As a B2B marketer looking to attract and convert new clients, part of your job is often search engine optimization (SEO) or at least SEO-related. It’s impossible to know absolutely everything there is about SEO and it’s often more of an art than a science.

However, you likely have a few pressing questions about SEO for your B2B web design and marketing strategy.

Let’s explore several pressing questions that we often hear from the B2B marketing teams we work with.

What do I do about the GA4 transition?

As the July 1 shutdown deadline for Universal Analytics (UA) approaches, the anxiety over what to do about the transition to Google Analytics 4 is clearly ramping up among marketers.

When you log into your Google Analytics account, you will see this at the very top:

Seeing this warning does not necessarily mean you don’t have GA4 set up yet and it’s easy to check if you do. Simply follow these instructions to check:

Click on “Admin” in the lower right corner of your dashboard.

Next, click on “GA4 Setup Assistant” in the Property View.

If it’s set up, you’ll see the following message:

You can either click on the button to go to your GA4 property or you can access it from your view dropdown menu at the top. We recommend going through and making sure any conversions you want to track on your B2B website are set up so you have a few months of data before the July transition.

If you have not set up GA4 yet, you need to set it up today. Instead of seeing the above notice, you’ll see a notice that says “Get Started” and “I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property. Google has instructions on how to set that up, which you can view here.

If you haven’t set up GA4, don’t panic, just proceed with the setup. All data from your Universal Analytics account won’t disappear, but it will stop collecting new data starting on July 1. Google hasn’t provided details on sunsetting UA just yet, so you will have historical data available for your B2B website.

Read more: Using Google Analytics to drive your SEO strategy.

What keywords should I be using?

Another common question we hear is, “What keywords should I be using on my B2B website and in my marketing strategies?” The short answer is: relevant terms that indicate an intent to buy. We have an entire blog dedicated to finding keywords that will convert and another post on choosing the right SEO keywords. The keywords that are right for your company will depend on the products or services you sell, your industry, and your audience.

Check out those two posts to get headed in the right direction for selecting keywords and performing keyword research:

5 steps to choose the right SEO keywords

Finding keywords that convert

How should I optimize my B2B website?

This is a common question and has a lengthy answer which may also vary depending on the SEO manager you work with. From our perspective, you need an entire SEO strategy integrated into you B2B website design strategy.

A well-optimized website has the following:

• a targeted keyword strategy
• optimized load times
• images and videos optimized for a good UX
• an ongoing strategy for adding fresh content while also focusing on conversions

If you are planning for a new B2B website, you should include an SEO strategy before you launch to ensure you are optimizing everything from the website structure to the content on the pages.

What should I be tracking in analytics?

What you track in analytics depends on the goals of your B2B marketing strategy. However, we assume that the majority of B2B marketers have lead generation as part of their KPIs, if not their main KPI. If that speaks to you, then you want to track the behavior of visitors to your site, the channels that brought them to your B2B website, which channels are producing the best quality leads, and the overall performance of your website (things like most visited pages, highest converting pages, pagespeed, etc.).

Do you have other pressing SEO questions about your B2B website and marketing strategy? Contact us today to set up a consultation and find out how we can help you achieve your SEO goals.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This couldn’t be any truer than on a website.

While images make your website visually more compelling and engaging, they also can add value to your SEO efforts.

Many high ranking B2B websites come from keyword rankings, page speed optimization, and back-link referral sources, but often overlooked is how well their images are optimized. Without properly optimizing the images on your website, you’re losing out a critical part of your SEO strategy.

Image optimization creates a better user experience, adheres to modern-day accessibility standards, prompts faster page load times, and boosts your B2B website’s overall SEO value by creating additional ranking opportunities.

Follow these 5 tips to better optimize images on your website.

1. Resize Your Images

Thinking about adding a 7680×4320 (8K) image to your website? Think again.

