Impactful SEO Audits for B2B
A detailed audit of your B2B website can mean the distinction between winning brand-new customers and losing them to the competition. In this brand name brand-new episode of Whiteboard Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven walks you through four locations that can take your audits to the next level.
So something I sometimes battle with is how to level up your fundamental SEO audit into something that's actually impactful for a B2B business that needs a long-term, tactical strategy. Now when I'm discussing an SEO audit, I'm not simply discussing a technical audit, something you can simply pull from Screaming Frog.
It's truly about getting a clear picture of a site's present SEO compliance and most importantly showing the ways, both in the brief and long term, that you can deal with them to help them attain their objectives So today I'm going to stroll you through my method to SEO audits and walk you through action by step. Now prior to we get started pulling data, there are a couple of things I like to figure out.
Competitors and goals.
Primary is competitors. So SEO, it does not exist in a vacuum. If we want to improve our rankings, a competitor is likely going to need to lose rankings. It's really crucial to get a concept of what rivals you're going to be looking at so you can see how you stack up in relation to them. Now, once again, it's truly important to make certain that your competitors are reasonable.
I can't tell you how many times I've been given Google as a competitor. Now maybe they're a competitor for you, but it's really important to ensure that you're being practical and finding rivals that are of a comparable size so that the insights you're offering are actually going to be valuable and actionable. If somebody gives you Google as a competitor, think about it, maybe supply some options.
Another thing I like to take a look at is goals. If you're assessing a business, ask them what their goals are. Possibly they just released a brand-new product and they truly would like some particular insights regarding how they can improve that content. Or possibly they're going through a website migration in a couple of months, and they truly want some insights associated with that.
Great audits are not one size fits all. You can truly level up your audit by making sure that it's customized to the site and the business you're looking at specifically. Now that we have actually got our competitors, we've got our objectives, let's get started by taking an appearance at keywords.
1. Keywords
Undoubtedly, keywords are so crucial. It's where you require to start because keywords are the foundation of SEO. Now this is an audit. We're not doing a complete keyword research technique here. This shouldn't take you all the time. There are a couple of tools that you can use so that you can get some really fascinating and helpful information about keywords without having to put in an entire lot of time.
So Moz's Keyword Explorer is an actually fantastic location to start. I love to utilize the Compare Link Profiles tool, and this is an actually excellent way to take a look at one website versus its competitors and see how it's doing from a really high level. It'll help you determine if there's somebody who's actually elite, who's ranking for 20 times more keywords than you, that's maybe not the most reasonable rival to monitor yourself against.
You can see if maybe there's a website that's truly equivalent. Or if there's a site that's not ranking for barely any keywords, that's not going to be one you have to worry about. It's a really good place to begin simply to get sort of an idea of the competitive landscape. Another really helpful thing to look at is the keyword overlap. We have actually seen overall keywords.
Let's say the blue is your leading competitor, green is competitor two, forklift training and then the red is you. You really desire to take a look at that area where your rivals overlap however you do not have any keywords that are ranking.
This is so essential, due to the fact that possibly you'll identify a subject location where all of your competitors have material for, but the website you're taking a look at doesn't. This is a truly excellent location to begin and can help you supply some initial content ideas and get sort of a window into your rivals' material techniques. Speaking of content, let's talk about looking at content for an SEO audit.
2. Material
This is probably where I spend the most time personally when I do audits, since it's actually important and there are likewise so many different things to look at and you can discover something new pretty much every time. When you're looking at a B2B site in particular, nevertheless, one thing you want to make sure you're having a look at is the funnel. Do they have content for all of the funnel phases, and are they funneling individuals from one phase to the next?
Take a look at their website like you're somebody visiting it for the first time. Do they have an actually clear contact type?
Is it simple to browse to the demonstration, if that's a really essential conversion to them? See if there's something they're doing truly, truly well, that the site you're looking at is not.
Take some screenshots. Share some specific things a rival is doing that possibly you can learn from and discover a method to do your own version of on your website.
3. Technical
All right. Another location to always make sure you consist of is technical, since all of us understand that even if you have the best, amazing material on your website, if your technical SEO is a mess, it's not actually going to matter if you're not able to get that content indexed.
A great location to start is to do Moz's On-Demand Crawl so you can take a look at things like 404 errors, replicate material, perhaps they have missing out on metadata on all of their truly valuable leading pages. Maybe they have truly bad site speed, and it's absolutely nothing that they have actually ever prioritized.
You can also take an appearance at things that might be impacting indexation. Take a look at their robots.txt.
Take a look at their sitemap. Just check all packages and make sure that there's absolutely nothing that might be impacting their search appearance.
4. Off-site
.
Finally, I always like to take a look at off-site. This is another fantastic usage of Moz. I love to utilize Moz's Compare Link Profiles option to get a concept of how you stack up with your competitors when it comes to off-site.
Now I know that off-site is truly difficult. Link structure is hard, and it takes a long time to truly show results. Understanding how you stack up versus your competitors, when it comes to Domain Authority and it comes to total links, actually assists you get an idea of how tough it's going to be and how long it's going to take to catch up with your competitors in the search engine results page.
So I always like to take a look at Domain Authority, external links, connecting domains and really just discovering insights as far as who's going to be the most difficult, who is the most authoritative, and where do we stand today. You can also have a look at particular backlink profiles and link overlap, really comparable to the rival overlap.
See if there's a site where all of your competitors have backlinks from and you do not. Possibly it's really relevant, a market publication, and you can supply them that and you can help them ultimately, hopefully, get a link from there too. All. We've taken an appearance at keywords, content, technical, and off-site. If you followed all the steps, you need to have an actually fantastic audit with some extremely actionable, short-term and long-lasting action items to supply.