SEO Archives - Maven Collective Marketing

Top 5 Benefits of Google Search Console

Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners/Operations Managers, Web Developers, Site Administrators, B2B Marketers

Are you challenged trying to improve your search results ranking, search traffic, and / or user experience of your website? Then, Google Search Console is the answer. This extremely useful and free tool, formerly known as the Google Webmaster Tool, is a web service by Google that allows you to optimize the content on your website with search analytics. That means you get real-time data on how the search engine is analyzing your website. Accordingly, you can monitor its performance.

Once you are set up, you can check site indexing, receive alerts about errors and / or broken pages on the site, gain insights to improve your site’s mobile usability, and more. These helpful features make it a valuable tool for business owners, web developers, site administrators, and marketers.

Advantages of Google Search Console

Setting up Google Search Console for your website gives you access to valuable insights and reports that have the power to transform your web performance. See how you can take advantage of this FREE beneficial tool to enhance your website:

1. Improve Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) Ranking:

When you build a site for your business, your main aim should be to provide a seamless user experience. The more users find the information on your website helpful, the more your website climbs up the ranks on SERPs to become easily discoverable. Google Search Console allows you to see how webpages will perform on Google’s SERP.

To improve your ranking you need to make HTML improvements by using appropriate tags and meta descriptions to structure the information cohesively. Start by using structured data or schema markup to effectively categorize your content based on the business objectives you wish to display on the website. Also, make the most of site links as they appear on the SERPs, below the main URL of the website, allowing users to easily navigate to key webpages. The performance of these elements can be observed using click through rate information on your website’s Google Search Console dashboard.

2. Increase Organic Search Traffic

There is no better way to understand your website’s traffic than by checking out Google Search Console’s (GSC) comprehensive reports to understand why websites in a domain rank higher or get more traffic, and compare the findings with the content on your website. This will allow you to identify SEO weaknesses and give you the opportunity to correct them.

Promising results are achieved by developing content using keywords, effectively managing internal links, and gaining backlinks from external websites with strong page and domain authority. If you include these in your B2B content marketing strategy, you will be able to target your audience effectively and increase search traffic organically.

3. Understand Google's Indexing

When you deploy your website or introduce a new webpage, you also need to check the index status report to know if the pages are properly recognized or indexed by Google, as well as other search engines (e.g. Bing). You can check the GSC to track the number of pages that currently appear in Google’s results. Often, businesses forget to downsize the content on their website, yielding obsolete products and services pages. This too impacts the ranking of your website. Therefore, it’s necessary to audit the website to identify blocked pages, remove duplicate content and URLs, and update keywords to stay relevant. You can do all that by monitoring the Google Search Console Index Overview.

4. Discover Crawl Errors

Have you experienced errors like 404 Not Found, DNS, 503 Service Unavailable? When these errors occur, they can affect your user experience and website performance on Google. Google Search Console (GSC) highlights such errors and keeps a record to ensure you fix the problem and restore services quickly. The sooner your webpage and its interactive elements load, the better it is for crawling. If there are pages on your website that you don’t want Google to crawl, or you want to look for errors proactively, you could test the robot.txt markup to get the job done.

5. Get Google Site Messages

Stay on top of critical issues such as malware alerts, crawl issues, and spam with the help of Google Search Console. The site messaging feature sends an alert from Google and ensures that you are the first to know when Google detects a problem. When you receive such alerts, all you need to do is resolve the issue as soon as possible to protect your website from potential risks. Once resolved, you can notify Google about the resolution to restore your overall website performance. Pro tip, make sure to quickly resolve such issues to yield true long-run benefits.

Get Started with Google Search Console

It’s not too difficult to get started with Google Search Console, you just need to put in the time and effort to truly reap its benefits. On top of that, signing up for Google Search Console, as a FREE tool to add to your toolkit, without the hassle of paid upgrades. You just need to get access and prove the ownership of your site to be able to view powerful insights.

