Your B2B company’s website had better be good. Recently, you may recall, we told you that “67% of the typical ‘B2B buyer’s journey’ is now done digitally.” Is your site slick enough to compete?
Here are 10 questions you need to consider in order to optimize your B2B company’s website:
1. Is it simple? Your website’s design, layout, font, and navigation process all need to be very simple. Your visitors need to find what they’re looking for – and quickly. Consider introducing drop down menus with clearly-determined categories like “Products” or “Services.”
2. Is it integrated? Your website needs to be connected to your blog and other social media platforms. Include appropriate social media buttons.
3. Is there downloadable content? Add content – e-books, tools, templates, and white papers – that your visitors can download. If a first-time visitor, for example, can leave your website with something tangible, what a plus!
4. Is your homepage fresh? New content is everything. Static websites, especially homepages, are alienating. Offer updates, news, fresh blog posts, and so on. Consider providing an RSS feed. Do whatever it takes to continually attract visitors to your site and to maintain a high online visibility. It shows that you care, and that your company is active.
5. Can we learn about the company? Tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you? What do you do? Let us meet the team. Gone should be the days of boring CEO headshots and background profiles. Upload a short, high-quality video teaching your customers about your company, how it works, or how it got started.
6. Is it optimized for search? Never, ever forget about SEO. Select keywords, and organically implement them into your content. You’ll improve search results if you can anticipate what people are searching for. And remember, search engines rank pages, not entire websites, so make sure all your content can be found using keywords.
7. Are you easy to reach? Include a “Contact Us” tab in your drop down menus. You should be extremely reachable. Give e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and business hours. If a potential customer can’t reach you, they may run to your competitor.
8. Does it look good? Website design is part of your visual branding. Memorable design is a simple balance of colour, text, graphics, videos and photos. You should be creating a pleasing atmosphere that entices people to return to your website.
9. Can users interact? What do your website’s visitors have to say? Give them a voice by allowing them to post comments or send feedback. Maybe you can include an occasional poll on your homepage, asking readers what they think about a specific topic.
10. Have you tested it? Before you launch your website, test everything. Can users leave comments? Are your links broken? What happens if a user omits required information in a form? Explore all possibilities by testing rigorously.
Did you answer “yes” to all the above questions? If so, then get that website up-and-running! If not, get to fixing it.
Good luck!
Hi there,I have a question as well and I would love if anonye can help me solve that issue or redirect me to a useful website/blog.Here’s my problem:My website is in french and the URL ends with .frWhen we first launched the website – in March – we had a URL ending with .fr/en for 4 english pages, but after two weeks we decided to suppress all the 4 english pages and keep the website only in French.Since last June, I’ve been seeing a lot of 404 errors in GWT: all of these URLS are .fr/en and the problem is that all the source sites are also .fr/enI feel lke these URLs are generated automatically, but this can’t be possible… Some of the pages didn’t even exist when we created the website. Now it seems like for each normal page (.fr/xxxxxx.html) an .fr/en/xxxxx.html is generated.I even had two pages like that generated for my PPC campaign.I’m not sure I have beel clear enough in my explanations, but basically: I have 404 errors relative to pages that never existed and the URLs pointing to these 404 are also 404 errors.Thanks for any help you can provide!