Are you looking to maximise your B2B SEO efforts but don’t know where to start? A B2B SEO audit helps you recheck your digital presence and keep it in good shape.
It allows you to analyze the technical and non-technical aspects of your SEO efforts to optimize outcomes.
In this article, let’s understand the steps for an SEO audit and how to conduct one for your business.
Pre B2B SEO Audit Checklist
First, let's list down the things to get started.
1. Business Goals
An enterprise SEO audit includes measuring business outcomes based on specific pre-set targets. List down your B2B SEO goals before executing an audit. The best way is to make your goals specific.
- Increase in organic traffic
- Improvement in keyword rankings
- Landing page conversions
- Website bounce rate reduction
- Rich snippet feature targets
- Backlinks and mentions
Having targets for these metrics helps you have clear objectives when conducting an SEO audit. Plus, such targets help you measure key SEO metrics against pre-defined benchmarks.
2. Competitive Analysis
Listing your main competitors helps you understand how well you’re fairing compared to competing businesses.
- Create a keyword list relevant to your products, services, and content.
- Use an appropriate tool to find websites that rank for all those keywords—these sites are your SEO competitors.
Next, work on creating a thorough competitive SEO analysis.
- Analyze your competitors' best-ranking pages and highest-performing keywords.
- Review their top backlinks.
- Review their website's user experience and make a list of things that are working for them.
- Perform a quick audit of their social media channels.
3. SEO Auditing Tools
Finally, list the tools you need for a B2B SEO audit. Get the necessary subscriptions to ensure a smooth auditing process.
Once you have all of these in place, it's time to start the audit.
How to Conduct a B2B SEO Audit
Conducting a B2B SEO audit involves thoroughly examining your website's content and technical SEO elements to enhance search visibility and conversion rates.
Start With a Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit helps you uncover technical issues hampering your site's search engine performance.
To perform an in-depth technical audit, use an SEO auditing tool like ScreamingFrog, Semrush, or Ahrefs. Let's review some things you must review in your technical SEO audit process.
Review Your Sitemap
A sitemap guides search engines through the site's structure, allowing them to find, crawl, and index all its content efficiently.
It's particularly beneficial for new websites with a few external links or large e-commerce sites with many pages.
An SEO auditing tool can track any sitemap-related issues website issues, such as:
No Sitemap
If your website lacks a sitemap, search engines won’t have a clear map of your site’s structure.
Outdated Sitemap
Your sitemap may be outdated if you’ve recently upgraded your site architecture (e.g., redesigned pages or changed URLs).
Broken Links
Broken links refer to hyperlinks that lead to non-existent or inaccessible web pages. These can occur for various reasons, such as misspelt URLs, updated URLs without proper redirection, or deleted pages.
Broken links can significantly harm a website's SEO performance by negatively impacting user experience and reducing the site's credibility.
An auditing tool guides you to fix all broken link issues, such as dead internal links, broken outbound links, broken redirects, and orphaned pages.
Site Speed
We all hate visiting a website that takes ages to load, don't we? That's why optimizing site speed is necessary for search engine optimization.
Search engines may penalize slow-loading sites by ranking them lower in search results, which can reduce visibility and traffic.
Well, also, if you have a slow-loading website, the bounce rate increases, which is not a good sign anyway.
A technical audit helps you to fix site speed on desktop and mobile devices.
Mobile Friendliness
You must remember that search engines are interested in how users interact with your website. Also, a big percentage of internet users now use mobile devices to browse through their favourite websites and content.
Websites showing up as the first listing on Google’s search results get an average of 39% clickthrough rate on mobile and 34.6% on desktop. (Source)
Hence, making it mobile-friendly is an integral part of a B2B SEO audit.
Make sure you track and fix all the aspects of mobile-friendliness when auditing your website:
- Implement a responsive layout that adapts seamlessly to different screen sizes.
- Simplify menus and ensure easy tapping on touch devices.
- Ensure large, readable fonts that are legible on small screens.
- Use flexible and optimized images that adjust to different screen sizes.
- Put up forms that are easy to fill out on mobile devices.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
On-page SEO is a critical part of a successful SEO strategy. When you run your website in a website crawler, it enlists all the on-page SEO issues and how you should fix them.
- Make sure you have keyword-optimized page titles and meta descriptions.
- The ideal way is to have user-friendly and keyword-optimized URLs.
- Image file names and alt tags should be keyword-optimized. Don't forget to perform image optimization—ensure all published images are high-quality and compressed.
Audit Your B2B Content
A content audit is a valuable process that helps you evaluate and improve your existing content and its performance in search engine results pages. Most B2B companies have content auditing as a vital part of their SaaS SEO strategy. Here are some of the advantages of conducting a content audit:
- Improve your branded content's rankings and visibility in Google search results.
- Get more people to engage with your content and generate a higher number of qualified leads.
- Enhance the branded content experience for your target audience.
To audit your content, you can use SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Surfer SEO, Semush, and Ahrefs.
Let's now look at some key elements of a B2B content audit.
Keyword Research
As a marketer, you know that getting lots of traffic to your website isn't enough; you need relevant traffic consistently.
- Check your Google Analytics account to see the quality of traffic you're getting from your current set of keywords.
