Impactful SEO Audits for B2B
An extensive audit of your B2B site can indicate the distinction in between winning new clients and losing them to the competitors. In this brand name 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 deal with is how to level up your basic SEO audit into something that's actually impactful for a B2B company that is in need of a long-lasting, tactical strategy. Now when I'm talking about an SEO audit, I'm not just talking about a technical audit, something you can just pull from Yelling Frog.
It's truly about getting a clear image of a website's existing SEO compliance and most notably showing the methods, both in the brief and long term, that you can work with them to help them attain their objectives So today I'm going to walk you through my technique to SEO audits and stroll you through action by step. Now prior to we begin pulling data, there are a number of things I like to determine initially.
Rivals and goals.
Number one is rivals. So SEO, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. If we wish to improve our rankings, a competitor is most likely going to need to lose rankings. It's truly important 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, again, it's actually important to make certain that your competitors are realistic.
I can't inform you the number of times I have actually been offered Google as a rival. Now perhaps they're a rival for you, but it's really essential to ensure that you're being realistic and finding rivals that are of a comparable size so that the insights you're offering are really going to be important and actionable. If someone gives you Google as a rival, believe about it, maybe offer some options.
Possibly they simply released a 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 site migration in a couple of months, and they really want some insights related to that.
Good audits are not one size fits all. So you can actually level up your audit by making sure that it's tailored to the site and the company you're taking a look at specifically. Now that we have actually got our competitors, we've got our goals, let's get started by taking a look at keywords.
1. Keywords
Clearly, keywords are so essential. It's where you need to start because keywords are the foundation of SEO. Now this is an audit. We're not doing a full keyword research strategy here. This should not take you all the time. There are a couple of tools that you can use so that you can get some truly interesting and practical details about keywords without having to put in a whole lot 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 a really good way to take a look at one website versus its competitors and see how it's doing from a truly high level. It'll assist you recognize if there's somebody who's truly 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 website that's truly comparable. Or if there's a site that's not ranking for barely any keywords, that's not going to be one you have to fret about. So it's a really good location to begin just to get sort of a concept of the competitive landscape. Another actually valuable thing to look at is the keyword overlap. So we've seen total keywords.
However what are those keywords specifically that are carrying out well? So my lovely illustration here of a keyword overlap chart provides you a concept. Let's state the blue is your top competitor, green is rival two, and then the red is you. You actually desire to take an appearance at that area where your rivals overlap however you do not have any keywords that are ranking.
This is so essential, since maybe you'll identify a subject area where all of your competitors have material for, but the website you're taking a look at doesn't. This is a truly great location to begin and can help you offer some initial material recommendations and get sort of a window into your rivals' content techniques. Speaking of material, let's talk about looking at material for an SEO audit.
2. Content
So this is probably where I invest the most time personally when I do audits, because it's really important and there are likewise so many different things to take a look at and you can find something new practically each time. When you're taking a look at a B2B site in specific, however, one thing you wish to ensure you're having 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 somebody visiting it for the very first time. Do they have a really clear contact form?
Is it easy to navigate to the demonstration, if that's a really important conversion to them? Have a look at their material and what they're doing, specifically making certain that they have material for the full funnel. This is another great chance to assess visit our website your competitors. Do the exact same thing on your rivals' websites. See if there's something they're doing truly, really 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 gain from and discover a method to do your own version of on your site.
3. Technical
All. Another area to always make sure you include is technical, because all of us know that even if you have the very best, remarkable content 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.
So a great location to begin 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 metadata on all of their really important top pages. That's good info to have and to share. Then you likewise want to broaden that to look at things like site speed. Maybe they have really poor website speed, and it's nothing that they've ever prioritized.
You can likewise take a look at things that may be impacting indexation. Take a look at their robots.txt.
Take a look at their sitemap. Simply inspect all the boxes and make certain that there's absolutely nothing that may be affecting their search look.
4. Off-site
.
I constantly like to take a look at off-site. This is another terrific use of Moz. I enjoy to use Moz's Compare Link Profiles option 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 actually tough. Link structure is hard, and it takes a very long time to really show outcomes. Understanding how you stack up against your competitors, when it comes to Domain Authority and it comes to total links, actually helps you get an idea of how hard 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 always 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 challenging, who is the most reliable, and where do we stand today. You can also take a look at particular backlink profiles and link overlap, very comparable to the competitor overlap.
Maybe it's actually pertinent, a market publication, and you can offer them that and you can help them ultimately, ideally, get a link from there too. If you followed all the actions, you need to have a really fantastic audit with some incredibly actionable, short-term and long-term action items to offer.