Not only is this image going to be massive, it might not even be needed. Some website modules look best with specific image dimensions and anything beyond that will be cropped. The most common desktop screen resolution is 1920×1080, so even if you’re doubling your image resolution to 3840×2160 for 4K or retina screen resolutions, you’re nowhere near the 7680 pixel mark of an 8K screen.

It’s always best to check with your B2B web development partner to make sure that you’re adhering to the right standards for your site.

Read more: Is your B2B web design effective? Here’s how to tell.

2. Utilize Compression Plugins or Tools

One of the biggest benefits of compressing and optimizing your images is the effect it has on page load times. A significantly smaller file size allows it to load faster and thus improves overall website speed.

Image compression can be done with image editing tools like Photoshop, but we know that not everyone is a designer or comfortable using such tools. Instead, there are many image optimization plugins available on WordPress.

The best optimization plugins don’t sacrifice any image quality either so there’s no need to worry about pixelated or grainy images.

3. Use Alt Tags

Alt tags were first introduced as an accessibility tool to help visually impaired users. Over the years, search engines have used alt tags to crawl and index images on your website as they provide more context. It is critical to assign alt tags to your images to make sure you’re maximizing your SEO efforts.

Like any other content piece, you should refrain from “stuffing” keywords into alt tags. Rather, alt tags should offer a detailed explanation of the image as it is. If you can fit a keyword in your description, great! If not, keep it short, simple, and as descriptive as possible.

Read more: A 5-step process to choose the right keywords for your SEO strategy.

4. Create Unique File Names

Similar to alt tags, make sure you’re saving your images with unique file names. Rather than importing a screenshot saved as “Screen Shot 2022-10-20 at 11.01.04 AM.png”, name it something more descriptive, such as what the screenshot is showing, like “Image-Optimization-Standards.png”. This enables you to find the name easily in your media library and provides search engines with more context based on the file name.

5. Ensure Images Are Mobile-Friendly

Plenty of website traffic comes in from mobile devices nowadays, so you’ll want to make sure your images display properly there. Whether you need to add a second image option for your mobile visitors or if your website automatically resizes images to best suit the user’s screen size, adapting your images to fit different screen sizes is critical to image optimization, and even more so for user experience.

You can use tools such as Google’s Moblle-Friendly Test on various webpages to make sure your images are optimized well for mobile devices.

Properly optimizing your images goes a long way for your SEO strategy. With these 5 tips in mind, you’re well on your way to creating and maintaining optimization standards for your images.

Need help with your B2B website optimization strategy? Reach out to us today to get started on the right track.

Google Analytics is an extremely useful tool when it comes to SEO for your B2B website. Google is one of the most popular search engines in the world, and it makes sense that to rank well on Google, you want to do as much as you can to optimize your website for their search engine. Google Analytics provides valuable information and data that your business can use to monitor and improve SEO performance.

Here are 4 questions to ask when going through Google Analytics to see if there are any areas for SEO improvement.

Who is visiting my website?

Companies can use Google Analytics to get detailed information about website visitors and where they’re coming from to build a complete customer persona. Google Analytics Audience Reports give more information about users on your website. You can see user demographics, device types, location, and more, which can help you tailor your content to your ideal audience.

It’s also helpful to review general B2B website metrics in this section, such as pages per session, average session duration, and bounce rate. Each metric gives insight into user behavior and the effectiveness of the B2B website as it stands.

Read more: GA4 vs Universal Analytics

How are users arriving?

Google Analytics allows B2B website owners and marketers to take a deep dive into where exactly their users are coming from. By frequently reviewing the Acquisition Overview report, you gain access to a high-level snapshot of each channel and their efficacy in driving traffic to your website. When discussing SEO, we’re particularly concerned with two channels: Organic Search & Referral.

Organic Search is defined as a free listing in search engines because it’s relevant to someone’s search terms. To optimize for organic search, the website must have these search terms sufficiently placed throughout the website on both landing pages and blogs in areas that make sense. Google penalizes websites that “stuff” keywords for the sake of relevancy, so you also want to make sure that you’re adding keywords only in places that make sense.

