Spindustry Blog

4 Ways Your Website is Hiding from Search Engines

Posted by JoAnn Seeman on September 3, 2014
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SEO statThe key to business success is not just great products, but also having knowledgeable sales reps who can close the deal. What about the step before that – where potential customers are doing online research to find out more about the product or service?

Research from Pardot says that 80% of B2B product research for a future purchase begins on Google, Bing or Yahoo. This means it’s vital to not just provide website visitors (potential customers) with good information, but to make sure the site appears in their search results.

Here are a few reasons that search results sometimes miss the mark:

1. Guessing about which keywords are important: How do you know which keywords are most important? Talk with your dealers and customers and learn what keywords they use when talking about the company and its products. Based on that feedback, conduct keyword research to find which terms are used most often. Use this data to select 10 targeted keywords.

2. Trying to be all things to all people: A website audience may be made of dealers and end-users, as well as the media and general public. To give the right information to the right people, create a clear pathway for various types of audiences to navigate your website. That way, dealer terminology will appear on pages targeted to dealers, and consumer terminology for consumers.

3. Content age: Search engines favor new, quality content. If the product listed on the site has not been updated recently, search crawlers do not register the content or rank it as high as fresh content. A blog can also be a great way to do keep digital content fresh and improve SEO without re-doing the primary website content. Did you know that B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who don’t? Now that’s a compelling business reason to blog! (Source: Social Media B2B)

4. Basic SEO elements are missing: Whether B2B or B2C, the basics of good website SEO include using targeted keywords in the Title Tag, Meta Description and Meta Keyword tag on each page, as well as the Alt Tag on every image and the regular body text throughout the site. Don’t forget to specifically name images too: “black-cat.jpg” tells search engines a lot more “IMG429.jpg.” Learn more about SEO Basics in our blog post on “5 SEO Tips for your Site.”

Which of these SEO challenges are the biggest problem for your business? Let us know in the comments below.

Topics: SEO