How to Conduct a Basic B2B SEO Audit

Conducting an SEO audit is a good first step for any B2B company that’s looking to pay more attention to its online presence. It helps you see where you are, so that you can better steer your company toward where you want to go.

An SEO audit, put simply, is an evaluation that will show you how well your website appears on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s a standard procedure that you should be able to initially conduct in-house. The insight you gain from your additional audit will give you what you need to seek out more specific, specialized assistance from a professional digital marketing company.

This insight will be your foundation for any successful digital strategy. In today’s post, we’ll walk you through how to get it by conducting a B2B SEO audit that covers your site’s technical, content, and advanced needs.

B2B SEO Audit: Technical SEO

Robots.txt

• Some robots.txt files can have specific instructions within that inadvertently block search engines from crawling or indexing. If you’re trying to track and catalog pages using Google Analytics, these files can get in the way of that. You can check for these files by looking for differences between the number of pages you view in Google search results vs the pages you see listed directly in Analytics. If something shows up in Analytics but not in search results, that’s a sign of a wayward robots.txt.

Sitemap

• Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to better crawl your site. Make sure yours correctly reflects your website’s content.

Mobile Friendliness

• Mobile searches overtook desktop searches in 2015 and mobile searches continue to increase each year. Mobile-friendliness is a big deal for any business owner’s website, whether they’re business or customer-facing. Attempt to access your website online. How does it operate? Are there areas where things load slowly or clunkily? Key tenets of mobile-friendly design include making sure text is readable, content width is correct, and both zoom and viewport configurations are appropriate. You can also view how Google scores your website’s mobile-friendliness within the mobile Core Web Vitals section of Google Search Console.

On-page Elements

• Your on-page SEO elements are all of the pieces of a website that come together to create a successfully ranking page. These elements include title tags, headings, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. Each of these individual factors will need to contain unique, appropriate keywords and easy-to-read copy.

URL Structures & Linking

• Your website should not have any broken links (4xx or No Response status codes) within it. This provides a better user experience and also allows Google to crawl easier.
• Check on your URLs, making sure they’re following URL structure best practices.
• Check for any 404 errors. Do you have a working 404 page? If not, take this opportunity to create one.
• Check on your 301 redirects to make sure they’re working as intended.

Indexation Status

• Your website’s pages get crawled and read by Google every time a search is made. The search engine then indexes your pages to see where they rank for various keywords. If your pages aren’t indexed, they don’t show up in search results. If they don’t show up in search results, they can’t be read, and, in turn, your rankings will fall. All you have to do to make sure pages are showing up is review your Page Indexing status report, found within Google Search Console.

B2B SEO Audit: Content

Keyword Research

• Keyword research is critical to getting an accurate picture of which types of verbiage work for your business – and which ones don’t. The right keywords will boost SEO traffic and improve your ranking, but most importantly the right keywords will also help you bring the right traffic to the right pages.
• Remember, it isn’t websites that rank for keywords, it is specific pages within a website.
• A keyword audit is a big deal, and most of the time we recommend leaving the process to professionals.
  • However, if you’re interested in doing it yourself, there are a number of different keyword research tools available on the market, but some favorites include Moz Explorer, SEMRush, and the suite of tools available from Google.

Content Audit

• Your website will rank poorly if certain content missteps are in place. These missteps can include:
  • Duplicate content
  • Thin content
  • Out-of-date content
• Look for new opportunities for future content. You know your industry and the messages people are looking for, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities to do even better. Some tools you can use to find new opportunities include:
  • AlsoAsked, a website that lets you submit a search term and receive information on what other questions people ask in relation to that term.
  • AnswerThePublic, another tool that extrapolates potential search topics based on autocomplete data, giving you helpful consumer insight.

B2B SEO Audit: Advanced Technical SEO

Schema Markup

• If you’re not already familiar with schema markup, now is a great time to learn. Essentially, it’s a markup that delivers structured data to search engines, benefitting both the engine and your website. Types of schema that your website should use depend fully on your business. The most beneficial schema types for B2B companies include LocalBusiness, Product, Article, or FAQ Schema.

Image Optimization

• There are plenty of things you can do to optimize your on-page images for search engines. We’ve already talked about image alt tags, but it’s important to also make sure they fit standard aspect ratios and aren’t so oversized that they slow down your page load speeds.

Site Speed

• The faster a page can load during a Google search, the better it ranks within its algorithms. The question becomes: how do I see how quickly my pages are loading and how do I improve their speed? First, there are plenty of tools available online that can give you page load speed data. Depending on how happy you are with your speed test, there are further steps that can be taken to increase speed. Some of these steps include optimizing image sizes, upgrading your servers, and enabling compression.

Taking these steps will be a remarkable help as you work to improve the ranking and success of your business’s website. The next best step for any company that wants to continue moving forward is to partner with a digital marketing company. The right company can help you take the raw data you’ve collected and turn it into a foolproof strategy for future success. If you’re curious about talking to a company that focuses on helping B2B marketers succeed in organic search, why not get in touch with Windmill Strategy?