B2B SEO Audit: What it is and Why it Matters
Running a B2B SEO audit for your business’ website can help identify technical problems and opportunities to improve website performance. Just like fine-tuning operations in any business sector, maintaining an optimized website ensures you’re delivering a seamless user experience and adhering to search engine requirements. A well-audited website can lead to improved keyword rankings and search visibility, helping you reach the right audience at the right time. For example, in the manufacturing industry, an audit might uncover slow-loading product pages, outdated technical specifications, or poor mobile experience. All of these are issues that can impede search performance and user engagement. Whether your website is brand new or hasn’t been updated in years, a B2B SEO site audit is an important step in maintaining your digital presence.
What are SEO Site Audits?
SEO site audits evaluate your website's technical performance and visibility to identify issues and opportunities for improvement. By leveraging sophisticated SEO tools, your website can be analyzed in a way similar to how search engines like Google interpret it. These findings can help benchmark your website against industry averages and provide a roadmap toward improving its technical performance, such as page load speeds, and SEO-specific elements, such as indexing control and redirect effectiveness.
Benefits of SEO Audits:
Identify and fix technical issues: You can detect problems like broken links, slow page load times, and crawl errors that can negatively affect user experience and search engine performance.
Improve website visibility: With any SEO audit, you can uncover opportunities to optimize meta tags, headers, and content for stronger keyword alignment and rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Stronger user experience: You can ensure your website is mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, and fast-loading, all of which are factors that improve engagement and reduce bounce rates.
Optimize for search engine crawling and indexing: Ensure your site is well-structured so search engines can easily crawl and index your content, increasing the chance of higher visibility.
Increase conversions: A technically sound and well-optimized website attracts the right audience, driving higher-quality leads and improving your conversion rates.
Support for long-term business goals: An SEO audit aligns your website with broader business objectives by ensuring that it serves as a strong foundation for growth.
B2B SEO Audit Process
1. Crawl Website
The first step for an SEO audit is to crawl your website. This involves using advanced tools to render your pages as a search engine bot would, providing detailed insights into what’s working and what needs improvement. A thorough crawl can cover your entire root domain, specific subdomains, or subfolders, depending on your goals. For example, if you have a main domain (website.com) and a separate subdomain (blog.website.com), you can crawl them together or separately to identify issues. The time required for a crawl will depend on your website’s size and technical complexity. While free online audit tools may seem appealing, they often lack the depth and accuracy needed to uncover all technical performance issues.
Some website crawl tools that I use at Workshop Digital include:
- Screaming Frog: Desktop-based tool that provides detailed insights into all of the technical SEO issues like broken links, duplicate content, and missing metadata.
Cost: Free for basic use (up to 500 URLs); paid version available for unlimited crawling and advanced features.
- Ahrefs Site Audit: Cloud-based audit tool that offers in-depth technical SEO site audits, including crawl reports, error prioritization, and recommendations.
Cost: Paid
- Semrush Site Audit: An all-in-one tool that provides a comprehensive website audit, identifying issues like crawl errors, HTTPS status, and page speed. This tool is great for benchmarking against your competitors.
Cost: A free trial is available, but there is a paid version.
2. Analyze Results
An SEO site audit provides a comprehensive technical overview of your website, highlighting the most important action items to address. These items are often categorized as “critical issues” and may include problems with your SSL certificate, sitemap indexability, or robots.txt file configuration. Resolving these issues is important for maintaining a secure, crawlable, and optimized website.
The example below provides information from Screaming Frog about what URLs can appear in search results and what the response codes are. If you have a high number of 400 errors, it is worth checking to see if you can set up redirects for any high-performing pages to avoid user confusion. For example, if one of your manufacturing products no longer exists and the page does not redirect to a similar product or the overall Products page, users may simply leave the website instead of browsing further.
While critical issues should be prioritized, addressing less pressing concerns can still provide significant benefits. Resolving as many issues as possible can improve your site’s overall performance and give you a competitive edge in organic search results. By carefully analyzing your audit report, you can develop a clear roadmap for technical and SEO improvements.
3. Implement Solutions
The findings from your site audit may require technical expertise to address, especially for resolving complex development issues. For example, if your website does not automatically redirect users to the HTTPS protocol, this may require server administration. Similarly, other issues like fixing sitemap errors, optimizing robots.txt files, or improving page speed may demand advanced IT or development knowledge. I recommend utilizing an in-house developer or a developer agency to make sure you don’t accidentally make the problem worse when trying to fix it.
