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How to Perform an Effective B2B Competitor Analysis
September 5, 2024
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Search engine optimization (SEO) has always rocked the marketing world, with many business owners rushing to stack their web pages on relevant keywords and backlinks. Talk about measures like optimizing meta description, meta tags, and so on.
Sure, these techniques are magic if done well, but that’s just all. SEO brings in leads; however, that doesn’t mean these leads will convert. And if your leads don’t convert, it’s almost the same as never having generated them in the first place.
That’s where customer experience comes in.
In this article, we will discuss the relationship between SEO and customer experience and how you can leverage both to improve lead conversions and customer loyalty in 2024.
One hard lesson you’ll learn over the years in the marketing world is that there’s no one-way-fits-all solution. In our case, SEO is not a standalone marketing strategy, so long as the goal is to make profits.
For maximum effectiveness, you have to combine it with a good customer experience (CX), and here’s why:
You’ve probably heard of the sales funnel a dozen times as a business owner, SEO person, or marketer. For B2C businesses, we have five main layers:
It’s more or less the same for B2B brands but much more condensed into awareness, consideration, and decision-making.
Basically, SEO is responsible for the awareness stage. It boosts your website's ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) and ensures you can effectively target your audience on the internet.
Once people visit your website organically, the work of SEO is about half done. The other half is about ensuring your page loads fast, does not lag, and provides value content-wise.
Anything contrary to this, such as delayed page loading, automatically leaves a bad impression on your visitors. This, in turn, ruins their evaluation of your website and contributes to a negative CX.
Overall, customer experience influences a customer’s consideration and decision-making stage. If your website reception is poor, customers are likely to ditch your product and services. If otherwise, you know what happens.
So, SEO drives the initial part of your sales funnel, whereas customer experience pivots the customer journey at its end. Even if leads successfully visit your website, it’s up to CX whether they will buy or ride.
Let’s use Google as our case study here since it has a market share of over 91%. Google uses as many as 200 ranking signals to determine its SERPs' ranking, one of which is mobile-friendliness.
In 2015, Google released a mobile-friendly update. Later, in 2018, it introduced mobile-first indexing, which means that pages with mobile-friendly designs were indexed first, according to SEJ.
While mobile-friendliness does not move the needle alone, it’s obviously a crucial element of offering a good page experience to internet users, according to Google’s Search Liaison. A good on-page experience equals quality customer experience.
This is even more evident from Google’s overall reiteration of “intent” as a major ranking criterion, which means content that provides more value and meets a user’s search intent will have a positional edge on SERPs than those that don’t.
Don’t forget that good content and mobile-friendliness are primary elements of good customer experience. If you provide valuable and relevant content, readers will stay. If your pages are optimized for mobile devices of any screen type, you’ll retain mobile users.
And now, search engines like Google have made these same elements essential considerations for SEO.
It is, therefore, safe to say that customer satisfaction and experience is a core part of SEO, and they are interdependent.
Your page ranking on SERPs is a trust badge. A normal internet user believes, “If Google trusts you, then you must be valuable.” So, SEO promises them value and prompts them to click.
Once they land on your page, how easy it is for them to navigate your website, the graphical interface of your pages, the value of the content they meet, and the ease of access to communication channels and other resources will determine if your page truly lives up to its search ranking.
With good CX, that shouldn’t be a problem, of course. As one promises value based on search engine trust, the other helps you deliver that value and meet the trust.
As you can see, SEO and CX are interdependent rather than being silo marketing strategies on their own. If there’s good SEO but poor CX, there won’t be conversions. And if there’s a good CX but poor SEO, then there won’t be leads to convert in the first place.
Finding a balance between these two and leveraging them skillfully is essential to scaling your conversion in 2024. Here’s how:
Website architecture, also known as website or SEO structure, depicts the arrangement and organization of your website pages. This is a leading point on this list because it affects:
Take a typical house setting as an example. There is a bedroom, a parlor, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a miscellaneous room. While this looks like a few spaces to juggle around, if not classically arranged, you could end up in the bathroom while trying to navigate your way out of the house as a first-time visitor.
Likewise, if your website arrangement—page organization and all—is poor, it’ll be very difficult for search engine bots and visitors to crawl or navigate effectively. This affects both your SEO and customer experience.
I mean, no one likes a mushy structure.
A well-arranged site structure also has fewer touchpoints or crawl depth. This is the number of clicks you need to reach the bottom of a category. And the more it is, the more frustrated your potential customers or visitors become.
Look at the image depicting a deep website architecture below:
And compare it to this flat architecture:
If you ask us, flat architecture is much more advisable, even for an e-commerce business owner with thousands of product pages. It offers fewer clicks, thus making it easier for visitors to locate all the resources they need as fast as possible.