Are you running low on bandwidth and unable to give your website the attention it deserves? From setting up your Google Search Console to simplifying the process of generating and translating reports, Maven Collective Marketing can handle it all. We offer a comprehensive Digital Performance Audit to determine areas of improvement and will act as an extension of your team to help you succeed with better web performance. Reach out to our knowledgeable experts who will walk you through all of it with ease. Book your consultation today!

Actionable Insights for Your Website's Performance

Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Microsoft Partners, SaaS-Based Organizations

Google is on a quest to improve the user experience of surfing the internet by optimizing search engine results. Now, optimization is no longer focusing only on creating quality, informative and reliable content; it’s also about delivering a great user experience. To clearly define what a great user experience refers to, Google announced Core Web Vitals that help measure the performance of your website.

Google first announced these performance measures in June 2021. By adding these quantifiable measures, Google is trying to help businesses or website owners know where they stand regarding website ranking.

If you own a B2B tech website, then this new update is extremely useful for you as it will help fine-tune your current SEO strategy and take necessary actions to improve overall website performance and organic search results, leading to higher clicks and engagement.

What are Google Core Web Vitals?

Under the user experience umbrella, Google has set the following metrics for measuring Core Web Vitals. Read ahead to learn if your website’s core web vital scores are in the green:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Isn’t it annoying to wait for a webpage to load? The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measure is set to capture and evaluate your webpage’s load speed. According to Google, if your web page takes more than 4.0 seconds to load, your website’s performance is poor and will most likely lead to a higher bounce rate. The aim should be to stay under 2.5 seconds to deliver an optimal user experience.

2. First Input Delay (FID)

When a user clicks on an interactive element on your webpage, and it takes too long for that action to trigger, your website’s overall user experience is impacted. With the help of the First Input Delay (FID) measure, you are able to track the performance of your website. According to Google, performance at or below 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds) is considered good, and anything taking longer than that implies that there’s a noticeable lag and needs improvement.

3. Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS)

When an interactive element is clicked upon, nobody enjoys it when shifts its position or redirects them to an unrelated page. Thus, websites need to be responsive and load elements faster to reduce bounce rates and increase user sessions. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) helps you monitor such visual shifts in the website’s layout. To stay in the green and keep your customers happy, aim to achieve a score of 0.1 seconds or less in this metric.

Tools to Measure and Analyze Core Web Vital Scores

Before you invest in any tool, make sure to understand how the Core Web Vitals are measured so that you can compare the results and make informed decisions. The most powerful tool is the Chrome User Experience Tool, which reports directly on each of the vitals. Other tools such as Chrome DevTools, Google Search Console, Lighthouse, DeepCrawl, PageSpeed Insights, Web Vitals Chrome extensions, etc. are also excellent. To start, these tools will help you breakdown the web vitals into measured elements. But just understanding the factors involved is not enough, make sure to test and compare the results with alternate tools to ensure that the numbers are accurate before you act on the results.

How Do Core Web Vitals Impact SEO Performance?

Core Web Vitals are a critical component of your technical SEO. However, to improve performance scores you need to do more than just send your developer a list of metrics to fix. Without any context of the elements that need fixing, you will not be able to see any web performance improvements. Instead, make a list of all measured Core Web Vital elements to provide your developer with granular recommendations to improve your scores.

Why Should B2B Tech Organizations Care About Core Web Vitals?

Every B2B tech business aims to improve its website search rankings. With Google’s latest update, it’s imperative to pay closer attention to the user interface and enhance the website’s user experience. Solely focusing on optimizing content won’t be enough to reach a greater audience and achieve those desired search results’ improvements.

Also, it’s challenging to improve the organic search ranking of the website overnight. Consistency is the key, and it’s equally important to constantly experiment to optimize and improve the overall experience of your website. The sooner you adapt and improve upon the measurements recommended by Google, the better it will be for you to evaluate where your website stands and plan for improvements. It will also help you gain a competitive edge in the oversaturated software services industry.

