Every element on your website should serve a purpose with the ultimate goal of making your users’ experiences enjoyable, engaging and valuable so they can convert to a lead or customer with ease. Today’s web users have a very low tolerance for complexity and delays when browsing through a site. In fact, if a website doesn’t prove its value in under 10 seconds, most users will leave and go elsewhere. Plus, with 94% of B2B buyers researching online before finalizing a purchase, it’s crucial to ensure that your website delivers the right information and is optimized for lead conversions. If your B2B organization has been considering refreshing its website, review and consider applying the following B2B website tips and redesign best practices to reflect the latest best practices for improving speed, mobile-friendliness and search engine optimization (SEO).
Ask key questions for each section of a website page
When considering a website element to update or add, ask yourself these questions:
- How will this impact user experience?
- Will this help or hurt user engagement?
- Is this element easy to utilize?
- Is this element’s intended purpose clear?
Assess call-to-action (CTA) buttons
The placement, size and color of your CTA buttons can prove critical to get your website visitors to convert on site. Make sure the text clearly describes the desired action you want your audience to take. For instance, “Download Now” versus “Contact Us” ask very different things of your users, so make sure the language used is clear and easy to understand. As with virtually every web element, testing the effectiveness of different variables such as color and verbiage combinations is highly recommended.
Ensure the site imagery represents the brand well
Website imagery plays a huge role in how audiences perceive your brand overall and has been shown to impact engagement. Do you want your website imagery to present a professional, people-driven look and feel? Consider leveraging high-quality photography for your website that include images of professionals collaborating with each other in ways that are reflective of your target audience. In fact, research has shown that the use of faces in web design has a positive impact on user behavior. Keep in mind that B2B websites normally require a professional tone and appearance to build credibility in your industry, and make sure that the illustrations and imagery you choose to use convey these sentiments.
Simply put, the images you decide to use should be aligned with your overall brand identity.
Consider using iconography to support key points on your site
Incorporating icons on your website can be beneficial as they allow your brand to:
- Communicate information quickly and make content easier to understand and follow.
- Show your brand personality through icon style such as professional, modern, colorful or fun.
- Encourage engagement by breaking up large text blocks to make pages more digestible and visually appealing.
Use the minimum number of fields needed on web forms
What actions do you want website visitors to complete? Common B2B actions include signing up for a product demo, registering for a webinar or downloading a white paper. In all these cases, web forms are typically used to capture the information that visitors are asked for in exchange for the offering. To optimize engagement, it’s important to consider how much information visitors are willing to provide and balance that with what information you truly need.
Write content to optimize for your users AND search engines
Your website content should be written to either educate, inform or entertain your audience. While the people using your website should always come first, it’s important to remember that search engines analyze the relevance of your page when ranking search results. Write web copy that optimizes for both people and search engines with the following best practices:
- Create content that is relevant and attracts your specific target audience. This will entice your web visitors to dig into your website’s content to learn more about your product or service.
- Avoid writing content with jargon, fluff or too many technical terms. Visitors should be able to understand quickly and easily what your organization offers. If your website doesn’t accomplish this, expect your web visitors to quickly bounce from your site and look elsewhere. Use words and terminology that are meaningful to them and make your content easy to understand. Save your technical terminology for spec sheets or FAQ pages.
- Optimize your on-site SEO. On-site SEO means optimizing content elements on your site that you have control over to rank higher in search engines. However, don’t overstuff your content with keywords and SEO-optimized language. Top search engine Google has now updated its algorithm to better understand the nuance of language and context of words, which will prioritize content that is well-written over content created for a search engine. Because of this, it’s critical to write content that is in-depth, user-friendly, and high quality.
Take Your B2B Marketing to the Next Level
Forming a strong B2B marketing foundation can help take your organization’s success, and marketing, to the next-level. Learn how to create a content marketing strategy and plan that is catered to your ideal target audience, craft brand messaging that hits on key pain points and build buyer personas that form the ideal individual you are trying to reach with Marketing Pro Series courses. With the addition of one-on-one marketing coaching and interactive templates and exercises, these online marketing courses are an immersive experience aimed at helping you achieve your business goals.
