Five SEO failures we find on every B2B website
Same five problems on almost every site we audit. None of them are hard to fix. All of them are quietly costing inbound leads.
We've now run the diagnostic on a few dozen B2B websites. The same five problems show up almost every time. None require a redesign. None take a developer more than an afternoon. All of them are quietly costing inbound leads.
Here's the list, in the order they hurt you most.
1. No Open Graph image
When someone shares your URL in Slack, LinkedIn, iMessage, or an email preview pane, the link unfurls into a card. That card shows your site's og:image if it exists. If it doesn't, the card shows nothing — just your domain and a partial title.
The fix is one PNG (1200×630) and one line of meta tag. Maybe an hour of work.
The cost of not doing it: every inbound referral from a buyer, broker, or partner who mentions your site in a chat or email shows up as a blank preview. People stop clicking blank previews. You'll never know how many you lost because there's nothing to count.
Check yours: paste your URL into Slack. If the preview is empty, you have the problem.
2. Wrong (or missing) JSON-LD schema
Schema markup is how Google's crawlers and AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude) understand what kind of business you are. There are dozens of schema types: Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, ProductCatalog, FinancialService, Restaurant, and so on.
The most common site we audit has either:
- Zero schema entries (Google guesses what you are), or
- One schema entry typed
Article(Google thinks you're a blog post)
A typical real business needs three to five schema entries minimum. Once they're in place, you start showing up in Google rich results, get Knowledge Graph treatment, and become discoverable to AI search engines that increasingly pull from structured data.
Cost to fix: a few hours of structured-data writing. ROI: months of organic visibility improvements.
3. Broken or placeholder links
We audited a recent prospect's homepage and found 25 links that went nowhere. Some were href="#", some were javascript:void(0), some were empty. Each one a dead end for a visitor who tapped expecting to learn more.
Broken links don't just frustrate users. Google's crawler reads them as quality signals. A high percentage of dead links on a page lowers the page's perceived authority.
Fix: a 15-minute audit with a free broken-link checker, plus a developer hour to either wire each link to its real destination or remove it.
4. Missing image alt text
On the same prospect site we audited, 23 of 67 homepage images had no alt text — about 34% blind to Google Image Search and to accessibility tools.
For a B2B company showing off facility photography, product shots, or certifications, image search is real referral traffic. Alt text is a one-line caption per image. Hours of work for ongoing organic surface.
Plus: accessibility compliance. If you sell to enterprises with procurement reviews, missing alt text can flag you on accessibility audits. Easier to fix it now than answer the question later.
5. Page weight over 200 KB
Modern best practice for HTML payload (not images, not scripts — just HTML) is under 100 KB. Most B2B sites we audit ship 250-400 KB of HTML on the homepage. WordPress + Elementor + a dozen plugins is the usual culprit.
The cost: slower first paint on mobile, particularly on corporate networks where most B2B buyers research. Slow first paint is a documented ranking signal AND a documented bounce predictor.
Fix: a developer audit of the WordPress plugin stack. Cut what's not earning its weight. Move what's left to async loading.
How long this takes
A team of two can knock out all five fixes on a typical site in roughly a week. Most agencies will quote you $10-20k for the work. We've started including the fix list in our paid audit — $5,900, credited toward whichever build you decide to run next.
Either way, the punchline is the same. None of these are hard. All of them are quietly costing you inbound. And every month they go unfixed is a month your competitors with better digital hygiene are pulling ahead in Google.
Run the audit if you want a personalized scoreboard for your own site.