For many of the B2B Brands, we work with, the technical side of search engine optimization (SEO) takes a backseat to the other, more commonly understood areas of SEO like content marketing or backlink outreach. And who can blame them? The language and process of doing technical SEO are, well, technical. Yet, so often, B2B Brands go along paying minimal attention to it until one of two situations comes up:
- They’re doing a website migration and want to maintain their SEO health through the transition.
- Their content has begun tanking in the SERP rankings for an unknown reason, and they suspect it could be a technical issue.
We’ve worked with B2B Brands to retain or improve their websites’ technical health at these stages. In some cases, their technical health is decent, but in others, technical health might significantly affect their ability to bring in organic traffic.
The core of the problem is that B2B Brands tend to take a reactive approach to technical SEO. Something has gone wrong, and now they need to fix it.
Especially for established websites that have many pages, this is where companies can find themselves in a daunting situation and a deep hole. The alternative is to take a proactive approach to periodic technical health checks and preventative maintenance.
In this article, we’ll cover two challenges when B2B Marketers neglect technical SEO and how simple technical fixes can drive key web pages to the top of the search rankings. Finally, we’ll wrap up our areas of focus for helping B2B Brands improve technical SEO.
If you’ve been working to improve your SEO and your progress has been stagnant or declining, you can schedule a B2B SEO Growth Strategy Session to learn more about how our team can help you start driving results from your efforts.
The infographic below contains the five biggest takeaways from our new report on industry trends and what they could mean for you.
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Technical SEO Services for B2B Brands
Our process for doing technical SEO includes investigating four critical areas of your website:
1. Crawlability
A technically healthy website is structured so that Google or Bing’s “crawlers” can look at all the content or code on your website and analyze it. So, in this step, we look at the health and “cleanliness” of your website’s information architecture (as described in the first example above) and sitemaps. And we have several tools that we use to improve crawlability and reduce errors, including:
- The effective use of robots.txt
- Implementing crawl rules
- Increasing internal linking
- Updating sitemaps
2. Indexability
Indexing, different from crawling, is another essential element of technical health that ensures search engines can effectively access and render your content to gauge its relevance for inclusion in search results. In this step, we work to implement appropriate uses of:
- Caching
- JavaScript/Dynamic Rendering
- Canonical tags
- Redirects
3. Security
Lapses in security and encryption erode the trust that search engines — and users — place in your website, which can risk limiting visibility in results. In this step, we work to ensure your site meets SEO best practices in security, such as HTTPS.
4. Speed
Website performance, particularly speed, is a critical factor for both user experience and search engines when determining the quality of a website. You can have high-quality content on a given topic, but if your page load speed is too slow, search engines will respond by favoring other pages in search results.
The number one culprit that slows down websites is large images, so we’ll do image compression in this step to speed things up. In addition, there are several other tools we’ll use to speed up your website, including:
- Mobile-first
- Minifying JS/CSS
- Caching
- Implementing a CDN
Proactive Technical SEO Beats Reactive Technical SEO Every Time
There’s a saying in the SEO world. It says, “The best time to start SEO was five years ago. The next best time is now,” which is especially true if you haven’t paid much attention to technical SEO.
As you’ve seen, waiting until something goes wrong can result in some real headaches and wasted time. Alternatively, taking a proactive approach can allow you to:
- Spot opportunities you didn’t know were there
- Build a technically sound foundation to set yourself up for future success
We focus on both advantages in our SEO work at Michira Marketing. Schedule a B2B SEO Growth Strategy Session to learn how our B2B SEO Agency can help you grow your B2B Brand through SEO.
