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24-Point Enterprise SEO Audit For Large Sites & Organizations

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24-Point Enterprise SEO Audit For Large Sites & Organizations

If your website is struggling to rank in search engine results pages, an enterprise SEO audit can help you identify why.

For any SEO provider or in-house marketer who wants to audit an enterprise website, these 24 items should be on your checklist before moving forward with any SEO campaign.

What Is An Enterprise SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is an evaluation of a website to identify issues preventing it from ranking in search engine results.

Enterprise SEO audits are focused primarily on large, enterprise websites, meaning those with hundreds to thousands of landing pages.

Why Perform An SEO Audit?

Auditing your website is the first step in developing a successful SEO strategy.

Why?

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a website can help you tailor your SEO campaigns accordingly.

Performing an audit also helps your team direct your time, resources, and budget to the optimizations that will have the greatest impact.

What To Include In Your Enterprise SEO Audit

Auditing a large website can be very demanding, with over 200+ ranking factors in Google’s algorithm.

So to run a more sufficient audit, separate your audit into five parts: content, backlinks, technical SEO, page experience, and industry-specific standards.

You will need to rely on SEO software tools to run your audit successfully.

SEO platforms like SearchAtlas, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and others are a must for auditing any large website.

Content

Are You Targeting The Right Keywords?

The foundation of all successful SEO is strategic keyword targeting.

Not only do your target keywords need to be relevant to your products and services, but they also need to be realistic goals for your website.

So before you analyze whether your enterprise website is properly optimized, make sure your keyword goals are indeed reachable.

It’s possible that your target keywords are too competitive, or that you’re not targeting keywords with high enough search volume or conversion potential.

You can utilize a keyword tracking tool to see what search terms your enterprise website is already ranking for and earning organic traffic from.

Screenshot from SearchAtlas, May 2022screenshot of a keyword tracking tool

Then, perform any necessary keyword research to find keywords that may be a better fit for your website.

Once you’ve ensured that improper keyword targeting is not the source of your poor SEO performance, you can move on through the remainder of your audit.

2. Do You Have SEO-Friendly URLs?

The URLs of your enterprise web pages should be unique, descriptive, short, and keyword-rich.

screenshot of a SERP result with a red box around the url Screenshot from Google, May 2022screenshot of a SERP result with a red box around the url

URLs are visible at the top of search results and can influence whether or not a user clicks through to the page.

Use hyphens between words to keep the URL paths readable and omit any unnecessary numbers.

3. Are Your Meta Tags Properly Optimized?

Google crawlers look to the title tags and meta descriptions to understand what your web content is about and its relevance to specific keywords.

Like URLs, these tags are also visible in the SERPs and influence whether or not a searcher clicks.

Your audit should include checking that your web page’s meta tags are unique and following SEO best practices.

Use a site auditor tool to identify the web pages to address to speed up the process.

screenshot of SearchAtlas site auditorScreenshot of SearchAtlas, May 2022screenshot of SearchAtlas site auditor

Make sure to check for:

  • Original and unique titles and meta descriptions for each web page.
  • Proper character length: 50-60 for title tags and 150-160 for meta descriptions.
  • Keyword or variation of target keyword including in both title and meta descriptions.

Google sometimes rewrites page titles and meta descriptions, but this only happens a small portion of the time.

Optimizing these meta tags is still an essential step in on-page SEO.

4. Is Your Content High-Quality And In-Depth?

Although content length is not a ranking factor, in-depth content often displays characteristics that Google likes, such as original insight, reporting, in-depth analysis, and comprehensive exploration of the topic.

There is no magic number when it comes to content length. Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines state that web pages should have a “satisfying” amount of content.

They also state:

“The amount of content necessary for the page to be satisfying depends on the topic and purpose of the page. A high quality page on a broad topic with a lot of available information will have more content than a high quality page on a narrower topic.”

Still not sure whether your content is long enough?

Look to your enterprise competitors who are already ranking and measure how long their content is compared to yours.

screenshot of word length comparison feature in SearchAtlasScreenshot of SearchAtlas, May 2022screenshot of word length comparison feature in SearchAtlas

Then, aim to have content equal to or more in-depth than theirs.

5. Are Your Landing Pages Internally Linking To Each Other?

Internal links help Google find and index your pages. They also communicate website hierarchy, relevance signals, topical breadth, and spread around your PageRank.

Make sure you evaluate whether or not your pages are leveraging an internal linking strategy. Also, take a close look at the anchor text used to link to other pages of your website.

screenshot of site auditor tool in SearchAtlasScreenshot of SearchAtlas, May 2022screenshot of site auditor tool in SearchAtlas

Your pages need to have internal links pointing to other pages, and be sure internal links are pointing to that page.

Otherwise, you will have orphan pages, meaning pages that Google cannot find and index because there is no linking pathway to them.

6. Does Your Content Show Expert Sourcing With External Links To Relevant Content?

Google also looks to external links to understand website content and the authority of websites.

External links should be only to relevant, authoritative sources, and your website links out to sites with higher Domain Authority scores than your own.

Otherwise, Google is less likely to trust your enterprise website if you appear to be keeping low-quality websites in your link neighborhood.

