SEO Trends For B2B Websites

Navigation/Hierarchy

One of the biggest trends for B2B websites currently is optimising their website hierarchy/navigation. Let’s take an industrial website for example, which may have product listings on the website. A lot of these companies will have a page of the product for consumer purposes, a page of the same product for manufacturing purposes, and maybe even a third page for the same product for application purposes. This is commonly so the page can be used across three subdirectories like so:

• domain.com/shop/product-1
• domain.com/manufacturing/product-1/
• domain.com/applications/product-1

The issue with this is that the website can run into duplicate content problems if the pages are exactly the same. The website should either only have one URL for the page, or if there really needs to be 3 URLs then one of them should be the canonical.

Even if the pages are unique and not duplicate, you can still be creating user experience problems. Perhaps a user sees the product name, clicks it and is taken to the manufacturing page, when they were looking for the shop page instead.

E.A.T

EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It’s a set of guidelines on how Google rates a website or specific webpage, and it can impact your search rankings. EAT isn’t used on every search query, it’s mainly used for niches that can be placed in the YMYL category (Your Money or Your Life.) With a YMYL search query, Google considers it extremely important to ensure it ranks only the best and most trusted websites. The basis of a YMYL search is that it can impact the user’s health or finance – which explains the name.

For a website or page to rank well for a search query which would impact a user’s health, wellbeing or finance then the website needs to be trustworthy, the company should be an authority and the content should be coming straight from an expert. If you’re researching about your upcoming heart surgery, you’re probably not looking for a blog from Ronald McDonald! And this is exactly why it’s a B2B trend: EAT is Google’s attempt of separating the professionals from the everyday blogger.

Structured Data

Structured data, such as Schema data, are little snippets of code that can be inserted into a website. Structured data is meta information served to search engine bots, it can’t be viewed by the user. Structured data allows your webpage to display as a Rich Result snippet, depending on which structured data you use. These rich results can include things such as prices, product stock, business name, opening hours, rating stars etc. Structured data isn’t used for website rankings, but you could potentially drive more clicks to your website by having a more visible presence on the SERP via the Rich Result snippet.

Mobile

Having a mobile-friendly website is definitely not a new thing. Today, responsiveness is the bare minimum you need when it comes to a business website. It’s time B2B websites start actually optimising the user experience for mobile users, but many webmasters are reluctant to do this because the majority of B2B searches and traffic is still desktop. But why does that mean that the other 30-40% of your traffic should have a bad user experience? Mobile is increasingly being used for B2B searches and it’s time B2B websites start to optimise for their user experience instead of doing the bare minimum!