Your B2B Website Ranking Might Crash in 2024 Here’s how to fix it
Your website is not ranking well in search results, you are spending a lot of money to list your company on industry directories, you are not receiving inquiries from new customers but you don’t know what else to do.
Table of Contents
Why not look at your site from the perspective of your customers and ask yourself a few questions:
- Is the content useful and does it answer customer questions
- Is the design and navigation clear and easy to use, even on mobile devices
- Is the content well written or is it sloppy and full of basic language errors?
These are the type of questions that Google’s new search algorithm is now trying to answer. So if you look at your own website and answer “no” to any of these questions, then it is time to review your digital marketing to avoid losing customers to your competitors.
The March 2024 Google “Helpful Content Update”
The March 2024 Google algorithm update is one of its most significant changes so far and it will impact the search ranking of the following types of websites:
- Low quality websites with no high quality useful content for their customers
- Large industry directories
- Famous websites advertising commercial products
There will be many other impacts, but for B2B manufacturers in Taiwan, these are the most significant ones. In this article I will go through these impacts and help you to discover whether your website will be affected so that you have the chance to do something about it.
Does your website have high quality, useful content?
You may have hired a Taiwan SEO company to carry out technical work to make your website rank high in Google Search. Those old methods are no longer working effectively and many websites are already seeing a huge drop in their traffic since the update started in March 2024. Google is getting smarter every year and it is becoming harder and harder to make a low quality website appear in search results.
But that is the way it should be.
It might be helpful to understand the difference between good and bad SEO practices so that you can determine whether your marketing company is still capable of helping your website rank highly to help you find new customers.
What are bad SEO practices?
- Building low quality backlinks from other websites to your website
- Linking your website to the SEO company’s industry directory website
- Hiding links to other websites in your webpage
How can you check for hidden links in your website?
Look at the bottom of your website. If you see a link to the company that designed the site for you, that is OK. If you see other links to other websites, those are not OK and they are stealing your traffic and sending it to your competitors.
What are good SEO practices? These Are The Things You Should Do
- Writing original content that is helpful for users
- Regularly creating and updating the site with new content
- Writing helpful blog articles that inform your customers
- Making sure that you have high quality images and video on the website
If you would like to have a free SEO audit of your website, then please click the link and we will get in touch with you.
Large Industry Directories are Rapidly Losing Value
If you are paying for B2B directory sites run by marketing companies or sites like Globalsources or Alibaba, then you need to review where you are spending your marketing budget.
Google has been downgrading these sites for a while now so if you check international search results for your keywords you will often find that these directories are disappearing fast and individual company websites are being shown instead. I just tried a search for “cnc milling machine” in the USA and Alibaba and other directories were not even in the top 100 search results.
If you would like to check your international search rankings, you can go to the chrome web store and search for a plugin called “Google Search Location Changer”. Once installed you can select the country and then view the search results to see for yourself.
When these websites only list your site with basic company information this is not adding value for the customer, the directory site is not creating useful new content about your company. Google can see this and is now targeting the ranking of these sites with its updated spam policies.
Famous Websites Are Losing Traffic Too
Many manufacturers that make consumer products have invested in paid “reviews” to help them make online sales. So if a customer wanted to discover whether a product they wanted to buy was any good, for example a “soldering iron”, they might go to Google and type: “best soldering iron”. If you did that before the March Google Update you would see a long list of review sites that were paid by manufacturers to write favorable reviews of their products. Not actually helpful for consumers at all.
Google is addressing this issue, so if you now search for product reviews, you will see that almost all of the review sites have disappeared from the search results.
Famous news sites which have high traffic and are viewed as trustworthy have also been using their position to help sell products by providing reviews with links to purchase the products on Amazon. If the news site is an expert in the particular type of product being sold, that is fine, but if not then it often appears to just be “Sponsored” content which is of little real value to the consumers and Google can now see this too.
Is the New York Times an expert in soldering irons?…
What do the search results look like after the update?
Now when you search for a product like a soldering iron you will see a list of sites that have some expertise in the products and are writing the reviews themselves, so this is seen by Google as valuable and helpful content so they rank very highly. You will also see some sites like reddit or even Quora which are sites where consumers can discuss their own product experiences which again is useful rather than paid content.
So What Should I do Now?
The lesson to be learned from this is that Google is now focused on genuine helpful content that is useful for consumers and customers. If you use this as the guiding principle when planning your marketing you will be heading in the right direction. If you decide to do nothing, your competitors will be very grateful.
Key Points to Remember
Look at your website as if you were a customer
- Does it answer your questions?
- Is it easy to navigate?
- Does it have useful information?
- Is it up to date?
Also consider the following points:
- Avoid paying to list your website in directory sites
- Avoid paying to have your products reviewed
If you are concerned that you are not doing well with your digital marketing and would like a free SEO audit to try and find out what is wrong, then please complete the information on the page and we will get in touch with you.