The Executive’s Guide to Using an SEO Audit for Strategic Growth

A large American client, Edible Arrangements, recently reached out to Toptal for SEO support when their e-commerce platform experienced a significant decrease in organic traffic. The lost traffic meant lost revenue, and the leading purveyor of fruit bouquets and other gifts needed help quickly. We deployed a team of SEO specialists and developers to assess the damage and find the root causes. The team uncovered several factors contributing to the traffic loss, including accelerating competition from new e-commerce sites and a host of technical SEO challenges.

This is an increasingly familiar scenario for executives responsible for digital growth. The search landscape has changed, and even historically high performers are being impacted. HubSpot, for example, long celebrated for creating one of the most successful B2B marketing blogs on the internet, saw a massive 36% drop in organic traffic to its website in a single month in late 2024. This drop coincided with a Google algorithm update and capped a two-year tumble from HubSpot’s peak of more than 24 million monthly visits. Many SEO experts believe the decline stemmed from Google’s increasing prioritization of topical authority. Hubspot had spread its content too wide—covering topics like famous quotes and instructions for typing a shrug emoji—and was drawing traffic unrelated to its core business expertise.

Even companies that haven’t experienced a sudden traffic loss find themselves in a rapidly changing search environment. Google continues to push consistent algorithm changes, and AI is radically reshaping how people find products and information online. In this context, business leaders cannot take a hands-off approach to SEO. Executive insights into the company’s goals, growth plans, and differentiators are critical for shaping a search strategy that reflects where the business is headed. When SEO aligns with your strategic vision, it becomes a far more powerful driver of meaningful traffic and long-term growth.

Why Executives Should Prioritize SEO Audits

An SEO audit can unlock a host of short- and long-term strategic benefits to your digital marketing ecosystem. It offers an opportunity to address Google’s algorithm updates, the rise of AI search, an ever-evolving competitive landscape, and any technical issues that your website is having. A well-executed audit can also enhance your content strategy and paid search programs, and it can even reveal opportunities to improve your codebase for your digital properties, boosting traffic, leads, and momentum.

Depending on industry and other factors, experts recommend performing an SEO audit at least twice a year. Unfortunately, most companies are too caught up in triage mode to think strategically and schedule regular audits.

But that is a costly mistake. It’s hard to overstate the importance of SEO. The corporate website is a business’ virtual front door, answering service, 24/7 salesperson, and checkout all in one place. The overwhelming majority of traffic comes from one source: Google. At any given time, Google controls about 90% of the global search engine market, processing billions of searches per day.

Yet, page rankings are never stable for long: Google has launched eight confirmed algorithm updates since early 2024, including a massive core update that Google described as the most extensive update it had ever implemented. Among many other things, an SEO audit allows experts to gauge how well an organization and its web properties have fared in response to the most recent algorithm changes.

What Company Leaders Need to Know About SEO Audits

Despite persistent changes in the SEO game and the emergence of new variables like AI, the fundamentals of an SEO audit remain the same. An SEO mentor of mine and a 20-year veteran of the field, Ken Clark, taught me an approach I have since implemented successfully many times—one that starts with executive strategy discussions that guide keyword and competitive analysis and expands into technical SEO.

Executive Input Shapes Keyword Strategy

It’s crucial for executives and business leaders to engage in the audit process. SEO specialists should interview leadership teams about the company’s strategic direction at the outset. Clark always emphasized that the discussion should go beyond just keywords. Executives should be encouraged to reflect on the organization’s strengths and share plans for future growth and expansion.

Executive input reveals crucial opportunities to pursue new keywords, whereas auditing keywords with Google Analytics and Google Search Console (or related tools) only illuminates how existing keywords perform on the site. While performance data is vital for an audit, especially when it comes to sussing out the impact of Google’s algorithm changes or emerging competitive threats, it shouldn’t start there. The process is more successful when the SEO team understands the organization’s strategic priorities, allowing for a more comprehensive assessment of the overall content strategy.

