Organic search is the lifeblood of any business looking to gain sustained traffic to its website. As a business leader, you want your company’s site to turn up in online search results whenever someone types in a target keyword related to your business.
This means employing an array of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to boost your rankings on leading search platforms like Google and Bing. If you run a large business with a heavily trafficked website, you may benefit from a regular enterprise SEO audit.
What is an enterprise SEO audit?
An enterprise SEO audit is a comprehensive evaluation of a large-scale website’s search engine optimization strategy. Businesses conduct enterprise SEO audits to examine a site’s ecommerce SEO health—including its ability to draw organic search traffic—and to evaluate existing SEO strategies. Businesses use enterprise SEO audit results to improve their site’s performance and better achieve their digital marketing goals.
Enterprise SEO audits are tailored for sizable businesses with an extensive online presence and complex websites. Enterprise audits are complex and often require a team of SEO experts, data analysts, and technical specialists to conduct a thorough assessment and provide actionable recommendations to improve a website’s organic search performance at scale.
What should an enterprise SEO audit include?
- Site architecture
- Site speed
- Mobile SEO
- Content quality and strategy
- Backlink profile
- Local SEO
- International SEO
- Analytics and reporting
The enterprise SEO audit process includes everything a large website needs to reach as many internet users as possible. Here is an example enterprise SEO audit checklist:
Site architecture
Site architecture describes the organization of a website and is a crucial component of technical SEO. A technical SEO audit should include an analysis of your site’s URL structure to ensure it is logical and won’t confuse search engines.
Search engines use site crawlers to gain more information about websites and determine whether to add them to their search index (database). For your site to appear in search engine results, it must be indexed by Google and other search engines.
One way to make it easier for crawlers to index your site is by submitting an XML sitemap, which lists all of the pages on your site in a format that is easy for crawlers to read. Your audit should include checking your XML sitemap and robots.txt file (found at “yourdomain.com/robots.txt”) for indexing errors.
Site and server speed
Slow page loading isn’t just annoying—it could prevent your site from appearing in Google search results. Google uses site speed as a ranking factor when determining which pages to show in search results. Google measures several elements of page loading known as Core Web Vitals:
- First Contentful Paint (FCP) is how long it takes a browser to render the first piece of DOM content—like images, non-white elements, or SVGs—on a webpage.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is how long it takes to load the largest image or text block on a webpage.
- First Input Delay (FID) is how long it takes a webpage to respond to user interaction, such as clicking a button.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is how stable a webpage’s layout remains after loading.
- Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures connection setup time and web server responsiveness, specifically measuring the time between the request for a resource and when the first byte of a response begins to arrive.
Part of your technical SEO audit should include checking your site speed and improving it by compressing images and fixing broken links. If your site receives a lot of traffic, you may consider using a CDN (content distribution network), which hosts copies of your site on servers globally.
Another aspect of your audit should be to ensure your server speed is up to par. TTFB can be an especially useful metric here. TTFB takes into account several request phases, including redirect time, DNS lookup, request, and more. It helps you find out if you need to reduce latency in connection setup time. In general, sites should try and achieve a TTFB of 0.8 seconds or less.
In fact, we actually used TTFB—in conjunction with FCP—in an in-depth look at Shopify site and server speed. We found that Shopify stores load up to 2.4x faster than our competitors, with up to 3.9x faster server speeds. Specifically, based on our FCP data, we found that 93% of Shopify stores are fast, loading 1.8x faster than stores on other platforms. And our TTFB is an impressive 0.51 seconds, due in large part to our robust infrastructure.
All this to say that as you perform your site and server speed audit, we highly recommend considering Shopify—not just because it’s good for us, but because it’s the best for your business.
Find out how much faster your website can be on Shopify
Mobile SEO
Google uses mobile-first indexing and strongly recommends creating a mobile-friendly site using responsive design, which displays content based on the user’s device. Although you should consider mobile devices in each aspect of your SEO audit, it’s also a good idea to do a specific mobile SEO audit.
Google Lighthouse is a free tool you can use to check if your site is mobile-friendly.
Content quality and strategy
An enterprise-level SEO audit is a great time to evaluate your website content and ensure your content strategy aligns with your business’s goals. Check your content for:
- Quality: One popular way to assess your content is Google’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, and trust) framework. You might also compare your content to your competitors’ by conducting an SEO competitor analysis.
- New opportunities: Consider incorporating keyword research into your SEO audit to identify additional content opportunities.
- Duplicates: Flag any duplicate content that search engine crawlers may interpret as spam. You may need to add or update canonical tags, which point to the “master” version of a page.
