How to improve the ranking of your B2B website
When a company asks our SEO team to investigate why their website isn’t ranking well, it usually takes a bit of detective work. In most cases, their websites are well designed and some even have good content on each page, some are regularly updated with news too, but still it’s a mystery why their websites may not performing in search engines. Let’s dig into this a bit more…
There can be a whole host of reasons why a website might not be ranking as well as it could be and that could start with the way that the website has been designed and built. However, we’re not going to talk web design in this blog, rather we’re going to look at it from a content generation/SEO point of view.
Here are the top six reasons why your website might not be ranking:
Is your website regularly updated with relevant content?
It is good practice to add at least one piece of fresh content to your website every month. This is particularly important for construction, manufacturing and b2b businesses. This could be a news story, a blog, some video content, a staff achievement, literally anything relevant to the business, and with keywords, wherever possible. If it’s of interest to your customers, then it is worth sharing it on social media.
Does the website have lots of spammy backlinks?
It is worth checking out, what domain authority does your site currently have and how many backlinks are there? This can give an indication of where any issues may lie. If you find your Domain Authority is low, this means that Google does not rate the value of the authentic content of the website very highly and what value it brings to users. It may also be the case that the number of backlinks to your website may be low – typically under 100. This signals to Google that other sites are not choosing to be linked to your site, therefore suggesting it should not be very well ranked.
Backlinks are important in determining your website’s ranking, but not the most important thing. However, if you have a majority of no-follow, no-value backlinks generated by third parties, for example, a football club you supported or through some advertising you ran, you might actually be penalised for it. This might seem a minor thing but can actually have a negative impact on SEO. If you have, say, 95% backlinks from images, which are no-follows, then this would be looked on in a negative way by the search engines. Genuine backlinks should be from authentic content about your businesses, its products or services.
By analysing your backlinks, we can see where they are coming from and what can be done to ‘clean them up’. Then you need to look how you can create more authentic, genuine backlinks from high domain authority sites. This will add much more value to your site. I would definitely say that quality, not quantity is the key here. Backlinks from high domain authority sites, for example, regional or national news sites or good quality businesses, are definitely worth it.
Are you carrying out proactive link building activity?
You can’t just expect links to come to you. You need to work with a B2B PR agency, like Dragonfly PR, that is actively reaching out to high domain activity publications. For example, in the construction sector, this would be Construction Enquirer the Construction Index, or Construction News. In the industrial sector, it could be the Manufacturer.com, manufacturingtalk or memuk.org. Similarly, local and regional business media can have high domain authorities, so securing a story on their site, which links back to yours, really can add value – this just goes to show the real value of online PR stories.
Are you optimising the website with your keywords?
This might sound an obvious thing to do but you may be surprised. Often web agencies can design and build a beautifully constructed site, but the SEO aspect has been given little thought. So many times companies ask us to look at their site and why it’s not ranking and it’s because the meta descriptions and meta data is either not in place at all, or is nothing relevant to the business, or has simply been copied from page to page. These descriptions are there to give Google’s spiders a strong indication of what they are going to find when they crawl the site and duplicate meta descriptions is a red flag to the search engines.
Take a look at your Meta descriptions
If we find your meta descriptions are not up to scratch, we carry out Google keyword research to identify short and long tail keywords that the website should be targeting and look to include these on the back of the site. Meta data also needs to be added to any future blogs, pages, news stories etc and wherever possible make this slightly different to what has been added before. Websites can be downgraded by Google if the meta data is just copied and pasted from one page or blog to the next, so make it authentic and relevant to each page.
Websites can be downgraded if photos are not effectively tagged and given descriptions, so Google can ‘see’ what the image is representing. This is a similar but important change, which would usually have to be made by your web designer.
Make sure content is skilfully crafted by an experienced SEO content creator
Has your website fallen into the trap of having too few words per page (ie less than 400) or is the copy so vague that you don’t actually mention your keywords. It is surprising how often this happen, so describing yourself as a solutions provider for many industries may be true, but what solutions are we talking about here – and which industries? Be as specific as you can and, if you need help in creating fresh, authentic content for your b2b website, to help your site to rank better in the search engines, then why not get in touch.
We would be happy to carry out a free review of your website, make some recommendations, give you a quote to put it right and see what you think. So if you want to find out why your website is not getting the ranking you crave, then why not give us a call on 0114 349 5341 or email hello@dragonflypr.co.uk.