SEO Cheat Sheet: Best Practices To Rank Your B2B Website in Google’s Top 10 Results

Applying these small practices can make your small business rank on top

Organic search is typically the largest traffic source for any B2B website, usually accounting for 60-70% of total traffic. But simply receiving this organic traffic doesn’t mean that it’s the right traffic that is going to convert.

I’ll show you how to better optimize your web pages so you can rank in Google top 10, attract the right people, and grow your revenue.

1. Make your website mobile responsive

One of the keys to rank high in the search engines today is having a responsive website design. This is because a responsive website allows a desktop computer, a tablet, and a smartphone to access your website easily.

Optimizing your website to be mobile responsive is more important than ever. Why? Because smartphones receive the largest number of online searches — taking up 60% of the total searches conducted online.

Having an unresponsive website is detrimental to your SEO efforts. Business Insider predicts that by 2020, 45% of all ecommerce sales in the U.S. will be completed on a mobile device. This amounts to $284 billion in monetary terms!

One of the things Google looks at in ranking a website in search is how responsive the website design is.

Google considers this because it affects the user experience. When visitors to your website are unable to access and use your website on their favorite mobile device, they bounce off before they even see your “best” content.

In turn, Google search engine makes decisions based on user’s behavior on the website. If users are not happy (i.e., they are not able to use the website as they should), it’s a sign of a poor user experience.

Consequently, a website with a poor user experience will ultimately lose its organic rankings or not rank at all in the first place.

No matter how good your content may be, a bad design would reduce the number of visitors you have. Even the few visitors who eventually land on the website will leave before you can make an impression on a potential customer.

In some cases, some have kept two different websites for desktop and mobile but this is a bad idea. This could lead to a problem of duplicate content as Google bots see the two websites differently. Google claims that over 60% of mobile users will go to a competitor website if they find yours to be non-responsive.

To ensure your website is mobile responsive, if you’re a WordPress user, then ensure you use a modern WordPress theme as most of them are well-optimized for all mobile devices.

By introducing a mobile responsive website design, Offspring, an online store that sells fashion trainers and sneakers was able to increase mobile/tablet conversion rate by 15.19%, improve mobile/tablet revenue by 102.58%, and improve search engine rankings which resulted in 25.59% increase in organic traffic.

2. Improve your page load time

If you’re given an opportunity to improve your website visibility by 37%, will you take it? Well, you can achieve that improvement when you have a fast loading website. One of the factors Google considers when ranking a website in the search results is how fast the page can load.

Imagine going to a website for information but it takes forever to load? The next thing you do is leave to another website with a faster load time.

Search engines also receive signals that a particular website is slow. More so, if you fail to optimize your website for speed, you’re chasing your readers and potential customers away.

It’s also been shown that longer load time affects conversions negatively. Nobody wants to wait longer than 3 seconds for a website to load properly. Your customers must be able to access your website content as fast as possible. This will improve the user experience and bring in more organic search traffic.

By improving page load time, AutoAnything recorded a 9% increase in conversion rate and a 13% increase in sales. By shaving 7 seconds off its load time, edmunds.com increased page views by 17% and ad revenue by 3%.

3. Create an intentional keyword strategy

One of the biggest mistakes people make when producing content for a website is writing for themselves. Most people do it unconsciously and are unaware they are doing it. But you should avoid this because it will do more harm to your SEO campaigns than good.

The content on your website is for your visitors and potential customers. To produce valuable content that will connect with this audience, you must understand their needs, address their questions, and speak their language.

Using “intentional keywords” — those keywords that tell you their purpose right off the bat (e.g., best Nike running shoes for women) are a sure way to easily dominate search results, and increase conversions.

Intentional keywords reveal intent and help the ideal customers to make informed decisions.

One important benefit this gives you is that it improves your website search visibility. Because the terms people use daily in their conversation is usually the same search terms they use to search for information on search engines.

When people search for your product, what are the terms you think they use to describe your product? Does it have an acronym? You must incorporate all these keywords in your content page to achieve a higher ranking.

Your keyword strategy should target long-tail keywords mostly. You want traffic to your website but some types of traffic are more beneficial to a B2B website than some other forms, which is the type of traffic that long-tail keywords generate.

This is why your website should target long-tail keywords. Although these keywords usually have a low volume, ranking for them is more beneficial to your B2B business. Why? Because they are more specific. These long-tail keywords also reveal the pain points of your potential customers.

For instance, ranking for a search term like “cheap leather shoe for winter” is more beneficial in making sales than ranking for ‘shoe’. The long-tail keyword will likely sell more shoes than the head keyword “shoe.” And there is less competition for it in the search results.

You should also study what your competitors are doing. Identify which keywords they are optimizing their top-ranking pages with.

Whatever keyword strategy you use, make your content readable for your customers. Remember that stuffing your content with keywords would get you penalized by search engines. The best approach is to produce useful content and only use keywords to improve it.

BrightEdge shared a case study on how Stanley increased its organic traffic by almost 200% due to keyword improvement. They were able to have 40% of the terms they ranked for on the first page and 7.5% in the number 1 position.

4. Optimize your B2B website for quick search engine indexing

To rank in the top 10 for any search term, there are important elements that must be present on your website. These are the elements that tell the search engines what your page is really about. More importantly, these elements influence clicks on your search results.

i). Title tag: One of the most important website elements is the page title tag. The page title is a summary of the content on a particular page. Do the page title and title tag accurately represent what the page is about? Is your title tag unique? Is the title geared towards benefits for your visitors?

ii). Heading tags: Another element is the heading tags. The H1 tag is the main heading while the H2 and H3 tags are for subheadings.

iii). Page URL: In the same vein, your page URL give search engine bots and users an idea of what your page is about and you must optimize it for the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

iv). Meta descriptions: These are the short sentences that appear below the title of a post in the search results. For best results, it should be kept at 156 characters or fewer.

A meta description of a page should serve as a teaser that will attract more readers to click through to your website. It should contain keywords but in a conversational way, rather than being over-optimized.

v). Image Alt Text: It tells search engines what your image is all about. It should be labeled with the right keywords. To have a chance of having your image in the top 10 of image search results, make sure it’s optimized properly.

Essentially, you should generate and submit a Sitemap of your website to Google. That way, search engine crawlers will frequent your web pages, index your new content, and send more traffic to your website.

5. Build trusted and relevant backlinks

Backlinks are important for organic search rankings. The links that point to a particular page serves a vote, recommendation, or influence. And it helps Google to gauge how popular, authoritative, useful, and relevant a given content page is.

For example, If hundreds of relevant and trusted websites link to your latest blog post, then there must be something special about it. Hence, such pages get higher rankings.

Pages that rank high on search engines are usually pages that have amassed many backlinks.

Don’t forget that it depends on the industry/market. 10 inbound links, for example, may be classified as “many” in the gardening niche, but in the “small business” market, you need 50+ backlinks to compete in the search engines. It all boils down to the competition.

Backlinks are so critical to search rankings that they impart results by 76%.

Link building is very important and creating great content will help you build better backlinks. As Cyrus Shepherd said on Moz: “90% of your effort should go into creating great content, and 10% into link building.”

In about 3 months, Inspira Digital Agency was able to get to the top 5 of search results by building the right links and creating helpful and evergreen content.

Conclusion

On a daily basis, people conduct over 3.5 billion searches in Google. In the U.S., 78% of people use the web to research products and services before buying.

Do your best to rank in the top 10 organic listings. Because the top 3 organic search results get 60% of all traffic from a web search, while 75% of users don’t click past the first page.

Use these proven best practices to improve your SEO campaigns and get increase your online visibility.