In order to compete in today’s highly competitive online B2B marketplace, you need the help of search engines. Getting search engines to deliver targeted traffic to your website, day after day, is one of the best investments that you can make for your business, and a big part of that daily-traffic delivery comes about through your SEO efforts. Unfortunately, however, too many B2B companies fail at SEO on a number of levels, which makes turning a profit a difficult task. Here are five of the most common SEO mistakes that B2B website owners make.
Making it difficult for search engines to find your content
In order for you to obtain search engine visitors, the search engines themselves must have access to your website’s pages and content. Unlike human visitors, though, search engines find it difficult, or even outright impossible, to navigate through Javascript or Flash laden interfaces. If your website is heavily reliant on Javascript, Ajax, jQuery, or Flash, and especially if you use any of these technologies for displaying a lot of your content or as an integral part of your navigation system, you’re likely doing yourself a disservices SEO-wise.
Not taking advantage of on-page elements sitewide
A website’s home page is important, and many website owners realize this and work extra-hard to optimize it. However, a website’s internal pages are just as important, if not more important, when it comes to a website’s overall search engine optimization and visibility.
Failure to optimize a website’s internal pages adequately can severely hamper your website’s SEO efforts. Amongst the most overlooked areas of on-page SEO include:
• Creating unique page titles for each web page
• Creating internal links to your website’s important pages using keyword-focused anchor text
• Using unfriendly URLs with visible variables instead of search engine friendly page names
Over-optimization of your website
Keywords are like food in some respects — the use of it is required for optimized living, but eating too much food, or using too many keywords, can actually hurt you. Many website owners try too hard to stuff more keywords on their website, thinking that it will somehow give them favor with search engines. Generally, it does not.
Instead, by using keyword strings as web page titles, and decimating content with keywords instead of useful content for visitors, you’re not only damaging your credibility in the eyes of your website visitors, you may eventually lose favor with search engines because of excessive keyword usage.
Trying risky methods to get ahead
There are two general ways that you can employ SEO for your website — the safe way, and the risky way. The risky way, which is often referred to as ‘black hat’ SEO, is attractive for some business owners, especially in high-competition markets. These tactics, which generally rely on a website showing different content to users and search engines, or other similar types of trickery, can produce good results, but usually only for a short period of time. For an example of the potential consequences, look up what Google did to BMW.de back in 2006 — Google removed the BMW website from their search listings, completely because they used unethical marketing tactics to get ahead.
If BMW didn’t receive a ‘pass’ from Google for their malfeasance, you probably won’t either.
Not testing and tracking data
Search engine optimization, at the end of the day, is a science that can be boiled down to quasi-mathematical equations — you do X, and you get Y result, albeit with some variations for each keyword market. For that reason, if you are testing and tracking your data — which pages your search engine visitors visit, the paths they take on your website, common exit pages, and which keywords attract buyers to your website — you can increase the reach, and effectiveness, of your business exponentially.
Without testing and tracking your data, however, you will potentially be losing money, every day, because you fail to identify keywords that convert, and potential problem areas on your website.
SEO is a powerful tool, but it can only work in your favor if you use the available tools and methodologies properly. If you’re currently making any of these common B2B SEO mistakes, it’s time to fix the problem areas so that you can maximize your effectiveness, reach, and ultimately your return on investment in the online business arena.
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