Kelley Fujino
Lubbock Electric Co.
The business-to-business (B2B) buyer’s journey has changed dramatically in recent years. Is your company prepared for today’s independent and digitally-empowered business buyer? The B2B buying process is becoming longer because the majority of buyers are spending more time in the research phase to evaluate products and services. What’s more, they are relying less on salespeople in this phase.
According to 2017 research from Forrester, 60% of B2B buyers prefer not to communicate with sales representatives as their primary information source. Increasingly, they are looking to digital media. In a 2014 survey of 3,000 B2B decision makers, Google discovered that 89% of B2B purchasers use the internet during their research process and that 71% of B2B researchers begin with a generic search. Further, B2B purchasers were found to do an average of 12 searches before engaging a specific company’s website.
In light of this data, I wanted to see how prepared EASA members are for today’s B2B buyer.
I selected 96 random EASA members for a quick website audit. I found that about 69% of them have a company website, but only 30% have a modern, “Google-ready” website. I will explain what I mean by “Google-ready” and how you can perform a simple website audit of your own in this article.
If your brand is not visible where your customers are doing their research, you are essentially removing your company from consideration. If you want new and repeat customers to choose your business, you need to be found online — at the minimum you need a website and a Google My Business Profile.
475 Inquiries to 21 – Google is the new phone book
If your company doesn’t have a web presence, how many opportunities could you be missing? I want to share with you some of the data we see at Lubbock Electric Co. With Google Business Insights, Google Analytics, and a Call Tracking Number in our phone book listings, we can actually compare the volume of inquiries we receive by phone between our placements on Google and in a traditional directory. In the fourth quarter of 2018, we received 475 phone calls from our Google My Business Profile through Google searches and Google Maps. We also had 62 phone calls from tracked “Click-to-call” links on our website. Mind you, these numbers only include inquiries made by clicking on a “Call Now” link on a smart phone. These do not include people who saw our phone number on Google or on our website and dialed on a separate device. Comparatively, we had only 21 phone inquiries from the phone book in the same period.
Your Google My Business Profile – name it and claim it!
Have you created or claimed your Google My Business page? It’s free advertising! Even if you haven’t, your company may already have a bare-bones profile created with public information by Google. Google My Business profiles appear to the right of search results in a separate box for direct company searches and below map results for general searches, such as “electric motor repair near me.” Do a Google search for your company name and city to see if your business has one. If you see a link that says “Own this business?” or “Claim this business,” it means that your business page is unclaimed. You can start the process of claiming it from that link. You can also go to google.com/business to either create or claim a business page. A Google account will be required. You are able to use your personal Google account for this, but you may also want to consider creating a separate Google account for your business. After verification, which could take a few days, you can easily update the business information, add business categories, and upload attractive pictures.
Perform a quick website audit
If your company has a website and you have not checked it recently, I highly recommend that you perform a quick audit. You should start by evaluating two factors: mobile responsiveness and connection security. In my quick survey, I found that only 30% of EASA member websites are both mobile friendly and secure. Why are these important? Google is already penalizing websites that do not have these features in search rankings. Furthermore, most browsers now warn users if the connection isn’t secure. Even if prospective buyers find your company website, they may not want to engage with it as a result. Fortunately, you don’t need any specialized knowledge to perform these easy checks.
How to check website responsiveness
To test your website’s mobile responsiveness, restore down your browser and use your cursor to drag the right edge of your browser window to the left to make the window narrower and narrower. If the text, graphics, and elements on your webpage reorder themselves automatically to fit the viewport, your website is mobile responsive. You can try this first with EASA’s website to get an idea of what this should look like.
Your website may have a separate mobile template that allows users to interact with it easily on handheld devices, but it is important to know that the Google algorithm favors responsive websites over dual-template websites.
Does this really affect electric motor service centers? Are our customers researching purchase decisions on mobile devices? Referring back to Google’s 2014 survey of B2B buyers, they found that 42% use a mobile device during the B2B purchasing process. To see if this may hold true for our industry, I reviewed Lubbock Electric’s website data from Google Analytics for all of 2018 and found that 57% of our traffic came from computers and 43% came from mobile devices (38% from phones and 5% from tablets). For this reason, I can confidently say that the growth of B2B buyers using mobile devices affects EASA members.
If your company’s website is not mobile responsive, you face the necessity of redesigning your website. Your options here are to initiate an internal website redesign (which is possible without extensive coding knowledge), to hire freelance web developers and designers, or to partner with a web development company.
How to check website security
Next, you should verify that your website has an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. SSL technology establishes an encrypted link between your prospective customer’s browser and your web server, ensuring that all data exchanged remains private. Look at the top of your browser window in the bar that contains your web address. Do you see a padlock icon? If so, your website is secure. If not, you need to do a little more digging. It may be that your website has a certificate, but the web server is not configured to automatically redirect traffic to the secure site. Enter your web address again starting with HTTPS:// instead of HTTP://. If this is successful, your website is secure, but you need to contact your web developer and request that all traffic to your website is automatically redirected to the secure address. However, if the test results in an error, your website does not have a valid SSL certificate.
SSL certificates can be acquired for free from Let’s Encrypt, but you will need someone who is knowledgeable about the technical setup of your website and the DNS (Domain Name System). It is much simpler to obtain a certificate from either your web hosting company or a certificate authority, like Comodo or Global Sign. Costs range from $50 to a few hundred dollars a year. Once acquired, an SSL certificate can be installed on your company website with a simple plugin. However, if you do not have someone already on your team who can make changes to your web server or your website, then you will need the help of a trusted web developer.
Content is still king
If your company website proved to be both mobile responsive and secure, the next step would be to evaluate the content. Is the information up-to-date, clear, and concise? Is it simple to navigate your website? Is it easy to contact your company? Is it clear what action you want customers to take? When was the last time that content was added to or updated on your website?
It is important to keep your website up-to-date for both customers and search engines. When content is regularly added or refreshed, Google recognizes this and treats it as relevant. Regular website updates are among the many factors that Google considers for search rankings. This means that a newly updated website will have more success being found than a website that has been unattended for months or years.
Having a modern, current website is vital to stay relevant no matter how small your business may be. Make it a priority this year to update your online storefront and expand your digital presence.
For further reading, check out the sources referenced in this article:
- The Changing Face of B2B Marketing
Kelsey Snyder and Pashmeena Hilal, Google.
March 2015.
https://bit.ly/2tqUxIK
- The Ways and Means of B2B Buyer Journey Maps
Lori Wizdo, Forrester Research, Inc.August 21, 2017
https://bit.ly/2RFEy6b