SEO in an enterprise setting, where a website has tens of thousands of pages, is like navigating a labyrinth of tunnels (product and content pages) that constantly shift around every few weeks.
When you couple this with multiple Google algorithm updates each year (there were nine confirmed updates in 2023), even the finest digital agencies face a set of challenges that impact their work’s performance for clients and their own scalability and growth.
From unexpected SEO slips after an algorithm update that results in ranking drops to manual (and tedious) monthly reporting that drains resources — managing SEO for large-scale ecommerce and media websites with thousands of dynamic pages is indeed a herculean task.
However, with the right technical SEO tool and a proactive approach, digital agencies can turn these challenges into stepping stones for scalability.
In this article, let’s look at the top five challenges digital agencies face when juggling multiple large-scale SEO projects and how they can transform those challenges into opportunities to improve the client experience and facilitate agency growth.
1. Establishing SEO vigilance
Picture this: your content, technical SEO, outreach and design teams work together diligently to strategize and implement impactful optimizations for an enterprise ecommerce website. Over time, your agency generates impressive organic traffic growth for the client, and then, you get hit by an algorithm update.
Or worse, for instance, the client’s dev team makes tweaks to the website code that inadvertently results in 50% of the website being blocked from indexation, leading to substantial drops in rankings.
Either way, your agency will shoulder the responsibility.
Such a scenario is familiar to most SEO agencies and could have severe consequences, including substantial financial losses for the client and potentially damaging the agency’s reputation.
What’s more, recovering those lost SERP positions and traffic could take months, and even when those metrics climb back to an acceptable level, there’s always a risk of losing clients due to the business impact of such a setback.
However, modern technical SEO platforms flip this challenge into an opportunity to prioritize client SEO security. Such tools let you set up real-time alerts so you can stay on top of any potential issues to ensure ongoing SEO vigilance and optimal SEO health for all clients.
For example, you can set up daily alerts that let your team know if SEO issues like title duplications, 4xx/5xx status codes, non-indexable pages, page load time, Core Web Vitals, etc., increase beyond a certain threshold. You’ll get notified about critical issues such as ranking drops, helping you take immediate action.
This way, you can swiftly address SEO issues as soon as they arise, preventing drastic consequences and maintaining client trust and satisfaction.
2. Improving resource allocation
Even the biggest agencies have finite resources. And one of the main resources at your disposal is your team’s time and expertise.
Spending it on creating monthly reports is far from optimal resource utilization.
Of course, you need monthly reporting to keep clients happy about the progress you’re making with your team’s efforts. After all, clients want to see clear returns on their SEO investments and stay on top of growth metrics such as organic traffic, clicks, SERP positions, and sales.
However, with limited resources and multiple clients, it can be challenging to create such insightful and visually appealing reports that would impress each client each month.
Again, advanced tech SEO tools enable you to work smarter, not harder, helping prioritize impact with limited resources.
For instance, using a technical SEO platform, you can have preset SEO dashboards that replace manual, routine reporting work, allowing your team to focus on strategic SEO tasks.
You can impress clients with visually compelling charts that illustrate rankings growth, country-wise SEO performance, engagement metrics (impressions, clicks, CTR, etc.) and Googlebot activity. This optimizes resource use and ensures that your team’s efforts are directed toward activities that elevate the quality of service provided to clients.
3. Embracing simplicity
Another common concern for agencies is that often, clients can’t truly appreciate the significance of advanced technical SEO strategies and the intricacies of implementing them. This is especially the case when clients don’t have an in-house search marketing team or any prior experience in SEO.
When this happens, you can have difficulty explaining the importance of investing in technical SEO, particularly for big websites with thousands of pages and dynamic content.
Ultimately, it may even lead to shifting your focus only on the basics — keywords, content and links — thus missing out on big opportunities that come with fundamental technical on-page optimizations that impact organic traffic and rankings dramatically.
