How to Perform an Enterprise SEO Audit: 20 Steps to Take

An enterprise SEO audit is ideal for bigger websites that have more than 1,000 webpages. This process gives you a detailed breakdown of what your website needs to improve if you want to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Performing an audit is an involved, step-by-step process. It’s best done with a checklist, whose items, such as mobile friendliness and website speed, you can cross off as you go along.

Case studies prove that conducting SEO audits leads to higher Google rankings and website performance.

What Is an Enterprise SEO Audit?

An enterprise SEO audit is a review of various, crucial factors on a large organization’s website to ensure that the website is functioning as optimally as possible for organic search and the user experience.

A pair of hands holding pencils in front of two laptops, as part of an enterprise SEO audit.

Being SEO compliant is vital to increasing your business’ revenue.

SEO Tools to Use

SEO and analytics tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and Semrush are helpful in providing you with more data and insight into your website during this process.

Benefits of an Enterprise SEO Audit

Performing an audit like this provides numerous benefits like greater organic traffic, more brand awareness, and increased on-site conversions. Even if you have decent name recognition as an enterprise-level company, you can always benefit from more leads and customers finding you through organic search.

How to Do an Enterprise SEO Audit in 20 Steps

Follow along with these steps to conduct a thorough SEO audit for any enterprise-level website.

Step 1: Identify the Goals of Your Audit

Not all enterprise SEO audits will have the exact same goal. That said, here are some common goals of an SEO audit:

Evaluating the current performance of the website
Identifying technical issues
Assessing content quality and relevance
Analyzing the backlink profile
Monitoring competition
Improving user experience
New business sectors or verticals you may want to move into

Once you’re clear on your goals, you can start in earnest on the audit itself.

Step 2: Target Appropriate Keywords

What keywords is your enterprise website ranking for? Is it ranking for the right keywords that your customers are searching for online? What additional keywords do you want to rank for and for what specific webpages?

All these questions need to be addressed in an enterprise SEO audit.

You can also check whether your current webpages are experiencing SERP ranking drops that lead to lower organic traffic or keyword cannibalization, which occurs when two webpages compete for the same keywords, thusly lowering their respective ranking opportunities.

Tools like Semrush are ideal for helping you determine the keywords you’re ranking for, which new ones you want to rank for, and any issues with ranking challenges.

Step 3: Use Keywords Smartly on Your Website

Each webpage on your enterprise website needs to be well-optimized for specific keywords you know your customers are searching for online. As an enterprise, you’re likely using more short-tail keywords to attract broader, more general searches to your website. It’s a good idea to also optimize for long-tail keywords, which have lower search volume and traffic potential but have stronger conversion rates due to the more specific intent behind the searches.

An infographic describing where to insert keywords on a webpage.

Also ensure that you’re not keyword-stuffing each webpage but that you’re using keywords sparingly. According to Ahrefs, don’t use a keyword density higher than 2%. For instance, if you write 1000 words, don’t use your keyword more than 20 times.

At the same time, Search Engine Journal concludes that keyword density isn’t a ranking factor. However, it’s a good standard to at least include your keyword in your page title, meta description, first paragraph, and then a few times throughout the body copy.

Step 4: Ensure That Your Pages Are Properly Indexed

A vital part of your enterprise SEO audit is to ensure that all your pages are properly indexed by Google, so that they can be crawled and shown on the SERPs. To do this, you can use Google Search Console, a free tool provided by Google.

Verify your website with Google Search Console and then submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website, making it easier for Google to find and index them. Once the sitemap is submitted, Google will then start crawling and indexing your pages. You can also manually submit pages for indexing.

It's important to regularly check Google Search Console to ensure that all your pages are being properly indexed. If you notice any issues with indexing, you can use the tool to troubleshoot and fix the problems.

By ensuring that all your pages are properly indexed, you increase the likelihood of them showing up in search results, driving more organic traffic to your website.

Step 5: Make URLs SEO-Friendly

URLs are an important part of SEO. Sometimes overlooked, they can contribute to your webpages being found on organic search with greater visibility. Plus, they are essential for the user experience, giving site visitors an accurate description of what content they can expect on the page itself.

