Here are five of the most common SEO mistakes I’ve seen while optimizing industrial B2B websites around the world:
1) External links in the main navigation menu/footer.
Send your visitors to an internal page first, before going directly off site from your homepage, main menu, or footer links. On the UX side, this gives you a chance to explain where they’ll be going before leaving your site. On the technical SOE side, you preserve some of your link juice by reducing the amount of external links from what used to be a link on every page, down to just one link on that one internal page. A common case involves a parent company that gets linked from every page. T that want exposure for their brand.
2) Not linking to their own internal pages inside body content.
Internal links improve the UX of a site by allowing your visitors to more easily navigate to relevant pages. The SEO benefit emerges in the form of better crawlability by search engine bots, and more frequent crawls of your most important pages. The better your internal link structure and hierarchy, the better your rankings of your most important pages.
3) Not talking about their own products and/or services in detail, or from the perspective of the target customer.
Incomplete or missing information is suprisingly common. B2B sites I’ve worked on have hesitated to add their entire product and service list to their website. Sometimes it’s a lack of ownership in the task, or not knowing about the potential benefits of giving the public (and search engines) more information about their business. Give room for every product and service you offer to have their own page on your website.
4) Relying on obscure acronyms without defining them within the context of their product/services/industry.
Clarity over cleverness is critical for b2b industrial websites. Too much insider lingo can cripple your SEO. Remember that the public may not be aware of how your internal team refers to your products or services. Make sure you explain things clearly and thoroughly, even if the explaination’s details seem overly obvious to you. Assume that a complete stranger lands on your product/service page for the first time. Would they be able to read the content and view the images of the page and understand what you offer? Make it so.
4b) Lots of things/entities have the same acronym. It’s helpful if you give more detail than “ABC 123” as a product name or page title.
Many industrial or manafacturing companies have technical names for their products that end being a list of consonants and numbers. In some cases your customers are using those acronyms to search for your products. But in the age of AI trying to understand your content, define your acronyms so it’s obvious what YOUR acronym means vs other alternatives that might be the exact same. Disambiguate your acronyms. All humans and machines will thank you.
5) Not enough high quality backlinks from other relevant websites within industry. Yeah this still matters.
Many B2B companies have a lot of physical reputation that hasn’t been translated into digital reputation. Backlinks are part of the digital evidence of a website’s physical reputation. The more relevant high quality natural backlinks that a website has pointing to it, the better.
Simple Takeaway
In a world where Google and AI tools are dynamically evolving daily, the most important task for a given website may be something totally different. But the basics are represented here:
- Write clearly and descriptively about what you sell, or the value you offer to the visitor.
- Build a useful internal link structure.
- Earn external links from your industry.
The search engine algorithms changes constantly, and AI adds all kinds of new ways for people to interact with your content. However, these basics still hold true and will help you rank in search engines and generative AI.
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