However, intuitive cloud software can transform technical SEO into a simpler, more digestible form. Cloud-based technical SEO tools are designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind — with straightforward visual tools and data illustrations — allowing not-so-technical teams to quickly understand and act on SEO data without getting bogged down in jargon.
Plus, when working with many clients, desktop-based technical SEO tools typically pose limits that can hinder your pace as they let you crawl and audit a limited number of URLs per month.
However, a browser-based SaaS platform lets you manage technical SEO for all clients within a single tool without limiting the number of domains, crawls or logs. This simplifies your team’s workflow and enables more efficient project tracking and optimization.
So, by embracing the simplicity offered by cloud technical SEO tools, you can democratize SEO tasks amongst your team while enabling better client understanding and involvement. This empowers clients and fosters a collaborative environment where strategies are built on mutual understanding and trust.
4. Merging insights and reporting SEO opportunities persuasively
As an agency, you need to create compelling arguments for the SEO wins your work is achieving to gain the client’s approval and guide your future strategy.
This requires you to amalgamate data and insights from various sources like Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics (GA), Ahrefs and so on.
Now, you can have your team spend a lot of time and effort on tedious Excel merging exercises for conducting profound three-dimensional SEO analysis. However, doing this for all clients regularly would be seriously resource-intensive. This complexity often hinders the implementation of impactful SEO work.
However, modern technical SEO tools replace laborious Excel merging, allowing you to extract solid SEO insights from various sources (GA, GSC, etc.) by joining the datasets into a single report.
Then, you can easily identify key SEO opportunities like optimizing unranked commercial pages, adding internal links, enhancing content size, reducing page load times, etc. and prioritize them into a list. This feature also lets you visualize a client’s potential revenue loss due to pages being ignored by Googlebot.
You can quickly save necessary charts with SEO opportunities for each client, which facilitates the creation of persuasive, data-driven reports in minutes. This way, you can deliver convincing SEO reports frequently to all clients, showcasing your strategy’s efficacy and getting buy-in on future campaigns from all stakeholders.
5. Scaling for success
Your SEO efforts enable your clients to rank higher on search engines and, ultimately, grow their business. But what about your own agency’s growth? How can you improve your prospect-to-client conversion rate?
This is a challenge in itself.
Now, consider this: instead of pitching a thousand words in your discovery call, wouldn’t it be easier to persuade prospects if you could add concrete SEO value at the very start of your discussion with them?
Here’s where conducting a “stealth crawl” for discreet analysis of your prospective client’s website helps. In “stealth crawling mode,” you can conduct a crawl of your client’s website before touching base with them to list critical on-page technical SEO issues and opportunities you can pitch.
Then, during your discovery call, you can reveal the list of vital technical optimizations that will boost their SEO. This shows that you’ve done your homework and that your digital agency is all about adding value, which will improve your odds of closing the deal.
Wrapping up
With the right technical SEO tool and a proactive, strategic approach, what seems like a set of challenges are, in fact, opportunities in disguise for your agency to enhance the client experience.
As a complete, cloud-based, easy-to-use technical SEO suite, JetOctopus enables your agency to:
Convert more prospects into clients: With stealth crawling, you can identify critical issues on prospective client websites before even knocking on their door, which positions your agency as a valuable partner right from the start.
Prove your team’s performance: With dynamic reporting features, you can visually and convincingly showcase your work’s worth every month, making clients feel that they are in the right hands when it comes to SEO.
Keep your clients happy: With alerts set up, you can establish peace of mind for your clients — if anything goes wrong, you will be notified instantly and can fix the issue before it leads to revenue loss for your client.
What’s more, you also get a free technical SEO expert for your team who knows the ins and outs of JetOctopus. While we offer a great onboarding experience, we want to ensure you get the most out of JetOctopus’ tools and can maximize your work’s impact on every client.
So, whether it’s the intricacies of client acquisition, the balancing act of optimal resource allocation, simplifying the technicalities of SEO, or ensuring efficient yet effective reporting, with JetOctopus, each hurdle is a stepping stone to refine and elevate your agency’s practices.