Consider, for example, a digital design studio that is planning to launch a product design offering. Their website’s current focus on the keyword “design” won’t attract customers who are specifically looking for product design help. Understanding a company’s strategic direction allows the SEO team to identify new keyword opportunities that align with where a business is headed.

How to Evaluate Existing Keyword Performance

Once executive input has clarified the company’s strategic priorities, SEO specialists will evaluate how current keywords are performing using tools like Google Analytics or third-party platforms like Semrush and Ahrefs. This analysis can reveal pages that are underperforming due to weak keyword targeting or content gaps. It also helps teams assess how well the current content supports the strategic goals outlined during executive interviews. The goal is to understand not just what’s working but why—and to identify quick wins as well as longer-term opportunities.

A deeper analysis may reveal surprising patterns. For instance, certain pages might attract traffic for irrelevant search terms, leading to high bounce rates. Look beyond surface metrics like impressions or clicks and instead focus on intent: Are the visitors landing on the site actually in-market for the company’s products or services, or at least would-be buyers doing research? Mapping keyword performance to conversion metrics—such as demo requests or purchases—can help prioritize updates and uncover which keywords truly support business goals.

The Benefits of Competitive Keyword Analysis

The keyword strategy refresh should also address the competitive landscape. If a brand’s content doesn’t go as deep as a competitor on keywords that align with the executive strategy, that content will rank lower, causing the brand to lose critical organic traffic. After all, websites ranking first on a Google search engine results page have an average click-through rate of 27.6%, 10 times that of the result in the 10th position.

A competitive keyword analysis illuminates where competitors are playing and making big bets, not just in their organic content strategy, but also where they’re willing to pay for engaged, high-intent traffic. It can also reveal how competitors are going to market. What messaging are they using? What tone? This analysis presents opportunities for differentiation. Bringing these results and analysis to executives for input can then facilitate more informed marketing decision-making.

Refreshing an organization’s keyword strategy—and thus its online content—will also help garner high-quality backlinks from reputable sources. Such backlinks are critical to a site’s domain authority and ranking potential. Like me, Clark believes that focusing on top-notch content development usually yields more benefit than instituting a dedicated link-building practice. If you produce quality content, you’ll get backlinks organically by establishing trust and confidence with readers.

Technical SEO Has a Major Impact on Success

The next phase of an SEO audit involves the technical aspects of the website. Even if the website performs relatively well, an SEO audit will uncover gaps more than 90% of the time, says Alan Muther, a Toptal SEO expert who worked on the Edible Arrangements project and has previous experience as a senior SEO and content marketing manager at LinkedIn. “We’ll split our technical audits into components like indexation, crawlability, on-site, content, and external linking, and we’ll cover opportunities where the site can be doing better,” he says. A comprehensive technical SEO audit entails a full site crawl and analysis, assessing the back-end tagging and underlying technology, including the codebase.

Technical issues often arise when web development and design teams don’t recognize the impact their choices have on crawlability of the site. For instance, a development team might want key section headings to be treated as H1s for stylistic reasons, not understanding the complicated message that formatting will send to Google, which needs to determine the most essential subjects on each page. When brands leave the decision to Google’s web crawlers, the crawlers often choose the wrong option.

This is where executive engagement can make a real difference. While leaders don’t need to audit redirect chains or inspect source code, their strategic input is critical for prioritizing technical fixes based on business value. A slow-loading landing page for a flagship product or an indexation issue affecting a high-converting blog post shouldn’t sit in the backlog. When executives understand how technical SEO impacts visibility and revenue—and actively help teams align SEO work with company goals—technical improvements are more likely to be implemented effectively and on time.

