SEO Strategy: The Dos and Don’ts for a Successful B2B Website

Search Engine Optimization is one of the essential elements that dictate the success of any B2B. There’s no point in having an eCommerce website that isn’t visible in the search engine result pages. Such a website is characterized by reduced leads and conversion rates, leading to reduced revenues and losses.

If you want your website to be found through organic searches, you must be willing to invest in B2B SEO. However, there is a bit of fuzziness when it comes to investing time and energy in an SEO strategy. This is because SEO experts tend to have varied opinions on what is best and not best for SEO. Indeed, SEO has continued to evolve amidst constant lever adjustments by search engines, making it even harder to know which strategy may work for your B2B. However, our experience with SEO has constantly pointed out the following SEO Dos and Don’ts to help improve your website.

1: General State of the Website

Do: Ensure Your Site is Secure

Cybersecurity threats are hitting businesses hard, getting away with essential user data. Cybersecurity ventures now predict the global cost of cyber breaches to hit $10.5 trillion by 2025. Such figures usually cause paranoia in internet users. For this reason, Google has been trying to spark cybersecurity by ranking secure websites ahead of insecure websites.

Website security is thus an essential element of search engine optimization. For instance, SSL certificates which are now indispensable ingredients of web security will directly impact your google rankings.

SSL certificates work to encrypt the in-transit information being exchanged between the web browser and the client-server. You must acquire one for your site to stay on top of the search engines and engender customer trust. With so many SSL certificate providers such as Comodo SSL Certificate, RapidSSL, GeoTrust Certificate, Thawte SSL etc. securing your website has been made even easier.

Do: Optimize Your Site Speeds

Speed is a crucial website element to the extent that Google has made it one of its top-ranking factors. Website speeds also have a direct impact on bounce rates.

For you to rank high in search engines, you must first optimize your site speeds. Luckily for you, with the PageSpeed Insights tool, you can easily measure your web pages’ speed and take corrective measures as soon as possible. 

Don’t: Fail to optimize Website for Mobile.

Failing to optimize your site for mobile is the first step towards failure. Mobile friendliness matters a lot for SEO, and it is one of the most significant ranking signals for both Google and Bing. As such, websites that have been optimized for mobile will rank higher than non-mobile websites.

Today, a good part of traffic comes from mobile devices, and this is due to the increased use of mobile devices and fast internet connectivity. Even if your business does not rely on the traffic originating from mobile devices, it is always crucial that you optimize your site for the sake of rankings. Failing to do so will negatively impact your rankings in search engines results pages.

Luckily, most modern CMS website builders like WordPress include themes which are automatically mobile-responsive making it easy to meet the requirement.

2: Keywords

Do: Incorporate Specific Keywords Within the Content

Keywords are one of the most significant SEO ranking factors. Most marketers now understand the importance of using keywords in their content. However, most do not realize that using the keywords can significantly impact the rankings and user experience.

Before creating content for your B2B, you must do thorough keyword research to discover the most relevant keywords to help organic searches. You must know the words that your searchers use to search for your content and incorporate them carefully in your content.

Don’t: Keyword Stuffing

While incorporating keywords in your content, you must never forget that search engine algorithms can now understand the human language through artificial intelligence and machine learning. For this reason, you must avoid repeating exact words and phrases in your content, as they could potentially kill your search engine rankings.

3: Audience

Do: Write Your Persona

Another critical thing to note when writing up your strategy is to ensure that the content is relevant to your persona. Persona refers to the fictional representation of your target audience.

Here, you must strive to write content relevant to your persona and which your target audience will scan through the internet to find. Ask yourself, what is it that will make my prospects search for my content? Upon establishing this, you can then write content that adds value to your persona.

Don’t: Write only for Google Search

You are writing the content for your persona and not for Google. It would help if you stuck to your lanes. This is not to say that you should ignore your content’s impact on search engines. The concept here is simple: Write content that your audience loves, and search engines will find a way to love it.

What is suitable for your audience is good for the search engines. It is as simple as that. You must always understand that search engines only provide your audience with the means to find you.

4: Website Content

Do: Focus Your Content Around Keywords

The best strategy here is to first include your keywords or phrases in your title and meta title. The Google search results have provided you with over 600 pixels to impress your web visitors before Google cuts your title short. In other terms, you have up to 60 characters to use, which is plenty of space to set your keywords properly. However, I recommend that you do not go beyond 55 characters for safety purposes.

In the body of your content, you must strive to keep your content as simple as possible. Including irrelevant information to fill out the word count will not work for you. Additionally, You must avoid repeating keywords and phrases as that might cost your rankings.

Do: Create Relevant Content

Relevant content is one that your web visitors and customers will enjoy reading, and it is content that adds value to your web visitors. Relevant content increases your chances of attracting more visitors and going top in the search engine results pages. Furthermore, you must consider quotable and shareable content to increase your chances of getting backlinks, another critical SEO player. Search engines recognize backlinks from other websites as a vote of confidence in favor of your content.

Don’t: Copy Large Chunks of External Content.

Duplicating content cannot help SEO and usually doesn’t hurt it, but the case is different for copying someone else’s content. Copying someone else’s content will hurt your SEO badly.

Search engines have a soft spot for original content. They, however, dislike copied content, and presenting them with one will only make them push you to the bottom of the search engine results pages. Most B2B always find it hard to create original content. However, you can always hire a professional content creator to do the work for you. It is a worthy investment that will help you climb the SEO ladder to the top.

5: Links

Do: Use Relevant Links

It would be best to always approach the links from the quality and not quantity point of view. Filling your content with a lot of links may make your content look spammy. A few relevant links to great internal web pages and external links to authoritative websites could positively impact your SEO.

Do: Disavow Shoddy Inbound Links

Sometimes the success of your B2B SEO success strategy would be impacted negatively by third-party websites. For instance, if websites with poor content link to your websites, Google may penalize you. As you can note, you have been penalized for a fault that has nothing to do with you.

To take complete control of your SEO, you must disavow harmful links. Doing so will let google know that it should not consider such links when ranking your website.

Don’t: Link Too Often to External Sites.

Too many outbound links make your content hard to read, and it also results in high bounce rates, which is something that search engines will be looking at when deciding where to rank your site in search engine results pages. For this reason, you must always ensure that you limit the number of outbound links you use in your content.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization will continue to be a key B2B marketing tactic. As you craft your SEO strategy, you must consider the above pointers. Doing so will make you avoid some of the mistakes that could cost the success of your B2B SEO. It would be best if you also remembered that positive SEO results take time. It would be best if you had the patience to see the fruits of your labor. Do not rush into making changes to your strategies and making conclusions about failed strategies.