Enterprise SEO Audit: What Is It? Why You Need Help With One
Search engine optimization (SEO) works for large and small businesses, but how it works slightly varies, including how to audit the pages.
This blog post answers standard questions about the enterprise SEO audit:
- What is it?
- How does it differ from traditional or regular optimization audits?
- Why is enterprise SEO audit important?
- Why should a business hire someone to do it?
- What usually happens during the audit?
Read below and discover the underrated value of a comprehensive SEO audit for growing businesses and large enterprises. Let’s go!
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What Is an Enterprise SEO Audit?
An enterprise SEO audit is an in-depth evaluation of the various factors impacting a large business’s organic search rankings. It involves evaluating the three primary elements of optimization:
- Technical
- On-page
- Off-page
Although this definition is similar to a regular SEO audit, it varies based on these factors:
- Regular SEO audits typically focus on smaller websites with fewer pages and a narrower scope of products or services. Big businesses involve large-scale websites with thousands or even millions of pages, complex structures, and diverse content.
- Because the site and budget are smaller, a traditional SEO audit focuses on analyzing the pages, particularly the content, and enhancing them for local search.
- Enterprise SEO audits require a more comprehensive strategy to accommodate the unique needs of larger organizations, including optimizing websites with a vast number of pages and targeting a wide range of keywords.
- Both regular and enterprise SEO audits assess off-page factors such as backlink profiles, and social media engagement. However, the latter usually involves analyzing more complex off-page factors because of the larger online footprint of their websites.
- Both types of audits evaluate on-page factors such as content quality, keyword usage, meta tags, header tags, and internal linking. Enterprise SEO audits might need deeper analysis and optimization because of the sheer volume of content and pages.
- Traditional audits typically focus on the technical aspects of smaller websites such as site speed, crawlability, and indexing. For enterprise SEO, the coverage is wider and more complex. These include site architecture, interconnections between multiple domains and subdomains, and content management systems (CMS).
Because of the size and complexity of large sites, an enterprise SEO audit usually takes longer than one for traditional optimization. It can take anywhere between one and two months.
Why Are Enterprise SEO Audits Important?
An enterprise SEO audit matters because it helps businesses identify and address various factors that influence their organic search rankings, especially for large websites with thousands of pages, multiple languages and regions, and highly competitive keywords.
An enterprise SEO audit does the following:
- Uncovers issues preventing optimal organic search performance.
- Guides the team in directing time, resources, and the budget toward the most impactful optimizations.
- Optimizes the content for relevant and lucrative keywords, attracting more qualified traffic and maximizing return on investment (ROI).
- Identifies areas for improvement in the user experience, leading to increased satisfaction and engagement.
- Strengthens their local SEO strategies, increasing visibility and attracting more customers from targeted geographic locations.
- Helps businesses identify strengths and weaknesses in their online competitors’ strategies.
- Tracks their progress, compares current performance against past results, and accordingly adjusts their campaigns.
Why Do You Need Professional Help With an Enterprise SEO Audit?
Many enterprises use artificial intelligence's benefits on market-driven platforms to DIY the audit. Enterprise SEO agencies provide many benefits that these tools cannot:
- SEO professionals have the knowledge and experience to effectively analyze and optimize large websites. These characteristics further improve the accuracy and relevance of the results.
- They are familiar with the latest best practices and can identify issues that might not be apparent to someone without their expertise.
- Enterprise SEO audits are resource intensive. Agencies have access to advanced tools and technologies and know which apps or platforms work best.
- Optimization teams are able to customize strategies to address large websites' unique challenges and requirements.
- Like any type of SEO, enterprise optimization is an ongoing process. The right digital marketing team can provide continuous support, track progress, and make necessary changes to ensure that your website maintains optimal search engine performance.
- When budget and other resources become limited, enterprise SEO agencies prioritize issues based on the impact on search engine rankings and traffic.
What Happens During an Enterprise SEO Audit?
Digital marketing agencies use a thorough checklist during site audits, but they may skip or add more depending on the goals and issues they discover. Usually, the process involves the following:
Step | Purpose | Assessed Factors |
---|---|---|
Crawl the entire website. | Identify any potential errors that affect crawlability and indexability. | Broken links, 404 errors, redirect issues, and duplicate content. |
Analyze the structure. | Improve the user experience and search engine ranking. | URL structure, ease of navigation, internal linking, and mobile friendliness. |
Assess the on-page optimization. | Ensure that your pages are correctly optimized for your target keywords. | Meta titles, meta descriptions, headers, keyword optimization, alt tags for images, and URL structure for individual pages. |
Check the website’s speed. | Keep the page speed at no more than three seconds. | Speed check through Google PageSpeed Insights |
Evaluate the backlink profile. | Determine and enhance the domain authority and search engine ranking. | Quality and quantity of backlinks. |
Perform a comprehensive content analysis. | Guarantee that the content follows search engine guidelines and best practices, ranks well in the search results, and attracts and engages the audience. | Uniqueness, relevance, length, depth, social media presence, and avoiding keyword stuffing. |
Do a competitor analysis. | Provide insights into potential opportunities for your own website. | Competitors’ top-performing content, backlink profiles, and keyword strategies. |
Conduct a technical SEO study. | Enhance navigation, user experience, and crawlability. | XML sitemaps, robots.txt, HTTP for security, and structured data such as schema markup |
Summing Up
A comprehensive enterprise SEO audit shows that you can maximize your large website, especially your content, to attract audiences and retain customers. However, it could be challenging and difficult to understand.
Work with Digital Authority Partners (DAP) if you need help. As a reliable enterprise SEO agency, we use data-backed approaches to maintain, improve, or grow your ranking, traffic, and visibility to hit your business goals.
Contact us for a free consultation.
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