A clear and detailed audit report, including a prioritized list of action items based on impact, can help guide your team in resolving issues effectively. When you work with Workshop Digital for technical SEO purposes, we will provide an SEO Site Audit presentation and an in-depth data file with priority scores so we can figure out the next steps accordingly.
4. Validate Fixes
Addressing all the issues identified in your technical SEO audit may not be feasible in a single pass. After remedying some of the more critical issues, it’s important to re-run the crawl to assess progress and identify the next steps.
The follow-up analysis will indicate which problems have been successfully resolved and highlight any remaining areas that need attention. Comparing the updated results to your initial benchmark score provides a clear picture of the improvements made.
For certain issues, particularly those related to indexing and coverage, it may be necessary to manually validate those fixes through tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This step ensures that search engines recognize and apply the corrections. Regularly validating fixes and re-auditing as needed can help maintain your website’s technical health over time.
Bonus Tip: Use Screaming Frog APIs!
Did you know that Screaming Frog can directly connect to various tools, such as Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights? Go to Configuration in the top menu bar, select “API Access” and then choose the API you need (see example below).
After connecting, you can then use the tools to help with priority levels for implementation:
Google Analytics 4: See what pages should be fixed first based on traffic and conversions.
Google Search Console: Check which pages have structured data (or Rich Results) warnings and errors.
PageSpeed Insights: Identify what pages have slow load times.
Auditing Manufacturing Websites
The best manufacturing websites leverage a combination of technical, on-page, and off-page optimizations. Let’s dive deeper into the common issues we detect during audits and how you can measure the return on investment (ROI) from the fixes.
Common Issues Detected by SEO Site Audits
During a B2B SEO audit, the following common problems are often identified. Here’s a high-level look at each issue and how you can address them:
Crawlability and Indexability Issues
These site audit issues often contain broken links, redirect chains/loops, blocked pages, and XML sitemap issues.
How to fix: Review your site’s crawl report to identify broken links and redirects, update or remove them as necessary, and ensure your XML sitemap is properly formatted and submitted to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
On-page Optimization Issues
These audit results include duplicate or thin content, poor content readability, missing metadata, duplicate or missing H1 tags, and image optimization issues.
How to fix: Conduct a content audit to address duplicates, optimize metadata with unique and relevant information, rewrite or expand thin content, and assess and improve image optimization using insights from Screaming Frog.
Technical SEO Issues
The more technical problems often found in a B2B SEO audit include slow page speed, mobile usability conflicts, invalid HTTPs, structured data errors, and canonicalization issues.
How to fix: Use tools like Pagespeed Insights to improve load times, ensure your site is mobile-responsive, configure your SSL certificate correctly, validate structured data using Schema Markup Validator, and review canonical tags for accuracy.
International SEO Issues
While not relevant for all manufacturing websites, targeting multilanguage/foreign markets may encounter Hreflang tag issues.
How to fix: Audit Hreflang tags to ensure proper implementation for language and regional targeting, and verify these settings using tools like Google Search Console or specialized SEO audit tools.
Measuring Your Return-on-Investment
Measuring ROI from your SEO efforts requires leveraging strategic reporting solutions and focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business goals. While a B2B SEO audit offers valuable insights into your site’s technical health, tracking organic keyword rankings and organic traffic over time provides a more comprehensive view of progress. It may not seem like technical SEO has a direct impact on traffic and conversions, but think about it this way: if you arrived at a webpage that was slow to load or difficult to navigate, you would probably leave the website and choose another one (AKA a competitor). Or, if other factors like metadata and content weren’t optimized, you may not appear in search results in the first place!
To better understand your ROI:
Establish benchmarks for metrics like keyword rankings, organic traffic, and lead conversions.
Use analytics platforms like Google Analytics or advanced SEO dashboards to monitor ongoing performance. I like to leverage Google Looker Studio to aggregate data from across different platforms into a single source of truth.
Incorporate a long-term perspective, recognizing that B2B workflows often involve extended lead times, which can delay immediate results.
Work With an SEO Agency That Understands B2B Needs
Implementing an effective SEO strategy is important for any B2B business aiming to improve its presence and reach the right audience. A comprehensive SEO audit will provide valuable insights into technical challenges, website usability, and content optimization, offering a clear roadmap for improving overall performance.
If you’re ready to get started with an SEO agency with extensive B2B experience, schedule a free SEO audit consultation for your website.
