Impactful SEO Audits for B2B
A detailed audit of your B2B website can suggest the distinction in between winning brand-new customers and losing them to the competition. In this brand name brand-new episode of White boards Friday, visitor host Carly Schoonhoven strolls you through four locations that can take your audits to the next level.
So something I often deal with is how to level up your standard SEO audit into something that's really impactful for a B2B company that requires a long-term, tactical plan. Now when I'm talking about an SEO audit, I'm not simply discussing a technical audit, something you can just pull from Screaming Frog.
It's really about getting a clear photo of a website's present SEO compliance and most importantly revealing the ways, both in the brief and long term, that you can work with them to assist them accomplish their objectives So today I'm going to walk you through my technique to SEO audits and walk you through action by action. Now prior to we get begun pulling information, there are a couple of things I like to figure out.
Rivals and goals.
It's actually essential to get an idea of what competitors you're going to be looking at so you can see how you stack up in relation to them. Now, once again, it's actually essential to make sure that your competitors are practical.
I can't tell you how many times I have actually been offered Google as a rival. Now possibly they're a rival for you, however it's truly important to make sure that you're being sensible and finding competitors that are of a comparable size so that the insights you're offering are actually going to be important and actionable. If somebody provides you Google as a competitor, think about it, possibly offer some options.
Another thing I like to take a look at is objectives. So if you're examining a business, inquire what their goals are. Perhaps they simply released a brand-new product and they truly would like some particular insights as to how they can improve that material. Or maybe they're going through a website migration in a couple of months, and they really desire some insights connected to that.
Good audits are not one size fits all. You can actually level up your audit by making sure that it's customized to the site and the company you're looking at specifically. So now that we have actually got our competitors, we have actually got our objectives, let's begin by having a look at keywords.
1. Keywords
It's where you need to begin due to the fact that keywords are the backbone of SEO. This shouldn't take you all day. There are a couple of tools that you can utilize so that you can get some truly interesting and practical info about keywords without having to put in an entire lot of time.
So Moz's Keyword Explorer is an actually great location to begin. I enjoy to use the Compare Link Profiles tool, and this is a really great way to take a look at one site versus its rivals and see how it's doing from a truly high level. It'll help you identify if there's somebody who's actually elite, who's ranking for 20 times more keywords than you, that's perhaps not the most realistic rival to monitor yourself against.
You can see if maybe there's a site that's really comparable. Another truly valuable thing to look at is the keyword overlap.
What are those keywords specifically that are performing well? My beautiful drawing here of a keyword overlap chart offers you an idea. So let's say heaven is your top competitor, green is rival 2, and after that the red is you. You actually want to take a look at that area where your rivals overlap but you don't 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 content for, but the website you're taking a look at does not. This is a really excellent place to begin and can help you offer some preliminary content recommendations and get sort of a window into your rivals' material strategies. Speaking of content, let's talk about looking seo specialist at material for an SEO audit.
2. Content
This is probably where I invest the most time personally when I do audits, because it's really valuable and there are likewise so numerous various things to look at and you can discover something brand-new pretty much every time. When you're looking at a B2B site in particular, however, something you wish to make sure you're taking a look at is the funnel. Do they have content for all of the funnel stages, and are they funneling individuals from one phase to the next?
So take a look at their website like you're somebody visiting it for the first time. Take a look at their awareness material and see: Exist mid-funnel CTAs? Are they making the next action they desire me to take clear? Or what is that ultimate conversion that they desire people to take in the purchase stage? Do they have a truly clear contact type?
Is it easy to browse to the demo, if that's a really important conversion to them? Have a look at their material and what they're doing, specifically making sure that they have material for the full funnel. This is another excellent chance to assess your competitors. Do the exact same thing on your competitors' sites. See if there's something they're doing actually, actually well, that the website you're taking a look at is not.
Take some screenshots. Share some specific things a rival is doing that perhaps you can gain from and discover a method to do your own version of on your site.
3. Technical
All. Another area to always make certain you include is technical, because all of us know that even if you have the best, incredible material on your website, if your technical SEO is a mess, it's not truly going to matter if you're not able to get that content indexed.
A great place to begin is to do Moz's On-Demand Crawl so you can take a look at things like 404 errors, duplicate material, perhaps they have missing metadata on all of their actually important top pages. Possibly they have really bad site speed, and it's absolutely nothing that they've ever focused on.
Use Google's Page Speed Insights. See if there are some particular suggestions that you can provide and that you can help them repair, due to the fact that eventually it has to do with attempting to get them to want to deal with you and demonstrating how you could help them repair those concerns. You can also have a look at things that may be impacting indexation. Have a look at their robots.txt.
Take a look at their sitemap. Just examine all the boxes and ensure that there's absolutely nothing that might be affecting their search look.
4. Off-site
.
Lastly, I always like to have a look at off-site. This is another excellent use of Moz. I like to utilize Moz's Compare Link Profiles choice to get an idea of how you stack up with your competitors when it comes to off-site.
Now I understand that off-site is really challenging. Link building is hard, and it takes a long time to really reveal outcomes. Knowing how you stack up against your competitors, when it comes to Domain Authority and it comes to amount to links, truly helps you get an idea of how hard it's going to be and how long it's going to take to capture up with your competitors in the search engine results page.
So I constantly like to have a look at Domain Authority, external links, linking domains and actually simply finding insights as far as who's going to be the most tough, who is the most authoritative, and where do we stand today. You can also take a look at particular backlink profiles and link overlap, very similar to the rival overlap.
See if there's a site where all of your competitors have backlinks from and you don't. Possibly it's really appropriate, an industry publication, and you can provide them that and you can help them eventually, ideally, get a link from there too. All right. We've taken an appearance at keywords, material, technical, and off-site. If you followed all the actions, you should have a really excellent audit with some super actionable, short-term and long-lasting action products to provide.