Once you establish your keyword strategy, it’s best to focus on this core set of keywords throughout the website – targeting each keyword on both landing pages and current and future blogs.

Pro Tip: Constantly introducing new blogs to your website is a great way to add keywords to the site, while keeping the content fresh and up-to-date, and Google encourages this!

Referral traffic is defined as a segment of traffic that arrives on your B2B website via another source, like through a link on another domain. With referral traffic, you can work with other businesses in the same industry and tap into new avenues of viewership. Google’s algorithm sees referral links as positive SEO ranking factors (especially for high-domain-authority websites) and signals of users’ confidence and relevance of information.

Pro Tip: If you see the referral website sources that you haven’t worked with before, it’s a good opportunity to reach out and see if they would be interested in working with you. They’ve already linked to your website in one way or another and you both stand to gain mutual benefits – your brand would gain more exposure, while they offer the latest thought leadership content to their audience, while your brand would gain much more exposure to a new audience segment.

Read more: SEO & Buying Intent – Choosing the Right Keywords

Are any landing pages experiencing less engagement?

Landing pages are meant to provide value and an optimal experience for the user. If you notice that a landing page has been historically underperforming, or is slipping in the top landing page report, it’s time to reevaluate the content of the page. It might be time to refresh the page and add in or update the content so that you’re putting your best foot forward, and keeping up with the latest trends and topics.

Your top landing pages on your B2B website are great for measuring the effectiveness of a specific page. Here are some additional, quick questions you may ask yourself to decide whether you need to make changes to the content on the page:

• Do pages have an unusually high bounce rate? If so, you may consider updating the content to be more relevant to the question the page intends to answer.
• Does the page have a shorter time on page than you expect? If so, it’s possible that there just isn’t enough content for the user to read through or it doesn’t answer their question so they move on to another page. Another possibility is that there are just too many CTAs and hyperlinks that take the user to other locations of your site. Having CTAs and relevant hyperlinks are great, but if you’re pushing them from page to page without providing them with sufficient information, it can make for an unpleasant experience.

Pro Tip: Review your top landing page report at least once a month and see if there are any opportunities to improve each page for readability, user intent, additional CTAs (or updating the current ones on page), and overall timeliness.

Why are people leaving my site?

The goal of each B2B website is to educate visitors, answer as many questions as possible, and get them to convert, whether that’s a phone call, a contact form submission, or a newsletter subscription.

However, what happens if you notice that often people aren’t taking any sort of action at all? It’s best to investigate the Exit Pages report in Google Analytics and see where exactly people are dropping off. When you pinpoint which pages visitors use to exit your website, you can target those pages and optimize them accordingly. They may need more content to better answer the topic of the page, while others may need an entirely different CTA to get them to convert.

Are you ready to improve the SEO of your B2B website? Contact Bop Design to conduct a thorough review of your website and Google Analytics properties today.

Choosing the right keywords to include in your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy requires combining an intimate knowledge of your industry with SEO best practices. Recently, we shared how to choose keywords with buying intent, which is critical if your purpose is to generate leads.

In this post, we walk you through a five-step process for choosing the right keywords for your firm’s SEO strategy.

1.    Create a list of terms you believe prospects are searching

Before you start doing any research or investigating search volume, create a wish list of keyword phrases. Ideally, this will be around 20 keywords but can be longer if you have a large B2B website with a variety of products and services.

The list is a starting point and should include terms that you believe people are typing into search engines to find the products or services your firm provides. If possible, get input from multiple departments at your firm, including your sales and customer service teams as they speak to clients on a regular basis and are familiar with terms the clients and prospects are using.

Download now: The MEGA Guide to B2B Web Design Best Practices.

2.    Do competitive research

Once you have your wish list, check out what keywords your competitors are targeting. We recommend identifying 3 – 5 competitors who offer almost exactly the same products/services or at least a majority of what you offer. There may be key differentiators, like price or quality, but choose firms that prospects will view as similar to your firm.

