Impactful SEO Audits for B2B
An extensive audit of your B2B site can indicate the distinction between winning brand-new clients and losing them to the competition. In this brand name new episode of Whiteboard Friday, visitor host Carly Schoonhoven walks you through four locations that can take your audits to the next level.
So something I often battle with is how to level up seo your standard SEO audit into something that's truly impactful for a B2B business that requires a long-term, strategic strategy. Now when I'm discussing an SEO audit, I'm not just discussing a technical audit, something you can just pull from Shrieking Frog.
Rivals and goals.
It's truly essential 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, once again, it's truly crucial to make sure that your rivals are practical.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been offered Google as a rival. Now perhaps they're a rival for you, however it's truly crucial to make sure that you're being sensible and finding competitors that are of a similar size so that the insights you're providing are in fact going to be valuable and actionable. So if somebody gives you Google as a rival, think of it, possibly offer some alternatives.
Another thing I like to take a look at is objectives. If you're evaluating a company, ask them what their objectives are. Maybe they simply launched a brand-new item and they actually would like some specific insights regarding how they can improve that content. Or perhaps they're going through a site migration in a couple of months, and they actually want 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 tailored to the site and the business you're looking at particularly. So now that we have actually got our rivals, we have actually got our objectives, let's get started by having a look at keywords.
1. Keywords
Certainly, keywords are so important. It's where you require to begin due to the fact that keywords are the foundation of SEO. Now this is an audit. We're not doing a complete keyword research technique here. This should not take you all day. There are a couple of tools that you can use so that you can get some truly interesting and valuable information about keywords without having to put in a whole lot of time.
So Moz's Keyword Explorer is an actually great location to start. I love to use the Compare Link Profiles tool, and this is an actually excellent way to take a look at one website versus its rivals and see how it's doing from an actually high level. It'll assist you recognize 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 rival to monitor yourself against.
You can see if possibly there's a website that's actually similar. Or if there's a site that's not ranking for barely any keywords, that's not going to be one you need to fret about. So it's an actually great location to begin just to get sort of a concept of the competitive landscape. Another actually valuable thing to take a look at is the keyword overlap. We have actually seen overall keywords.
Let's state the blue is your leading rival, green is rival two, 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 crucial, because maybe you'll determine a topic area where all of your competitors have material for, but the website you're taking a look at does not. This is an actually good place to start and can help you provide some initial content recommendations and get sort of a window into your competitors' material methods. Speaking of content, let's talk about looking at material for an SEO audit.
2. Content
So this is probably where I spend the most time personally when I do audits, since it's actually important and there are also numerous different things to look at and you can find something new pretty much each time. When you're taking a look at a B2B website in particular, nevertheless, one thing you want to ensure you're taking a look at is the funnel. Do they have content for all of the funnel phases, and are they funneling people from one stage to the next?
Take an appearance at their website like you're someone visiting it for the first time. Do they have a really clear contact type?
Is it easy to browse to the demo, if that's a really crucial conversion to them? See if there's something they're doing really, truly well, that the website you're looking at is not.
Take some screenshots. Share some particular things a competitor is doing that perhaps you can learn from and discover a way to do your own version of on your website.
3. Technical
All right. Another location to constantly make sure you include is technical, due to the fact that all of us know that even if you have the best, remarkable content on your site, 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 good location to start is to do Moz's On-Demand Crawl so you can take an appearance at things like 404 mistakes, replicate content, maybe they have missing metadata on all of their really valuable top pages. That's great information to have and to share. You also desire to broaden that to look at things like site speed. Perhaps they have really bad site speed, and it's absolutely nothing that they have actually ever prioritized.
You can also take a look at things that might be affecting indexation. Take an appearance at their robots.txt.
Take a look at their sitemap. Just examine all packages and make sure that there's absolutely nothing that might be impacting their search look.
4. Off-site
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Finally, I constantly like to have a look at off-site. This is another terrific use of Moz. I enjoy to use Moz's Compare Link Profiles option to get a concept of how you stack up with your competitors when it pertains to off-site.
Now I know that off-site is really challenging. Link building is hard, and it takes a long time to actually reveal results. Understanding how you stack up versus your rivals, when it comes to Domain Authority and it comes to total links, actually assists you get an idea of how difficult 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.
I always like to take a look at Domain Authority, external links, connecting domains and actually just discovering 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 likewise take a look at specific backlink profiles and link overlap, really comparable to the competitor overlap.
Maybe it's truly relevant, a market publication, and you can offer them that and you can help them eventually, hopefully, get a link from there too. If you followed all the steps, you ought to have a really excellent audit with some super actionable, short-term and long-lasting action items to offer.