Enterprises can have huge websites.
Thousands of pages.
Thousands of problems.
And thousands of SEO opportunities.
Though similar, it’s very different from a standard SEO audit. It deserves a different approach.
For a small audit, you can look at the page yourself.
Get a checklist and go for it. But at a large scale, this isn’t practical. You need a different approach.
You need an approach that works at scale for Enterprise SEO.
An approach that ignores the small problems and attacks the problems that really move the needle.
What is an Enterprise SEO Audit?
An enterprise SEO audit is a review of an enterprise's website from a content and technical SEO standpoint.
The goal is to find any problems that may be holding an SEO strategy back from success.
Enterprise SEO Audit vs SEO Audits
Both enterprise and “standard” SEO audits are theoretically the same.
The only difference is the size of the audit.
A “standard” SEO audit order is for the small “mum and pop” website, a website with a few hundred pages that can be manually reviewed.
An enterprise SEO audit, however, is for a much bigger website.
Think about tens of thousands of pages (maybe even millions).
Aka, too many pages to review manually.
To complete an enterprise SEO audit, you need several teams and different types of enterprise SEO tools.
You can’t do it alone. It’s too much work.
6 Steps to Conducting an Enterprise SEO Audit
When performing an enterprise SEO audit, you need a different approach. This approach looks like the following:
Identify Pain Points
First, you need to identify pain points.
As it’s an enterprise, this usually means talking to the stakeholders and upper management.
While talking to them, identify why they want the audit. For the most part, it’ll be a very specific problem.
For example:
- Increase organic CTR by “X” percentage.
- Lower the website’s bounce rate by an “X” percentage.
- Increase website LCP by “X” amount.
These are just examples. However, the main goal is to understand what the purpose of the audit is.
Once you understand what the purpose is, the process is much easier.
You can then ignore a lot of “fluff” and focus on what matters the most.
Segment the Website
Once you understand the pain points, you may want to segment the website. The area you segment, of course, should relate to the pain point.
For example, let’s say the enterprise has multiple languages on its website. English, French, and Dutch. And their goal is to increase organic CTR on their French blog pages.
In that case, it'd be a waste of time and resources to look at the English and Dutch pages. You can remove them from the audit. You can also remove all pages that aren’t blog posts.
By doing this, you’re only left with French blog pages. The key area you need to audit to strategise to increase CTR.
Determine Audit Scope
If an enterprise website needs an audit, you don’t want to perform a full audit (unless you really need to).
It’ll take too much time and resources.
Because of this, you need to decide on the audit type. There are many different audits. This typically includes the following:
|
Audit Type |
When to Use |
Key Actions |
|
General SEO Audit |
When identifying broad SEO issues and opportunities for overall website performance improvement |
Run a site crawl, check for traffic drops, identify duplicates, ensure mobile-friendliness, check Core Web Vitals. |
|
Content Audit |
When assessing the effectiveness of content in driving organic traffic and conversions |
Analyse page traffic, check backlinks, ensure crawlability, assess if the content aligns with SEO goals. |
|
Technical SEO Audit |
When diagnosing site health and functionality for search engine indexing and crawling |
Check indexing, reclaim lost links, improve internal links, add schema, and monitor Core Web Vitals. |
|
Competitor Analysis |
When determining competitive weaknesses and uncovering new SEO opportunities |
Analyse competitor traffic, content gaps, featured snippets, and backlink strategies. |
|
Link Audit |
When assessing link quality and identifying harmful links |
Review backlink profiles, identify spammy links, reclaim lost authority by fixing broken links. |
|
Internal Linking Audit |
When improving site structure and SEO authority distribution |
Plan internal linking structure, fix broken internal links, identify orphan pages, and improve internal link opportunities. |
|
Local SEO Audit |
For businesses targeting local markets, especially with physical locations |
Focus on Google Business Profile optimisation, NAP citations, reviews, and local on-page SEO. |
Conduct Specific SEO Audits
By now, you should know the enterprise's pain points, how you’ll segment the website, and the type of audit you’ll use.
