Visibility in Google: five things that count in B2B

Why visibility in Google works per page, not per website

Almost every guide at the top of Google offers a step-by-step plan for your whole website: fix the technology, create a business profile, pick keywords, add more content, use social media, build links. That list is not wrong. It just does not explain why one B2B site gets found and another does not.

Google ranks pages for each search first of all; site-wide signals count, but what appears in the result is a page. For every search it tries to show the pages that are relevant to that question. Your website is exactly as visible as its strongest page for that one question.

In B2B this weighs more than in a webshop:

• Search volumes are small, so every query without its own page is one too many.
• The question is specific. Someone typing "rent a transformer station" is not looking for a page about energy solutions.
• The technology is rarely the problem any more on a B2B site. Indexing, load time and a sitemap are a precondition, not a difference.

The five points below are therefore about the page and the measurement, not about the site as a whole. We assume you already know which search queries you want to be found for. If nobody is searching for what you sell yet, the work lies elsewhere: demand capture catches demand that already exists, and creating demand is a different trade.

1. One page per search query, not per service

Most B2B sites have one page per service, and that page has to do everything at once: orientation, comparison, price, specifications. Google then has to guess which question the page is meant for. In practice a competitor that answers one question completely wins.

Turn it around. Start from your list of search queries and give each one its own page:

• The buying query ("supplier of X") gets the service page.
• Every sub-question around it ("what does X cost", "X or Y", "maintaining X") gets an article.
• Two pages that answer the same question get merged. Otherwise they compete with each other.

That structure, one strong service page with articles around it, is also how we set up SEO for B2B. The service page catches the enquiry, the articles bring the reader there.

2. The answer sits in the first paragraph

A page that only answers the question after three paragraphs of introduction loses twice. The reader clicks back, and nowhere in the first hundred words does it say what the page is about.

So put the answer first:

• Open the first paragraph with the subject itself, not with "In this blog".
• Give the answer or the definition in two or three sentences. The rest of the page backs it up.
• Repeat the reader's question in a subheading and answer it directly underneath.

This is not a trick for Google. It is how a buyer reads a page: first check whether this is about their question, then read on.

3. The title contains the search query word for word

Google usually uses your page title as the clickable line in the search result. If the query is not in it, the searcher does not recognise their own question, however good the page is.

• Put the query at the front of the title, in the searcher's words, not in your own product name.
• Keep the title short enough to be shown in full in the result.
• Use the same question in the H1 and in the first paragraph, so that title, heading and text say the same thing.

Many B2B companies write titles like "Solutions | Company name". That is a title for yourself, not for the searcher.

4. Your articles point to your service page

Internal links cost little and are often forgotten. Google follows links to work out which page on your site is about a subject. If no article refers to your service page, that page stands apart from the rest.

• Every article links in its running text to the service page it belongs to, with an anchor that says where the link goes.
• The service page links back to the articles that answer the sub-questions.
• A new page gets links from two existing pages on the day it is published. Without those links, Google has to find it on its own.

What we saw

At Allround Hekwerk we did not start with the website but with the list of customer search queries: which terms around fencing do they type in, and which question sits behind each one. Every question got its own blog or knowledge base article, written with the expertise we gathered from the client. Those articles point on to the pages where a customer can place an enquiry.

See the Allround Hekwerk project

In our SEO projects we see that the first movement after publication is in the impressions, not in the clicks. A page first appears low in the results for the query it was written for. Only once it moves up do the clicks follow. That is why we measure impressions first.

5. Measure your visibility in Google on impressions before clicks

Search Console shows per search query how often your page appeared in the results (impressions), how often it was clicked and at what average position. Most companies only look at the clicks and conclude after a month that a new page is doing nothing.

Read the report in this order:

1. Impressions on the intended query. If they are there, Google has understood what the page is about. If they are not, something is wrong with the title, the first paragraph or the internal links.
2. Queries you did not expect. If the page gets impressions on a different question than intended, you have found a gap for a next page.
3. Position, and only then clicks. A page that moves up from the bottom produces impressions first and clicks later. That takes time, and that time is part of this route.

Clicks are the final step, and in B2B we count one more thing after that: which search query became an enquiry. Without that link you are steering on visitors, and visitors do not pay invoices. How that enquiry then reaches sales is described in our article on B2B lead generation.

Conclusion

Visibility in Google is, in B2B, a property of a page for one search query, not of your website. One page per question, the answer first, the question in the title and links from your articles decide whether that page gets found. Whether it works shows first in the impressions in Search Console, not in the clicks.