Impactful SEO Audits for B2B
A detailed audit of your B2B website can indicate the difference between winning new clients and losing them to the competitors. In this brand brand-new episode of White boards Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven walks you through 4 locations that can take your audits to the next level.
So something I sometimes battle with is how to level up your basic SEO audit into something that's truly impactful for a B2B company that needs a long-lasting, tactical strategy. Now when I'm talking about an SEO audit, I'm not simply discussing a technical audit, something you can just pull from Shrieking Frog.
It's truly about getting a clear photo of a website's current SEO compliance and most significantly revealing the ways, both in the brief and long term, that you can deal with them to assist them achieve their goals Today I'm going to walk you through my method to SEO audits and stroll you through step by step. Now before we get started pulling information, there are a number of things I like to figure out initially.
Competitors and objectives.
It's really important 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 really important to make sure that your competitors are reasonable.
I can't inform you how many times I've been offered Google as a competitor. Now maybe they're a competitor for you, but it's actually important to make certain that you're being sensible and finding competitors that are of a comparable size so that the insights you're providing are really going to be valuable and actionable. If someone offers you Google as a rival, believe about it, perhaps offer some options.
Maybe they simply introduced a brand-new item and they really would like some specific insights as to how they can improve that material. Or perhaps 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 certain that it's customized to the website and the business you're taking a look at specifically. So now that we have actually got our competitors, we have actually got our objectives, let's get started 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 should not take you all day. There are a couple of tools that you can use so that you can get some truly intriguing and handy information about keywords without having to put in a whole lot of time.
So Moz's Keyword Explorer is a really great place to start. 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 competitors and see how it's doing from a truly high level. It'll help you determine 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 rival to monitor yourself versus.
You can see if perhaps there's a site that's truly comparable. Or if there's a site that's not ranking for hardly any keywords, that's not going to be one you need to stress over. So it's a really good location to start simply to get sort of a concept of the competitive landscape. Another truly helpful thing to take a look at is the keyword overlap. So we've seen total keywords.
What are those keywords specifically that are performing well? So my lovely drawing here of a keyword overlap chart offers you an idea. So let's say the blue is your leading competitor, green is rival 2, and after that the red is you. You actually desire to take a look at that area where your rivals overlap but you do not have any keywords that are ranking.
This is so important, due to the fact that possibly you'll identify a subject area where all of your competitors have content for, however the website you're looking at does not. This is an actually great location to start and can help you offer some preliminary material ideas and get sort of a window into your rivals' content strategies. Speaking of material, let's talk about looking at content for an SEO audit.
2. Content
This is probably where I invest the most time personally when I do audits, since it's truly important and there are likewise so numerous various things to look at and you can find something new pretty much every 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 stages, and are they funneling people from one phase to the next?
Take an appearance at their website like you're someone visiting it for the very first time. Take a look at their awareness content 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 really clear contact form?
Is it easy to navigate to the demonstration, if that's a truly crucial conversion to them? See if there's something they're doing truly, truly well, that the site you're looking at is not.
Take some screenshots. Share some specific things a competitor is doing that perhaps you can learn from and find a way to do your own version of on your site.
3. Technical
All right. Another area to always ensure you consist of is technical, due to the fact that we all know that even if you have the very best, remarkable content 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.
A good location to start is to do Moz's On-Demand Crawl so you can take a look at things like 404 errors, replicate material, possibly they have missing metadata on all of their truly important leading forklift licence gold coast pages. That's excellent details to have and to share. You likewise desire to expand that to look at things like website speed. Perhaps they have really bad site speed, and it's absolutely nothing that they have actually ever focused on.
Use Google's Page Speed Insights. See if there are some specific suggestions that you can give them which you can help them repair, since ultimately it's about trying to get them to wish to work with you and demonstrating how you could assist them fix those concerns. You can also take a look at things that may be affecting indexation. Take a look at their robots.txt.
Have a look at their sitemap. Simply examine all the boxes and ensure that there's absolutely nothing that may be affecting their search appearance.
4. Off-site
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Finally, I constantly like to take a look at off-site. This is another fantastic use of Moz. I love to utilize Moz's Compare Link Profiles alternative to get an idea of how you stack up with your competitors when it pertains to off-site.
Now I know that off-site is really hard. Link building is hard, and it takes a long period of 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, truly helps you get a concept of how tough it's going to be and how long it's going to take to catch up with your competitors 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 reliable, and where do we stand today. You can also take a look at specific backlink profiles and link overlap, really similar to the competitor overlap.
See if there's a website where all of your competitors have backlinks from and you do not. Possibly it's actually pertinent, an industry publication, and you can offer them that and you can help them eventually, hopefully, get a link from there too. All right. We have actually taken an appearance at keywords, material, technical, and off-site. If you followed all the actions, you should have a really fantastic audit with some very actionable, short-term and long-lasting action items to supply.