How to do a Enterprise SEO Audit

Your online presence can define your business and enterprise companies face even higher stakes when dealing with incredibly large and complex websites. 

An enterprise SEO audit is a complete evaluation of your website’s health and performance, as well as overall compliance with best SEO practices tailored to the needs of large-scale businesses.

As a leading and experienced enterprise SEO agency, we understand that enterprise SEO audits require a specialised approach to address your organisation’s complexity and scale adequately.

What Is an Enterprise SEO Audit?

An enterprise SEO audit is an in-depth evaluation of the health and performance of a large-scale site. It’s also an opportunity to assess adherence to best SEO practices. Compared to standard SEO audits for smaller businesses, usually focusing on simpler site structures and a limited number of pages, an enterprise audit addresses the complexities of these large sites. 

When conducting enterprise audits, we have to account for higher data volumes, complex site hierarchies, and the need for coordinated strategies across departments, regions, and many stakeholders.

An SEO audit dives into technical SEO, content quality, user experience, on- and off-page factors, and local and international SEO considerations.

We often need to involve more detailed competitor analysis, advanced technical diagnostics and tailored recommendations for enterprise audits to accommodate broader business goals.

How To Do an Enterprise SEO Audit

By leveraging our extensive experience and leading-edge tools, we deliver actionable insights and strategies to ensure your site exceeds SEO best practices, driving sustained visibility and growth in search engine results.

Content Audit

A content audit ensures that all of a company’s content aligns with company objectives and user intent. The process involves reviewing all existing content, including blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions, and multimedia assets.

Key aspects of auditing content for search engines include assessing quality, relevance and performance.

Some of the things we evaluate as part of a content audit include:

• Readability
• Engagement metrics
• Relevant keywords
• Meta descriptions

Assessing these areas then helps us to identify gaps and opportunities for optimisation. We can prune outdated content, fill content gaps, conduct keyword research, and enhance high-performing pages to ensure your site delivers value to users and ranks well in search engines.

Technical SEO Audit

A technical audit is the backbone of an effective SEO strategy for enterprise websites. We look into the technical elements affecting your site’s performance and how search engine-friendly it is. These elements include:

• Site architecture
• Crawlability
• Indexability
• Page speed

We’re looking for barriers that prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your site.

Components include:

• Core Web Vitals: Google’s Core Web Vitals include metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These metrics help us assess and improve user experience and directly impact visual stability, interactivity and page load speed.
• Multiple Languages- Hreflang Tags: An enterprise website will likely target various regions and languages, so an audit needs to ensure the proper implementation of Hreflang tags. They need to be correctly set up to signal to search engines the version of a page users should see based on their location and language. This helps avoid duplicate content issues and enhances SEO performance internationally.

By addressing technical aspects, we can optimise a site’s foundation, preparing it to rank well in search engine results and provide the best user experience.

Backlink Audit

Next on our enterprise SEO audit checklist is a backlink audit. We assess the quality and relevance of inbound links pointing to your site and identify valuable, high-authority links as well as toxic, broken links that could hurt rankings.

This involves evaluating relevance, domain authority and the anchor text of every backlink.

By disavowing harmful links and creating a strategy to acquire high-quality links, we strengthen a site’s authority and trustworthiness, which are relevant to organic search performance.

We also look at internal links because these can affect organic traffic and search rankings.

User Experience Audit

User experience (UX) helps you retain visitors and convert them into customers.

An in-depth enterprise SEO audit looks at the usability and accessibility of your site, assessing elements like:

• Navigation structures
• Design elements
• Page load times
• Mobile responsiveness

We conduct usability testing and analyse user behaviour data to identify where users might face friction or drop-off points.

Report and Fix Errors

Doing the enterprise SEO audit is just the initial step because the real value comes from reporting and fixing the errors we uncover. We take a systematic approach to addressing the issues affecting site performance and rankings.

We prioritise and methodically correct errors.

High-Priority Errors

Time and resources are precious in an enterprise environment, so we first tackle the most critical errors.

High-priority issues can include ones directly affecting site accessibility because they have an immediate negative impact on user experience and search engine indexing.

Examples of high-priority issues include:

• Critical technical issues like 404 errors, 500 server errors, and redirect loops.
• Major content problems include duplicate content, thin content or low on-page SEO.
• Issues with Core Web Vitals can be high-priority because slow page load times, poor interactivity, scores, and layout shifts disrupt user experience.

We first remove the most significant obstacles to a site’s performance, facilitating a smoother, more effective optimisation process after that. 