Poke around on their websites and look at the headings they use, the type of language used in the copy, and the names of service or product pages. If they have a blog, it’s helpful to look through their posts to see what types of topics they address as well as the terms they include in the titles of the blog posts. Note any common terms or phrases that you see that you hadn’t considered but think are relevant.

Read more: What to Include in Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy.

3.    Do keyword volume/difficulty analysis

Now that you have a wish list and a list of relevant phrases, it’s time to do research. For many firms, this is the point where they bring in an SEO specialist to do the keyword research and analyze the results.

However, if you want to take a pass at it yourself, Google’s Keyword Planner is a good tool to try. Simply add in your list of terms and get the keyword volume and difficulty. Additionally, there are paid tools like SEM Rush and Moz that have keyword volume tools and will make recommendations for keyword phrases as well.

Get More Info: SEO for B2B Marketers.

4.    Analyze the research

Once you’ve performed the research, it’s time to move into analysis mode. Having a good knowledge of your industry is important at this point to weed out unrelated terms. When analyzing the keyword research, the goal is to choose the best match terms with the highest volume and moderate difficulty rating.

At this point, it’s also good to focus on terms that are specific to your business and are buying terms. Check out the buying terms article for more detail. You do want to have a good mix of specific long tail keywords and a bit more broad, top of funnel, search terms as well. Pay close attention to the search volume. If a word has zero search volume, either it’s off the mark or it’s too specific.

The size of your B2B web design layout and how may pages you have will dictate how many keywords to include in your SEO strategy. Keep in mind that similar keywords can all be optimized on the same page. For example, “Accounting Software” and “Accountant Software” are very similar terms and can be used interchangeably on a page.

Read More: What Happens to Your Leads After They Are Qualified?

5.    Test out your research via Google Ads

After finalizing and implementing your SEO strategy, it’s time to track and review your performance. However, it can take anywhere from 3 – 6 months to start seeing results from a new SEO strategy. This is especially dependent on other factors like the age of your website’s domain, the number of new pages, amount of copy on the pages, hosting provider, etc.

In our experience, the quickest way to get feedback on an SEO strategy is to concurrently run Google Ads for those same terms. You can instantly see the search queries leads that convert from Google Ads are using to get to your site and evaluate whether the leads are in your target market. Watching these closely for a month and evaluating every lead can help you refine and improve your SEO strategy.

Questions about an SEO strategy for your B2B web design project? Contact us today for a quick SEO chat.

When a B2B company is devising an SEO strategy, target keywords must be the foundation. Yes, there are many components to a holistic SEO strategy like page speed, technical SEO, inbound links, and more, but if you are not targeting the right keywords, all other B2B efforts will be done in vain. When brainstorming about keywords to target, the focus should always be on buying intent.

What Is Buying Intent?

Buying intent is an indication of a web searcher at a buying stage – meaning they are not in a research stage but are actively looking to buy a product or service. When determining keywords to target, typically the more specific, the better. Think of industry jargon and technical terms when considering your keywords. Good buying intent terms may not have high search volume, but your ideal client will be searching for them. If you target the correct buying terms, you will see your sales cycle shorten, objections lessen, and your close rate improve.

Long-Tail Keywords

Oftentimes, long-tail keywords correlate with stronger buying intent. Long-tail keywords are keywords that contain more words in the search query. For instance, with Bop Design, “b2b web design” and “b2b website design” are decent keywords to target. However, a term like “b2b website design agency” is even better. The added word of “agency” turns a search query from a research term to a buying term. It demonstrates that the searcher is likely looking for an agency to hire as compared to a term like “b2b web design” in which a searcher may just be researching trends and best practices.

Test on Google Ads

If you have new ideas on keywords that you believe will convert, test on Google Ads first before changing up your on-page SEO strategy. The immediacy of Google Ads means that you can test new keywords and their conversion performance in a matter of weeks. It is also much easier to measure Google Ads because you can see the exact search query that drove a conversion. Test your buying intent keyword hypothesis on Google Ads and let those results inform your SEO strategy.

