Success. It’s all any of us want, right? We want to be successful in our careers. If you own a business, you want that to be successful, too. Having a successful website is an essential tool in helping your business grow, but what factors are involved in making it successful? And how do you make sure your website checks off all the boxes?  

I always tell people there’s never a one-size-fits-all solution to anything, especially when it comes to your website and marketing strategy. There are, however, certain things everyone needs to consider in planning, building, and maintaining their website. Let’s break down the 7 things that help make your industrial B2B website successful.

1. Created with Your Business Goals in Mind

Before you even start having someone build your website, you need to ask yourself, “why?” Think about your business goals and what you hope to achieve short-term and long-term. Do you just want a place for people to find general information about your products and services? Or do you want your website to be a powerful sales and lead generation tool? Establishing all of this beforehand sets a solid foundation for designing your site and laying out content.

2. Personalized to Your Business and Brand

A website is basically a virtual storefront or headquarters, so you want to make sure it reflects your brand. Everything you use—colors, font, logos, and graphics—should be consistent with what you use in your brochures and other marketing materials.  Add your tagline (if you have one) to the homepage. On your About Us page, tell people about your business and add photos of your facility and team. Little things like this give your website personality and help prospects connect with your business.

3. Establishes Credibility and Trust

People want to connect with a business, even in the industrial B2B market. They need to know who you are, what you’re about, and feel they can trust you. And even if you specialize in incredibly niche products and services, you can count on having a lot of competition.

Nearly everyone has some variation of “We’re the #1 XYZ” on their website, but few give customers specific information on why they should choose a company. If you want to get more business, you need to build trust and credibility with prospects and customers.  And when talking about benefits, make it about the customer, not you. Address their pain points and challenges, then explain how you can help solve them.

Here are a few useful ways to build trust and credibility with your audience:

• Product reviews or customer testimonials
• Project galleries showing examples of your custom work
• Case studies and success stories
• Links to content you published in trade magazines

4. Speaks to Your Target Audience

Think of the companies or brands your purchase from frequently. What makes you like them? My bet is that you feel some sort of connection when you see their advertising or visit their website—almost like they know all about you and what you need.

If your target market is servo motor OEMs, what do you need to tell them? My guess is they want to hear about components made with precision and to tight tolerances. They want to know about high-speed performance without premature wear. Durable materials that are lightweight and withstand corrosion. And in this specialized industry, they want to know if you can do modified or custom parts.

Also, make sure your content is about the customer, not you. Tell them how your products or services help solve their problem. Give detailed information and show examples of how others have benefitted from working with your business.

5. Takes User Experience, Usability, and Accessibility into Consideration

The terms user experience (UX), usability, and accessibility are sometimes used interchangeably, but they aren’t all the same. UX ties into the overall site design and how different users interact with your website. Usability involves factors like page layout and your site navigation. For example:

• Intuitive, descriptive navigation and clear page hierarchy help customers find things quickly and easily.
• Chat functions are convenient and allow for quick answers to commonly asked questions.
• A fast and secure ecommerce checkout process is essential for ecommerce sites.
• Breaking up page content with headers, bullets, and images makes it easier to read.

Accessibility refers to your site's usability for users with vision, hearing, or other impairments that can how people interact with your site. These factors include but are not limited to color schemes, whether your images contain alt text, and how you label the text fields on your forms. A designer experienced in this area will make sure your site checks all the boxes.

6. Attracts the Right Customers and Qualified Leads

Every website needs well-written content that attracts the right audience and gives them the right information for their stage of the buyer’s journey. What you need depends on whether you’re going the ecommerce or non-ecommerce route, but here are a few examples:

• Informational pages or blog posts help show your expertise in a topic and catch people in the research stages of the buying cycle.
• Descriptive service pages and product category pages help people in the consideration stage. Buyers’ guides, case studies, calculators, and comparison charts are great for this, too.
• Product catalogs, spec sheets, CAD models, and other detailed information helps people in the decision stages.

Now, what about those leads? If you’re a service-based B2B company, leads are everything.  Some people think that RFQ submissions or direct phone calls are the only way to start working with a lead. But that’s not true!

Gated content, for example, can be great for lead generation. Instead of publicly posting certain pieces of content, you ask site visitors to complete a form before gaining access. This content can include case studies, MSDS sheets, buyer’s guides, CAD drawings, or spec sheets. Getting their information also helps your lead nurturing strategy and makes it easy for your sales reps to follow up.

Now, remember when I said there’s no one-size-fits-all solution? That absolutely applies here. I recommend always working with an experienced strategist or digital marketer to create a content and marketing strategy individualized to your business goals.

7. Checks All the Technical Boxes

It’s not just the stuff you see that makes a difference. Several other technical factors impact how well your website performs and contributes to its success:

• Website Speed and Performance: Would you wait 30 seconds for a page to download? Neither would your customers. Pages should only take 2-3 seconds to download; otherwise, you risk people leaving your site and going elsewhere. Slow download times also make your page rank lower in search engines, meaning fewer people will see your site.
• Mobile-Friendly Design: If someone accesses your website from their phone or tablet and has to squint to read tiny text or can’t click on links easily, they’ll leave. Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer negotiable and must be part of your design plan.
• Security: Having a secure website protects you and your customers from online threats. In fact, Google even considers website security a ranking factor.
• Functionality: Broken links, 404 errors, and other technical glitches are crazy annoying and can make people leave your site. It’s imperative to run regular site audits so you can detect and correct these issues right away.
• No Duplicate Content: Yes, you need content. But reusing the same text on several pages only confuses your customers and search engines. Avoid issues by adding unique content to each page.

Let the Professionals Help You Set Your Website Up for Success

Hiring a company knowledgeable in web development and digital marketing is the best way to get a website that helps grow your business. The team at Ecreative builds custom websites from the ground up and offers search engine optimization, copywriting, paid advertising, and other marketing to help you succeed online.