If you work in the professional services sector, you already know that competition is fierce. What many executives don't know, however, is how important B2B website best practices are in helping professional services firms stand out from the rest.
How important is it? The Hinge Research Institute has found that 82% of professional services buyers check a company's website to evaluate it as a potential provider.
This makes your website the most common source of information for buyers considering your services, far ahead of traditional referrals. It's worth noting that other sources, such as online search and social media, can also lead buyers to your website.
But a company's website isn't just important for the information it provides. It also establishes credibility, and this dimension is more essential than many organizations realize. Our most recent studies suggest that 9 out of 10 buyers will discard a company before even speaking with them. If your website doesn't clearly communicate how it can address a buyer's challenges, they are very likely to rule you out.
Why? Because people have become so accustomed to sophisticated and attractive consumer websites that they expect the same from business websites.
The continued growth of digital consumption has made B2B websites more important than ever. But how do you create a successful site that builds credibility, informs your audience, and drives your overall online presence?
Let's look at seven best practices that will help you achieve this.
1) Feature Educational Content
When potential clients visit your site, they are typically looking for information related to their problems and evidence that your expertise has addressed those types of problems. By creating valuable educational content, you can address both information needs and past performance in one go.
Keep all your content in an organized "library" or "resources" section accessible from your homepage. It should be a top-level subpage, prominently placed in the site navigation. On the library page itself, users should be able to organize your content by topic or format type.
You should never include promotional materials such as sales sheets, sales presentations, brochures, or company news in this section. Instead, this is a hub for genuinely educational resources: how-to guides, white papers, research studies, and webinars. Make sure your content is professionally produced and clearly demonstrates your company's areas of expertise. The writing and design should reinforce your credibility, not undermine it.
If you're going to commit to content, you must truly commit: never let your library page go stale. Update your library constantly with new content to demonstrate ongoing dedication to education and industry engagement.
2) Highlight Premium Content to Generate Leads
An educational e-book is a type of "premium" content that goes deeper than a blog post. While a blog post should be freely accessible to anyone in order to attract visitors, you can ask for useful information, such as a visitor's email address, before allowing them to download premium content.
This strategy is called "gated" content. "Gated" content requires some type of form. If you ask for too much personal data, visitors will be discouraged, but they are usually willing to exchange their names and email addresses for valuable content, and these are some of the most useful data you can collect. With this data in hand, you can continue nurturing and engaging the target audience through content aligned with different stages of engagement. Relying on content that converts is a powerful and fundamental lead generation strategy.
How will visitors find your gated content? Include attractive and relevant premium content offers, such as e-books, in your freely accessible content (i.e., blog posts), in the middle or at the end, where they are visible without being intrusive.
3) Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
More and more people are accessing B2B websites through mobile devices. These screens are smaller, and site designs that look beautiful and functional on a laptop or desktop can be confusing and unintuitive on a mobile device.
To give visitors the best possible experience, it's important to prioritize mobile usability in your design. After all, users who have a bad experience accessing your site from a mobile device will quickly leave and most likely won't return. Additionally, Google adjusts rankings based on mobile-friendliness and displays search results with "mobile-friendly" labels. Therefore, there is no doubt about the role of mobile in relation to overall visibility in search results.
How can you make sure your site is mobile-friendly? The answer lies in responsive design. This technique uses CSS to create sites that adapt fluidly, elegantly, and functionally to the user's device dimensions, creating a great experience for all your visitors.
4) Optimize Your Site for Search Engine Indexing
Earlier I mentioned that mobile-friendliness can influence how your site ranks in search engine results. There are many other "ranking signals," and using them deliberately is crucial for building online visibility and maximizing your search engine indexing.
While effective search engine optimization (or SEO) is a very broad topic, some of the most essential SEO best practices are:
- Make sure your pages have unique "meta" titles and descriptions, so Google (and searchers) can know exactly what each page is about.
- Use the HTML "image alt" tag to give context to the images on your site. This will improve accessibility for users and help Google understand the content of images.
- Include relevant keyword phrases. What phrases do people search for when looking for expertise like yours? Include these phrases in both site text and metadata. However, don't overdo keyword phrases; instead, use only the most natural and relevant ones.
- Consider page load time. On the Internet, a positive user experience (UX) is a must. Make sure your page design, plug-ins, etc. are optimally configured to take advantage of the best download speeds available from your hosting service provider.
- Use Google Search Console to monitor your site's performance and leverage data to increase traffic and produce more relevant content. If visitors are flocking to blogs on a specific topic, that might be a good area to focus on.
Even more than other aspects of online marketing, SEO best practices evolve rapidly and constantly. Make sure your team is prepared to stay up to date with the latest SEO techniques and guide your strategy accordingly.
5) Create Clear Calls to Action
Too often, visitors who want to learn more or explore services on a B2B website are left without a clear idea of what they should do to continue. If they don't know how to contact you (or anything else they want to do) easily, they'll simply move on.
That's why it's essential to include clear and compelling calls to action that guide visitors toward a specific task, explaining what to do next. These are usually bright, descriptive buttons. When planning your website (or its update), you should create an offer strategy that highlights which call to action will be placed on a given page and why. Think of this as a roadmap for the target buyer personas your website aims to connect with.
6) Demonstrate Your Company's Expertise
Your specialized knowledge is what sets you apart in the marketplace. Without it, no amount of marketing knowledge will help you succeed. With that in mind, your specialized expertise should also be at the center of everything you do online.
Use images and language that resonate with your target audience. Design and copy should reinforce your credibility, illustrate your company's knowledge and service offerings, and clarify your experience so visitors know exactly what you know and how you can help them.
Help visitors get to know you by providing detailed biographies of the people who work at your company, with photos, backgrounds, experience, recent projects, professional associations, and any other relevant information. Videos and company overviews are another way to present your organization, staff, and culture "face to face." Depending on company culture and your comfort level with social media, including links to social connections is helpful and makes staff appear more approachable.
7) Make Your Website Easy to Navigate
As we've already mentioned, your site should offer plenty of detailed information, but it must be clearly organized and easy to navigate. Otherwise, visitors may feel overwhelmed or fail to find the right information. Unlike entertainment websites, where visitors may be more willing to search for "hidden" information, the navigation architecture (information architecture) of a B2B website is not the place to be clever, as it will only frustrate visitors, waste their time, and encourage them to leave the site.
Make sure navigation menus are simple and uncluttered, with a maximum of six top-level categories. You can guide users to more specific subgroups of pages through dropdown menus; just make sure these menus are easy to find and that the font is large and legible. As a rule, you should avoid small text links throughout the site, and remember that user interface is very important for SEO considerations.
Ultimately, the structure and design of your website are the means through which the ultimate goal of the website is achieved: getting the right information to the right people and ultimately converting those visitors into buyers. When thinking about a new website or a redesign, make sure the goals and best practices described above are at the top of your list. If you follow these guidelines, you'll be well positioned to stand out from the rest of the market.