Technical Improvements Boost AI Search Performance

Addressing technical SEO issues can also improve your website’s performance with AI search tools and assistants. Nearly 60% of Google searches end without a click, in part due to the AI Overviews (AIOs) that Google now serves at the top of the results page. Companies can take a number of steps to appear in AIOs and enhance AI-powered search rankings. For executives, this means ensuring your teams adapt content to address natural language queries, deploy schema markup (already important from a technical SEO perspective), and write concise meta descriptions.

Beyond AIOs, AI platforms are emerging as search engines in their own right: In December 2024, ChatGPT attracted 566 million unique worldwide visitors, an impressive figure given the nascent stage of this AI sector and the new tools under development. Muther also points to OpenAI’s new Operator agent, which can help users complete tasks like selecting Thanksgiving recipes and buying the ingredients with minimal intervention. If the content on a grocery e-commerce website isn’t optimized correctly—especially for technical items like schema markup and page-load speed—the AI crawler will seek another source for those ingredients. “Humans don’t mind waiting for a site to load, but an AI agent isn’t going to wait,” Muther says. “From a tech perspective, you’re no longer just optimizing for humans and search engines.”

The technical aspects of an SEO audit can get confusing for executives and laypeople, but the potential impacts are huge. When preparing for an SEO audit, it’s important to bring someone on—whether in an on-demand capacity or as a full-timer—who is highly technical and capable of relating everything they do back to the overarching goal of driving targeted traffic and reaching your strategic priorities. Don’t be afraid to ask SEO specialists for case studies before bringing them on board. Their real-world examples should specify which KPIs they actively track for the technical SEO audit, the measurable outcomes, and the necessary timeline.

What Are the Immediate Benefits of an SEO Audit?

When content and technical strategies begin working in tandem on a website, high-quality content is easily accessible for Google web crawlers, improving the overall domain credibility and causing the pages to rank higher. Clark calls this positive feedback loop “SEO mojo.”

Yet, capturing SEO mojo can take time. According to a 2024 Ahrefs survey, brands typically begin seeing results from SEO efforts in three to six months. In the meantime, the SEO audit can help your brand consider where to supplement your organic strategy with a paid strategy to capture potential revenue from specific keywords while creating content to drive organic traffic.

This is one of the underappreciated SEO audit benefits: The ability to optimize paid spend for short- and longer-term returns. A thoughtful keyword strategy dictates where to invest and, more importantly, where you can stop investing. For example, if your brand is already ranking well for a competitive keyword, Muther says it almost never makes sense to spend money on ads for that keyword, unless you’re trying to flood the zone on a competitor or if you’re defending against competitors who buy your branded keywords.

Muther estimates about 90% of his SEO audit clients say they’re spending too much on paid ads, and the audit exposes opportunity gaps that nearly always allow them to cut their ad spend. Thus, while the full strategic benefits of an SEO audit may take time to materialize, your brand can find immediate competitive wins in the realm of paid search marketing.

Why SEO Is a Long-term Growth Strategy

As your business invests in SEO, it’s important to remember that traffic growth is not the sole measurement of success. Rather, SEO efforts should focus on driving the right traffic to the right destination. When companies begin using SEO as a way to generate traffic that is not related to their core area of business, it becomes problematic. Most of Google’s algorithm updates aim to enhance relevancy for users, and Google increasingly penalizes behavior (and content) that doesn’t support a site’s main purpose and expertise, as was likely the case with Hubspot.

For Edible Arrangements, rebuilding their tech infrastructure and correcting technical SEO issues has resulted in a steady recovery of traffic—and a sustainable foundation for future success. The company continues to invest in the product-focused content needed to compete in a crowded industry, while also pursuing growth through innovative product launches. (Check out my recent interview with Edible’s VP of E-commerce, Erica Randerson, to learn more.)

A smart, executive-aligned SEO strategy is critical for the long-term success of most modern businesses. A well-executed SEO audit uncovers both vulnerabilities and opportunities across content and technology, providing your teams with the data needed to make informed decisions that drive sustained growth.

Have a question for Jeff or his Growth and Digital Marketing team? Get in touch.