If you've ever managed a business website, then you know SEO can be a real challenge as you start to scale. There are typically a lot of boxes to check. You’re dealing with a mountain of data, and have a large number of pages to keep track of as you try to make improvements in your search rankings.
An SEO audit helps businesses to bring together web development and marketing teams to better understand how certain changes can or currently are impacting site visibility and user engagement. But before you start digging into the details, you need a clear plan laid out.
The good news is that there are proven strategies you can follow to make sure your enterprise SEO audit gives you the information you need to make wise choices for your business. Below, we’ll walk you through the core element of planning and executing an SEO audit for your company website while mentioning some of the most commonly used tools to help you achieve success.
Establishing the Audit Scope
Before you get lost in the weeds of your site’s SEO, you’ll need a plan for thorough evaluation. This sets the stage for your entire audit. It keeps the process laser-focused and efficient while making sure it can provide actual insights that will help the company reach its goals.
It’s also important to talk to people from different teams during this process. Marketing, sales, product design, and customer service can all benefit from evaluating different elements of a website.
By bringing all these different viewpoints together, you'll get a crystal-clear picture of where your website stands today and where you want it to be. Once you’ve done this, it’s time to get to work defining the actual scope of your audit.
Audit scopes are broken down into categories:
- General SEO: This is a basic routine maintenance check on your website. It captures the high-level SEO value a site currently has. It considers your website's architecture, if search engine crawlers can access your pages, and how often and the way you use certain keywords.
- Content Audit: This takes a good look at what you've already got on your website - your blog posts, articles, landing pages, and everything in between. This audit helps to answer important questions. Is the content still accurate? Does it actually provide value to the people visiting your site? Is the information addressing search intent?
- Technical SEO: At this point, you are looking under the hood of the website. You want to see things like the performance of the loading speed of your pages, how well the mobile version of your site functions, and if search engines have easy access to everything published on your site.
- Competitor Analysis: This looks at how your site performs in relation to other competitors within the industry and their rankings on search engines. It's a good way to know what they do right and where you capitalize on their shortcomings.
- Link Audit: This audit evaluates the links directed to your website from other sites. The objective is to check the reputation of the sites providing the link back and avoid links from low-quality or questionable sources. The primary goal should be to keep the link authority of the website as high as possible over time.
- Local SEO Audit: This makes sure your business comes up when online searches are made in your area. It looks at how well your Google Business Profile is set up, whether your business name, address, and phone number are used consistently online, and how often your business is discussed on other local business websites
Tools for Conducting an Enterprise SEO Audit
Choosing the right tools to conduct your search engine optimization audits is extremely important as it will influence how much information you collect and how helpful it will be for making impactful site changes. However, each tool has various functionalities and capabilities to consider.
Below is a breakdown of commonly used tools categorized based on their primary function:
SEO Crawling and Site Structure Analysis
- Google Search Console: Google Search Console helps site owners understand how Google sees the website and gives feedback in regard to crawl errors, sitemap, and mobile usability issues. You're able to access performance reports that help understand the exact search queries that make your site show up in the search results and analyze all the site's impressions, clicks, and average ranking position. This information helps in effective keyword optimization and content improvement, while also allowing you to correct potentially hidden crawling issues holding back your SEO efforts.
- Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog is capable of performing detailed on-site SEO audits by tracing how search engine robots crawl a website. It analyzes a particular URL and provides insights on broken links, duplicate page titles, and missing image alt texts. The tool's custom search feature makes it possible to search for certain strings of texts or code, allowing for hidden problems to come to the surface for development teams. It also integrates with Google Analytics and Search Console for more advanced functionality.
- Semrush: Semrush provides an overview of a website’s performance metrics from all angles. It offers detailed analysis on technical SEO, such as listing issues, determining if the site is crawlable, checking for duplicate content, and making sure HTTPS has been implemented correctly. The tool's backlink analytics feature also provides full access to a site’s link profile to help site owners identify toxic backlinks and reveal competitors’ link profile.
- Ahrefs: Ahrefs is a popular tool for a site analysis by meticulously analyzing backlinks, referring domains, anchor text distribution, link profiles, and more. It also analyzes keywords using a comprehensive keyword explorer tool, which provides supplemental information about search volume, competition, and estimated click rates. This assists the site owner in choosing content that is relevant to a specific industry, helping to increase their organic web traffic volumes.
- Lumar (DeepCrawl): Lumar helps brands identify more intricate site architecture issues, such as orphaned pages, redirect chains, and canonicalization problems. The platform's segmentation feature enables users to analyze specific sections of a website, isolating issues within particular directories or page types. Helpful data visualization features also offer a clear representation of complex crawl data, aiding in the identification of important website visitor trends.
Analytics and Performance Tracking
Tracking website performance and analytics is also critical. Integrating the right analytical tools into the SEO audit process ensures that optimization efforts are aligned with user needs and business objectives.
A couple good options for achieving this include:
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Google Analytics 4 (GA4) provides a holistic presentation of all the interactions a user has with a website or application. It seamlessly uses both a session and event scope analysis which provides much deeper data insights. Through GA4's "Exploration" feature, users can do a custom analysis of individual web sessions while seeing if there are any potential roadblocks to a successful conversion. The platform also incorporates machine learning features that provide predictive metrics, like the likelihood of visitor bounces or shopping cart abandonment, which can be vital for executing various site optimizations.
- Microsoft Clarity: Microsoft Clarity provides access to session recordings along with heatmaps to visually summarize user behavior on site. It shows how users interact with various website features and where they experience pain points. Heatmaps illustrate users' clicks, scrolling patterns, and the different site paths they take, helping to show what users pay most attention to and what escapes their interest. An Insights dashboard is also provided that captures useful metrics on user behaviors, such as dead clicks and rage clicks. These help development teams to better understand usability concerns that may affect SEO or conversion rates.
