6 Practical Tips for Improving Your B2B Website Performance and SEO
Google keeps bringing forth new updates on a regular basis and more often than not, these updates have an impact on the search results. Therefore, Webmasters, if not on their toes, lose out on the race to others. Basically, they have to work hard on their website performance and SEO to ensure better ranking and visibility on the search engine.
Don’t want this to happen to you? Without beating around the bush, here are some practical tips that you can use for improving your B2B website performance and SEO:
1. Make Your Website Responsive
With mobile searches taking over searches made from desktops, there is no other option but to create a website, which is responsive. Even Google favors mobile-friendly, responsive websites and it is speculated that it uses the same as a ranking factor as well.
In its developers’ blog, Google explains why it recommends using a responsive website design because:
- Users can easily share and link to the content on the website using a single URL.
- Google’s algorithms can easily assign indexing properties to the pages.
- It drastically cuts down engineering time, which otherwise is spent to maintain several pages for the same content.
- Mobile sites are never completely flawless. Creating a responsive website reduces the number of errors and mistakes that plague mobile sites.
- Users needn’t be redirected to a device-optimized view. This reduces page load time and improves their experience.
- Google saves its resources when its bot crawls a responsive site.
Google offers more insight about going responsive with a website in its webmasters’ blog
2. Offer Relevant Content
Nothing can beat fresh, relevant and high-quality content when it comes to retaining the visitors on a website. Also, it is one of the key factors that make visitors return to the website. Returning visitors are likely to take a call-to-action in the favor of your website, provided they get content that’s useful for them. The call-to-action they might take include:
- Sharing a brand or products on their social media channels
- Leaving a product or seller review
- Asking questions about product
- Interacting via comments, chatbots, email etc.
- Leaving a testimonial
- Recommend a product to their peers via their online profiles
So, how exactly what’s the kind of content they notice?
- A mix of multimedia and text – such as images, videos, PDFs, white papers, infographics etc.
- Precise content that doesn’t beat around the bush and is easy to read.
- Original content that offers information without being dull and drab.
- Shareworthy content, which appeals to them and makes them share it with their network.
With the right content on your website, you should be good to go.
3. Use The Right Tags and Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions, title tags, image descriptions are all important part of your website. They may or may not be considered by search engine bots to crawl your website, but they are definitely useful for visitors, who are on your site or come across it on the search results page. A bunch of keywords placed randomly will never make any sense to them or provide them with the information they need. Fill them in by using the right descriptions and you’ll see a change in your website’s performance for sure! Here are some examples of good and bad meta descriptions to refer.
4. Enhance Local Search
Google has been laying emphasis on the local search for a long time and done right, there are chances that your website may end up being on the top of local search results. A definitive guide to local search optimization has been put together by Search Engine Journal, which helps you get started with this.
Note: Apart from Google, you can also focus on secondary search engines as exemplified by this interesting local search ecosystem (in the USA) and get a boost to your business’s visibility.
5. Focus on Quality Link Building
Google values link building with a focus on links that are high-quality. For instance, credible links on social media platforms such as those mentioned on a verified account of an influencer on Twitter, do have a role to play in boosting your website’s SEO. Even the social media platforms on which the links are posted, have high-authority and gives a definite boost to your website apart from increasing its visibility. Therefore, to begin with, include your website’s link in all your social profiles.
Alternatively, you can also participate in posting content (that links back to your site) to high authority third party sites. Ergo, guest posting or providing your expertise via comments on other websites in your niche etc. may do the job for you. This may take time, but once done well, it’ll be definitely worth it!
As much as it is important to pay attention to external links, you also need to work on your internal links present on your website, beginning with a sitemap. It also helps search engines to crawl your sites quickly and easily.
6. Enhance User Engagement
A rule of the thumb that works not only for B2B websites but for all websites, in general, is to enhance the user engagement on the site. Follow the principle of “keeping things simple”, make products and other elements easy to find, include the sitemap at the bottom of the page, make use of whitespace, put the call to action buttons at the right places, use widgets creatively, and so on and so forth.
However, this may vary from website to website and it becomes difficult to follow the same rule. In this case, what you can do is use a heat map like the one provided by Crazyegg. The extremely valuable tool must be a part of your arsenal when you begin with knowing where your visitors click. Based on the analysis, you can chart out a plan to enhance your website’s performance and increase conversions.
Conclusion
These are the actionable tips, which put into use, will help you enhance both your website’s performance and SEO like never before. All you need to do is plan ahead and create a strategy that’ll yield results in your favor.
About the Author
Kunjal Panchal is a digital strategist, having five-plus years of experience in the field of Internet marketing. She is a social media geek, a complete foodie and enjoys trying varied cuisines. A perfect day for her consists of reading her favorite author with a hot cuppa coffee. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.