Impactful SEO Audits for B2B
A comprehensive audit of your B2B site can indicate the difference between winning brand-new customers and losing them to the competitors. In this brand brand-new episode of Whiteboard Friday, visitor host Carly Schoonhoven walks you through 4 areas that can take your audits to the next level.
So something I often fight with is how to level up your basic SEO audit into something that's actually impactful for a B2B company that needs a long-lasting, strategic plan. Now when I'm speaking about an SEO audit, I'm not just talking about a technical audit, something you can just pull from Shrieking Frog.
It's truly about getting a clear photo of a site's existing SEO compliance and most significantly revealing the methods, both in the short and long term, that you can work with them to assist them achieve their objectives So today I'm going to stroll you through my technique to SEO audits and walk you through step by step. Now prior to we get begun pulling information, there are a couple of things I like to figure out.
Competitors and goals.
It's actually crucial to get a concept of what competitors you're going to be looking at so you can see how you stack up in relation to them. Now, again, it's truly essential to make sure that your competitors are reasonable.
I can't inform you the number of times I've been provided Google as a competitor. Now possibly they're a competitor for you, but it's truly important to make certain that you're being sensible and finding rivals that are of a similar size so that the insights you're supplying are really going to be valuable and actionable. If somebody offers you Google as a rival, believe about it, maybe provide some alternatives.
Possibly they just introduced a new product and they truly would like some particular insights as to how they can improve that content. Or perhaps they're going through a site migration in a few months, and they truly desire some insights related to that.
Great audits are not one size fits all. You can really level up your audit by making sure that it's tailored to the site and the business you're looking at specifically. Now that we've got our competitors, we've got our objectives, let's get begun by taking an appearance at keywords.
1. Keywords
It's where you need to start since keywords are the foundation of SEO. This should not take you all day. There are a couple of tools that you can utilize so that you can get some actually intriguing and practical information about keywords without having to put in an entire bunch of time.
So Moz's Keyword Explorer is an actually excellent location to begin. I like to use the Compare Link Profiles tool, and this is a really good way to take a look at one website versus its rivals and see how it's doing from a truly high level. It'll assist you determine if there's someone who's really elite, who's ranking for 20 times more keywords than you, that's perhaps not the most sensible rival to monitor yourself against.
You can see if possibly there's a site that's really comparable. Or if there's a website that's not ranking for hardly any keywords, that's not going to be one you have to fret about. It's an actually excellent place to start simply to get sort of an idea of the competitive landscape. Another truly practical thing to look at is the keyword overlap. We've seen total keywords.
Let's state the blue is your leading competitor, green is rival two, and then the red is you. You actually desire to take a look at that location where your competitors overlap but you do not have any keywords that are ranking.
This is so essential, since possibly you'll identify a topic location where all of your competitors have content for, but the website you're taking a look at does not. This is a truly good location to start and can assist you provide some initial material ideas and get sort of a window into your rivals' material methods. So speaking of content, let's speak about looking at content for an SEO audit.
2. Content
This is probably where I invest the most time personally when I do audits, due to the fact that it's actually valuable and there are likewise so many various things to look at and you can discover something new pretty much every time. When you're taking a look at a B2B website in particular, nevertheless, something you want to make certain 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 stage to the next?
Take a look at their site like you're someone visiting it for the very first time. Do they have an actually clear contact form?
Is it simple to navigate to the demonstration, if that's a really crucial conversion to them? See if there's something they're doing really, truly well, that the site you're looking at is not.
Take some screenshots. Share some specific things a rival is doing that maybe you can gain from and find a method to do your own variation of on your website.
3. Technical
All right. Another location to constantly make sure you include is technical, since all of us know that even if you have the very best, remarkable material on your site, if your technical SEO is a mess, it's not really going to matter if you're not able to get that content indexed.
An excellent place to begin is to do Moz's On-Demand Crawl so you can take a look at things like 404 mistakes, replicate material, perhaps they have missing out on metadata on all of their really valuable top pages. That's great information to have and to share. Then you likewise wish to broaden that to take a look at things like site speed. Maybe they have really poor site speed, and it's absolutely nothing that they have actually ever focused on.
Usage Google's Page Speed Insights. See if there are some specific recommendations that you can provide which you can help them repair, since eventually it's about trying to get them to want to work with you and showing how you could assist them repair those problems. You can also take a look at things that may be impacting indexation. Have a look at their robots.txt.
Have a look at their sitemap. Just inspect all packages and ensure that there's nothing that may be affecting their search appearance.
4. Off-site
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Lastly, I constantly like to have a look at off-site. This is another excellent use of Moz. I enjoy to use Moz's Compare Link Profiles alternative to get a concept of how you stack up with your competitors when it concerns off-site.
Now I understand that off-site is truly tough. Link structure is hard, and it takes a long period of time to really reveal outcomes. Website Knowing how you stack up versus your rivals, when it comes to Domain Authority and it comes to amount to links, really assists you get a concept of how tough it's going to be and how long it's going to take to capture up with your rivals in the search engine results page.
So I always like to have a look at Domain Authority, external links, linking domains and actually just finding 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 likewise have a look at specific backlink profiles and link overlap, very comparable to the competitor overlap.
See if there's a website where all of your competitors have backlinks from and you don't. Possibly it's really pertinent, a market publication, and you can offer them that and you can help them ultimately, ideally, get a link from there too. All right. So we've had a look at keywords, material, technical, and off-site. If you followed all the steps, you ought to have an actually terrific audit with some extremely actionable, short-term and long-term action products to provide.