SEO
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can use a backlink tool like Ahrefs to identify your competitor’s total backlinks and unique referring domains.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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SEO
brightonSEO Live Blog
Hello everyone. It’s April again, so I’m back in Brighton for another two days of Being the introvert I am, my idea of fun isn’t hanging around our booth all day explaining we’ve run out of t-shirts (seriously, you need to be fast if you want swag!). So I decided to do something useful and live-blog the event instead.
Follow below for talk takeaways and (very) mildly humorous commentary. sun, sea, and SEO!
SEO
Google Further Postpones Third-Party Cookie Deprecation In Chrome
Google has again delayed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser. The latest postponement comes after ongoing challenges in reconciling feedback from industry stakeholders and regulators.
The announcement was made in Google and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) joint quarterly report on the Privacy Sandbox initiative, scheduled for release on April 26.
Chrome’s Third-Party Cookie Phaseout Pushed To 2025
Google states it “will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4” this year as planned.
Instead, the tech giant aims to begin deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome “starting early next year,” assuming an agreement can be reached with the CMA and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
The statement reads:
“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence, including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June.”
Continued Engagement With Regulators
Google reiterated its commitment to “engaging closely with the CMA and ICO” throughout the process and hopes to conclude discussions this year.
This marks the third delay to Google’s plan to deprecate third-party cookies, initially aiming for a Q3 2023 phaseout before pushing it back to late 2024.
The postponements reflect the challenges in transitioning away from cross-site user tracking while balancing privacy and advertiser interests.
Transition Period & Impact
In January, Chrome began restricting third-party cookie access for 1% of users globally. This percentage was expected to gradually increase until 100% of users were covered by Q3 2024.
However, the latest delay gives websites and services more time to migrate away from third-party cookie dependencies through Google’s limited “deprecation trials” program.
The trials offer temporary cookie access extensions until December 27, 2024, for non-advertising use cases that can demonstrate direct user impact and functional breakage.
While easing the transition, the trials have strict eligibility rules. Advertising-related services are ineligible, and origins matching known ad-related domains are rejected.
Google states the program aims to address functional issues rather than relieve general data collection inconveniences.
Publisher & Advertiser Implications
The repeated delays highlight the potential disruption for digital publishers and advertisers relying on third-party cookie tracking.
Industry groups have raised concerns that restricting cross-site tracking could push websites toward more opaque privacy-invasive practices.
However, privacy advocates view the phaseout as crucial in preventing covert user profiling across the web.
With the latest postponement, all parties have more time to prepare for the eventual loss of third-party cookies and adopt Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox APIs as replacements.
Featured Image: Novikov Aleksey/Shutterstock
SEO
How To Write ChatGPT Prompts To Get The Best Results
ChatGPT is a game changer in the field of SEO. This powerful language model can generate human-like content, making it an invaluable tool for SEO professionals.
However, the prompts you provide largely determine the quality of the output.
To unlock the full potential of ChatGPT and create content that resonates with your audience and search engines, writing effective prompts is crucial.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the art of writing prompts for ChatGPT, covering everything from basic techniques to advanced strategies for layering prompts and generating high-quality, SEO-friendly content.
Writing Prompts For ChatGPT
What Is A ChatGPT Prompt?
A ChatGPT prompt is an instruction or discussion topic a user provides for the ChatGPT AI model to respond to.
The prompt can be a question, statement, or any other stimulus to spark creativity, reflection, or engagement.
Users can use the prompt to generate ideas, share their thoughts, or start a conversation.
ChatGPT prompts are designed to be open-ended and can be customized based on the user’s preferences and interests.
How To Write Prompts For ChatGPT
Start by giving ChatGPT a writing prompt, such as, “Write a short story about a person who discovers they have a superpower.”
ChatGPT will then generate a response based on your prompt. Depending on the prompt’s complexity and the level of detail you requested, the answer may be a few sentences or several paragraphs long.
Use the ChatGPT-generated response as a starting point for your writing. You can take the ideas and concepts presented in the answer and expand upon them, adding your own unique spin to the story.
If you want to generate additional ideas, try asking ChatGPT follow-up questions related to your original prompt.
For example, you could ask, “What challenges might the person face in exploring their newfound superpower?” Or, “How might the person’s relationships with others be affected by their superpower?”