Improve Website Design Based on Web Vital Measurements

Here are some simple best practices to keep in mind while measuring the Core Web Vitals for your website and making educated judgments to improve website design:

Internet Speed or Server Issues: This is one thing that you cannot control. While testing the speed of your website, make sure that you are monitoring the speed of your internet as well to observe how the performance is impacted. Your website’s performance can be severely penalized due to server issues. Therefore, it’s necessary to monitor the performance over time to make the required adjustments.
Optimizing Website Content: Content such as text, images, videos, icons, etc. need to be formatted to render properly on different devices and browsers.
Cut Out Unnecessary Code: Only keep the code that is empirical to load the website and track insights. Additional or less important JavaScripts can impact the performance adversely. By cleaning up your code, you can improve website speed significantly.
Be Mindful of Lazy Loads & Preload Key Elements: Move all the lesser important images and videos below the fold. By using the lazy load method, you can make less important visuals load at a regular speed, thus not directly impacting the user experience. You can also ensure that elements such as the webpage font and hero images are preloaded on the browser to improve your Largest Contentful Paint score. HOT TIP: Remember to design and categorize your webpage according to the hierarchy of content to achieve a seamless flow.

For More Web Performance Tips Talk To A Maven

With the help of these tips, you can consciously take action to improve the performance of your website and provide an excellent user experience for every client and prospective customer. That, paired with a robust SEO strategy will help your website rank higher on Google’s search and maintain that position.

If you want to get professional assistance to evaluate your B2B website’s ranking and optimize its performance, make sure to reach out to the seasoned marketing experts at Maven Collective Marketing. Our skilled team of marketing mavens will set you in the right direction to build and grow your B2B business with a captivating website that delivers a seamless experience. Reach out for a free consultation today!

Make Sure Your B2B Blog is Strengthening Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, B2B Software Service Providers

Revised September 2023

Given the intangible nature of B2B software services and products, the importance of how well you educate your target audience cannot be ignored. The people you are looking to connect with and sell to must have adequate knowledge of your service(s)/product(s) and its value(s). Creating quality content is important to your readers, therefore, becomes a no-brainer for your marketing strategy. It helps drive traffic to your B2B website and improves your visibility in your target market. A blog can be used to identify challenges your prospective customers face, as well as diagnosing potential services/solutions to fill their needs, as a means of continuous education. Creating content to address your target audience’s requirements helps build brand recognition and helps your business gain their trust. Did you know those business-to-business companies that blog regularly generate 67% more leads? Now, who wouldn’t want that? Don’t wait to get started, instead follow the following steps to launch your B2B blog effectively.

Step 1. Identify Your Target Audience

First, you need to understand who you are speaking to, or writing for. Begin with persona development to narrow down your audience into specific people and their interests. There are several areas that you need to research to determine who your potential customers are going to be, such as demographic, geographical location, interests, and more.

Make sure to utilize the right tools to identify your target. Google Analytics’ demographic reports can give valuable insight into the age and gender of your audience. You can even find their affinity under the ‘Interests’ category. Google Analytics’ various segments can help build powerful audience reports for you.

Another route you can take is to dig into the audience segment of your competitors. Know your direct and indirect competitors and identify who is engaging with their content. You can figure this out by tapping into their social networks and monitoring their content topics and engagement across platforms. The types and topics of content they create will give you an idea of who they are writing for and engagement is a clear way of observing the interested parties.

Step 2. B2B Blog Keyword Research

Now that you know who you are writing for, the next step is to figure out what your target audience is searching for. It is important to create content around the problems your potential customers are looking to resolve. Keywords are the focal point of search engine optimization; for a B2B blog to be relevant, addressing search queries becomes crucial.

How do you figure out what keywords are being used? There are several free and paid tools that can guide you:

Google Keyword Planner: is a simple and powerful tool to discover the average monthly searches, keyword difficulty, and cost bidding on the keyword (i.e. paid ads). You can even filter it down by specific industries to get more accurate metrics.
SEMrush: allows you to create keyword gap analysis reports that give you insights into underutilized keywords that you can use.
Ahrefs: is another useful one to have in your toolkit, you can even research specific competitor domains and look into all the organic keywords that they rank for.
Moz: is a great pick if you want to know more about ranking keywords and/or get keyword suggestions.
Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools: can help explore your site and manage keywords.

