Rainu Bhele
, marketing manager at
Hallam Internet
highlights the common mistakes made by B2B marketers when optimising their websites and how they can be avoided
Having a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy in place for your business is the first step to increasing your visibility online. Although marketers are becoming increasingly digitally savvy, I still see numerous new clients that continue to make the same mistakes with their websites.
The list below curates six of the mistakes most frequently encountered, and how you can overcome them.
1. Brand name focus in title tag
You only have 150-165 characters at your disposable when crafting the title tag for your page. Do not waste them on your brand name. Remember the order the words appear in your title tags is important so conduct keyword research and place your target keyword first. If you must include your brand name, add this at the end.
For example, if you want to optimise your page for the key phrase
conveyor belt manufacturer
, ensure that these are the first words in your title tag:
Conveyor Belt Manufacturer | [
insert company name
]
2. Over stuffing keywords in your title tag
On a similar note, do not go too far the other way and stuff your title tag with too many keywords and phrases. Keep it short and simple, letting your meta description do the talking and drive clicks through to your website.
3. Too many pages with a similar keyword focus
Each page on your website should have a unique keyword focus. If you have too many pages targeting the same term you are at risk of suffering from keyword cannibalisation, where your pages will be competing with each other to rank.
Remember, your title tag helps search engines and visitors to your website understand what the content of the page is about and your page title and title tag should reflect this.
Looking back at our conveyor belt manufacturer, just because they want to rank for the term conveyor belt manufacturer, doesn’t mean that every page should have that term as the title tag – how will search engines determine which is the most relevant page for the search query?
4. Forgetting local SEO
Google are spending a lot of time on improving local search results and it is becoming increasingly difficult to get visibility in the ‘local pack’ on search engine results pages. Ensure that all your business locations, showrooms and offices are on the map.
Google My Business
is a great place to start. Ensure you create listings for each of your locations as mentioned above. Make sure all of your profiles are 100 per cent complete, and your NAP details (name, address and phone) match exactly to how they are listed on your website. Follow this with building up your local citation profile. Get yourself listed on local directories (Yell, Scoot, 118) as well as niche directories relevant to your industry.
In addition to building your local citation profile you should also implement schema markup on your website. Schema markup is essentially a piece of code that tells search engines what your data means rather than just what it says.
You can use schema markup to mark content as:
- Articles
- Local businesses
- Software Applications
- Events
- Products
- Restaurants
- Book Reviews
- Movies
- TV episodes and ratings.
Google’s
Data Markup Helper
is a great tool for doing this. Alternatively, your web developer should be able to help implement this for you.
5. Not checking page performance after optimising content
Many people optimise their pages, then fail to follow up on the results the changes made are achieving. Use
Google Analytics
to check if you have seen an increase in organic traffic to your website following on-page optimisation work.
You should also set up goals in analytics to track how many people are completing enquiry forms on your website. This will allow you to measure how many leads your SEO activities are generating.
6. Not taking mobile into account
Recent research by Google has identified that mobile devices act as shopping assistants – even for B2B businesses. This could be in the form of researching products/services or finding your business locations.
The mobile friendliness of your site is now a ranking factor in mobile search results too. If your website is not mobile friendly, it will not rank as highly on mobile devices. With search on mobile devices overtaking searches on desktops, this is a huge missed opportunity.
If your website is not mobile friendly use Google Analytics to check how many visitors are on your website using a mobile device and compare the data below with desktop visitors. If you are seeing large exit rates and little engagement from mobile, it is time to update your website.
- Number of visitors
- Time on site
- Pages/Visit
- Avg. session duration
- Bounce rate
- Goal conversions.
Key takeaways
This is by no means a comprehensive list. However following these six tips can help in making an improvement to your online visibility.
Remember:
- Include your target keyword in your title tag.
- Don’t stuff your title tag with keywords.
- Ensure each page on your website has a unique keyword focus.
- Keep on top of local SEO.
- Measure the results of your SEO efforts.
- Don’t forget to optimise for mobile.