Remember that ChatGPT’s answers are generated by artificial intelligence and may not always be perfect or exactly what you want.
However, they can still be a great source of inspiration and help you start writing.
Must-Have GPTs Assistant
I recommend installing the WebBrowser Assistant created by the OpenAI Team. This tool allows you to add relevant Bing results to your ChatGPT prompts.
This assistant adds the first web results to your ChatGPT prompts for more accurate and up-to-date conversations.
It is very easy to install in only two clicks. (Click on Start Chat.)
For example, if I ask, “Who is Vincent Terrasi?,” ChatGPT has no answer.
With WebBrower Assistant, the assistant creates a new prompt with the first Bing results, and now ChatGPT knows who Vincent Terrasi is.
You can test other GPT assistants available in the GPTs search engine if you want to use Google results.
Master Reverse Prompt Engineering
ChatGPT can be an excellent tool for reverse engineering prompts because it generates natural and engaging responses to any given input.
By analyzing the prompts generated by ChatGPT, it is possible to gain insight into the model’s underlying thought processes and decision-making strategies.
One key benefit of using ChatGPT to reverse engineer prompts is that the model is highly transparent in its decision-making.
This means that the reasoning and logic behind each response can be traced, making it easier to understand how the model arrives at its conclusions.
Once you’ve done this a few times for different types of content, you’ll gain insight into crafting more effective prompts.
Prepare Your ChatGPT For Generating Prompts
First, activate the reverse prompt engineering.
- Type the following prompt: “Enable Reverse Prompt Engineering? By Reverse Prompt Engineering I mean creating a prompt from a given text.”
ChatGPT is now ready to generate your prompt. You can test the product description in a new chatbot session and evaluate the generated prompt.
- Type: “Create a very technical reverse prompt engineering template for a product description about iPhone 11.”
The result is amazing. You can test with a full text that you want to reproduce. Here is an example of a prompt for selling a Kindle on Amazon.
- Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {product), capture the writing style and the length of the text :
product =”
I tested it on an SEJ blog post. Enjoy the analysis – it is excellent.
- Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {text}, capture the tone and writing style of the {text} to include in the prompt :
text = all text coming from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-bard-training-data/478941/”
But be careful not to use ChatGPT to generate your texts. It is just a personal assistant.
Go Deeper
Prompts and examples for SEO:
- Keyword research and content ideas prompt: “Provide a list of 20 long-tail keyword ideas related to ‘local SEO strategies’ along with brief content topic descriptions for each keyword.”
- Optimizing content for featured snippets prompt: “Write a 40-50 word paragraph optimized for the query ‘what is the featured snippet in Google search’ that could potentially earn the featured snippet.”
- Creating meta descriptions prompt: “Draft a compelling meta description for the following blog post title: ’10 Technical SEO Factors You Can’t Ignore in 2024′.”
Important Considerations:
- Always Fact-Check: While ChatGPT can be a helpful tool, it’s crucial to remember that it may generate inaccurate or fabricated information. Always verify any facts, statistics, or quotes generated by ChatGPT before incorporating them into your content.
- Maintain Control and Creativity: Use ChatGPT as a tool to assist your writing, not replace it. Don’t rely on it to do your thinking or create content from scratch. Your unique perspective and creativity are essential for producing high-quality, engaging content.
- Iteration is Key: Refine and revise the outputs generated by ChatGPT to ensure they align with your voice, style, and intended message.
Additional Prompts for Rewording and SEO:
– Rewrite this sentence to be more concise and impactful.
– Suggest alternative phrasing for this section to improve clarity.
– Identify opportunities to incorporate relevant internal and external links.
– Analyze the keyword density and suggest improvements for better SEO.
Remember, while ChatGPT can be a valuable tool, it’s essential to use it responsibly and maintain control over your content creation process.
Experiment And Refine Your Prompting Techniques
Writing effective prompts for ChatGPT is an essential skill for any SEO professional who wants to harness the power of AI-generated content.
Hopefully, the insights and examples shared in this article can inspire you and help guide you to crafting stronger prompts that yield high-quality content.
Remember to experiment with layering prompts, iterating on the output, and continually refining your prompting techniques.
This will help you stay ahead of the curve in the ever-changing world of SEO.
More resources:
Featured Image: Tapati Rinchumrus/Shutterstock
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