plugin clash, hack, or even accidental deletion. UpdraftPlus makes this easy for you.

Wordable

PublishPress role capabilities dashboard

Membership site built using MemberPress WordPress plugin

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SEO

TikTok Updated Community Guidelines To Include AI Content

Published

12 hours ago

March 22, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

TikTok Updated Community Guidelines To Include AI Content

TikTok has updated its Community Guidelines, which will go into effect on April 21, 2023.

The updated guidelines introduce TikTok’s Community Principles, which guide content moderation to uphold human rights and international legal frameworks.

TikTok worked with over 100 organizations globally to strengthen its rules to address new threats and reduce potential user harm.

Key changes to Community Guidelines apply to synthetic media, tribes, and civic and election integrity.

AI-Generated Content

TikTok defines “synthetic media” as content created or modified by AI. While AI and related technologies allow creators to express themselves in many new ways, they can also blur the line between fact and fiction for viewers.

Creators must label synthetic or altered media as such to mitigate the potential risks of spreading misinformation.

To reduce potential harm, synthetic media featuring real private individuals is prohibited. Private individuals include anyone under 18 and adults who are not public figures. The use of public figures over 18 – government officials, politicians, business leaders, and celebrities – is permitted, but with restrictions.

Creators must not use synthetic media to violate policies against hate speech, sexual exploitation, and severe harassment. They must also clearly disclose synthetic media and manipulated content that depict realistic scenes with fake people, places, or events.

Public figures cannot be used in synthetic audio or video for political or commercial endorsements to mislead users about financial or political issues.

You can, however, use synthetic media in artistic and educational content.

Protection Of Tribes

TikTok policies already include rules meant to protect people and groups with specific attributes from hateful behavior, hate speech, and hateful ideologies.

With new guidelines, the platform added Tribes to the list of protected attributes, including ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation.

While TikTok allows critical content on public figures, as defined above, it prohibits language that harasses, humiliates, threatens, or doxxes everyone.

Users can consult resources and tools provided by TikTok to identify bullying behavior and configure their settings to prevent it from affecting them further.

Civil And Election Integrity

Noting that elections are essential to community dialogue and upholding societal values, TikTok recently emphasized its alleged efforts to encourage topical discussions while maintaining unity.

To achieve this goal, paid political promotion, advertising, and fundraising by politicians or parties are prohibited. This policy applies to traditional ads and compensated creator content.

TikTok claims to support informed civic idea exchanges to promote constructive conversations without allowing misinformation about voting processes and election outcomes. Content that includes unverified claims about election results will not be eligible to appear in the For You Feed.

Before these changes go into effect next month, moderators will receive additional training on enforcing them effectively.

Will Recent Changes Prevent More TikTok Bans?

TikTok’s refreshed Community Guidelines and explanation of Community Principles appear to attempt greater transparency and foster a safe, inclusive, and authentic environment for all users.

TikTok plans to continue investing in safety measures to encourage creativity and connection within its global community of one billion users globally.

TikTok’s latest changes to improve transparency, reduce harm, and provide higher-quality content for users may be part of efforts to prevent the app from being banned in the U.S.

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a full committee hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew on how congress can protect the data privacy of U.S. users and children from online harm.

Organizations like the Tech Oversight Project have also expressed concerns about risks that big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta pose.

Featured Image: BigTunaOnline/Shutterstock

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