Conducting an enterprise SEO audit can reveal many issues that need to be resolved for optimal website optimization and enhanced organic search engine rankings. By addressing these problems early, businesses can increase organic search engine rankings while optimizing their websites. Select the best Boston seo agencies.
Technical SEO audits must include a thorough investigation of an entire site to detect issues like redirect chains, orphan pages, duplicate content, and keyword cannibalization.
On-page optimization
An enterprise SEO audit is a thorough examination of all the factors contributing to a website’s search rankings. The audit aims to identify areas for improvement and provide recommendations for action, such as fixing technical issues, creating more engaging content, or discovering potential organic traffic opportunities.
An on-page optimization audit reviews various elements of a web page, such as title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and URL structure. It checks for keyword usage and duplicative content to ensure navigation is optimized for search engines—significant on large websites with multiple subdomains or site structures.
On-page optimization is an integral component of any search engine optimization strategy, as a well-optimized page can increase visibility, leading to increased traffic and revenue. Unfortunately, on-page optimization can be an intricate process requiring expert knowledge of SEO techniques as well as ongoing learning of new approaches.
Title tags are essential in improving web page visibility. Search engines use them as the first step when indexing websites, so their appearance has an effectful way of influencing how high a webpage ranks in searches. A title tag should be both descriptive and concise while including your main keyword for maximum SEO impact. It should also contain these critical terms within its URL or header tags for optimal results.
Header tags are an integral component of on-page optimization, serving to organize content and enhance readability while also serving to describe the topic of each page. An ideal header tag must be short yet descriptive, with targeted keywords included, and be unique for every page visited.
An on-page optimization audit should also check for internal broken links that can be redirected using the 301 redirect method to another relevant page, improving user experience and increasing organic traffic. Furthermore, an audit should identify any 404 error pages, with which you should redirect visitors using an alternate URL or path.
An experienced professional should carry out an enterprise-level SEO audit. Automated tools may provide a good starting point, but manual audits provide far superior insight. A professional can pinpoint the root cause of problems quickly and provide recommendations for resolution, saving both time and money.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are lists of pages on your website used by Google to understand its structure, helping search engines find content while improving user experience. They are essential for enterprise SEO as they enable Google to index more of your pages, thus improving your rankings in search results. There are various tools available for auditing sitemaps; one such free tool is called XML Sitemap Checker, which allows you to identify errors within XML sitemaps as well as detect duplicates or other issues with them.
An enterprise SEO audit takes time and resources, so it’s critical to tackle the most pressing problems first. Start by talking with clients or stakeholders about their goals and what areas of their site are underperforming —then focus on those areas!
One of the primary issues plaguing enterprise websites is inadequate keyword optimization. A comprehensive enterprise SEO audit should include keyword analysis, content audit, link audit, and local SEO audit to detect and address critical technical problems impacting search engine rankings on your website.
An enterprise SEO audit must also consider any lack of structured data markup on web pages, using tools like the Structured Data Markup Helper to add it and find hidden opportunities to add structured data to them.
An effective enterprise SEO audit requires reviewing duplicate content and the way your website uses keywords and checking for any keyword cannibalization (i.e., pages targeting similar keywords as one another). A complete enterprise SEO audit should include such tasks to ensure its content meets the search intent of the target audience while adhering to all SEO best practices. It is also vitally important to test for keyword cannibalization – when one page targets identical keywords as another page on their respective domain.
An enterprise-level SEO audit should be conducted every few months or annually to ensure all pages comply with best practices, perform as expected, and reveal any opportunities to increase organic traffic to the site.
Keyword cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is an SEO issue in which pages compete against each other for search engine rankings, leading to reduced organic traffic and lower conversion rates on enterprise sites. To prevent keyword cannibalization from recurring, it’s wise to monitor SEO performance closely and implement any necessary fixes on an enterprise site.
As part of fixing keyword cannibalization, the initial step should be analyzing your content to identify any competing articles using Semrush or Ahrefs tools. You should then inspect current traffic levels on each page – if one page attracts more clicks than another, consider merging or revising its content accordingly.
Canonical tags can be highly beneficial if your site contains multiple pages that target similar keywords. Google will then know which page should rank first for a query, eliminating competitive rivalries between pages. However, only use this method when necessary; otherwise, you risk wasting valuable SEO assets.
Canonical tags can help address duplicate content issues, but they aren’t enough to stop keyword cannibalization. It would help if you considered various other factors as well, such as backlinks and whether the cannibalized page ranks highly for that keyword, in addition to organic search performance and internal links pointing towards it that should instead point towards your preferred page.
Finally, it’s also a good idea to search your site for keywords that are being cannibalized by other pages. This way, you can address any potential issues before they become more serious.
An effective enterprise SEO audit must examine the site’s structure and architecture to detect potential crawlability, indexability, or other SEO problems. Aside from this analysis, a full audit should also involve reviewing past SEO performance trends to prioritize issues according to impact and effort requirements.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is one of the most frequent SEO challenges, yet effectively managing it requires a complex strategy. Duplicate pages on websites may compromise rankings and lead to lost traffic; using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Google Lighthouse may be helpful for quickly detecting duplicate pages on your site and effectively addressing them.
Duplicate pages refer to any piece of content that appears across multiple URLs, both root domains and subdomains. Search engines view this as evidence that it’s duplicate content, which will penalize your ranking and only show one version in search results. This leads to user confusion and possible penalties from Google for plagiarism. If it is word-for-word duplicated, it may even lead to penalization as it can be seen as plagiarized work.
Duplication can occur through various means, from copy-pasting directly onto a webpage to linking URLs with different structures (track parameters, session IDs, print versions, or even just having the www prefix), leading to repeated content on a site. Therefore, canonical tags must be correctly set on websites to avoid duplication issues.
Enterprise SEO audits should focus on identifying and rectifying indexing issues. This is especially crucial for large sites with thousands or even millions of pages; otherwise, it can only be possible to index everything properly by using tools like Semrush for this process.
Enterprise SEO audits also involve an intensive examination of backlinks. This may include assessing all links pointing back to the site, verifying whether or not they point directly to its pages, and checking for any 404 error pages that have lost thousands or millions of backlinks; usually, these should be redirected so as to improve overall SEO and minimize duplicative content on it.
Read also: The Importance Of SEO Maintenance
