In your SEO career, there may be times when you feel like you’ve done a lot more than you used to.
What made you think that way?
Did you optimize for your 600th local customer and realize it’s not that challenging anymore?
Or maybe you feel that your freelance business or agency has grown, hired and matured to the point where you are no longer reaching your full potential.
If that’s you, it might be time to move upstream.
Maybe it’s time to switch from traditional to Enterprise SEO.
In any case, this was not a rash decision. Frankly, it’s a challenging thing.
You better have enough staff, skills, sales power and confidence to go out and present yourself as a search optimizer for some of the biggest brands on the internet.
But let’s recap first.
As I said, transitioning to enterprise SEO is a huge decision.
How do you know it’s really the right time for you?
Let me share some benchmarks you should be looking for to determine when it’s time to shift your strategy upwards.
But first, let’s get clear about the SEO differences I’m talking about.
How is enterprise SEO different?
Enterprise SEO Strategies The main difference from traditional SEO is their size and scale.
Whatever you do for small SEO clients, you do bigger for enterprise clients.
That’s painting enterprise SEO on a fairly broad spectrum, but for the most part, it’s proven 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’s not bad.
You’ll see what Screaming Frog has to show for the site, then assign the work to your staff and be done.
However, consider an enterprise-level website.
How many URLs does it have?
100,000? 500000?
one million?
The challenge of scale
If we stick to the idea that enterprise SEO is traditional SEO but bigger, then those 1 million pages require the same SEO optimization as a 100-page website.
The difference is having employees implement them, fully understand the site infrastructure, implement them without causing other site issues, and work with the client’s in-house SEO team to make sure everything goes smoothly.
For example, when I was young Shopify store Topics lead to where category and favorites pages repeat title tags.
When this happens on an ecommerce site with over a million pages, you need to find a solution right away, whether it has to do with adding canonical tags or different custom coding.
That’s what it does in enterprise SEO.
Big customer equals big responsibility, you need professional knowledge, personnelThis tool, and pure ability Deliver what these sites need.
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Enterprise-level reporting and communications
On that last point, you can also expect enterprise customers to check in much more than your small account.
The healthier hires you can charge for large-scale SEO work comes at the cost of providing your clients with more regular progress reports.
Suppose you need to implement a smart internal linking strategy on a 600,000-page e-commerce site.
You know it’s a tough job, and so do your customers.
All they ask is that you update them with the work you’ve done in the past two weeks.
Make sure you have staff to provide ongoing workflow and the ability to certify every two weeks.
Enterprise SEO then asked the SEO agency questions about operations, staffing, morale, organization, time management, and reporting.
You have to think about how to handle all of these things before committing fully to the corporate route.
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So, how do you know it’s time to switch from traditional SEO to enterprise SEO?
1. When can the page volume be processed
You know you can transition to enterprise SEO when you can handle a large number of pages that need to be optimized.
As you can imagine, fixing duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, and content on a local lawyer’s website is quite different than doing it for the country’s second- or third-ranked online shoe retailer.
And I’m not just talking about having knowledgeable people do the physical work.
If you’re going to scale up, there’s another problem automation tool You may need to upgrade to crawl everything.
Of course, screaming frog There is only a free version and a paid version, but if you use samlash or Arevesyou may need to upgrade to the largest and best plan.
This is because, depending on the size of your client, you need to be able to track 10,000 keywords instead of 5,000 and run more site audits each month.
If you look at the pricing of these premium plans and decide you can afford them based on what you’re going to make, you’re probably in a good place to make the switch.
2. When your agency is mature enough
If you want to take on enterprise SEO clients, the next benchmark to meet is becoming a full-fledged agency.
Now, I mean on two fronts – showing maturity and developing efficient and effective workflows.
Let’s focus on the latter one.
To say a company is mature is to say that it has everything it needs to continue growing steadily and become a true heavyweight in the industry.
If your agency moved past the startup phase, you might remember how different things were.
You probably have a skeleton staff with enough work to handle.
Your day-to-day processes may be very fragmented and not clearly defined or follow preferred practices.
You get things done, but maybe only after working 60 hours a week or more.
However, established companies have gone beyond that.
They have stabilized and accumulated enough retained earnings to hire managers and teams and define processes for everything.
Everyone is doing what they do best.
A company can forecast its financial position and meet it reasonably within a specified period of time.
And, perhaps most importantly, the employees of an established company want to be at the office (or a computer at home) every day, doing the job, using their skills to satisfy and impress the company’s clients.
This can only come from senior leadership with customer-centric and forward-looking information.
This is the type of environment in which enterprise-level SEO success can occur.
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3. When you have an organizational structure
You’ll know you’re ready to get into enterprise SEO when you have an organizational structure that handles your biggest clients.
I’m not just referring to the number of bodies you have in your seat.
It’s absolutely critical, but to me, whether you have 60 employees or 80 employees, it’s not as important as making sure every employee is in the right place and shares the overall vision of the company.
Everyone in your company should do what they do best and follow the goals set by the team leaders and executive management.
Since we’re talking about team leaders — middle managers, if you will — the best they can do for team members is:
- clear goal,
- empower them to help themselves,
- encourage their success,
- let them know they care about them,
- and help whenever necessary.
When employees feel appreciated and valued as part of their overall career, they tend to be happier in their roles.
Employees who are satisfied with their roles are more likely to give their all to fulfill the company’s mission statement and do their best to deliver the best enterprise SEO product on the planet.
4. When you have income to cover further growth periods
Finally, let’s talk about revenue and how to develop it into Enterprise SEO Agency you want.
Let’s say you’re a small to midsize SEO agency looking to get into the corporate game.
There may be some hurdles in that period of positioning yourself as an entity that can handle big fish.
This won’t happen overnight, and while your sales team or subject matter experts are struggling to close leads, you’ll need more short-term gains to fund a relatively slow business growth.
But don’t underestimate the importance of other income.
Getting into a new game takes time.
If you drop everything and focus on getting one or two big clients, you won’t have the resources to do any of the things I’ve listed here; certainly not to hire and grow your team and processes.
While it’s important to sign up new clients during this time, your top leadership should also focus on maintaining churn or churnto a relatively viable 3% to 5%.
Hey, you’ve been hearing this for years: retaining customers is as important as signing new ones, and it sounds right here.
You’ve seen how much planning, work, and coordination is involved in executing an enterprise SEO strategy for your clients.
You cannot compromise any of your past successes now.
Define the vision and processes that will guide your customer service manager Show real value to your customersthey will want to be with you during this time.
See through the bumps in the road
You probably already know that planning is one thing. Doing what you plan is completely different.
You’ll run into a few hurdles on your way to becoming an enterprise SEO guru.
But I think you’ll know when it’s time to try.
This can happen when you hit the benchmarks I listed above.
The future is open and waiting for you.
All you need to do is take the first step.
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Featured image: Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock
