Business to Business marketing can be difficult. Small and medium-sized businesses often find it tough to compete in search results against larger firms that have marketing teams and spend hundreds of dollars a week for Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC).
Don’t despair - in our latest blog series we will be providing tips for On Page SEO, Off Page SEO and the best (free!) services that can boost your company’s online presence and help with your marketing efforts.
Elements of On page SEO
Your website is the face of your company and on page SEO plays an integral part to how and where your site shows up on search pages. On page SEO is not only about what appears on the page – it is also about user experience. Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics used to measure how visitors experience your site. These vitals include how fast your site loads, input responsiveness, how accessible your site is for impaired individuals and other user centric criteria.
Elements of Off page SEO
The “authority” of your domain is an important part of off page SEO. Authority of your domain can be increased with links from other sites and services, brand recognition/mentions,creating and sharing content on social channels, tied in with local marketing efforts.
Improving on page SEO
Knowing how visitors experience and interact with your site can help you identify what elements should take priority when it comes to making improvements to your site and what content to expand.
Google Search Console offers various tools and reports on how search engines interact with your site, your site’s search traffic and performance – including Core Web Vitals.
Google Analytics tracks and measures how users interact with your site – for example, if a visitor found your site organically, from social media or a referral link. It can also provide other details such as visitor location, device, what content they engaged with and for how long. This information provides you with valuable insight for your SEO strategy and implementing the items below:
Keywords – Google has to know what your page is about in order to show your website in search results. This is accomplished by using keywords associated with your business. There are many services that can help with keyword research, but you can always start by considering what you would type into a search page if you were the person looking for your business or service.
URLs & Page Titles - Since both page titles and URLs show up in search engine ranking pages (SERP’s), they should include keywords to let visitors know what they will find on the page. Using specific and unique keywords in the title tag of each page also helps search engine crawlers to better understand your site.
For companies with multiple locations, URLs can also be used to specify a location. For example, if you have a law firm with offices in Greenville and Spartanburg, a good URL structure would be www.ourlawfirm.com/greenville or www.ourlawfirm.com/locations/spartanburg.
To prevent Google from cutting off the title in search results, page titles should be no more than 50-60 characters long (Google may still cut off the full title, even when you are within the character limit.) If it will not put you over the character limit, include your company name. Using the law firm example from above, a good page title would be Greenville’s Best Full-Service Law Firm | Our Law Firm
Meta Description – Although Google has stated that Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, they will apply bold text to a users search term that appears in your meta description. Be sure to include core key words in the description and keep it within 160 characters to ensure it displays properly in the SERPS.
Page Content – Content is king. The content of your website should always address your target audience’s search intent and showcase E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.) Each page of your site should have a unique title and use Heading tags (typically H1 – H6) to break up content for better readability. Be sure to include your keyword for the page in the H1 (heading 1)tag. Ensure all pages meet accessibility requirements with backgrounds and fonts that provide good contrast, properly sized link buttons and adequate spacing between page elements.
Images & Video– When it comes to AV assets,smaller is better and less is more, since large file sizes can slow your pages down significantly.
As a general rule, JPEG images are a smaller file size than PNG. Currently, Google recommends using “modern image formats” such as Web P or AVIF file types for images. No matter which file type you use, images should be properly sized and optimized. A great tool for converting and optimizing images https://tinypng.com/, which allows you to convert up to 20 images for free.
All images and videos should also be made accessible for screen readers by adding an ALT Tag description of the image or content of the video.
If having large AV assets is a must for your site, consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to lessen the impact on your page speed.
Open Graph Protocol – With the Open Graph Protocol, also known as open graph meta tags, you can control what content displays when sharing rich content links from your website on social media and the web. This gives you the ability to optimize your content for clicks, which can help to improve website traffic, brand recognition and reputation, as well as search engine ranking.
Implemented on your website via <meta tags> in the<head> of your webpage, the four required metadata properties Title,Type, Image and URL. Optional metadata properties include Description, Audio, Video and Site Name. A full list of available types, structured properties and examples can be found on the Open Graph Protocol site linked above.
Once implemented, any shared link to the page will include the information and images contained in the metadata of the Open Graph Protocol (OG). The example image below shows the difference between a shared link that utilizes the OG protocol vs a link that does not.
Here is the metadata code we use on our FAQ page to produce the rich object link shown in the image above:
Open Graph Tips:
If your title meta property is more than 100 characters long, it will automatically be reduced to 88 characters.
A good image size for Open graph images is 1200 x 627 pixels, with a maximum file size of 5MB. At this size the images look great without exceeding Facebook’s limits.
Descriptions should be engaging and no more than 200 characters long.
If og:image is used it should also specify og:image:alt to provide an alt description of the image for screen readers.
Backlinks – Links from other trusted websites are very valuable for SEO. Other pages linking to your content via backlinks help to show your E E A T to both site visitors and web crawlers. There are a number of ways to obtain backlinks, but earning them naturally with high quality blog posts, infographics and other sharable media should be your focus.
SEO takes time and it can take months to see results, but Page Speed Insights can help you keep track of changes to ensure they have made a positive impact. This report provides a “score” for both the desktop and mobile versions of your website, based on load time and other Core Web Vitals as well as provide you with an actionable list of items to help improve your score. Keep in mind a perfect score is almost impossible, especially on mobile, so aim for a performance score of 85 or better for desktop and 65 for mobile, (unless the majority of your traffic comes from mobile devices).
If you use the Google Chrome browser, the Lighthouse extension in Chrome is a handy way to quickly view page speed insights for any page you visit, (including your competition).
These basic concepts can go a long way in helping you improve your on-page SEO. Check back soon for our next blog post featuring a list of actionable tips and free services that can help you boost your online presence and business to business marketing efforts.
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