Constantly Track & Measure

New buzzwords arise all the time. What used to be “pull marketing” is now typically called “inbound marketing.” “Interactive agency” is now typically called “digital agency.” To be successful with targeting strong buying intent keywords, a savvy marketer always has their finger on the pulse of demand. Constantly be listening to how prospects and clients classify your firm and evolve your B2B digital marketing accordingly. Look at keywords your competitors are targeting to ensure you are not missing anything.

With SEO and buying intent, it is never “set it and forget it.” It requires constant listening, research, and nimbleness. If you embrace those activities, you will see a consistent increase in quantity and quality of conversions, closed sales, and most importantly, profit.

Contact us today to talk to our team about a B2B website and content marketing strategy for your business.

Search engine optimization is absolutely critical for B2B web design and content marketing. But what about videos and video marketing? Well, it depends, do you want people to see and watch your videos? Let’s go ahead and assume that yes, you’d like people – especially prospects – to watch and engage with your videos. Then, yes, SEO is essential for your videos as well.

There are some great resources out there for optimizing your videos for search, including a great in-depth article on Video SEO from the knowledgeable folks over at WordStream. If you prefer to watch a video, then check out the helpful tips from the Ahrefs team.

In this short post, we are going to take a high-level look at 5 essential steps you must take to optimize your video for search – whether it’s universal search results, video search results, or search on a video platform, like YouTube.

Follow these tips when publishing any videos for your B2B firm.

1. Use Keywords in Your Title (But Make It Interesting)
2. Include Keywords in the Video Description
3. Create an Interesting Thumbnail + Closing Slide
4. Post It to Your B2B Website
5. Share It Everywhere!!!

Ok, let’s look a little closer at each tip.

1. Use Keywords in Your Title (But Make It Interesting)

When a video is finally finished and ready to upload, most B2B marketers get so excited to upload it, they forget that the title is everything – especially when it comes to search engine optimization.

The takeaway here is to include relevant keywords in your video title – BUT to make sure that it’s still interesting. For example, “Accounting Software Tips” is an optimized title, but it doesn’t entice a viewer to click on it. Be sure to optimize your title for interest and clickability (is that even a word?). A more interesting title is “Accounting Software Tips to Save Your Firm Money,” or “Save 30 Minutes a Day with These Accounting Software Tips,” or “Time-Saving Software Accounting Tips.”

Read more: B2B website checklist to maximize CRO.

2. Include Keywords in the Video Description

This may sound like common sense, but is a commonly overlooked or misused portion of a video upload. The video description is your opportunity to sprinkle in more relevant keywords that a person may be using to search for videos like yours. The description should also give more information about what is covered in the video. While a person may not read the description before watching the video, search engines will consider it when trying to match videos to search queries.

If you aren’t sure about the length, always err on the side of a longer description with the most important information at the beginning.

Also – always, always, always include a link back to your B2B website in the description. Ideally, this is placed right after the introductory sentence.

3. Create an Interesting Thumbnail + Closing Slide

SEO is somewhat of a popularity contest. The search results that get more clicks and engagement are typically shown more often. For this reason, it’s absolutely essential that you or your designer creates an interesting thumbnail with a title for your video. Not only will the title show up in search results – see example below – it tells the viewer what your video is about!

Additionally, if a person is searching for a video on a video platform like YouTube – the thumbnail slide is much larger than the title! You don’t want to have them scroll right past your video because it’s a random thumbnail that doesn’t correlate to your video title.

A closing slide should also be created for every video. Why? Because if you don’t create one, the video platform will just layer in other unrelated videos at the end of your video and the viewer won’t remember who you are, what your brand offers, or your B2B website.

Read more: SEO for B2B Marketers.

4. Post It to Your B2B Website

If your B2B web design doesn’t allow uploading videos to a video library or blogs or a webpage, call up your web developer or marketing agency. Go ahead, we’ll be here when you get back.