- Links: When you audit your internal linking structure, you assess the links that go from one of your site’s web pages to another. You also identify orphaned pages (pages that have no links pointing to them) and broken links, and flag opportunities for internal linking.
- Outdated content: Flag any outdated content for updating.
- Images: Check images to ensure they load properly and include alt tags (aka alt text), a short description of the image that improves accessibility and helps crawlers understand what your page is about.
- Structure: Each piece of content should include an SEO title tag, header tags (H1, H2, H3, and so on), meta descriptions, and structured data schema for elements like products and reviews.
Backlink profile
Your backlink profile consists of all your backlinks, or inbound links to your site. Backlinks are important because they increase your domain authority.
Auditing your site’s backlink profile might include disavowing backlinks from sites with poor reputations, analyzing anchor text distribution, and conducting a competitor backlink analysis to identify backlinking opportunities. Link-building strategies are also known as off-page SEO because, in contrast to on-page SEO efforts, these strategies rely on sites other than your own.
Local SEO
This audit point improves your position in local search rankings, which is crucial if your business operates physical storefronts. It includes a local citations audit and consistency check. And since Google is a major driver of local search results, it includes a Google Business Profile optimization assessment.
International SEO
If your site receives international traffic, you should run an international SEO audit. This includes hreflang implementation analysis for multilingual and multiregional targeting. You can also use this for a geotargeting assessment in Google Search Console.
Analytics and reporting
An enterprise SEO audit should review and report on SEO KPIs (key performance indicators) like organic traffic, conversions, and bounce rates. The audit is a good time to ensure proper tracking set-up in Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
How to do an enterprise SEO audit
- Prepare and plan
- Conduct a comprehensive site analysis
- Analyze data and generate insights
- Produce a report with actionable recommendations
- Take action and monitor your results
If you have the resources, you can conduct a comprehensive enterprise SEO audit that assesses your core web vitals, guides your enterprise SEO strategy, and helps drive organic traffic from SERPs (search engine results pages).
Here’s a step-by-step process for running an SEO audit for your enterprise site:
1. Prepare and plan
To begin the audit process, assemble necessary data sources, define your audit goals, assign an audit team, and set up SEO audit tools like Screaming Frog, Semrush, or Ahrefs. You’ll want to grant the tools access to Search Console data and your company’s internal content management system (CMS) to make the process seamless.
2. Conduct a comprehensive site analysis
Conduct a thorough review of your enterprise website and content using your SEO tools. Your analysis will include specific audits for technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, local SEO, and international SEO. Tools like Shopify’s Web Performance dashboard can be especially helpful here, as it provides Shopify customers with deep insights into their store’s speed, stability, and interactivity. What sets our dashboard apart is the fact that it also captures actual experiences from users, providing a more robust understanding of how a site performs. That way, users can turn that information into positive impacts on SEO results.
3. Analyze data and generate insights
Compile data from your SEO tools to create a comprehensive overview of your enterprise website’s SEO performance. Identify strengths, weaknesses, patterns, and anomalies to prioritize issues and potential improvements.
4. Produce a report with actionable recommendations
Create a detailed report summarizing findings, insights, and recommendations in a clear, actionable format. Follow a standardized reporting format so you can compare data from past and future audits.
5. Take action and monitor your results
Implement changes based on your action plan, and set key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor progress. More than just general goals, KPIs help you focus on measurable changes to things like keyword performance, organic traffic, site speed, or conversions.
Monitor your website traffic for signs of progress. You may need to conduct an additional SEO audit after implementing your strategies for a sustained period—it can take around six months for your efforts to show results.
Enterprise SEO audit FAQ
How often should you conduct an enterprise SEO audit?
Conduct an enterprise SEO audit at least once a year. More frequent audits, such as every six months, may be necessary based on significant site changes, algorithm updates, or shifts in your business and marketing goals.
How much does an enterprise SEO audit cost?
Conducting an enterprise SEO audit could range from several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars for a large-scale enterprise website with extensive pages and complexities. An SEO agency might charge hourly, while others may offer fixed packages based on the scope of the enterprise audit.
What are the main components of an enterprise SEO audit?
The main components of SEO enterprise audits include technical aspects like site architecture, indexing, and mobile-friendliness. Such SEO audits also feature in-depth evaluations of content quality, keyword optimization, backlink profiles, and site search. Lastly, they may include a competitive analysis that compares your website to other enterprise sites, potentially borrowing from those sites’ SEO strategies.