To build the right architecture, do the following:
Interlinking, or internal linking, is a crucial component of a good site architecture which involves linking one page to another on the same website. If you’re a fan of Avatar Korra like me, you can call Interlinking the Spirit Guide since it tells search engines where to find all your resources.
According to SEJ, Google uses internal links to discover pages and rank them accordingly. That makes it an essential part of your SEO strategy.
Don’t also forget that your visitors are always looking for more information. So, when they’re on resource A, they already expect provisions for resource B, C, and so on. With adequate interlinking, your website can easily retain visitors and keep them engaged with valuable content.
A common mistake website owners make is leaving internal linking as an afterthought. They mass-produce thousands of disconnected content first and consider internal linking later.
But sorry, that’s not going to work. Linking two pages together is the same as telling search engines and your visitors that they are related content-wise.
For an afterthought strategy, you will most likely end up linking all sorts of irrelevant pages together, which in turn, defeats this purpose.
The way out? Draw up your interlinking charts earlier. And here’s how:
Customer experience encompasses a customer’s entire journey from their first interaction with you to the last. At the beginning of these interactions, you have the visual aspect. When someone lands on your website for the first time, the most striking thing they pay attention to is how your website looks.
That makes user interface (UI) a core part of forming an impression on your audience. If you do it wrong, you ruin the entire experience right from the start, and there’s barely anything you can do to salvage it later on.
One of the factors influencing your UI is the navigation bar. Over 94% of surveyed users say a site’s easy mode of navigation is its most important feature. And we know Google tries to please its users over website owners, which means a website with good navigation has an edge over one without.
So, implement a user-friendly navigation bar. Advisably, a horizontally nested bar makes it easy for visitors to access all the information they need at a glance. See what Cultbeauty did on their homepage below.
A vertical navigation bar is preferably useful for smaller screens like mobile devices to minimize space use. However, it also has to contain all the important menus or pages your visitors will need.
Of course, you can’t nest all your primary pages in the top navigation bar, especially if your website houses a ton of them, as in e-commerce websites. In this case, you can implement a footer menu like SEMrush did.
Other things you need to do for a great UI include the following:
People say content is king. But that’s not true. Only quality content is king. The rest are just fluffs filling up your website and will do more than good, whether for SEO or your website page visitors.
Search engines such as Google consider quality content essential, and we can be as daring as to say quality content is a crucial ranking factor on SERPs. This is because Google has many times reiterated providing good and valuable information to users. In fact, that’s the whole essence of search engines in the first place—to provide accurate information.
When people search for a term online, Google recommends sites that offer the most valuable and relevant resources for that term.
So, what determines if your content is HIGH QUALITY or not?
Google talks more about it below.
It’s all about value, credibility, specificity, uniqueness, and engagement.
To create quality content or improve existing ones:
While there’s no exact optimal loading speed, the average loading time in 2023 was as low as 2.5 seconds.
An additional second to this average count increases your bounce rate by 32%. More bouncing means less dwell time. This could indirectly tell search engines that your web content is not valuable enough to retain readers. Subsequently, your page will receive fewer recommendations.
On the customer side, a study by Portent shows that B2C sites that load in 1-second record 3x more conversions than those loading in 5 seconds. That's evidence your customers prefer a page that loads in a flash, not the other way around.
Our attention span keeps decreasing as we enter a tech-dominated era. So, you’re expected to fix your speed and progressively aim for zero-second load.
To do that:
Nothing turns off a zealous visitor than an oversized website on his or her small screen. Traditionally, pages were mainly created to fit in large system screens. But times have changed, and over 96.3% of internet users use mobile phones for online access.
Therefore, you have to appeal to this group as you’re appealing to desktop users. Use flexible CSS codes and grids to accommodate all screen sizes.
Another better way is to create different page templates on the same topic or focus on different screen sizes.
For instance, you could create separate homepage templates for mobile screens less than 720px, another for screens less than 1020px, and so on. This is costly and time-consuming but operationally effective as it allows hyper-personalization of content to each group of users. Of course, you still have to ensure consistency in content.
Search engine optimization (SEO) and customer experience (CX) are each effective strategies standalone, but if your goal is conversions, then you have to combine them. While SEO draws in leads to your website, a good customer experience strategy ensures they convert.
To leverage both for better conversions, first evaluate and fix your website’s architecture—organization, navigation, crawl depth, and internal linking. Then redesign the user interface if lacking so as to grab users’ attention. Lastly, create valuable content, improve site speed, and optimize your website for all screens.
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