Most B2B SEO audits arrive as a 40 page PDF with 200 issues in it, sorted by severity, and nobody ever does anything with it. The issues are usually real. The problem is that the document never says which of them is costing money, so nobody knows where to start and nobody starts.
A Google Search Console SEO audit does the opposite. It is free, it uses your own data rather than a crawler’s guesses, and it answers one question: which queries are your buyers typing, and where are you losing them. You can run it in an afternoon.
One client, spring 2026. After the March technical fixes, Search Console impressions roughly tripled by June and were up more than 6x by August. Organic sessions moved by one. The plan on the table was more articles. We did one hour on titles and meta descriptions for the ten pages with the most impressions instead. The site was already being shown. It was being passed over.
What is B2B SEO?
B2B SEO is the practice of getting a company’s pages to rank for the queries its buyers type while they are deciding, rather than for the queries that produce the most traffic. The two lists overlap far less than people expect, and confusing them is the most common reason a B2B site gets more visitors and no more pipeline. That is also the short answer to what SEO for B2B companies should be optimising for: buyer queries, not volume.
A B2C site with 100,000 monthly visitors and a 1% conversion rate has a business. A B2B company selling €40,000 contracts needs a few hundred of the right people, and it can afford to ignore almost everyone else. That changes which keywords are worth having.
How does a Search Console audit differ from a normal SEO audit?
A crawler audit tells you what is wrong with your site. A Search Console audit tells you what is happening to it in search. Both matter, but only one of them is based on what real people actually did.
Crawlers guess at intent, estimate volume, and flag hundreds of technical issues without knowing which pages anyone cares about. Search Console shows the queries you appeared for, the position you held, and whether anyone clicked. Start there, because it tells you where to point the crawler afterwards.
How does Google Search Console work?
Search Console reports how your site performed in Google search: which queries showed your pages, how many times they appeared (impressions), how many people clicked, and your average position for each. It is free, it only covers Google, and it only shows data for a property you have verified ownership of. Google documents every column in its Performance report help page.
Two things to know before you read anything into it. Data lags by about three days, so today’s numbers are not there yet. And position is an average, so a keyword sitting at “8.4” may have been at 3 on some days and 15 on others.
The audit, in six steps
Set the date range to the last 28 days, with the comparison to the previous 28 days switched on. Everything below happens in the Performance report.
1. Queries with impressions and no clicks. Sort by impressions, then look at the rows with zero or near zero clicks. These are queries where Google already thinks you are relevant enough to show. You are being seen and passed over, which is a title and meta problem, not a content problem. It is also the cheapest fix on this list.
2. Positions 5 to 20. Filter to that band. These are pages that already have authority and are a few places from traffic. Improving one of them beats publishing something new, every time, and it is the step teams skip because publishing feels more like progress.
3. Pages losing clicks against the previous period. Sort by click difference. A page that dropped is either being outranked by something new, or has gone stale, or lost internal links in a redesign. Find out which before rewriting anything.
4. Query to page mismatch. Pick your five most valuable queries and check which page ranks for each. When two of your pages trade places for the same query, you are competing with yourself, and Google is picking for you. Decide which page owns it, and make the other one link to it.
5. The 404 check, if you have migrated anything. Open the Pages report and look at Not found. After a CMS migration this list fills up with URLs that still have links pointing at them, and every one is authority going nowhere. Redirect them to the closest relevant page, not all to the homepage.
6. Separate buyer queries from everyone else. Go through your top 50 queries and mark each one: would someone who typed this ever buy from us? Students, job seekers and competitors doing research all show up in this report. This is the step that turns an SEO audit into a business document, and it is the step almost no audit includes.
What does the output look like on a real site?
Here is ours. It is not flattering, and that is the point. In the last 28 days piquiyo.com had 2,240 impressions and 3 clicks, at an average position of 18.6. In the 28 days before that: 774 impressions and 7 clicks.
Impressions nearly tripled. Clicks more than halved.
That is step 1 and step 2 of this audit describing our own site. We are being shown far more often, at a position where almost nobody clicks, for queries our titles are not written to win. It is exactly the pattern this audit is built to find, and we found it on ourselves before we found it on anyone else.
What is SaaS SEO, and does any of this change?
SaaS SEO is B2B SEO applied to a product with a free trial or a demo as the conversion, which means the buying questions carry more weight than the category questions. Pricing, integrations, comparisons and migration queries convert; definition queries mostly do not.
The audit above does not change. What changes is step 6: for SaaS, mark integration and comparison queries as buyer queries even when the volume looks small, because those are people already choosing between two products.
What this audit will not tell you
It will not tell you about queries you have never appeared for. Search Console only reports what already happened, so everything you are completely absent from is invisible in it. That gap needs a keyword tool and a look at who currently ranks.
It also will not tell you whether the traffic converts. Search Console stops at the click. Pair it with your analytics and your CRM, or you will optimise your way to more of the wrong visitors. The B2B SaaS marketing metrics that actually predict growth are on the other side of that click, and so is the B2B lead generation work that turns a visit into an opportunity.
What to do with the output
In order, because the order is most of the value.
- Rewrite titles and metas for the high impression, no click queries. Hours of work, and it changes the click rate on impressions you are already earning.
- Improve the pages sitting at 5 to 20 for queries you marked as buyer queries. Not all of them. The buyer ones. Your ideal customer profile is the filter.
- Fix the cannibalisation you found in step 4. Pick a winner, redirect or de-optimise the loser.
- Clear the 404s.
- Then, and only then, plan new content, using the queries you are absent from entirely. That is where demand generation content earns its place.
Most teams start at step 5, because publishing feels like progress. It is also why their SEO takes a year to show anything.
When is it worth hiring a B2B SaaS SEO agency?
Hire when the audit has produced a list you agree with and nobody on your team has the hours to work through it, or when the same audit twice in a row shows nothing moved. Those are capacity and capability problems, and both are worth paying to solve. What is not worth paying for is someone to tell you what your own Search Console already says.
Do not hire before you have run the audit yourself. You will not be able to tell a good proposal from a bad one, and you will end up buying volume you did not need. If you have run it and want a second pair of eyes on what it means, that is a conversation we are happy to have.
Frequently asked questions
How do I run an SEO audit in Google Search Console?
Open the Performance report, set the last 28 days with comparison on, then work through six views: queries with impressions and no clicks, positions 5 to 20, pages losing clicks, query to page mismatches, 404s in the Pages report, and finally mark which queries a real buyer would type. It takes an afternoon.
Is Google Search Console enough for an SEO audit?
For the first audit, yes. It shows what actually happened rather than what a crawler estimates. It cannot show queries you have never appeared for, so pair it with a keyword tool once you have worked through what it does show.
How often should B2B companies run this?
Monthly for the click and position checks, quarterly for the full six steps. Any more often and you are reacting to noise, since position averages move around on their own.
What is a good average position for B2B?
The wrong question. An average position of 18 on twenty buyer queries is worth more than position 4 on a query nobody who buys ever types. Judge position per query, and only for queries you marked as buyer queries in step 6.
Why are impressions rising while clicks fall?
Usually because you are ranking for more queries at positions where few people click, or because your titles do not match what those searchers wanted. It is the most common pattern in B2B Search Console data and it is a title and targeting problem, not a traffic problem.
One thing to do this week
Open Search Console, sort last 28 days by impressions, and read the top 20 queries. Mark each one: would a person who typed this ever buy from us?
If most of the list is no, your SEO is working correctly on the wrong instructions, and no amount of new content fixes that.
If you want the shortcut, our SEO Content Studio takes a URL and gives you the brief and the rewrite. Paste a link and see what it says.