Impactful SEO Audits for B2B
A detailed audit of your B2B site can mean the distinction between winning brand-new customers and losing them to the competitors. In this brand name brand-new episode of White boards Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven strolls you through four locations that can take your audits to the next level.
So something I in some cases fight with is how to level up your standard SEO audit into something that's actually impactful for a B2B business that is in need of a long-lasting, tactical plan. Now when I'm discussing an SEO audit, I'm not just discussing a technical audit, something you can just pull from Shouting Frog.
It's truly about getting a clear photo of a site's current SEO compliance and most notably revealing the methods, both in the short and long term, that you can work with them to assist them attain their goals Today I'm going to stroll you through my approach to SEO audits and stroll you through step by step. Now prior to we get started pulling data, there are a couple of things I like to figure out.
Rivals and goals.
It's truly essential to get an idea of what rivals you're going to be looking at so you can see how you stack up in relation to them. Now, again, it's actually essential to make sure that your rivals are realistic.
I can't inform you how many times I have actually been given Google as a competitor. Now maybe they're a competitor for you, but it's really crucial to make sure that you're being practical and finding competitors that are of a comparable size so that the insights you're supplying are really going to be valuable and actionable. So if somebody gives you Google as a rival, think about it, possibly supply some alternatives.
Perhaps they just released a brand-new item and they actually would like some specific insights as to how they can improve that material. Or perhaps they're going through a website migration in a couple of months, and they truly want some insights related to that.
Great audits are not one size fits all. So you can truly level up your audit by making certain that it's customized to the website and the business you're looking at specifically. So now that we have actually got our competitors, we have actually got our goals, let's get going by having a look at keywords.
1. Keywords
It's where you need to start due to the fact that keywords are the backbone of SEO. This should not take you all day. There are a couple of tools that you can use so that you can get some actually interesting and useful information about keywords without having to put in a whole bunch of time.
Moz's Keyword Explorer is a really great location to start. I love to use the Compare Link Profiles tool, and this is an actually excellent way to have 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 possibly not the most practical competitor to monitor yourself against.
You can see if possibly there's a site that's really similar. Or if there's a website that's not ranking for hardly any keywords, that's not going to be one you have to stress over. So it's a truly good location to begin just to get sort of an idea of the competitive landscape. Another really useful thing to look at is the keyword overlap. We have actually seen overall keywords.
Let's state the blue is your top competitor, green is competitor 2, and then the red is you. You really want to take an appearance at that location where your rivals overlap however you don't have any keywords that are ranking.
This is so essential, since perhaps you'll determine a topic location where all of your rivals have material for, but the site you're taking a look at does not. This is a really excellent place to begin and can assist you offer some initial content tips and get sort of a window into your competitors' content strategies. So speaking of content, let's talk about looking at content for an SEO audit.
2. Content
So this is most likely where I invest the most time personally when I do audits, since it's truly valuable and there are also many various things to take a look at and you can find something brand-new pretty much every time. When you're looking at a B2B site in particular, nevertheless, one thing 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 stage to the next?
So have a look at their website like you're someone visiting it for the very first time. Have a look at their awareness material and see: Are there mid-funnel CTAs? Are they making the next step they desire me to take clear? Or what what does a forklift test consist of is that supreme conversion that they desire people to take in the purchase phase? Do they have an actually clear contact kind?
Is it easy to navigate to the demonstration, if that's an actually important conversion to them? Have a look at their material and what they're doing, particularly making certain that they have material for the full funnel. This is another good opportunity to examine your rivals. So do the same thing on your competitors' websites. See if there's something they're doing truly, really well, that the website you're looking at is not.
Take some screenshots. Share some specific things a rival is doing that maybe you can gain from and discover a way to do your own variation of on your website.
3. Technical
All. Another location to constantly make certain you consist of is technical, since we all understand that even if you have the best, remarkable material on your site, if your technical SEO is a mess, it's not truly going to matter if you're unable to get that content indexed.
So a great place to begin is to do Moz's On-Demand Crawl so you can take a look at things like 404 mistakes, duplicate content, maybe they have missing metadata on all of their really important leading pages. That's excellent details to have and to share. Then you also want to broaden that to look at things like site speed. Perhaps they have actually bad website speed, and it's absolutely nothing that they have actually ever focused on.
You can likewise take an appearance at things that might be affecting indexation. Take a look at their robots.txt.
Have a look at their sitemap. Just inspect all packages and make sure that there's absolutely nothing that might be impacting their search appearance.
4. Off-site
.
I constantly like to take an appearance at off-site. This is another great usage of Moz. I enjoy to utilize Moz's Compare Link Profiles alternative 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 actually difficult. Link building is hard, and it takes a long period of time to actually show results. But understanding how you stack up against your competitors, when it concerns Domain Authority and it comes to total links, actually assists you get a concept of how difficult it's going to be and how long it's going to take to catch up with your rivals in the search engine results page.
So I constantly like to take a look at Domain Authority, external links, connecting domains and really simply finding insights as far as who's going to be the most hard, who is the most authoritative, and where do we stand today. You can also take a look at specific backlink profiles and link overlap, really comparable to the rival overlap.
See if there's a site where all of your rivals have backlinks from and you don't. Possibly it's actually pertinent, an industry publication, and you can provide them that and you can assist them ultimately, ideally, get a link from there too. All. So we have actually had a look at keywords, content, technical, and off-site. If you followed all the actions, you need to have a truly great audit with some extremely actionable, short-term and long-term action items to provide.