Impactful SEO Audits for B2B
A comprehensive audit of your B2B site can imply the difference in between winning new clients and losing them to the competition. In this brand brand-new episode of White boards Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven walks you through 4 areas that can take your audits to the next level.
So something I often battle with is how to level up your basic 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 simply discussing a technical audit, something you can simply pull from Shrieking Frog.
It's actually about getting a clear picture of a site's present SEO compliance and most importantly revealing the methods, both in the short and long term, that you can deal with them to assist them attain their goals Today I'm going to stroll you through my approach to SEO audits and walk you through action by action. Now before we get begun pulling data, there are a couple of things I like to figure out.
Rivals and goals.
Number one is rivals. So SEO, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. If we wish to enhance our rankings, a competitor is likely going to have to lose rankings. So it's really essential to get an idea 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 really important to make certain that your rivals are sensible.
I can't tell you the number of times I have actually been provided Google as a rival. Now possibly they're a rival for you, however it's really important to make sure that you're being sensible and finding competitors that are of a comparable size so that the insights you're supplying are actually going to be valuable and actionable. So if somebody provides you Google as a rival, think of it, maybe offer some options.
Another thing I like to have a look at is goals. So if you're examining a business, inquire what their objectives are. Possibly they simply launched a new item and they really would like some particular insights as to how they can improve that content. Or maybe they're going through a website migration in a few months, and they actually desire some insights connected to that.
Excellent audits are not one size fits all. So you can actually level up your audit by making sure that it's tailored to the website and the business you're taking a look at particularly. So now that we have actually got our rivals, we've got our goals, let's start by having a look at keywords.
1. Keywords
It's where you need to begin because keywords are the backbone 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 truly interesting and valuable info about keywords without having to put in a whole bunch of time.
Moz's Keyword Explorer is an actually great place to start. I love to utilize the Compare Link Profiles tool, and this is an actually great way to take a look at one site versus its rivals and see how it's doing from a really high level. It'll help you determine if there's somebody who's really elite, who's ranking for 20 times more keywords than you, that's maybe not the most realistic rival to monitor yourself versus.
You can see if possibly there's a website that's actually 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 worry about. It's an actually excellent place to start simply to get sort of an idea of the competitive landscape. Another actually helpful thing to take a look at is the keyword overlap. We have actually seen overall keywords.
What are those keywords particularly that are performing well? So my charming illustration here of a keyword overlap chart provides you an idea. So let's say heaven is your top competitor, green is rival two, and then 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 essential, because possibly you'll identify a subject location where all of your rivals have material for, but the site you're looking at does not. This is a really great place to start and can help you supply some preliminary content suggestions and get sort of a window into your competitors' material strategies. So speaking of content, let's speak 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, because it's truly important and there are also so many different things to take a look at and you can discover something new basically each time. When you're looking at a B2B site in particular, however, something you wish to make certain you're having a look at is the funnel. Do they have content for all of the funnel stages, and are they funneling individuals from one phase to the next?
Take a look at their website like you're somebody visiting it for the very first time. Do they have a really clear contact type?
Is it easy to navigate to the demo, if that's a truly important conversion to them? See if there's something they're doing really, really well, that the site you're looking at is not.
Take some screenshots. Share some specific things a competitor is doing that maybe you can gain from and find a method to do your own version of on your site.
3. Technical
All. Another area to always make sure you consist of is technical, due to the fact that we all understand that even if you have the very best, amazing material on your website, if your technical SEO is a mess, it's not actually going to matter if you're unable to get that content indexed.
An excellent location to begin is to do Moz's On-Demand Crawl so you can take a look at things like 404 mistakes, replicate material, maybe they have missing out on metadata on all of their really valuable leading pages. Possibly they have really poor site speed, and it's absolutely nothing that they have actually ever prioritized.
You can also take an appearance at things that might be impacting indexation. Take a look at their robots.txt.
Have a look at their sitemap. Simply check all the boxes and make sure that there's absolutely nothing that might be impacting their search appearance.
4. Off-site
.
Finally, I constantly like to have a look at off-site. This is another terrific usage of Moz. I enjoy to utilize Moz's Compare Link Profiles option to get an idea of how you stack up with your rivals when it concerns off-site.
Now I understand that off-site is really hard. Link structure is hard, and it takes a long time to actually show results. However knowing how you stack up against your rivals, when it comes to Domain Authority and it pertains to amount to links, really assists you get an idea of how tough it's going to be and for how long it's going to take to catch up with your rivals in the online search engine results Best SEO on the Gold Coast page.
So I always like to have a look at Domain Authority, external links, connecting domains and actually simply discovering insights as far as who's going to be the most tough, who is the most authoritative, and where do we stand today. You can likewise have a look at particular backlink profiles and link overlap, extremely comparable to the rival overlap.
Possibly it's truly relevant, an industry publication, and you can supply them that and you can assist them eventually, hopefully, get a link from there too. If you followed all the steps, you must have a really excellent audit with some extremely actionable, short-term and long-lasting action products to offer.