7. Are You Using Rich Media And Interactive Elements?

Google likes to see images, videos, and interactive elements like jump links on the page. These elements make content more engaging and easier to navigate.

However, if these elements slow down your page load times, they are counterproductive to your SEO efforts. That will be addressed in a later part of your audit.

8. Do Your Images Include Keyword-rich Alt Text?

Enterprise websites – particularly ecommerce sites – may feature thousands of images.

But because Google cannot see images, they rely on alt text to understand how those images relate to your web page content.

Your audit should include confirming that image alt text is not only present but descriptive and keyword-rich.

9. Are Your Pages Suffering From Keyword Cannibalization?

With hundreds to thousands of landing pages, there may be times when your landing pages are not only competing against your competitors but other landing pages on your website.

This is called keyword cannibalization and it happens when Google crawlers aren’t sure which page on your enterprise site is the most relevant.

Some tips for resolving keyword cannibalization:

  • Find another keyword and re-optimize one of the competing pages.
  • Consolidate the competing pages into one longer, in-depth page.
  • Use a 301 redirect to point to the higher-performing or higher-converting page.

Backlinks

10. Do You Have Fewer Backlinks Than Your Competitors?

Google’s #1 ranking factor still remains the same: Backlinks.

If your enterprise website is competing against well-known incumbents in your industry, it’s likely they have a robust backlink profile, making it difficult for your website to compete in the SERPs.

backlink report in AhrefsScreenshot from Ahrefs, May 2022backlink report in Ahrefs

You can use a backlink tool like Ahrefs to identify your competitor’s total backlinks and unique referring domains.

unique referring domains competitors in AhrefsScreenshot from Ahrefs, May 2022unique referring domains competitors in Ahrefs

If there is a significant gap in backlinks or referring domains, this is likely a source for fewer keyword rankings or lower-ranking positions.

Dedicate a significant portion of your SEO campaign to link building and digital PR if you want to outrank your competition.

11. Does Your Website Have Toxic Backlinks?

Although backlinks are important for improving site authority, the wrong type of backlinks can also harm a website.

If your website has toxic backlinks from spammy, low-quality websites, Google may suspect your enterprise website to be guilty of backlink manipulation.

Google has gotten better at recognizing low-quality links, and after their 2021 Link Spam Update, Google also claims to nullify spammy links and not count them against websites.

However, there may still be moments when toxic backlinks should be disavowed.

You will want to focus on identifying where those toxic links are coming from and take the necessary steps to create and submit a disavow file.

Some SEO software tools can identify toxic links and create disavow text for you.

screenshot of the generate disavow text feature in SearchAtlasScreenshot of SearchAtlas, May 2022screenshot of the generate disavow text feature in SearchAtlas

Disavowing the wrong way can actually harm your SEO performance, so if you are unfamiliar with this Google tool, make sure you seek the assistance of an SEO provider.

12. Is Your Anchor Text Distribution Diverse?

Google also looks to the anchor text of your backlinks to understand relevance and authority. Relevant anchor text is important, but not all webmasters will link to your pages in the same way.

If the majority of your anchor text is branded, that’s okay.

Look for too much exact-match anchor text or high CPC anchor text that Google crawlers may flag for suspected backlink manipulation.

anchor text distribution in SearchAtlas SEO softwareScreenshot of SearchAtlas, May 2022anchor text distribution in SearchAtlas SEO software

If your anchor text does not display a healthy level of diversity, design a link building campaign around earning links with anchor text that improves diversity and signals healthy backlink practices to Google.

Technical SEO

13. Have You Submitted An XML Sitemap And Did it Include The Right Pages?

Because enterprise websites have thousands of landing pages, one of the most common issues uncovered in enterprise SEO audits is related to search engine indexing.

That’s why generating and submitting an XML sitemap is important. It communicates your website hierarchy to search engine crawlers.

It also tells them which pages of your website are the most important to crawl regularly and index.

If your enterprise website adds new product pages or content to your website, you can also use your sitemap to show Google the new pages rather than wait for crawlers to discover them through internal links.

screenshot of Yoast SEO sitemap generatorScreenshot of Yoast SEO, May 2022screenshot of Yoast SEO sitemap generator

14. Have You Maxed Out Your Crawl Budget?

Google’s web crawlers will only spend so much time crawling your web pages, meaning your enterprise website may have pages that don’t end up in Google’s index.

Although improving your page speed and your site authority can lead to Google increasing your crawl budget, that takes time. So in the meantime, focus on making sure you’re using your crawl budget wisely.

If your audit uncovers essential pages that are not being indexed, your enterprise website may benefit from crawl budget optimization. You want your highest value, highest converting pages to end up in Google’s index.

15. Is Your Schema Markup Properly Setup?

A very powerful optimization that your enterprise website can utilize is schema markup.

If your enterprise website already includes schema on some of your pages, you will want to confirm that your schema is validated and eligible for rich results.

Screenshot of Google's rich results textScreenshot of Google, May 2022Screenshot of Google's rich results text

You can use Google’s rich result to test your pages that include schema markup to confirm they are properly validated but to be even more efficient, use your favorite site crawler to test all of your pages at once.

