Before we get into the details, an enterprise SEO audit is essentially a large-scale SEO assessment.
The website is usually quite large, with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pages.
For more giant corporations or well-funded startups, another option is available. For instance, we’ve worked with clients that I’d classify as an enterprise, yet their website is still relatively young in Google’s view.
Is there a difference between a B2B and a B2C audit?
In a nutshell, yes and no. A B2B audit or analysis usually involves content-driven websites, whereas a B2C audit or accounting usually consists of both content and an eCommerce store.
SEO Audits for Businesses at the Enterprise Level:
When discussing an audit with a client of any level, you must make the potential gain.
After all, no one at the top of an organization cares about or understands an SEO audit; they’re more concerned with the cost per lead, traffic potential, and other metrics. Higher-ups are usually more concerned with data-driven information.
As a result, we make our Audits’ overall value and basic expectations very obvious.
We believed it would be beneficial to break down our general audit procedure for both aspiring SEO leads and future clients.
For scalability, focus on easy wins:
In almost every SEO situation, quick wins within your audit should be a top focus in your organization.
This accomplishes several goals:
- The digital marketing team that hired you will be relieved to learn that your services, research, and audit recommendations are effective.
- You’ll gain developer trust; developers will execute your SEO recommendations and adjustments at an enterprise-level more often than not. They must be on your side.
- You make everyone around you look good, and your work impacts the individuals who hired you in the first place.
Custom audits only, no audit tool or similar auto-generated technology:
We frequently take offense when lower-level SEO managers (i.e., firms who aren’t well-versed in SEO) use your chosen SEO tool for assistance or generate a large-scale report for your assessment.
The audit report may offer some recommendations, but it is unrealistic to expect them to “fix a problem” and remove all of your search engine blockages.
Whether it’s a startup or an enterprise-level website, every investigation and auditing must be performed by a skilled technical SEO specialist.
It would help if you went down several rabbit holes within your audit until you uncover the source of a website’s troubles. Artificial intelligence, or whatever programming language you want to use, is still a long way off.
SEO Problems To Include In Your Audit:
It’s generally a good idea to write out the client’s audit objectives. Increasing organic traffic from search engines is a bit hazy, so you might have to dive deeper into what your customers desire.
Typically, you’ll require pre-audit data such as
- We’d like to outrank the competition, which is XYZ websites;
- These portions of our website are currently suffering to attract search engine traffic.
- Our material will not update in the search results after we publish it because some regions of our website will not index, or the index rate will be too low.
- We redesigned our website in JavaScript, and our traffic plummeted • and so forth.
Frequently, this results in a happier end client.
Focus on Problems That Have Scalability:
It would help if you prioritized audit topics that can positively impact sitewide while identifying the clients’ needs.
In other words, in your analysis, focus on “must-haves” rather than “good to have.”
You can mention minor issues in a report, but marketing teams are frequently under pressure and must concentrate on issues that move results forward.
Libraries for JavaScript:
In Enterprise SEO, this is an essential topic that is generally misunderstood. Most SEOs aren’t developers, which puts them at a significant disadvantage in the company.
Different Templates On A Enterprise Audit Website:
A website or eCommerce store will typically have a few different layouts for Enterprise SEO.
For example, all blog entries may have one or two layouts, and eCommerce category pages may have one or more themes used across the site.
Identifying the various website templates is a great place to begin. If you can locate frequent issues preventing search traffic from increasing, their web development team can usually provide a solution sitewide.
Here are a few things to keep your eyes peeled for:
Page loading time:
The speed of each of these templates is arguably the first and most evident consideration. You’ll likely be able to figure out what’s holding the page back.
I feel there is a point of diminishing returns, which means that focusing on speed will no longer bring any further SEO benefit, though dialogues may be a different story.
However, I was surprised to find that, at the enterprise level, websites are more feature-focused than performance-focused. That is to say, based on our research, their websites are frequently slow.
The Essentials of the Internet:
We’ll usually incorporate Core Web Vitals findings during the speed phase of the enterprise audit.
In reality, we’re primarily interested in what “Lighthouse” suggests. Lighthouse is a Google Chrome extension that is available for free.
CSS Optimization:
This is especially frequent with popular CMSs like WordPress, which is utilized by many businesses.