While many businesses think their B2B sites operate just like B2C sites, it’s a notion that isn’t quite accurate. With a B2C site, you are directly appealing to a customer who will do research and purchase accordingly. However, with a B2B site, you’re appealing to a team of people who collectively have analyzed needs for their business and now are looking to implement solutions. B2B sales operate on much longer purchasing cycles, and services generally cost more, than B2C direct products.
It’s important to know how to maximize sales from your B2B eCommerce site, tailoring the strategies and products to reflect your knowledge of how B2B and B2C differ. Here are some easy ways to tweak your site so that it reflects an effective and consistent B2B SEO strategy.
It’s All About the Quality
Think about your current website. Many businesses have eCommerce sites that lack quality and overcompensate with quantity. Information is cut and pasted from other sites (including those of competitors), which then creates a glut of duplicated content online. This doesn’t allow for differentiation in search results and serves to confuse your target customer. You need to have original, long-form cornerstone content on every page, along with supplemental materials that are directly linked to that content.
The same goes for your product images. Google appreciates attention to detail, and that means using high-quality product images that are optimized correctly. For example, make sure an image file name isn’t just a random string, but instead contains the product name. Optimization boosts search result rankings, as well as boosting your conversion rate.
Buttons and Links
One easy way to build consumer confidence in your site and boost your rankings is to add buttons that link to Facebook and Twitter. The current Google algorithm takes into account social links. The more people are sharing and posting about your products, the more it will show in your search result rankings.
Your site also needs to include inbound links. Businesses often report that creating links is a skill they do not know how to effectively perform. However, for a business selling a physical product, creating inbound links is as simple as cultivating a product review chain. By providing samples to reviewers and bloggers, you are not only increasing your brand recognition and strength, but you are also receiving backlinks, boosting your Google rankings.
Finally, it’s important to backcheck and make sure everything is working properly. Are there internal links to all pages on your site? If not, valuable content may be overlooked by your customers. Are there any links to your competitors’ websites? You’d be surprised how often that happens when it shouldn’t. Are all your contact details (mailing and email address, phone number, social media accounts) included on every page of your site? Customers shouldn’t have to hunt to find you.
Finally, keep it simple. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking the more complex your site is, the more professional it looks. For instance, think about flattening your site or minimizing the number of clicks it takes to find content. With an easy, intuitive layout, your B2B customers will be better equipped to find and navigate through information.
Optimize Your B2B Web Pages
A key step toward effective utilization of your website is to make sure it is optimized for Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If search engines have trouble deciphering your site content, they will not give you a high ranking.
SEO maximization is not difficult to achieve if you keep in mind some basic principles. Make sure that your main keyword is located in your title tag to ensure receiving an SEO boost. Make sure your product is located in a tag and all your meta tags are working correctly. Your main keyword should appear in the first paragraph. Finally, add in a number of images and infographics, as visuals are a vital component of SEO. People spend more time looking at images, which plays into the search algorithms. If your bounce rate is low, Google takes notice.
Review your URLs. All of your site’s URLs should follow the same formatting specifications. They should also be intuitive. In other words, the content on a page should be reflected in wording within the URL. Avoid condensing your keywords into URLs. Instead, optimize by keeping the main keyword in your title and use tags for your secondary keywords, as well as main keyword synonyms.
Save Everything. Track Everything.
It’s a good habit not to delete pages, even if items on the page are no longer available. Let customers know they can’t order a particular item or service right now, but keep the page running for SEO purposes.
Likewise, you should be tracking usage statistics through a tool such as Google Analytics. An analytics tool delivers information on how many unique visitors have come to your site, in addition to what pages they visited and how long they spent on each page. By analyzing bounce rates and what pages are getting attention, you can easily make appropriate fixes and get your search results back on track.
Google Search Console is another beneficial analytic tool. It can help monitor website traffic, as well as analyze which keywords are working. There may be keywords you’re not taking advantage of or that you need to quit relying so heavily on.
Finally, don’t forget your mobile users when analyzing and tracking your data. Google’s algorithm heavily favors websites that are mobile-friendly.
SEO for your B2B eCommerce site doesn’t have to painful or time-consuming. It’s clearly an area where working smarter and not harder can pay off in higher search rankings and improved ROI.
Let the professionals at IronPlane help you navigate through the SEO maze and optimize your B2B eCommerce site.