16. Do You Have Excessive Broken Links Or Redirects?

Over time, links naturally break as websites update their content or delete old pages.

It’s important to check your enterprise website to confirm your external and internal links are pointing to live pages.

Otherwise, it will appear to Google that your website is not well-maintained, and Google will be less likely to promote your web pages in the SERPs.

17. Do Similar Pages Include Canonical Tags?

Enterprise websites (particularly ecommerce sites) may have duplicate content that targets different regions or is programmatically built out.

If those pages don’t have canonical tags, they will look to Google as duplicate content.

It’s important to confirm that the best, most in-depth version of the page has a self-referential canonical tag. All of the similar pages include canonical tags that identify the master version of the page.

screenshot of canonical tag site audit in SearchAtlasScreenshot from SearchAtlas, May 2022screenshot of canonical tag site audit in SearchAtlas

A site auditor tool like SearchAtlas can confirm whether your canonical URLs are properly implemented and if Google crawlers understand which page to promote in the SERPs.

18. Does Your Multilingual Content Leverage Hreflang Tags?

For multilingual enterprise websites, hreflang tags can help you show the right language content to the right searchers.

This improves your relevance signals and can have a huge impact on your conversion rates.

However, it’s easy to make mistakes when implementing hreflang and canonical tags.

As a general rule, only add hreflang tags to your web pages with self-referencing canonicals – not duplicate copies of the page.

Page Experience

19. Do Your Pages Meet Google’s Core Web Vitals Standards?

If your pages do not meet Google’s Core Web Vitals standards, they are unlikely to rank.

Google knows that load times, responsiveness, and visual stability impact the quality of a user’s experience, and thus the quality of a web page and whether or not it’s rank-worthy.

list of Core Web Vitals metricsScreenshot of SearchAtlas, May 2022list of Core Web Vitals metrics

You can see your Core Web Vitals metrics in your Google Search Console account.

You can also use the free platform to validate any fixes and see whether or not they improve your CWV metrics.

Screenshot of Google Search Console Core Web Vitals report with a red box around the Validate Fix buttonScreenshot of Google Search Console, May 2022Screenshot of Google Search Console Core Web Vitals report with a red box around the Validate Fix button

20. Do Your Web Pages Include HTTP Or HTTPS Protocols?

A secure website is also essential to the quality of the user’s experience.

If your web pages are not utilizing HTTPS protocols, you are not providing users with a secure browsing experience.

As a result, Google is less likely to promote your pages.

screenshot of protocols distribution feature in SearchAtlas SEO softwareScreenshot of SearchAtlas, May 2022screenshot of protocols distribution feature in SearchAtlas SEO software

21. Are Your Mobile Pages Responsive And High-Performing?

The majority of searches now happen on mobile devices.

Also, with mobile-first indexing, Google predominantly uses mobile pages in its index.

It is also more likely to use your mobile pages when determining where to rank your pages compared to your competitors.

Some common mobile mistakes that occur include:

  • Unresponsive design.
  • Intrusive pop-ups.
  • Bad UI/UX elements like button size.
  • Unplayable or missing content.

Industry

22. Are You Considered A Your-Money-Your-Life (YMYL) Website?

If your enterprise website is considered a health, financial, legal, or other YMYL website, Google has extremely high standards for the content that it will promote to searchers.

Although this does not impact all enterprise websites, it’s important to know whether your website falls under this banner to make sure you meet Google’s specific standards for your YMYL industry.

23. Does Your Website Show High Levels of E-A-T?

Google wants to see that your content is relevant to users’ keywords.

It also wants to see that your website, as a whole, displays industry expertise.

E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trust. It’s hard to quantify, but some more tangible factors include:

  • In-depth, well-researched content (e.g. blogs, ebooks, long-form articles).
  • Expert authorship and sourcing (e.g. an author byline that shows industry-specific expertise and credentials).
  • A clear purpose and focus for each page.
  • Off-site reputation signals (e.g. an article in a reputable online publication that mentions or links to your website).

If you’re still not sure what E-A-T looks like in your industry, look to the top-ranking content of your competitors to see the topical depth, expertise, and sourcing, and model your content accordingly.

24. Does Your Website Have Strong Reputation Signals?

If your goal is to rank for branded searches, other authoritative websites may feature content about your brand competing with yours in the SERPs.

If your enterprise has a Wikipedia page or press in online publications with high Domain Authority, those digital locations may rank higher than your domain.

If this is the case, you may need to take a more unique approach to link building to improve the branded signals of your content.

Optimizations like schema can also help ensure that information about your brand is featured at the top of the SERP, particularly if those websites that mention your enterprise brand do so negatively.

Final Thoughts On Conducting Your Enterprise Audit

Sitewide audits can be daunting, but they are worth the time and effort to craft a tailored, custom SEO campaign strategy.

Make sure to leverage the best SEO software tools throughout your audit to speed up the process and ensure the most accurate evaluation of your website.

Once your audit is complete, you can easily prioritize those optimizations that will be the most impactful.

More resources:


Featured Image: Yuriy K/Shutterstock

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Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

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  • Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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