- Do your keyword research to understand which keywords are more relevant to your business from now on. Use keyword research tools like Semush or Ahrefs to find the best-fitting keywords.
Check for Duplicate Content
If you have lots of duplicate content on your website, getting search rankings will be harder.
- Check for pages with plagiarism issues.
- Look for pages that may have been accidentally published multiple times.
- Find website pages with thin content.
It's ideal to re-do pages with thin or duplicate content to make them original and reader-friendly. If you find there are extra versions of a content piece, make sure you delete it from your website.
You might also realize that your website faces keyword cannibalization issues. Keyword cannibalization happens when you accidentally create many pages targeting the same or similar keywords.
This can weaken the site's overall ability to rank effectively for those keywords. To track keyword cannibalization issues, you can use a free tool like seotesting.com.
Finally, you must remember that the goal of a winning content strategy is to offer authentic and unique content to your prospective customers. It's the best way to earn targeted traffic for your branded content.
Outdated Content
If you don't update your existing content with the latest industry trends, it naturally gets outdated over time. What is the downside of having outdated content on your site?
The problem with outdated content is that its rankings start falling in search engines. An SEO audit helps you track all such old content so you can work on updating it.
That shouldn't be very complicated, right? So, let's move on to the next one on our list of content checks.
On-Page Content Optimization
Don't you agree that creating relevant content is the life and soul of a successful SEO strategy?
I bet you do. And that's why optimizing and re-optimizing your branded content is so crucial. In this section, let's delve into this aspect of a B2B SEO audit.
Keyword Optimization
Adding relevant keywords to your content is a core strategy for making it relevant to your niche. Moreover, a definite keyword strategy helps search engines understand your content and categorize it under a specific topic.
A content audit in a tool like Surfer SEO can help you figure out if you have used the right keywords in your content or not. You can use this nifty tool to track content keyword density and optimize it for superior business outcomes.
Header Tags
A content audit helps you to adjust the number of headings you have in your content. Additionally, you should review your content to make sure you're structuring and organizing your headings and subheadings in a logical way.
This SEO strategy helps you to showcase your topical hierarchy to search engines in an effective manner.
Optimizing your headings for keywords adds to your search engine optimization efforts.
Readability
Improving content readability enhances user experience and improves your website's credibility with search engines. You can use a tool like Grammarly or Readable to track and analyze your content's reliability score.
Plus, these tools will guide you to improve your score and write easy-to-read copy.
Here are some evergreen tips to make your content more readable:
- Use short sentences and paragraphs to convey your messages effectively.
- Write in simple language without using too many complex terms or jargon.
- Give your writing a natural and logical flow.
- Use bullet points to say more with less.
By giving your audience small chunks of easy-to-digest information, you can do wonders for your content's readability, which will surely show in the search results as well.
Review Content Metrics
A good SEO audit includes a deep analysis of your content performance. You can head over to your Google Analytics dashboard to check some of the key content metrics.
- Check for metrics like organic traffic and bounce rate.
- Make a list of pages that are performing better than others and enlist the reasons for the same.
- A look at your conversion rate also offers insights into the overall quality of your branded content and its level of search engine optimization.
Final Thoughts
Improving search engine rankings doesn't happen overnight, but you can definitely get there with persistent optimization and regular B2B SEO audits.
It's great to audit your SEO efforts yourself; however, hiring a professional B2B SEO agency helps you get an unbiased analysis of your search marketing campaigns.
So, if you're looking for an external partner, book a free call with one of our SEO experts here at TripleDart.
To give you a heads-up, we have worked with national and international B2B brands to achieve tremendous results from SEO and organic content marketing.
SEO Audit: FAQs
What is a B2B SEO audit?
A B2B SEO audit is a comprehensive review of a business's website and content strategy, focusing on the SEO aspects that affect search visibility and conversion rates.
It involves analyzing how search engines perceive your content, identifying areas for improvement to rank higher in search results, and aligning your SEO efforts with your business objectives.
How much does an SEO audit cost?
The cost of an SEO audit depends on factors such as the size of the website and the depth of the audit. In 2024, businesses can expect to pay anywhere from $650 to $14,000 for a professional SEO audit.
The range reflects a basic analysis of on-page elements to comprehensive reviews that include competitor analysis, backlink assessment, and strategic recommendations for improvement.
What are the benefits of conducting a thorough SEO Audit?
Conducting a thorough SEO audit is essential for tracking and improving a website's search engine performance. It offers you actionable insights to improve results from your SEO efforts.
How long does it take to complete an SEO audit?
The duration of an SEO audit depends on the complexity of the website.
On average, a manual SEO audit for a small website might take a couple of days, while a more comprehensive audit for a larger site could take between 2 to 6 weeks.
What should be included in a B2B SEO audit?
A comprehensive B2B SEO audit should cover several key areas to ensure a thorough evaluation of your website's search performance.
Firstly, check and analyze whether you're targeting the relevant terms across all stages of the buyer journey.
Secondly, you should check for on-page elements like meta tags, headers, and image optimization.
Thirdly, you must review and fix technical aspects such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and proper indexing.
Additionally, perform a content audit to evaluate the quality and relevance of your site's content. Lastly, work on analyzing and improving external backlinks and internal links.
