A good B2B website must have three distinct qualities: stellar visual design, relevant resources and information, and seamless navigation. Although it can seem simple enough to follow and observe these three guidelines, many B2B companies still make critical mistakes in their web design. Because of this, they end up curating poor customer experiences to their clients. This leads to a negative brand placement and stunted audience reach.
Connecting with an online audience through a B2B website
Many elements integrate with each other when making a business website, regardless of what industry you're in. What makes an effective B2B website is your capacity to utilize these different components to answer and respond to your client's needs. Besides your online user's perspective, Google's algorithm can detect your web design's inconsistencies and inefficiencies. This results in your current search engine ranking and reflects the kind of user experience your site promotes.
If you want to make an efficient B2B website, here are three web design mistakes you should avoid:
1. Having duplicate content
It's easier to look at this mistake as a content marketing issue. Content spinning is the practice of recycling a topic in one article and reshuffling the information to produce a duplicate piece. Although it can be slightly beneficial from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, it can harm your brand in the long term.
Besides content duplicates, many business owners don't realize that they're committing a similar mistake with their homepages. Having several homepages can lead to a slower progression of your sales funnel. It can mess up your traffic tracking data for your analytics. Unfortunately, it's sometimes an unavoidable issue, depending on the platform you're using for your website. Thankfully, you can set up a 301 redirect to redirect searches to the URL version of your website automatically.
2. Poor loading speeds
B2B businesses need to offer a streamlined and consistent service to keep up with a client's demands and strict timetables. Slow-loading B2B websites work against the idea of collaboration, which can give your brand a bad name while damaging your search engine ranking. Faster-loading sites gain more positive reception from their users, which also translates to higher placements in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages)rank. This allows your landing pages to get better organic search results, increasing your visibility to your target market.
Thankfully, Google has a convenient and free-to-use tool that can rate your site's loading speeds on mobile and desktop devices. It also recommends solutions on how you can solve the loading issues present.
3. Lacking a sitemap for your website
Besides your navigation tools for designing an easy-to-use User Interface (UI), you also need to accommodate Google's AI web crawlers. A sitemap allows search engine bots to understand how your site operates and guide it to the site's different landing pages. An XML sitemap is a critical element of the SEO process because it organically arranges pages by importance and which ones should appear on search results. Another companion sitemap is an HTML sitemap that lists all the pages and URLs of your site. It's a helpful index that contains all relevant pages that contribute to your UI design and enables Google to know that your site is user-friendly.
Conclusion
With today's competitive digital market, it's important to optimize your website as your leverage to an online audience. Unfortunately, not all business owners are internet savvy enough to master all the intricacies of web design. Thankfully, you can outsource your site's web development to trustworthy professionals with many years of industry experience.
Mastering SEO is one way to develop your website's efficiency and online visibility. At LionRank, we provide business owners with a DIY SEO tool that can audit your site and provide innovative solutions to its faults. Start a subscription of a $7-trial with us today and use our versatile software to optimize your website!