Competitor and Keyword Research
Choosing the right tools for competitor and keyword research is important for gathering accurate and actionable data. Integrating these tools into the audit process ensures that SEO efforts are aligned with market demands and helps to stay competitive.
Below are some options worth exploring:
- BrightEdge: BrightEdge is focused on enterprise-level keyword and competition research. The all-in-one SEO platform has a feature that offers detailed keyword intelligence, including search volume and keyword ranking distribution, as well as overall competition scores. It also suggests various content optimization strategies while providing customizable dashboards and reports for tracking SEO performance and ROI.
- WebFX: WebFX offers a set of SEO tools that specialize in keyword research, competitor research, and metrics analysis. Its competitive analysis functionalities enable simple website comparisons of domain authority, backlink proficiencies, and organic traffic volume. The tools also help site owners remediate problems such as absent metadata, broken hyperlinks, and sluggish page load speed.
Technical SEO Audit Steps
Indexability and Crawling
Ensure that your site is readily accessible to search engines by checking if your robots.txt file is mistakenly blocking important pages. Fix the Google Search Console indexing errors so that the pages can show up on the search results. You'll also need an up-to-date sitemap to help crawlers navigate your pages with ease.
Mobile Optimization
Make it a point to check for mobile usability problems using various online mobility performance tools. Improve the overall experience users have on mobile devices by using a responsive design and ensuring the site has fast page load speed and easy-to-use navigation. You should also focus on reducing file sizes of images and enable client-side caching to improve mobile responsiveness.
Page Speed Optimization
User experience and search optimization rely greatly on loading speeds. There are tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals which can highlight parts of your site that may be lagging behind in this area. Take the time to implement browser caching and image compression, as well as reduce the amount of HTTP requests your site receives for better speed optimization.
Structured Data and Schema Markup
Structured snippets and schema markup make it easier for search engines to populate your page and also enable rich snippets. Check your markup with schema validation tools to ensure that they are correctly read and shown in SERPs. Validation with Google’s Rich Results Test can help validate that your site is serving rich snippets and flag any errors that need to be addressed.
Security & HTTPS Implementation
To ensure uninterrupted secure connections, validate your SSL certificate’s validity and expiration periods. Implement HTTPS redirect rules by ensuring all website visits use a tunneling through secure channels. Use tools such as “Why No Padlock?” to identify mixed content problems, such as insecure scripts and images, and resolve them as soon as possible.
Content and On-Page SEO Audit Steps
Assessing Content Quality
Content quality analysis helps you identify thin or stale content that's not contributing much to users' needs. Matching your content with search intent allows you to make sure it addresses the exact search intent of your target audience. It also provides you with an opportunity to better position keywords for optimizing search engine visibility.
Metadata Optimization
Fine-tuning meta elements like title tags, page descriptions, and content headers increases the chances of increased visibility and click rates on search engines. A title tag should reflect the keyword for the page and clearly outline what the page contains. Meta descriptions should use a relevant short statement that helps motivate the target audience to explore them further. You'll also want to ensure your content headers follow a structural order and help summarize key points to improve readability and retention.
Internal Linking Strategy
Creating an internal linking structure ensures the smooth interconnectivity of web pages, leading to more seamless navigation throughout the site. Even distribution of internal links, especially across orphaned content pages, helps to better locate important information and positively contributes to the site's structure. However, the internal links provided should be relevant to each other so that users don’t have to navigate through several irrelevant pages.
Duplicate Content Issues
Resolving duplicate content issues is critical to avoid ranking penalties on search engines. Adding canonical tags to consolidate content allows you to set the preferred version of a page to be indexed whenever there are several versions available. This will make sure search engines don't try to index the duplicated content, while always making sure the correct pages are the ones that contribute to rankings.
Additional SEO Audit Considerations
Backlink and Link Profile Analysis
- Evaluating Backlink Quality: Understanding the value of your backlinks is important when trying to evaluate sudden rises or drops in search rankings. Things that contribute to ranking drops can be lower quality links that come from spammy or fake websites. These hurt the reputation of your website and can set your SEO efforts back. By working to eliminate low-quality backlinks, you'll help to improve the credibility of the site and avoid loss in web traffic.
- Internal Link Optimization: You'll want to search for any broken website links on your site that lead to a 404 page error. This interrupts the user navigation experience and makes crawling and indexing the webpage impossible. It's important to evaluate all links on your site to make sure there are no page loading errors.
- Competitor Link Analysis: Understanding the backlink profile of competitors gives you a preview into the types of referral sources other businesses are targeting. This helps you to know the potential sites where you can build new backlinks. Measuring competitor backlinks and looking for the total number of referring domains, the quality of the links attained from them, and the anchor texts used are all helpful insights that can be used in your own SEO campaigns.
Local and Global SEO
- Local Audits: Making a site more visible in a local search requires managing various local ranking factors. Ensuring accurate business information, including contact details and business hours, is important when building business profiles online. Managing NAP citations and local listings across different platforms is also important as it helps search engines to feel more confident when providing users with local business suggestions. Encouraging and responding to customer reviews also helps to boost local ranking signals and is another way to increase visibility.
- International Audits: When it comes to international audiences, adding hreflang tags is important for communicating the language and regional differences to search engine crawlers. These tags make sure the correct version of a webpage is shown in accordance with the user's language and local area.
Get More From Your SEO Audit
Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit requires careful planning and execution. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you’ll make sure you’re getting more value out of the process while revealing important insights that can help you improve the search engine rankings of your site.