A great website strategy is key to creating an impactful and powerful website. In this blog post, we'll explore the key steps to creating a successful B2B website strategy.
The right website strategy provides the foundation for an effective website that serves your buyers' needs and generates demand.
By creating a website strategy, you ensure that each step you take towards website creation aligns with your overall goals. It helps you to create a website that enables your buyer to discover you, find the content that's relevant to them, and convert when they're ready to do so.
There are seven key steps to creating a successful B2B website strategy:
1. Define your goals
2. Understand your audience
3. Establish a value proposition
4. Audit your existing website
5. Redirection and migration plan
6. Research your keyword strategy
7. Create a sitemap
The first step of creating a B2B website strategy is defining the goal of your new website project.
In today's world, the overall goal of a website should be to effectively communicate what you do and take visitors on a journey, from discovering what you do to evaluating your offering and contacting you when they're ready.
However, often times businesses build new websites to achieve specific goals. It might be to boost organic traffic or generate more opportunities through your website. Or it might be to create a comprehensive information hub for your audience. Your goals should align with your company's objectives to guide the best actions and decisions.
Here are some examples of specific goals for a website project:
It can be tempting to put whatever your internal teams want on your website. This might be their unique sales pitch for your offering, information about a specific part of your services, or extra pages and content that your internal stakeholders believe is useful.
However, does all this 'stuff' align with what your buyer is looking for? It's not worth including if it's not relevant to your target audience.
Take time to understand what your ideal buyer journey is. What might your audience be looking for, how will they navigate your website, and how easily can they find things?
Using this, you can begin to plan a website that is truly useful and not just an over-filled brochure that contains everything about your offering.
A value proposition is a succinct summary that communicates why a buyer should choose your offering.
It's a great point of reference for internal and customer-facing teams when understanding the value that your business offering creates. A value proposition signifies that you and your internal teams agree upon the value your business provides. And from a strategic perspective, it can be used as starting point for expressing the value of your offering on your website.
For example, if your value proposition is "we're easy to do business with", you should strive to make sure your website says that and does that with an appropriate conversion point. This ensures that your website project aligns with your overall business goals.
A website audit will reveal what is and what isn't working on your existing website. It's the process of collecting and analysing data from your website to understand how it's performing. It should analyse:
This reveals areas you can change or keep in your new website strategy to solve pain points in your website user experience and journey. It also benchmarks where you're at so you can measure the performance of your new website in the fuure.
A website audit can be an extensive process. You can manage the process in-house, or get support from an experienced website agency to conduct a comprehensive website audit for you.
Website migration is a critical part of the process if you have an existing website or are merging multiple websites together. For example, you might be migrating your website to a new CMS, like HubSpot CMS.
If you want your audience to still reach your website using old links and retain the authority from your previous website, careful management and planning of redirection and migration is a must. Don't skip it!
Most B2B buyers still use search engines as a primary method of research across all stages of the buying process. This is from the time they start identifying a problem right through to selecting a company to buy from.
Importantly, you want to ensure your website is visible from the start of the buyer journey and make sure it plays a part in your demand generation strategy. When a buyer realises they have a problem, the next logical step is to search for a solution. A website can take people on a journey from problem discovery to decision making using a carefully crafted user experience.
And while you should make your business visible across multiple channels - like social media, ads, or live events - you also need to make it easy to find via search engines too.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) improves where your website appears in organic search engine results. And a keyword strategy is central to SEO. Read our step-by-step guide to learn how to improve SEO.
The best step you can take toward driving organic search traffic to your new website is to build your sitemap around your keyword strategy. And most importantly, your sitemap needs to guide visitors to the most important content for them.
You should create website pages that target keywords that you find are relevant to your business offering. This ensures you optimise your pages for language and search results that your target audience is actually using.
A sitemap can help you organise your website for search engines, provide a clear overview of its hierarchy, highlight your website's overall purpose, and help you understand how pages are linked.
Every business wants its website project to be successful. But don't take a shot in the dark when it comes to building your website. Defining a B2B website strategy better positions you to have a successful website project. You'll be more prepared, more aligned, and more equipped with the data you need to instigate an effective strategy.
