Impactful SEO Audits for B2B
A detailed audit of your B2B website can imply the difference between winning new customers and losing them to the competition. In this brand new episode of Whiteboard Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven strolls you through 4 locations that can take your audits to the next level.
Something I often struggle with is how to level up your standard 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 speaking about a technical audit, something you can simply pull from Shrieking Frog.
It's truly about getting a clear picture of a website's current SEO compliance and most significantly revealing the methods, both in the brief and long term, that you can work with them to help them achieve their objectives So today I'm going to stroll you through my approach to SEO audits and stroll you through step by action. Now prior to we get started pulling data, there are a couple of things I like to figure out.
Competitors and objectives.
It's actually essential 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 truly important to make sure that your competitors are practical.
I can't inform you the number of times I have actually been provided Google as a competitor. Now possibly they're a competitor for you, however it's actually important to ensure that you're being reasonable and finding rivals that are of a comparable size so that the insights you're offering are really going to be valuable and actionable. If somebody gives you Google as a competitor, believe about it, perhaps supply some alternatives.
Maybe they just introduced a new product and they really would like some particular insights as to how they can enhance that content. Or perhaps they're going through a website migration in a couple of months, and they truly desire some insights related to that.
Excellent audits are not one size fits all. So you can really level up your audit by ensuring that it's tailored to the website and the company you're looking at particularly. So now that we have actually got our rivals, we have actually got our objectives, let's begin by taking a look at keywords.
1. Keywords
Obviously, keywords are so crucial. It's where you require to begin since keywords are the foundation of SEO. Now this is an audit. We're not doing a full keyword research study technique 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 fascinating and useful info about keywords without having to put in an entire lot of time.
Moz's Keyword Explorer is an actually terrific place to begin. I love to use the Compare Link Profiles tool, and this is a really great way to take a look at one website versus its competitors and see how it's doing from an actually 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 perhaps not the most sensible competitor to monitor yourself against.
You can see if maybe there's a site that's really comparable. Another really valuable thing to look at is the keyword overlap.
Let's state the blue is your leading competitor, green is competitor 2, and then the red is you. You really want to take an appearance at that area where your rivals overlap but you don't have any keywords that are ranking.
This is so essential, due to the fact that perhaps you'll determine a subject location where all of your competitors have material for, however the site you're taking a look at does not. This is an actually good place to begin and can help you offer some preliminary content recommendations and get sort of a window into your rivals' material techniques. So speaking of content, let's talk about taking a look at material for an SEO audit.
2. Content
This is probably where I spend the most time personally when I do audits, due to the fact that it's actually important and there are also so lots of various things to look at and you can discover something brand-new pretty much every time. When you're looking at a B2B site in specific, nevertheless, one thing you wish to ensure you're having a look at is the funnel. Do they have material for all of the funnel stages, and are they funneling individuals from one phase 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 browse to the demonstration, if that's a truly essential conversion to them? Have a look at their material and what they're doing, particularly ensuring that they have material for the complete funnel. This is another good opportunity to assess your competitors. Do the exact same thing on your competitors' sites. 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 particular things a rival is doing that maybe you can gain from and find a way to do your own variation of on your site.
3. Technical
All right. Another area to always ensure you include is technical, due to the fact that all of us know that even if you have the very best, incredible content 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 an appearance at things like 404 errors, duplicate material, possibly they have missing out gold coast seo specialist on metadata on all of their actually valuable top pages. Maybe they have really bad website speed, and it's nothing that they have actually ever focused on.
Usage Google's Page Speed Insights. See if there are some particular suggestions that you can give them which you can assist them fix, because eventually it's about attempting to get them to want to deal with you and demonstrating how you might help them fix those problems. You can likewise have a look at things that might be impacting indexation. Take a look at their robots.txt.
Have a look at their sitemap. Simply 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 take a look at off-site. This is another fantastic use of Moz. I enjoy to use Moz's Compare Link Profiles choice to get a concept of how you stack up with your competitors when it pertains to off-site.
Now I understand that off-site is actually challenging. Link building is hard, and it takes a very long time to truly reveal outcomes. But understanding how you stack up against your competitors, when it concerns Domain Authority and it comes to total links, actually helps you get an idea of how tough it's going to be and for how long it's going to require to catch up with your competitors in the online search engine results page.
I always like to take a look at Domain Authority, external links, connecting domains and truly simply finding insights as far as who's going to be the most challenging, who is the most authoritative, and where do we stand today. You can also have a look at specific backlink profiles and link overlap, extremely comparable to the competitor overlap.
Maybe it's truly relevant, an industry publication, and you can provide them that and you can help them eventually, ideally, get a link from there too. If you followed all the actions, you must have a really great audit with some incredibly actionable, short-term and long-term action products to supply.