Google and other search engines are giving videos more and more priority in search results. As such, B2B websites with video have the potential to show up more in searches – especially if both the video and the web page are optimized.

The only caveat here is to ensure that however you post the video to your website, whether you use a video hosting platform like Vimeo or Youtube and embed it on your site or whether you upload it directly to your site – you make sure it’s done properly and won’t negatively impact page speed.

For more on page speed, check out Page Speed Tips.

5. Share It Everywhere!!!

Did all the exclamation points convey our excitement? I sure hope so. You can’t wait around for search engines to start ranking your video and showing it in search results. Take charge and start sharing your video everywhere! In addition to posting it to your B2B website, share it on your social media channels, upload it to social media for ad campaigns, include it in your email newsletters, share it with your entire company over Slack or Teams or whatever messaging platform you use.

The key here is to get more viewers to watch your video (from different IP addresses) to drive up views. Do you remember the part about SEO being a popularity contest?

There you have it. Our 5 critical, crucial, essential, important tips for optimizing your video.

Questions about SEO for B2B website design or marketing? Contact us today to schedule a chat.

Search engine optimization (SEO) for B2B marketing is an ongoing, evolving strategy. It requires being consistent while also being adaptable.

Whether you are getting up to speed on SEO or having been running an SEO strategy for a while, it’s important to remember that at the center of SEO is your target market and getting them to your B2B website. In this post, we take a look at seven things all B2B marketers should be doing right now.

Evaluating Keyword Strategy

Think of your keyword strategy as setting the tone for your overall B2B content marketing and website activities. While the keywords tend to be consistent year over year, it is important to evaluate your keyword strategy at regular intervals. This can be quarterly, bi-yearly, or yearly.

When evaluating your keyword strategy, look at the search volume for certain terms, whether they are relevant to your business, and what the intent is behind the searches. You want to have a mix of general search terms and specific buying terms.

General search terms, like “accounting software,” can include a broad mix of queries from consumers searching for personal accounting software to people looking to see what types of accounting software exists. A more specific buying-intent search, like “accounting software for manufacturing firms,” likely indicates a manufacturing professional interested in purchasing software for their company.

Whenever you evaluate your keyword strategy, always perform fresh keyword research. For many terms, the search volume won’t vary significantly, but trends can change and new terminology can come to light.

Testing Using Google Ads

Google Ads are considered a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy rather than an SEO strategy, but they can provide a lot of data quickly for SEO. As you know, SEO takes time and it can be months before an optimized B2B website ranks for the targeted keywords. However, search ads on Google are almost immediate and can be managed and updated easily.

Even though you have a keyword strategy in place and are optimizing your website in alignment with that strategy, Google Ads give you the ability to do more real-time testing. Not sure if a particular industry provides better leads? Build an industry campaign and test it. Then you’ll know if you need to build out more industry pages on your website. Wondering if your target market searches for a product or service by a brand name? Use a Google Ads campaign to test it and see what types of leads are generated.

For many, Google Ads validate an existing SEO strategy, but they can also be helpful in identifying new areas for lead generation and filling out necessary content on your website.

Tracking Leads + Search Queries

This seems obvious, but it’s not always done by B2B marketers. For many companies, anecdotal feedback from sales ends up defining whether a marketing strategy is successful or not. This is not acceptable. All inbound lead generation should be carefully tracked and measured.

We recommend taking time every month to look at ALL the inbound website form submissions and evaluating which were good and which were not. Additionally, all leads should be attributed to the marketing channel that got them to the website, whether it’s organic search, Google Ads, remarketing, email marketing, referrals, etc. While it may be last touch lead attribution (so it doesn’t tell the whole story), it does indicate the last channel that got the prospect to convert to a lead.

If you are using Google Ads in your SEO and B2B marketing strategy, you should be carefully tracking the search queries of website leads. While you only see the search queries for visitors who clicked on a Google ad, it can provide insight into what people are searching and which terms bring in higher-value leads.

Read more: Why you want more organic search traffic.