The best practice is to include your exact main keyword or keyword phrase in the URL. Ensure your URL is no longer than five words, and use hyphens to separate words. You don’t have to include small words like the conjunction “and” or articles like “an.” Use only lowercase letters and no special characters.

Step 6: Check Your Title Tags

When conducting an enterprise SEO audit, it’s crucial to check your title tags. Title tags are an integral component of on-page SEO, playing a significant role in helping search engines understand the content on your website. They are also the first element that users see in the SERPs, making them essential for attracting clicks and driving organic traffic to your site. These don’t appear on your actual webpages though.

By checking your title tags during the audit, you ensure that they include the relevant keywords for the page and accurately describe the content on each page. This optimization can improve your website's visibility in search results and enhance the user experience by providing clear and informative titles for each page.

Conducting a comprehensive review of title tags can help identify any missing, duplicate, or poorly written tags that may be negatively impacting your SEO efforts. By addressing these issues, you align your title tags with your SEO strategy, improving your website's search engine rankings and driving more qualified traffic to your site.

Step 7: Check Your Meta Description Tags

Meta descriptions are the small snippets of text that you see in the SERPs under the title tags for each search result. They provide quick, catchy information that explains what content you’ll see if you click through to that search result. As such, they need to be persuasive to convince searchers to click through to your website.

Here are actionable takeaways when writing a meta description:

It should be less than 105 characters, so it doesn’t get cut off on mobile devices.
You need to include the primary and secondary keywords.
It should correctly reflect the content on the page.
It must not be a duplicate of an already existing meta description for another page.

A Google SERP simulator like Mangools helps you write a meta description in the right length to avoid issues with displaying the full snippet on mobile devices.

Step 8: Avoid Website Duplication

To avoid website duplication and keep your website SEO compliant, you need to clarify to Google that your enterprise website is unique. Some websites can be set up with different URLs like:

http://yourwebsite.com
http://www.yourwebsite.com
https://yourwebsite.com
https://www.yourwebsite.com

Google treats all of these versions of your website as different websites. Based on which URL you visit, if the browser doesn’t automatically redirect you to a uniform, single version, then you have work to do. Utilize 301 redirects to consolidate duplicate content by redirecting multiple URLs to a single, primary URL. This ensures that search engines recognize the authoritative version of the page and avoid indexing duplicate content.

Each page also needs one-of-a-kind, valuable content. This includes writing original product descriptions, blog posts, and about pages. Avoid copying content from other websites or from your own site.

You can also use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a webpage, especially if you have similar content across multiple URLs. This will help search engines understand which version of the page should be prioritized in search results.

Regularly monitoring and auditing your website for duplicate content is also essential. Utilize tools like Google Search Console to identify duplicate meta descriptions, title tags, and other content issues that could harm your site's SEO.

By implementing these strategies, you can effectively avoid website duplication and ensure that your site remains SEO compliant.

Step 9: Make Sure Your Headings Make Sense

There’s almost nothing worse than a bad user experience when visitors land on your website. Content that’s not organized well or doesn’t allow them to quickly pick up the important parts of your article, landing page, or service page won’t get repeat visits.

Headings and subheadings allow your visitors to efficiently understand what the content of any page will discuss. Write headings so that they accurately describe the paragraphs in each section of your page, allowing your readers to efficiently skim through your content and immediately decide if it’s relevant to them.

Also, get the hierarchy of headings correct, which are expressed in header tags:

H1 — This is the headline of your page, which acts as the title of the page. You only need one H1 per page.
H2 — The H2 tags are the main headings of your pages, which break your content up into smaller sections and give readers a strong idea of the content of each page.
H3 — H3 tags break up your sections into even more specific subsections.
H4 — The H4 tag is quite rare. Its purpose is to break up your subsections (H3s) into even greater detail. This occurs when your content is complicated and needs further breakdowns.

Step 10: Look After Your Internal Links

When conducting an enterprise SEO audit, it's important to be mindful of internal linking within the website. Internal linking plays a crucial role in helping search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of your website, as well as guiding users to relevant and related content. When evaluating internal linking as part of the audit, there are a few key things to consider.

Ensure that all important pages are interlinked, particularly those that are high priority in terms of SEO and conversion goals. This helps to distribute link authority throughout the site and improves the flow of organic traffic.