You’ll now need to perform the audit.
How you’ll do that depends on the audit.
However, almost 100% of the time, you'll use a tool or selection of tools to perform the audit.
Use Tools to Visualise Data
It can be difficult for those who aren't SEOs to understand SEO terminology and data.
To make this easier, you can use tools to visualise the data. This is much easier to comprehend.
Again, the tool you use will depend on the audit. However, it’ll most likely be something like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, etc.
Put Together Deliverables and Reports
After conducting the audit and collecting the data, you can deliver the audit results to your customer, boss, CEO, or whoever it may be through an enterprise SEO report.
Because it’s an enterprise, don’t deliver anything and everything. Be very specific. Understand that the changes can be resourceful and that there are limited resources.
Ideally, you should highlight 5 to 10 of the main issues. You can then tie these issues to their overall goal.
For instance, the audit might have exposed large image files if the goal is to increase the LCP speed. In this case, you’ll suggest how many large image files are on the website.
You can even go as far as showcasing the enterprise projections of how your recommended fixtures will impact their SEO/goals.
Common Enterprise SEO Audit Problems
When performing an Enterprise SEO audit, problems can arise. The most typical issues are the following:
Failure to Segment Website
Firstly, most people fail to segment a website. As a result, they audit the entire website instead of dividing the site into management sections for auditing.
Without question, this works for a “standard” website—however, not so much for a website with hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of pages.
Auditing Too Much Data
Similar to segmentation, a lot of auditors audit too much data. The more simple, the better. It’s far too easy to get lost in the data.
If you have a pain point or a goal, focus on it. Don’t audit everything—only audit areas that have the potential to improve your SEO performance based on a specific goal.
Auditing too Infrequently or Frequently
Additionally, don’t audit too much or too little. Ideally, you should perform a comprehensive audit every 6 to 12 months. This seems to be the sweet spot.
If a significant problem arises, you may want to audit immediately.
You can then identify the issue and move forward. However, other than that, every 6 to 12 months is a good enough time to wait between audits.
Not Prioritising Opportunities
When performing an audit, you’ll find a lot of issues. And though it can be tempting, you don’t want to fix all the problems.
Simply put, some problems are worth worrying about while others aren’t. It depends on their significance and the enterprise website's SEO goals.
Be conscious of trends in enterprise SEO, there may be new opportunities in updates to search results or new search engines to contend with.
Try to prioritise the opportunities. It’ll increase your efficiency and reduce the resources required to solve SEO opportunities.
Enterprise SEO Audit Tools
There are many different SEO auditing tools for enterprises. Some of the most popular options consist of the following:
|
Tool |
Purpose |
Best For |
|
Monitors search performance, indexes issues, and crawl errors. |
Diagnosing indexing and crawlability issues, optimising mobile usability. |
|
|
Offers comprehensive site audits, backlink analysis, and keyword tracking. |
Identifying technical SEO issues (broken links, duplicates), analysing backlinks, tracking keywords. |
|
|
Provides site audits, competitive research, and keyword performance tracking. |
Conducting full technical SEO audits, keyword tracking, competitor research. |
|
|
Crawls websites to identify broken links, duplicate content, and errors. |
Deep technical SEO audits, identifying crawlability issues. Can be paired with Google Analytics and PageSpeed Insights for enhanced analysis. |
|
|
Tracks website traffic and user behaviour. |
Understanding user engagement, tracking traffic sources, and identifying trends. |
|
|
Analyses page speed and provides Core Web Vitals data for optimisation. |
Improving page load speed, optimising Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) for both mobile and desktop users. |
Final Word
After reading the above, you should know how to conduct an enterprise SEO audit.
The process itself can be performed in six steps:
- Identify pain points
- Segment the website
- Determine the scope of the audit
- Conduct the specific SEO audit
- Use tools to visualise data
- Put together deliverables and reports
By following these six steps, you will know the problem, audit the problem, and come up with actionable solutions that require minimal resources.
Strapped for time, we can help you with our Enterprise SEO services, we've got the team that can help you deal with scale!