Optimizing Page Speed

How fast your B2B website loads is becoming a large component of SEO and with good reason. You don’t want your prospect’s first experience with your B2B website to be frustrating. And what if they don’t have time to wait for it to load and they bounce back to the search results and go with your competitor? You’ve lost a lead before you ever spoke to them.

There is a lot that goes into optimizing page speed. Your best bet is to work with a developer who will take a comprehensive look at your B2B website and implement the changes. Ideally, they will report back to you to show what the difference is. You may not notice a two-second reduction in load time, but search engines and users will. Your developer should allocate anywhere from 15-20 hours for a page speed review and optimization.

Read more: Page speed tips from a web developer.

Carefully Crafting Metadata

Some metadata impacts SEO and other metadata doesn’t – but spending time on all of it can pay off. For example, optimizing meta titles and urls with keywords will improve SEO since it gives clear indications of what the content is about. However, while meta descriptions don’t directly impact SEO, when properly crafted, they can entice prospects to click on your website from the search engine results. This is where B2B marketers can lend value by crafting concise, clear descriptions that include keywords and draw the reader into clicking through.

Read more: The art of choosing the right SEO keywords.

Optimizing Images + Image Names

Image optimization has a variety of SEO benefits. By making sure all images are sized properly to maximize load times, you can improve the user experience and page speed. Additionally, if image names are optimized with keywords and alt tags, they provide better descriptions and can rank in image searches.

As a B2B marketing agency, our designers often follow a particular format for naming image or illustration files. These are necessary for our internal processes and keeping files organized. However, when images are uploaded to websites for blogs or webpages or email newsletters, the image names are often changed to be optimized for SEO. For example, a file with the name “ClientXYZ_serviceB_Date.jpg” doesn’t say much to search engines. However, when uploading the file, it can be optimized to say, “Accounting_Software_Reporting_Metrics” and added to the blog that discusses metrics that accounting software provides.

Reviewing Analytics + Adapting

One skill that is crucial for B2B marketers today is tracking and reviewing analytics. It’s one thing to track analytics and another to set aside time to review and interpret the data. When it comes to SEO, analytics are great for helping update and adapt marketing strategies to better support the overall business.

While tracking keywords is part of the process, it’s also important to monitor the quality of inbound traffic to the website. Additionally, tracking things like pages visited, blogs viewed, and time on site can help drive new content creation, or updates to existing content, or even provide insight into what prospects care about or don’t care about.

SEO for B2B

Your B2B website is a great lead generation tool when paired with a dynamic SEO strategy. By continually working on optimizing your website, you can ensure it will be generating good quality leads on an ongoing basis.

Looking to revamp your B2B website design and SEO strategy? Contact us today for a consultation.

A common question we get at the start of a B2B web design project is, “How can we maintain our SEO during a website redesign?” If you’ve already put the effort into building a strong SEO foundation, you don’t want to lose it when you update the look and functionality of your website.

As an SEO Manager, below are my tips for maintaining your SEO before, during, and after a B2B website redesign.

Preparing for the New Website Launch

Run an SEO audit on your current site

Start by running an SEO audit of your existing website so you have a starting point and understand your current optimization level. Be sure to look closely at what pages are currently well optimized and bringing in organic traffic. Use Google Analytics or another SEO tool (like SEM Rush, Moz, Ahrefs, etc) to find the best performing pages. Use Google Webmaster tools to find where the website ranks for keyword search queries. Knowing which website pages rank for which terms will help you decide which pages to keep and what copy is doing well. Additionally, this will help you see which pages can be removed or need to be reworked (if they aren’t ranking).

Read more: Why you want more organic website traffic.

On-page optimizations

Perform keyword research for your target terms or to identify new terms to target in your SEO strategy. If your SEO strategy is even only 2 years old, you can identify new keyword opportunities to include on any new website pages in your redesign.

Follow best practices for on-page optimizations once you have identified your target terms. These include adding target keyword phrases to H1, page titles, meta descriptions, body content, anchor link text, alt tags, etc.

