B2B SEO is a vast topic. Experts estimate that search engines such as Google consider over 200 factors in deciding where to place your business on the search results page. 

While many factors are visible to the user - such as content and design, there are arguably even more under the surface 

In this article, we'll focus on how your business can optimise 'technical SEO' factors, the tools you can use, and the benefits to your business and potential customers.

What is technical SEO?

Technical search engine optimisation refers to enhancing your website's speed, functionality, security, and accessibility to search engines to achieve a higher place on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

If you've been around awhile, you might remember typing a search query into 'Ask Jeeves' or 'Yahoo!'. These websites' search algorithms were pretty simple and focused on finding the pages that most often feature the search query. They were helpful but didn't always provide the best sources upfront. 

Google blitzed the scene with a more intelligent algorithm - PageRank - which assessed how many others linked to a website and used this as a ranking and quality factor.

Since then, Google (and other search engines) have developed numerous techniques for determining which content and website will provide the best, safest experience for the user and answer their question the quickest.

So, technical SEO is all about enhancing your website's technical, often unseen, aspects to provide a better experience for users and search engines.

Why is technical SEO important for my B2B business?

Your business may excel in on-page SEO or writing killer content that audiences love. However, neglecting technical SEO allows competitors to outrank you on search engines and attract more visitors - which means less leads and slower growth for your business. 

Poor technical SEO can often impact the user experience, leading to user frustration and hurting your chances of making a great first impression. 

How can I optimise my B2B website's technical SEO?

Thankfully, there are a lot of great tools out there that can help point out the most apparent issues affecting your technical SEO. We'll provide links to these at the bottom of the post. 

But for now, here are the top things we recommend focusing on:

1. Ensure search engine robots can see your site - Often, businesses will inadvertently prevent themselves from appearing on search results pages due to a missing or incorrectly formatted robots.txt file.
   
2. Help search engines understand your site - A best-practice sitemap, logical page hierarchy, good URL structure, and good navigation across your website are essential.
   
3. Secure your website with an SSL certificate - using SSL/HTTPS ensures user's data is safe when visiting your site. It's also an increasingly important ranking factor. If your SSL certificate is missing or invalid, some browsers may warn users your website is unsafe or prevent them from accessing it entirely.
   
4. Ensure your website is as fast as possible - Many websites have massive images that can easily be resized appropriately and compressed. Having larger than necessary images can slow down your website and consume precious mobile data for visitors. Reduce your website code as much as possible, and ensure the code is minified.
   
5. Make your website beautiful and usable on any device - With an endless variety of screen sizes across desktops, laptops, tablets, mobiles, and more, it's essential to ensure your website offers a great user experience regardless of screen resolution.
   
6. Have unique content on each page - Google can often penalise duplicate content, so having unique content on each page can help with your technical SEO. Ensure each page has an individual meta title and description, customised content, and that technical issues are not resulting in Google indexing more than one version of your page (e.g. /backpacks and backpacks?search_category_34994). This can get pretty technical, so we recommend reaching out to us here if you are facing any issues.
   
7. Use headings properly - Each page should have only one 'Heading 1' and descend in order from there. There can be multiple subheadings (i.e. 'Heading 2'), but keeping them tidy helps search engines understand the content and purpose of your page.
   
8. Fix broken links - Users landing on missing pages (404's) can impact your SEO. Work to fix missing pages by adding content there or using 301 redirects. 

There is so much more to dive into here - we've only scratched the surface! We'll save more for our next blog. 

If you'd like to know more or think we've missed something in this article, feel free to reach out here.

We also know that with an ever-growing list of marketing and sales priorities, your B2B business may struggle to find the time to focus on technical SEO. We can help. Learn more here.

Recommended technical SEO tools

To get started, we recommend running a report on the following tools to assess the state of your technical SEO.  

• Aamplify Website Grader - Try our free assessment tool that reports your website's performance at technical SEO.
  
• Google PageSpeed Insights: A great report that helps you understand your website's performance and issues on a technical level.
  
• Seobility: An accessible, quick overview of your SEO and any technical issues.
  
• Google Search Console: Ensure your website is set up correctly on Google Search Console. This free tool will let you know if Google is detecting any issues with your website, what search terms are leading to traffic on your website, and more. 
  
  Next in this series: B2B SEO: The What, Why and How of Backlinks