Be Wary of Irreversible Changes

While issues must be addressed promptly, approaching them cautiously is equally important, especially in a complex enterprise environment. Irreversible changes can have unintended consequences, affecting site functionality and SEO performance.

We’ll carefully review and follow an approval process for all major changes to ensure that all changes are backed up and tested in a staging environment before going live.

We inform stakeholders and secure approval for major changes, with clear plans to quickly roll back any changes if issues arise after implementation.

Advanced Audit Strategies

We leverage advanced audit strategies to help enterprise-level organisations maintain a competitive edge. For example, using AI and automation tools can increase the efficiency and accuracy of SEO audits. Additionally, understanding the capabilities of tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs provides deeper insights and more actionable data.

AI and Automation SEO Tools for Audits

AI and automation tools significantly impact how we do enterprise SEO audits. These can quickly process huge amounts of data, identifying patterns otherwise missed during manual audits.

Benefits of these advanced tools include automating repetitive tasks like crawling, data collection and reporting.

AI algorithms can detect issues with more precision, and these tools can handle the scale of enterprise sites, making it easier to maintain and optimise large volumes of content.

Tools We Use

The tools we have available and use include the following:

Google Search Console

Monitoring and maintaining your site’s presence in Google search results is essential. Features of Google Search Console include:

• Performance reports analyse search traffic, including clicks, impressions, and average position.
• Index coverage is used to identify and fix issues that keep your pages from being indexed.
• URL inspection to see how Googlebot sees individual URLs.
• Submission and management of XML sitemaps to improve your site’s crawlability.

Ahrefs

Key Ahrefs features and tools include:

• Keywords Explorer helps discover new keywords, track their performance, and analyse their features on the search engine results page (SERP).
• We can perform in-depth technical audits with Site Audit to find performance-related issues.
• The Site Explorer Feature analyses backlink profiles and helps assess competitors’ link-building strategies.

SEMRush

This tool’s notable features include:

• The Site Audit performs a competitive audit of your site’s health, highlighting issues related to site performance, HTTP, crawlability, and internal linking.
• Monitor your site’s daily rankings for target keywords with Position Tracking.
• The ability to analyse your backlink profile with the Backlink Audit tool and look for possibly harmful links.

Regular audits are important for maximising the benefits of each of these tools. We focus on actionable insights to drive meaningful improvements rather than getting bogged down in data overload. 

To ensure a holistic SEO approach, we also use these tools to foster collaboration among teams, including developers, marketing strategists, and content creators.

Generating customised reports targeted to the specific needs of stakeholders highlights the most relevant findings and metrics.

FAQs

What is an enterprise SEO audit?

An enterprise SEO audit comprehensively evaluates a large-scale website’s SEO health. It covers technical, on-page, off-page and user experience factors. It involves analysing the site’s structure and content, backlink profile and performance metrics.

What does enterprise SEO mean?

Enterprise SEO strategy refers to the practices and processes to optimise large-scale websites for search engines. Unlike traditional SEO, which typically focuses on smaller sites with fewer pages and simpler structures, enterprise SEO is for organisations with an extensive online presence, like multinational corporations, major publishers and large e-commerce sites. The scale and complexity of these sites, which can have thousands to millions of pages, require more advanced tools and techniques.

What’s included in an enterprise SEO audit?

While we customise audits to each business’s needs, some of the things included are technical SEO analyses. This looks at site architecture, crawlability and indexability, site speed and performance, HTTPS and security and mobile friendliness. Content evaluations review all existing content and analyse keyword strategy. Elements of on-page SEO include internal linking and schema markup. Off-page SEO includes analysing the backlink profile and link-building opportunities.

Is an enterprise SEO audit worth it?

SEO audits are worth the investment because they identify hidden issues and can improve search engine rankings. When we conduct enterprise SEO audits, we also include an assessment of user experience, which can improve engagement and conversion rates. The SEO landscape changes frequently, so regular audits ensure compliance with guidelines and best practices. Investing in an enterprise SEO audit also helps improve your digital marketing ROI.

How often should an enterprise SEO audit be conducted?

The recommendation is to audit enterprise websites at least once a year or whenever significant changes are made. Regular audits help maintain SEO health and adapt to changes in search engine algorithms.

Elevate Your Enterprise Website Performance

Investing in a comprehensive enterprise SEO audit can transform your site’s visibility, user experience and success overall. Our expert team will uncover and fix critical errors, optimise your content and implement advanced strategies. 

We’re here as a leading enterprise SEO agency and provider of enterprise SEO services to help you unlock achievable, sustainable growth, so contact us to take your SEO strategy to the next level.