Count your words. While a minimal design with very little copy can look nice, it can work against you for SEO. Before you chop off thousands of words of optimized copy from your existing B2B website, consider how it will translate to a new design to preserve the SEO.

Read more: SEO for B2B – Beyond the basics.

Set 301 and 302 redirects for existing errors

Before you ever launch a new website, it’s critical to see if there are any existing errors on your website. Using an SEO tool, identify and investigate any 301 or 302 errors. It can be easier to fix these before you launch a new website.

Determine your SEO goals

Define what you want to get from your SEO strategy going forward. Are you looking to increase your keyword ranking for certain terms? Do you want to improve organic traffic to certain pages? Do you want a 10% increase in traffic over last year? Set defined, measurable goals for your SEO strategy. The more specific, the better.

Now, that you have sufficient knowledge of your existing SEO and goals, below are a few tips to make the transition to a new website smooth and seamless.

Read more: Google PPC ads in a nutshell.

Redesign Implementation/Post Launch Steps

Do Not Work on a Live Website

Never work on a live website when it comes to SEO. All of your transferring should be in place before you launch. This ensures that if you discover any issues come launch time, they are minimal.

Match Up the Structures of the Old and New Websites

Unless your current website structure is providing a negative user experience, there are big changes to the company’s offerings, or the existing site has a very poor structure, it’s critical to match up the old and new websites. This includes making sure any pages that are being removed are redirected and that all of the old content you are preserving has a new spot. An example includes bringing over old blog posts to a new blog.

Save the Original B2B Website Information

Save the original B2B website information. If you work with a reputable B2B website design company, they will handle this. Rather than overwrite an old website, they will preserve the previous website information to be referenced if needed.

Use 301 Redirections

When you are changing the layout or structure of a website during a launch, it’s important to implement 301 redirects. These should also be monitored for 30 or so days post-launch to identify and fix any errors that show up.

Also, be very cognizant of the changes you make to internal link structure on your B2B website. Crawl data can be a help here to help identify which of your website pages link to other pages on the website. If you make changes to a lot of URLs, you will have broken links in your content, so you need to perform an audit. There are plug-ins available to facilitate this, as you don’t want to delete any of these since it could cause a negative impact.

Use Good 404 Pages

Create a nice 404 page that provides the user information about what has happened, should they land on a page that no longer exists. The 404 error page should direct them back to an existing page on the website so they don’t leave your website altogether.

Keep Track of Backlinks

As you’ve built up the SEO of your website, you have likely earned or built good quality backlinks. Pre and post-launch, you want to keep track of all your backlinks and address any errors or issues with backlinks. Don’t forget social media profiles provide backlinks to your website. Therefore, if you end up changing your domain, you will need to update all of your social media profiles as well.

Details to Fix Before Going Live

Before you launch a new B2B website, follow an SEO checklist. Hubspot has a nice SEO website launch checklist. You should check to make sure that you resolved any issues you discovered above and have a plan for the launch. Who will handle any 404 errors? Who will monitor the SEO and keyword rankings? Who is submitting the sitemap?

Other things include, using optimized H1s and Page titles. Drafting nice meta descriptions for all the main pages. Your website developer will also have a technical SEO checklist to review prior to launch that covers things like compressing images for faster load times, ensuring a clean CSS that can be easily crawled, opening up pages to search engines, submitting sitemaps to search engines, etc. Again, your best bet is to work with a b2B web design agency who is well-versed in SEO for websites and understands your SEO objectives.

After the New Website Goes Live

Even with all of this work, there is still work to be done post-launch. Start by creating webmaster profiles in Bing and Google to submit new XML maps and monitor for 404 errors. From there, continue checking, monitoring, and making any suggested updates.

When done properly, a B2B website redesign can not only preserve your existing SEO, but can also take your SEO to the next level.

Have more questions about maintaining the SEO of your website for an upcoming redesign? Contact us to schedule a SEO strategy and web redesign strategy session.