If you work in the professional services sector, you are already aware of how fierce the competition is today. The importance of a Bizpedia website’s best practices in making professional services firms stand out from the competition is something that many executives are unaware of.
What then, is its significance? 82% of buyers of professional services, according to the Hinge Research Institute, look at a company’s website before making a decision about whether to work with them.
This elevates your website above traditional references to become the most popular informational resource for customers researching your services. Notably, customers may eventually find your website through other channels like social media and internet search.
The significance of a company’s website, however, extends beyond the information it provides. In addition, it creates credibility, which is more significant than many businesses realize. The majority of consumers—90%—will reject a business before speaking with them, according to our most recent data. Your chances of being rejected increase if it is unclear from the information on your website how you can resolve a customer’s problems.
What causes that, specifically? Because people are so accustomed to highly developed and captivating consumer websites that they anticipate the same from business websites.
B2B websites now have greater importance than ever due to the ongoing rise in digital consumption. But how do you build a website that succeeds, establishes credibility, educates your audience, and advances your entire online presence?
This is exactly what you will learn from these seven best practices.
1) Provide educational materials.
Prospective customers typically visit your website in search of information about their problems and proof that your expertise has dealt with problems similar to theirs. You can address both knowledge and past performance in a single motion by producing worthwhile educational content.
Maintain a well-organized “library” or “resources” section on your website that is easily accessed from the home page. This ought to be a top-level sub-page that commands a lot of visibility in your website navigation. Users ought to be able to arrange their content by topic or type of format right on the library page.
Brochures, sales papers, presentations, and business news are all examples of promotional items that should never be included in this section. Instead, it serves as a clearinghouse for how-to manuals, white papers, research reports, and webinars that are actually instructional. Ensure that the content you provide is of a high standard and that it amply illustrates the pertinent specialist areas of your organization. Your credibility ought to be increased, not diminished, by the writing and design.
Never allow your library page to become stagnant if you’re going to commit to content; do so wholeheartedly. If you want to show that you are committed to continuing education and industry engagement, regularly update your library with new material.
In comparison to a blog post, an educational eBook offers more in-depth, “premium” content. Although a blog post should be freely available to everyone in order to attract visitors, you can request useful information such as a visitor’s email address before allowing them to download premium content.
This tactic is referred to as “gating” content. Gated content requires some sort of form submission. Visitors will become discouraged if you request too many personal details, but they frequently give up their names and email addresses in exchange for useful information, which is among the most useful data you can gather. With this information in hand, you can keep cultivating and attracting target audiences with content that corresponds to the various engagement stages. A strong and essential lead generation tactic is to rely on content that converts.
In the first place, how will visitors find your gated content? Include enticing and pertinent offers for premium content, like eBooks, in your publicly available content (i.e., blog posts), but only at the middle or end of the piece, where it is obvious without being intrusive.
3) Optimize your website for mobile devices.
Increasing numbers of customers are viewing B2B websites on mobile devices. Because mobile devices have smaller displays than laptops or desktop computers, website designs that look lovely and function well on those displays may appear disjointed and confusing on mobile devices.
Prioritizing mobile-friendliness in your design is crucial if you want to provide visitors with the greatest experience possible. After all, users who have a horrible experience using a mobile device to view your site will leave soon and probably never return. Additionally, Google does modify ranks depending on search results that are displayed on mobile devices and have “mobile-friendly” tags. Thus, the contribution of mobile to total visibility in search results is clear.
How do you make sure your website is compatible with mobile devices? Respondent design holds the key to the solution. This method makes use of CSS to build websites that fluidly, elegantly, and functionally adjust to the size of a user’s device, resulting in a wonderful user experience for all of your visitors.
4) Ensure that your site is indexed by search engines.
I already mentioned that your site’s ranking in search engine results may be impacted by how mobile-friendly it is. There are numerous additional “ranking signals,” and employing them purposefully is essential for increasing your online presence and search engine indexing.