You particularly want to identify the pages on your site with the most PageRank. Tools like Semrush can help you find these when you use their Site Audit tool. Once you know which pages on your site have the most SEO authority, you can internally link to internal pages that don’t yet have sufficient links or page authority.

Additionally, be mindful of using descriptive anchor text that accurately reflects the content of the linked page, rather than relying on generic phrases like "click here" or "read more."

It's also important to check for any broken or redirected internal links, as these can cause issues for both users and search engines. Broken links can lead to a poor user experience and negatively impact crawlability and indexing, while excessive redirects can slow down page load times and cause ranking issues.

Step 11: Make Your Website Fast

One of the most integral elements of Google’s ranking factors is website speed because it relates strongly to the user experience on a webpage. Think of it: When the page you’re visiting takes a long time to load, you get impatient, frustrated, and then likely bounce, never to return.

According to Search Engine Journal, the page speed of a website is a confirmed ranking factor. So what can you do to increase your site speed?

During your SEO audit, use a tool like PageSpeed Insights to ascertain the speed of your site. If you fail, whether on desktop or mobile, PageSpeed Insights will let you know, along with what to fix. It provides information on crucial metrics like first contentful paint (when the first copy or image is painted) and others.

Finally, according to a study by Portent, to get the best website performance surrounding conversions, your pages need to load between 1 and 4 seconds.

Step 12. Make Your Website SEO-Friendly

SEO is the single-biggest game changer you can focus on if you want more organic traffic, leads, and customers who regularly visit you. As an enterprise, SEO is still just as crucial for you because there are always would-be customers who don’t yet know your brand. Being found on Google through organic search—via optimized articles and landing pages that your prospects discover when searching for keywords and questions—is a solid way of increasing your brand awareness.

Make your enterprise website SEO-friendly by running a site audit in tools like Semrush to identify broken links, duplicate pages, and webpages that aren’t getting any traffic.

Besides that, try the following:

Focus on mobile content marketing
Make your website fast
Work on earning more backlinks
Strive to get more earned media mentions

Write more product-led content and thought-leader articles on your blog

Step 13: Do a Backlink Audit

A backlink audit is a crucial step in an enterprise SEO audit, as it helps to evaluate the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your website. Backlinks are important for SEO as they signal to search engines the authority and relevance of a website.

By conducting a backlink audit, you can identify any toxic or spammy backlinks that may be harming your enterprise website's SEO performance. It also allows you to analyze the anchor text used in backlinks, identify potential opportunities for new backlinks, and understand the overall link profile of your website.

A backlink audit helps you to also ensure compliance with search engine guidelines and avoid any potential penalties for manipulative link building practices. It provides valuable insights into the website's backlink profile, which is essential for developing an effective SEO strategy.

Software like Semrush has a dedicated Backlink Audit tool, which gives you a detailed breakdown of your backlinks.

Step 14: Consider the Quality of Your Content

Is your content on your enterprise website at a high standard? Does it immediately answer your site visitors’ questions and address their pain points? Are you including information your competitors don’t have, like case studies, expert interviews, data and statistics, infographics, and downloadable templates?

If you’re not yet doing so, you may want to strongly consider incorporating that into your content going forward.

Readers and site visitors want content that benefits them, which they can’t get anywhere else. Search Engine Journal has a helpful article that consolidates some of Google’s definitions for what constitutes quality content. This includes concepts like writing for users instead of search engines, maintaining a positive website and author reputation, and demonstrating expertise.

Step 15: Optimize Your Images

Optimizing images is important. First, optimized images improve the loading time of a website, which is crucial for user experience and search engine rankings. Slow loading times can lead to higher bounce rates and lower conversions, so it's essential to ensure that images are not causing any unnecessary delays.

A Google analysis of 11 million mobile landing pages concluded that longer page load times correlate with higher bounce rates. For example, as page load time increases to 3 seconds from 1 second, the chance of a bounce jumps by 32%; as page load time increases to 10 seconds from 1 second, the chance of a bounce skyrockets by 123%.

Infographic describing the best image resizers.

Additionally, optimized images can help reduce the overall file size of a website, saving server space and bandwidth. This is particularly important for mobile users who may have slower internet connections. By reducing the size of images without sacrificing quality, you can create a more efficient and responsive website.