Step 3. B2B Marketing Content Calendar

You know your audience and you have a list of keywords ready, start planning your content! You do not want to bombard your audience with too much information all at once. It needs to be paced out at regular intervals for them to be able to absorb all that knowledge and garner interest for more.

You can also keep in mind current affairs, holidays, global events, and other big picture happenings that might influence your writing. It is always important to stay relevant to what is going on in your industry and how the taste and preferences of your audience are evolving over time. Some tools to help you maintain a calendar for social media posts are: HubSpot, Hootsuite, Buffer, etc. You can even maintain a spreadsheet to keep all your content ideas in one place.

Not to mention, all this planning will be a waste if you are not looking to churn out good quality content. For example, do not just pick any and every topic to write on just because a certain segment is talking about it. Always remember to see how important is it for your business and for your audience to know more about this topic. Quality content is not limited to what you write about but also included other aspects like the writing style. Determine the tone of voice you are going to follow throughout your content marketing journey and stick to it to build your brand image.

Step 4. Start Writing Your B2B Blog Now

If you have followed steps one to three, then you are ready to start that B2B blog! You are now equipped to begin some real content writing work. There are a few things you should be mindful of when creating your, primarily, make sure it is optimized for search engines.

There are many content marketing guidelines for B2B companies, but here are some common ones that you must be aware of at all times:

Keyword stuffing is a big no-no! Do not overdo it with keywords but ensure that it is included in the text periodically and is a part of your main heading and some subheadings as well. It is vital to be optimized for both short and long-tailed keywords. You can incorporate synonymous keywords and phrases to not sound repetitive and also widen your reach. But make sure you are optimizing your images and HTML elements (e.g. title tag, alt text, meta description) with the primary keyword.
Linking is another vital part, both internal in your B2B blog and external from your B2B blog. Tie your website or blog together by linking to and from other relevant information. You can link out to other resources that you have used to create your blog as well. Also, don’t overlook link optimization by including keywords in your critical URL tags!

Step 5. Don't Forget B2B Content Promotion

Content promotion is not just about paid channels, you can even do it organically across your social media platforms and well-planned email campaigns. The route you choose totally depends on your marketing plan, so try and few different ways before deciding what works best for your business.

Just writing blogs is not enough, it is all about making sure it reaches the right readers. Organic content promotion ensures that your work reaches those that are looking for it.

Search engines also care about content promotion. You have the opportunity to expose your writing to new and old audiences online. If your blog is informative it is likely to drive engagement and be noticed further when shared via social platforms. You even earn links if you are promoting it correctly across the right platform.

Posting on online communities and groups is one good way to get your content noticed. By creating value for your customers through well-promoted content you even have the chance to improve your domain authority and ranking on search engines.

Marketers who prioritized blogging received 13 times more ROI than companies that did not in 2019. This widening reach is how you can drive meaningful traffic to your website, which will leave to eventual conversion. Isn’t that the end goal of any marketing strategy?

Distinct B2B Blogging Advantages

Throughout this blog, we have covered several ways in which a B2B blog can boost your B2B marketing strategy. Let’s take a quick overview of all the ways a blog can impact your B2B marketing strategy and give it the lift that it needs.

Creating good quality blogs and observing how readers engage with them helps you understand their interests and prepare future content around that. You get to know your audience better and plan whether you are creating content for the right audience and how to nurture their interests towards conversion.

Utilizing content to present your expertise and showcasing involvement in the industry makes your content more engaging. If your content is truly informational, your blog can help you achieve that thought-leader status. Your target audience following can grow rapidly if your content adds concrete value.

We have briefly touched upon conversion before, but it is no secret that turning leads into customers is what all businesses want. Your content can be a vital part of the nurturing in between. It is the bridge that helps readers know your services, capabilities, and brand well enough to actually invest in it and seek solutions.

Do not underestimate the power of blogging!

