Big businesses face a special challenge when it comes to SEO. Their websites are huge, with lots of pages and complex features like online stores and multiple locations. To make sure their websites show up well in search results, they need to use technical SEO the right way.

In this guide, we’ll talk about the important technical stuff that might be missing from your SEO plan. Get ready to learn how to supercharge your business’s SEO!

A Full SEO Checkup for Big Companies

 

When you check your website’s SEO, it’s not just about the technical stuff. You also need to look at:

1. Technical SEO Audit: This checks for technical problems that affect your website’s SEO.
2. Content Audit: This looks at your website’s content quality and helps find areas for improvement.
3. Keyword Audit: You learn how people search for your stuff and make sure your content matches.
4. Backlink Audit: You check the websites that link to yours to make sure they’re good.
5. Competitive Analysis: You see what your competitors are doing with their SEO.
6. Local SEO Audit: If your business has physical locations, you make sure you show up in local searches.
7. User Experience Audit: This checks how easy your website is to use.

In this guide, we’re mostly talking about the first one – the technical SEO audit. But remember, all these checks work together for the best results!

Finding Hidden Problems in Your SEO Audit

 

Think of SEO like building a skyscraper. Technical SEO is like the foundation that holds up your website’s search results. If your foundation isn’t strong, your website might not show up well in searches. This is even more important for big businesses.

 

Here are two challenges that can cause problems in SEO audits for big companies:

1. Big Websites: When your website is massive, the technical audit can be really tricky.
2. Unique Features: Big businesses often have special things on their websites that regular audits might miss.

This guide goes beyond the usual checks (like looking at titles and headers) to find issues that come from the complexity of big websites. We’ll look at:

1. Canonicalization Issues: These can lead to duplicate content problems.
2. Indexing Issues: These involve how search engines see and list your pages.
3. Dealing with Big Challenges: We’ll talk about how to handle problems unique to big businesses.

Getting Canonical Tags Right Canonical tags help search engines know which version of a webpage to show when there’s similar content. For big websites, like ones with lots of product pages or franchises, getting these tags right is super important.

 

Here’s a simple example of how they look:

If a page has unique content, its canonical tag should point to itself. But with big websites, you often have lots of pages with similar content. In those cases, the tag points to the main source.

Common Mistakes with Canonical Tags Forgetting to use them, using self-referencing tags too much, or creating complicated chains of tags can all cause problems.

Ecommerce Issues: If you have an online store, you need to use canonical tags to avoid problems with product pages and categories.

Franchise Problems: Big businesses with lots of locations can end up with duplicate content. You’ll need canonical tags to show where the original content is.

Checking for Canonical Errors Use Google Search Console to find errors related to canonical tags. Look out for issues like duplicate content without proper tags or Google choosing the wrong page as the main source.

Don’t Forget to Keep Checking Don’t just set up canonical tags and forget about them. Regularly check to make sure they’re working right. Bad tags can hurt your SEO!

Indexing Your Massive Website Indexing is super important for big websites. It’s about making sure search engines list the right pages. But with thousands or millions of pages, it can be tough to get it all right.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Use Google Search Console: It helps you find problems with indexing.
2. Run a Screaming Frog Crawl: This tool gives you a list of all your pages and their status.

Watch Out for Orphaned Pages These are pages that aren’t linked to other pages on your site. They can be a problem. You need a good internal linking structure to help search engines find all your pages.

Check Your Sitemap and Robots.txt Your XML sitemap is like a map for search engines. The robots.txt file tells search engines what to look at and what to ignore. Make sure they’re working right.

Compare Your Lists Look at the list of pages from Google Search Console and compare it to the one from Screaming Frog. If they don’t match, you’ve got indexing problems to fix.

Dealing with URL Issues Little things like HTTP to HTTPS redirects, using “www” or not, and mixing upper and lower case letters in your URLs can affect your indexing.

Fixing HTTP to HTTPS Redirects: Make sure your site uses a secure connection (HTTPS), and set up redirects from HTTP to HTTPS.

Choose “www” or Not: Decide if you want to use “www” in your website’s URL and set up redirects accordingly.

Avoid Mixed Case URLs: Be consistent with how you use capital letters in your URLs. Inconsistent capitalization can cause issues.

Making a Plan for Better SEO Once you’ve found all these issues, don’t panic! Your goal isn’t to have a perfect website with no errors. It’s to keep improving your site’s SEO over time.

Set Realistic Expectations: Don’t worry if you find lots of errors. Focus on making your website’s SEO better, not perfect.

Start with High-Priority Items: Fix the issues that will have the biggest impact first. These are usually related to indexing and canonicalization.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: Some errors are less important. Don’t spend too much time on them if they won’t make a big difference.

Tech Challenges and Solutions Every big business is unique, and they have their own technical and organizational challenges. Understand what you can and can’t fix with your website and plan accordingly.

Bridging the Gaps for Great SEO Big websites have unique challenges, but with the right approach, you can master SEO and make your site perform even better in search results. Good luck!

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