Search engine optimization (SEO) is a cost-effective way to improve your search engine ranking and bring visitors to your ecommerce site.
The buyers and decision makers at B2B companies will research at least half of their purchases online before making their choice. Having effective SEO strategies that enable potential customers to find your B2B ecommerce site will make a significant difference to your results.
Last year (2017), Google made between 500 and 600 updates to its algorithms to deliver the best quality and most relevant results for searches. If you’re taking a process-driven approach to your target keywords and phrases, these updates might have an impact on your search engine results.
Quality content
To get the best results and secure more organic traffic, you need to be creating content that is highly relevant, fresh, high quality, engaging and unique.
Repeating relevant keywords across your B2B marketing efforts won’t win you those valuable top spots on the search engine result pages (SERPs). You will need to plan your keywords, meta descriptions and phrases based on thorough research and weave them into compelling online content for every page of your site.
Useful and authoritative content marketing
Search engines will interpret links to your site as confirmation that you are delivering trustworthy and credible content. Detailed articles, explainer videos, white papers and a whole range of other in-depth, high-value content can contribute to improved search results over time.
High-quality blog posts with embedded videos can encourage visitors to return. Internal links from your blog to other relevant website pages can also contribute to your search results. Social media and emails are valuable distribution channels for your blog content, driving your contacts back to your ecommerce site.
What do we mean by high-quality blog posts? It’s a good question. Each business will have differing audiences to target and markets to penetrate. So with this in mind, take the time to get to grips with what is relevant and pressing in your industry. What questions are people asking? What do people want to know about? What opportunities are there for your business to get interest by being a trusted source of information and insight?
By pinning down these areas of opportunity for your business and writing engaging content that provides readers with thoughtful and actionable information, the high-quality content that can make a real difference to your marketing success is attainable and achievable.
User journeys
Search engines prioritize user experience, so make sure your content is clear and easy to access. Google has introduced ‘Rank Brain’ that will not only monitor your click through rates (CTR) from search results, but also how long people stay or dwell on your site. Pages that visitors stay to read are likely to give your search volume a boost.
On the other hand, anything that distracts or prevents users from accessing the information they are searching for is likely to have a negative effect on your results. This will include pages with a lot of advertising and very little content and advertising that pushes content down the page. Making a user link through multiple pages to see all the content they are looking for can also have an adverse effect on your results.
Responsiveness
It’s important to deliver a fast and effective user experience on mobile devices as well as on your desktop. In 2018, Google is rolling out its Mobile First Index, which means that if your site doesn’t load quickly on mobile devices, your search results could be affected.
Voice search
More people now make voice searches. 20% of searches on mobile devices are already voice searches. By 2020, it’s predicted that half of all searches could be voice searches.
A good approach is to create content in the form of answers to questions, including a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section on your site. This will not only improve the chances of it appearing as a response to people searching using voice search terms, but also as a featured snippet on page one of search results.
Moving with the times
One element that is vital to digital success is being able to consistently move and adapt with changing market factors. There is a real need to be flexible and progressive with your approach to how you run and edit your online presence.
Having a strong SEO presence is a great way to boost your digital profile. It gives you the basis to be discovered by relevant audiences and potential customers. But those audiences and potential customers will change over time, so an attitude of continuous improvement and making positive tweaks and changes to your SEO is a strong route to go down.
Stay on top of the most relevant and searched for terms and keywords that are related to your B2B business. This is a process you should do consistently over time, as SEO and keywords are consistently changing, even if only in quite subtle ways.
The right platform
Last, but not least, you’ll need an ecommerce platform that is SEO-friendly and has the features needed for you to build a strong SEO foundation. With Cloudfy’s user-friendly content management system (CMS) you can create and publish all the content you need as part of your B2B SEO strategy, while the meta data management feature allows you to implement optimized meta data in line with your keyword agenda and keyword research.
Contact us to find out more about harnessing the power of SEO for your B2B ecommerce business.