If you need further guidance with starting your B2B blog, B2B marketing strategy, or just content promotion, get in touch with us. At Maven Collective Marketing, we work with several B2B software and B2B software services companies, including certified Microsoft Partners, to improve web traffic, lead generation, website performance, content marketing, email marketing, paid advertising, virtual events and much more. Contact us to find out how we can deliver the expertise you can measure to add value to your B2B marketing with impactful steps.

Improve SEO on Your B2B Website

Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Business Strategists, Microsoft Partner Organizations

We all know how important it is to have high SEO rankings, but with over 200 search engine ranking factors in Google’s search engine algorithm alone, it can feel a little overwhelming knowing which factors are the most critical for a successful online marketing strategy.

One question we are frequently asked by our clients is “how can we improve SEO on our B2B website?” This might sound like a simple question but producing the desired results for your B2B website requires establishing and maintaining a complex series of strategies and tactics.

In this blog post, we’ll highlight the key search engine ranking factors you should be integrating to improve SEO.

Keyword Research Is Essential to Improve SEO

Keyword research is ESSENTIAL to improve SEO strategy and practice.

There are various FREE and paid tools for keyword research, which can be helpful to gain a better understanding of a keyword. We recommend you take the time to evaluate the demand and competition of the keywords you are targeting and think about how someone would search for relevant information based on the specific product or service you are offering.

It’s also worth bearing in mind how competitive a keyword is. If you need to focus on building more authority on your B2B site, try targeting less competitive words until you have built a stronger foundation for your site.

Once you’ve researched and chosen your keywords it’s time to plan relevant and high-quality content around these keywords, BUT make sure it sounds natural and avoid using too many.

How to Improve SEO With Content Marketing

Producing high-quality content is crucial to increasing your rankings, but DON’T forget about old content once it’s up on your site. Your content needs to be relevant and up to date, so make sure you are reviewing and updating existing content regularly.

This is a fantastic way to signal to visitors that your website contains fresh, exciting, and accurate information. It will also likely increase the amount of time people spend on your site, also known as your dwell time, which can significantly improve SEO.

When reviewing existing content ask questions like, does my content demonstrate expertise, authority, and trustworthiness? Google’s ranking factor “E-A-T” (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) is used to measure just this.

While search engines want to ensure users are getting high-quality content, they also want to know that users are acquiring accurate and trustworthy information from your content.

Focus on Technical Elements to Improve SEO

Improving the technical SEO of your site is more important than you might think, so you want to ensure your site is compatible with the standards set by search engines, as this will significantly influence your ranking.

We recognize there are a lot of different aspects to technical SEO, so to make things easier we’ve highlighted some key points for you to focus on:

XML sitemaps – make sure to use an XML sitemap, as this shows search engines your website URLs and allows them to see what content is available and how to reach it.
Site structure – have an organized and flat structure that shows your site’s pages are only a few links away from one another. This also helps search engines to access and “crawl” all of your pages easily.
URL structure – a consistent and logical URL structure provides a better user experience and helps users understand how to move around your site.
Linking – internal links direct users to other relevant pages on your site, which increases your authority as well as your dwell time. It also helps search engines to “crawl” more of your site’s pages.
Duplicate & thin content – avoid duplicate content or providing thin content with little or no value to the user. We recommend using a social audit tool to help you find and remove duplicate content on your site.
Canonical Tags – canonical URLs help you manage similar content on your site and helps specify the exact URL you want visitors to see in search results.
Rich snippets – a type of markup that enables you to include additional information on your pages, making them more noticeable in search results. This will naturally increase organic traffic to your site.
404 pages & 301 redirects – you want to show search engines that all of your links are live, so make sure you don’t have any broken links and use 301 redirects to redirect users if you’ve restructured your site.
HTTPS – make sure to use HTTPS, an encrypted version of HTTP that will improve the security of your site for visitors by encrypting the data between your browser and server.

Offer an Optimal User Experience to Improve SEO

Evaluating your site for page performance is key to ensuring visitors have an optimal user experience on your page, whether on a desktop or mobile device. This will not only improve SEO but also increase organic web traffic. What’s more, with the increase of mobile browsing, it’s more important than ever to have a mobile-friendly user experience and a fast-loading speed.

