When was the last time you really took a good look at your B2B business website?

This can mean you benefit from things such as:

• Aspects of the site that didn’t quite work properly are getting fixed
• Half-finished posts that were published are getting improved
• Internal linking is getting looked at and improved
• Typos and spelling issues are all getting fixed
• 2-3 optimised articles targeting your ideal customer profiles published every month
• Reporting and stats apps are set up correctly, so there’s transparency around where you’re ranking and what for
• Images having their alt tags correctly added and being optimised
• Redirects are being done correctly
• Eyes on Google Search Console to fix any issues with your website that it’s been picking up

The point here is that none of this is really rocket science, but the reality is that it’s probably been 6 weeks since you last even had a basic look over your business website (simply because you’ve been too busy running the business and doing other stuff)

I appreciate that a £1,000-a-month investment in an SEO contractor might well be too rich for many small businesses, but it doesn’t have to be that much. It could be 1 hour a week, or 2 hours a week; you simply have to weigh this against what that website could be worth to you if it’s done well, looked after, and optimised properly.

For many small businesses, marketing and customer acquisition costs sit right towards the bottom of the “Where do we spend our money first?” list.

But the reality is that if you can just eke out a recurring budget to invest in your website and SEO (beyond getting a website live), it will pay off if done properly.

You’d be surprised how easy it is to do it right (and wrong)

Unless you run an SEO agency, my guess is that SEO is probably not your area of expertise, so if you’re trying DIY SEO, it generally means a lot of googling or asking GPT and then implementing what you’re told in the blind belief that it’s correct

SEO is more nuanced than that, and this is the crucial thing: it doesn’t take ages, you can get a lot done in 4 hours, even if you only invest 4 hours a month, if you’re doing the right things for your website and not just blindly following AI tips.

The reason I say this is that the internet is full of SEO experts, but a lot of the SEO expertise you read is not for B2B websites, it’s for affiliate marketing websites. You know those sites where they compare cameras and then hope that you click through and buy something on Amazon, so they get a cut

SEO for affiliate marketing is very, very different from SEO for a B2B service-based website.

AI trains itself on what it finds on the internet, and what it finds is huge amounts of information about affiliate marketing SEO, so when you ask it about your B2B site, it simply spits out what based on what it knows, which is affiliate marketing – do this sort of SEO on your B2B website, and it’s a surefire way to tank it

Marketing a small business that offers B2B services or productized services is about identifying ideal customer profiles and writing for your audience. Affiliate SEO is about ranking for long-tail keywords and driving as much traffic as you possibly can, blindly hoping that one of those 10,000 visitors wins you a reward

The next time your P&L takes a dive, spend some time looking at your website

It can be the source of as much new business as you need. When your website is built, structured, and optimised properly, it will rank for the right queries and deliver the right sort of visitors.

You don’t need 5,000 visitors a month, you need 1,000 of the right kind.

Conversion rates can climb significantly when you’re getting the right traffic and drop significantly when you get the wrong traffic.

Again, this is another metric that people often read about and apply to their own website; our conversion rate is 0.2%, so for every 500 visitors that we get, we get 1 inquiry.

The math above is correct, but also incorrect if 450 of those visitors to your website searched for something that you ranked for, and they’re not even in the same ballpark as someone looking to use your services.

A good real-life example of this is a website I looked at recently that was generating about 8,000 visits a month and simply could not understand why they were not getting any conversions.

They were in a particular niche where a particular word was used frequently, and that word was often spelt incorrectly. Someone decided it would be a good idea to write a blog post about how to spell the word in question.

The result was that about 7,000 people who visited their site were looking for an answer to how to spell a word; not to get a quote for their services.

The traffic they received wasn’t even related to their business at all. One wrong blog post got them ranking for something they shouldn’t even have ranked for. The hard truth here is that unpicking that will also take an awfully long time.

The more time you invest in your website doing things properly, the more returns you’ll receive

That’s the honest truth. B2B websites are often left lying around for months on end without updates or improvements, and business owners wonder why what should be a primary driver of new business is just sitting there looking pretty.

If you’d like a frank discussion about your own website, get in touch. We’ll do a basic audit of your website, review your data, and then spend an hour explaining how we can help you improve it.