The demand for SEO is soaring high with technological advancements. It has become the strategic practice for enterprises and other businesses in recent years; a model that boosts the revenue channel. Along with the discipline, the Global SEO market is also expected to grow by its projected size of US $1.6 Billion by 2027 and the growth of a CAGR of 14.4% over the period 2020-2027 [Source].
To compete in the noisy digital world and drive traffic to your website, indeed, SEO is your ‘caduceus’! However, organic traffic may rise over time if you strategize the content and keywords appropriately, assessing your SEO goals. In addition, for a thriving success in SEO, data-driven insights are the fuel that can back up your strategic approach.
Especially before starting with SEO for an enterprise, you must clearly understand the site data, including the rank of your website. But how can you decode it? At this juncture, enterprise SEO audits appear in the scenario.
An audit is an objective assessment rather than an opinion or analysis. It helps you derive the data that can set you straight to achieve your SEO goals, provided the audit is performed correctly. In this article, we have enlisted & discussed some common mistakes in enterprise SEO audits; let’s read on to prevent these fallacies from derailing your site’s SEO success.
SEO audit is a process of measuring the strength of your website in organic search and identifying its growth opportunities. A thorough audit helps you understand how users navigate your site and what they expect from it. It further aids you in achieving long-term goals based on the insights derived from the SEO Audit.
Talking about SEO audits, it is noteworthy that there is a difference between conducting SEO & enterprise SEO audits. And the fundamental difference is the size of your website. Enterprise SEO audits are a more comprehensive process. In this instance, Enterprise SEO experts come into play with all their experience and expertise to work on the core areas of your business visibility.
There are three main stages you can perform an enterprise SEO audit:
Start by doing a dry run using enterprise SEO tools to get an idea – but, for an in-depth analysis, it will always be helpful to outsource a growth advisory team.
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Many marketers and founders fail to understand the importance of SEO, hence, leads to common SEO mistakes. We will discuss the most common SEO pitfalls to avoid to get your business’s best results and traction.
To succeed in SEO, you should have a clear idea about presenting your business goals. Without a proper understanding of your goals, do not run any campaign which may treat you with initial traffic but could end as a misery without any conversion.
A clear vision like better quality traffic, more organic leads or more organic sales, or a target audience (informational content or conversion-specific content) will help you achieve your goals. Of course, you can target all of them but segment them by quarter, half-yearly, or annual plan.
For example, suppose you generate 20000 organic traffic for your website, but only 1% book a sales call from you. The possible reasons behind this maybe:
a) You are generating the wrong traffic for your website, or
b) Your CTAs are doing a poor job of converting visitors to a customer – maybe they are not correctly aligned.
It is a secret ranking factor that influences SERPs. Google always prefers content that matches the given query, and accordingly, they structure the search engine result pages.
Search intent drives users’ search – whether they are looking for a purchase or looking for information before making a purchase.
For example – if someone types “enterprise SEO audit,” they are probably looking for how to do an enterprise SEO audit? And if someone types “enterprise SEO audit services,” – they are looking for an SEO audit service.
For a better user experience, Google started introducing new SERP features, and it is going to increase in the future. Targeting SERP intent-based content will undoubtedly help you stay ahead in the race.
While doing an SEO audit, check whether existing content fulfilling the SERP features like knowledge panel, knowledge graph, people also ask box, video, featured snippet, and shopping box (whichever is applicable for the business).
The target will be to present on either of the SERP features – plan content accordingly. One single piece of content can be covered in various formats if possible.
Mobile-friendliness of a website plays a vital role in the search realm. As of February 2023, 57.38 percent of the total web visits are mobile, compared to 42.62 percent from desktops [Source].
You can understand from the above data how hand-held devices are an essential factor and stage a significant role in your website traffic. An in-depth audit on mobile optimization will help you be aware of the elements you may be ignoring and help you build more advanced types of designs.
SEO is changing fast due to constant Google algorithm updates. To cope with the pace, you need to be proactive in creating your website authority. In what way you can achieve that – by analyzing website backlink data.
Make sure you have links mentioned to your site from natural and niche-specific resources. Private Blog Networks (PBNs) are dead now. Google greeted them as penalties rather than rankings.
Build more quality links than raging towards the number of links. Avoid link sellers to prevent burning out your cash and rankings.
Targeting topics through a single content format can be challenging as more competitors will be working on the same. Hence, you can slightly add uniqueness by covering a topic in broader forms like videos, audio, and infographics.
Many people like to watch videos as they think they can connect to the content through it, whereas some of them want to listen on the go— a few of them like a brief on content through graphical information (aka infographic).
The bonus and the fun fact is that they all add value to the SERPs – considering them as SERPs features.
SEO is evolving with time. Old school techniques no longer work. There are no SEO best practices on which you can entirely rely and ensure web traffic.
To stay on the game, you have to watch the latest updates and plan to move the needle accordingly. You need the industry SEO experts to stand out from the crowd to achieve that.
Ranking factors depend significantly on the Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness of content, known as E-A-T. It is a concept coined by Google by which it can filter out which site is more trustable.
Do authors have enough expertise to talk on a particular topic? Is there a bio/page to justify their knowledge? Do they have social media presence and acceptance from the industry-specific community? All of them are important to showcase expertise.
Provide the information about your company, location, contact details, author bios of resources, recognitions, awards, and social media links.
Better results from your SEO efforts may depend on the mistakes detailed above and how better ways you avoid them while doing enterprise SEO audits. It is ideal if you do it quarterly – in this way, you can stay updated on the current site statuses.
This article was to get well acquainted with the challenges others have experienced and avoid them in your marketing efforts. All the mistakes have proven quite widespread, so they are now easy to identify & recognize before you make them. If not, let FirstPrinciples Enterprise SEO Experts handle it in a better way for you to spot and fix the issues.
Pushkar Sinha
