Optimizing your B2B website to attract, convert and close visitors begins with knowing your buyer personas and the website experience they need.

Condensed...

There are 3 primary aspects of B2B website optimization: 1) buyer personas, 2) user experience, 3) and on-page SEO.

Ready: Buyer Personas

The secret sauce of getting more of the right visitors is based on buyer personas. If you're like many B2B companies and have multiple personas, get started by prioritizing them. Focus first on the most lucrative personas and the products and services that most appeal to them.

Aim: Website User Experience

After you've honed your buyer personas, the next step is developing the user experience.

Fire: On-Page SEO

With the heavy lifting of buyer personas and user experience out of the way, you can then proceed to on-page SEO.

1. Page Title
2. URLs
3. Page Headers
4. Content
5. Meta Description

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User experience, site usability, and onsite engagement have become more important for major search engines in their assessment of a site's "rankability," Use this checklist of tips to ensure your landing pages are sending all the right signals.

Digest...

Here's a checklist of 10 "killer" tips to ensure you're able to add a bit of CRED to your SEO campaigns, as well as demonstrate campaign success!

1. Are the primary headlines aligned with intent?

2. Are you matching content type with query intent?

3. Can users perform a quick scan above the fold to answer who, what, and why?

4. Is it obvious what they should do next?

5. Are there on-page modification options? (based on query modification)

6. Are 'next clicks' consistent?

7. Can they share what they've found?

8. Ultimately, can users find the banana?

9. Have you segmented traffic by topics?

10. Are you tracking first click queries for optimized pages?

Get an in-depth understanding of the math behind statistical significance in A/B testing.

Conclusion...

You may be asking yourself why this is important if you can just use a free tool to run the calculation. Understanding how statistical significance is calculated can help you determine how to best test results from your own experiments. Many tools use a 95% confidence rate, but for your experiments, it might make sense to use a lower confidence rate if you don’t need the test to be as stringent. Understanding the underlying calculations also helps you explain why your results might be significant to people who aren't already familiar with statistics.

When you look at some of the emerging topics in marketing – analytics, metrics, A/B testing, conversion optimization and the like – there seems to be a growing interest among marketers in what I like to call … evidence-based marketing.

To help marketers become more evidenced-based, we’ve crafted the agenda for Optimization Summit 2013 in Boston around three key phases. No matter what phase you’re at, you can improve your ability in that phase, and try to move towards a more mature evidence-based marketing program. Here is a brief explanation of each phase, along with a sampling of resources to help you prepare for Optimization Summit 2013, or simply improve your own efforts.

• Optimization is determining the value of the company, each product and each offer, and improving the communication of that value to the customer. So, this includes landing page optimization and conversion rate optimization. But, it also includes messaging, copywriting, design and presentation.
• Experimentation is testing to learn more about what values resonate, and what messaging and processes to secure transactions are most effective. It includes A/B split testing and understanding how to read your metrics and analytics to understand which treatment won. But far beyond that, it also includes the ability to understand what makes a test valid or not, how to learn from your test results, and what to do with this information.
• Transformation focuses on not only applying what has been learned, but also helping your marketing team make a cultural shift within your organization.

Marketing Strategy - Landing pages aren't dead—or even unimportant—but you shouldn't be treating them as a standalone strategy. Rather, you should be focusing on the big picture: optimizing the entire customer experience.

Excerpt...

Landing page optimization is the act of testing and fine-tuning the design elements on individual pages, and perhaps introducing rudimentary rules-based segmentation. CXO, on the other hand, is the goal of using sitewide visitor data, such as individual users' behavior and preferences, to personalize all site content (including landing pages and their numerous elements).

With 2013 in full swing, now is the time to think about how you will go beyond landing page optimization and start putting the customer experience at the heart of your marketing strategy.

Here are five steps to take to help you get there.

1. Create a culture of testing
2. Put the customer at the heart of your organization
3. Start using loyalty program data to personalize
4. Harness the power of social media
5. Get your mobile and tablet strategy right, or get left behind

Cost doesn’t just exist where monetary transactions exist. When you ask prospects for information, there will be an associated cost.

Summary...

Optimization suggestion #1: Don’t start a conversation with bullet points

Optimization suggestion #2: Identify and express your value proposition

Optimization suggestion #3: Identify and express value at every level in your sales process

Here are 10 reminders that it's worth it to plan holistically and take advantage of the synergies between channels:

1. More touch points than ever before. Your customer's journey has a greater number of touch points, and more types of touch points, than ever before to research, buy, and get service.
2. SEO saving paid search dollars.
3. Paid search focusing SEO efforts.
4. Email learnings shared.
5. Social media supporting SEO. Your social media strategy can support your SEO priorities dramatically.
6. Social media supporting SEO (continued). Your social media activities can also support your SEO priorities by engaging in targeted outreach. Specifically, your social team should reach out to key bloggers, forums, review sites, etc. and ask them to link to your preferred landing pages.
7. Scoring drives content customization. Your marketing automation system, such as Marketo or Eloqua, generates engagement scores for prospects and customers. You can use these scores to tell a content customization tool such as test and target which content to present to a given visitor. For example, someone with a high engagement score could be shown a "click to chat" box to help close the sale.
8. Site behavior determines display ads.
9. Search customizes content.
10. PPC media gives insight into market.

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