Use tools like TinyPNG and ShortPixel to quickly reduce the size of your images on your enterprise website.

Optimized images can also improve SEO by including relevant keywords in the file names and alt tags, which can help improve search engine rankings and make the website more discoverable.

Step 16: Manage 4XX Status Codes Properly

What are status codes? They’re 3-digit numbers describing the status of a webpage. If your page starts with a “4,” it reveals either a broken page or a client error. A page that starts with a “4” is also a 4XX status code, such as when a page displays a 404. In cases like this, the page could’ve been moved, or the URL is incorrect.

No matter if the page was getting a lot of organic traffic or not, you should always fix a 4XX status code as soon as possible, if you encounter it during your enterprise SEO audit. Doing so ensures that the user experience of your site visitors will continue to be good, instead of having them running into broken pages to deal with during navigation.

Step 17: Double-Check Robots.txt Files

Managing robots.txt files is crucial for controlling which parts of a website can be accessed and crawled by search engine bots. This step involves reviewing the robots.txt file, which is a text file located in the root directory of a website, to ensure that it’s properly configured to allow search engines to index important pages and exclude irrelevant or sensitive areas.

During the audit, check for any errors or misconfigurations in the robots.txt file that may be blocking search engine access to important content, such as product pages or key information. It’s also important to make sure that any sections that should not be indexed, such as duplicate content or thin pages, are properly blocked.

Managing robots.txt files in the context of an enterprise SEO audit also involves collaborating with your IT or development team to implement any necessary changes and ensure that the file is optimized for search engine visibility and crawlability.

Note that, if you want to block sensitive information from appearing on Google, go with password protection or a noindex directive instead of using robots.txt files. According to Google’s Robots.txt Introduction and Guide, robots.txt files aren’t a means to keep pages out of Google.

Step 18: Manage Your Sitemap Well

Your XML sitemap makes it easy for search engine’s crawlers to locate specific pages on your enterprise site and then index them accordingly. No audit is complete without ascertaining if your sitemap is accurate and reflects the latest structure of your website.

Since an enterprise website is bound to have hundreds and even thousands of pages, there’s a high risk that some of them will fail to get indexed properly by Google. That’s why it’s doubly important that your sitemap is accurate, up-to-date, and submitted to the search engine.

Step 19: Make Your Website Secure

Ensuring that your website is secure is integral to an enterprise SEO audit. A secure website is essential for protecting the sensitive information of your users, such as personal details, payment information, and login credentials. If your website is not secure, it can be vulnerable to hackers and cyberattacks, leading to data breaches and damage to your company's reputation.

Search engines like Google prioritize secure websites in their search rankings. Websites with HTTPS encryption are favored in search results, meaning that a secure website can positively impact your SEO performance.

From a design and development perspective, a secure website contributes to a positive user experience, which in turn can improve your website's overall performance and engagement metrics. Visitors are more likely to stay and interact with a website that they trust to be safe and secure. To wit, according to website security leader Sitelock, more secure websites positively impact conversion rates since non-secure websites dissuade visitors from staying and transacting.

Step 20: Incorporate Structured Data

Structured data is helpful because it offers Google more of an indication about your website’s content. Structured data comes in many forms, but you can describe it through something called Schema markup.

Infographic showing different kinds of Google structured data features for rich results on the web.

There are 30 categories of structured data that Google search supports, according to Google Search Central. A few of them include:

Articles
Podcasts
Videos
Datasets

By adding structured data to specific pages, you increase your chances of getting your content to appear in rich result in Google search. As a result, this can increase your clickthrough rate and organic traffic.

Start Your Enterprise SEO Audit Today

Now you have all the information you need to move forward with your audit. An enterprise SEO audit can be a time-intensive, prolonged process if you do it carefully, which you must. Since enterprises have huge websites, it takes a while to go through each page. Speed is not the issue here. Rather, it’s making sure that each page is performing well in the broader goal of bringing more traffic to your website and raising its rankings in the SERPs.

If you’re in need of a content marketing agency to partner with for your SEO audit, then reach out to us now. Contact The Glorious Company today for a consultation and estimate.

Any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below.

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