Despite the huge topic of search engine optimization (or SEO), these are some of the most important SEO best practices:
- Make sure each of your pages has a distinct title and “meta” description so that Google (and users conducting searches) can understand what each is about.
- To provide context for the photos on your website, use the “image alt” HTML tag. This will increase user accessibility and aid Google in deciphering the meaning of your photos.
- Add pertinent keyword phrases. When seeking for expertise like yours, what keywords do people use? Include these words in the metadata and site copy. Use only the most natural and pertinent keyword phrases instead of stuffing your content with unnecessary ones.
- Keep the website load time in mind. A good user experience (UX) is essential while shopping online. Make sure your page design, plug-ins, and other elements are configured optimally to benefit from the fastest download rates offered by your host service provider.
- Utilize Google Search Console to track the effectiveness of your website and use the information to drive more traffic and create more insightful content. You should pay attention to a topic if blogs on it are receiving a lot of traffic.
SEO best practices are changing quickly and continuously, more so than other aspects of online marketing. Ascertain that your team is capable of staying current with SEO tactics and adjust your strategy as necessary.
5) Clearly state what should be done.
On a B2B website, it happens all too frequently that users who want to learn more or investigate services are left in the dark about how to proceed. They will simply move on if they can’t easily figure out how to get in touch with you (or do whatever else they want to do).
It is critical to offer clear, enticing calls-to-action that direct users toward a specific task and explain what to do next. These typically take the form of vibrant, educational buttons. When you plan your website (or website upgrade), you should create an offer strategy that explains which call to action will be placed on each page and why. As a road map for the target personas that your website seeks to engage, think of this.
Regardless of where they appear, calls-to-action need to be obvious and stand out from the rest of the page. Get my free evaluation rather than “Submit” is how they should phrase their language, which should be descriptive, specific, and dynamic.
Calls to action are part precise science at their most effective. When experimenting with different text, colors, and other elements to improve click and conversion rates, use A/B testing to compare visitors’ reactions to different calls-to-action.
6) Describe the expertise of your firm.
In the end, your area of expertise is what distinguishes you from the competition. No amount of marketing expertise will help you succeed if it’s lacking. In light of this, the core of everything you do online should be your expertise. According to our research, buyers now give firm expertise a higher priority than they did even five years ago when making their selections.
Utilize vocabulary and metaphors that your target audience will find appealing. In order to give visitors a clear understanding of what you know and how you can help them, your website’s design and copy should support your credibility by emphasizing your area of expertise and your company’s knowledge and service offerings.
By offering thorough profiles of the staff members at your company, together with their images, backgrounds, experience, current projects, professional affiliations, and any other pertinent information, you can let visitors get to know you. Another approach to provide a compelling, “face-to-face” introduction to your company, its people, and its culture is through video features and firm overviews. Including links to social connections is helpful and makes staff appear more approachable depending on the culture of your company and how comfortable your employees are using social media.
Your website should include a lot of specific information, as we’ve already mentioned, but it also needs to be well-organized and simple to use. Otherwise, visitors risk being overloaded or failing to find the appropriate information at all. In contrast to entertainment websites, where users may be more willing to look for “hidden” information, a B2B website’s information architecture should not be clever because doing so will only irritate users, waste their time, and cause them to leave.
Make careful to limit the number of top-level categories in your navigation menus to six. Dropdown menus can direct readers to more focused subsets of pages; just make sure they’re simple to find and have type that is both large and readable. Generally speaking, you should steer clear of using small text links on your website, and keep in mind that user interface is crucial for SEO considerations.
In the end, your website’s structure and design are how you achieve the site’s primary objective: distributing the appropriate information to the right audiences and ultimately turning those visitors into customers. Make sure the objectives and best practises mentioned above are at the top of your list as you think about creating a new site or renovating an existing one. You will be in a good position to differentiate yourself from the competition if you adhere to these recommendations.