Arriving in 2021 is Core Web Vitals, Google’s latest ranking factor. With this new factor, your search ranking will be measured by the user’s experience on your site – we’re talking about the speed of your site when it loads, page performance and mobile experience.

Algorithm updates can have a big impact on your rankings, as well as traffic to your site, so it’s important to stay ahead of them. Here are a few points that will help you understand how to prepare your B2B website for Core Web Vitals:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – how long does it take for the largest piece of content on your site to load? Whether it’s a video, an image, some text, on your desktop or on your mobile, your ranking will be influenced by the loading speed of that content.
Cumulative layout shift (CLS) – is used to measure the stability of your site. Think about whether a user may experience an unexpected layout shift when they go to click a button.
First Input Delay (FID) – how fast can your site start to process and produce a result when a user clicks on something?

Remember, this is all about providing an optimal user experience, so make sure your site offers an easy, accessible and fast experience for visitors.

Improve SEO with High Quality Backlinks

It’s important to build high-quality backlinks by linking to authoritative and trustworthy sites that are relevant to your subject matter. Backlinks not only demonstrate subject matter expertise, but they also build your own authority and trustworthiness.

Take the time to link your content only with relevant and high-quality backlinks and make sure not to include too many.

Grow Your Social Signals

Social shares may not be a direct ranking factor but getting more social shares to your site can really help your search engine ranking. There are two key reasons for this:

More social shares help to increase organic traffic to your site.
More social shares mean there are greater opportunities for your content to build backlinks.

What’s more using platforms such as Google My Business (GMB) and Bing Places for Business is a fantastic way to improve your B2B business ranking. There is a long list of benefits for local businesses, such as increased customer trust, expanded search engine real estate, increased website traffic and one-click accurate business information for customers.

It’s Possible to Improve SEO!

As we mentioned earlier, the question “how to improve SEO on our B2B website?” is a simple one to a complex series of strategies, tactics, and execution planning, but by following this resourceful guide you too can improve your search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your B2B website.

Have further questions or would like hands-on guidance applying these strategies and tactics?

Get in touch at maven@mavencollectivemarketing.com to learn how our expert team can improve your SEO and drive measurable results.

Drive more traffic to your beautiful website and perfectly crafted content with these SEO tips and components.

Learn why your B2B company should put in place content guidelines to ensure your content occupies its rightful throne.

Know the difference between fundamental concepts such as SEO and SEM to construct a comprehensive marketing strategy.

Learn how to ensure your marketing efforts cater to the concept of semantic search because it’s not going anywhere.

Optimize your B2B solutions and services’ content with the perfect title tag. Learn how to convey the message to your audience in the best possible way.

Top 5 Benefits of Google Search Console

Advantages of Google Search Console

1. Improve Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) Ranking:

2. Increase Organic Search Traffic

3. Understand Google's Indexing

4. Discover Crawl Errors

5. Get Google Site Messages

Get Started with Google Search Console

Actionable Insights for Your Website's Performance

What are Google Core Web Vitals?

Tools to Measure and Analyze Core Web Vital Scores

How Do Core Web Vitals Impact SEO Performance?

Why Should B2B Tech Organizations Care About Core Web Vitals?

Improve Website Design Based on Web Vital Measurements

For More Web Performance Tips Talk To A Maven

Make Sure Your B2B Blog is Strengthening Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Step 1. Identify Your Target Audience

Step 2. B2B Blog Keyword Research

Step 3. B2B Marketing Content Calendar

Step 4. Start Writing Your B2B Blog Now

Step 5. Don't Forget B2B Content Promotion

Distinct B2B Blogging Advantages

Do not underestimate the power of blogging!

Improve SEO on Your B2B Website

Keyword Research Is Essential to Improve SEO

How to Improve SEO With Content Marketing

Focus on Technical Elements to Improve SEO

Offer an Optimal User Experience to Improve SEO

Improve SEO with High Quality Backlinks

Grow Your Social Signals

It’s Possible to Improve SEO!

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