If your B2B website is underperforming due to poor design, uninspired content or lack of exposure, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table in the form of lost leads and sales.
Whether you’re working with an existing site or starting from scratch, here are some B2B website design best practices that will take your business from lost to found:
1. Keep customers in mind. Design for humans—they’re the ones buying from you. Make your site intuitive, easy to navigate and uncluttered. If humans come to your site, search engines will follow.
2. Optimize for search engines. That being said, search engines do need to find you. Tag all images with your keywords and keep keyword density to less than 2% so the bots don’t confuse you with spam.
3. Add quality content. Engaging content is critical to good B2B website design. Quality content, i.e. home page content, blogs and articles keeps visitors interested and informed. It ensures that they will be back and next time, they’ll bring friends.
4. Keep it fresh. Update your content. Post a new blog at least twice a week. Write articles regularly. Search engines reward sites that keep their content fresh—and so do the people who read it.
5. Add a blog. According to the Hubspot 2010 State of Inbound Marketing Report, B2B website design that includes a blog helps businesses generate 67% more leads per month.
6. Include calls to action. Let people know what you want. Use action words to make valuable offers (“download our ebook now!”), and you may see conversion rates rise by as much as 30%.
7. Claim your listing. Google, Bing, Business.com and Yahoo offer online directories where you can claim a listing under your category. Here, local buyers can find you and learn about you.
8. Socialize. Linking your site to your social media accounts makes it more interactive and sharable.
9. Link to other sites. Identify bloggers in your industry and network with them to get high-quality links to your site.
10. Go mobile. According to Forrester Research, mobile commerce accounts for 2% of all ecommerce in 2011. That’s about 6 billion reasons to go mobile with your B2B website design.
11. Measure results. Once you have a good design in place, stay on top of it. Use Google Analytics, Web Trends or another free service to track how your site is doing.
