He had spent a year on SEO and the site still could not answer one question: who are you, and why should I believe you?
The site nobody could vouch for
A friend who runs a small factory asked me to look at his website. He had been "doing SEO" for about a year and had very little to show for it. I sat down with the whole thing in a single ninety-minute block — FocusBottle running in the corner, the light in the bottle dipping the moment I reached for my phone around minute nineteen.
By the end of the block I had six things wrong with it. But the order I fixed them in turned out to matter more than any one of them, and that is the part worth writing down.
Fix the proof before the keywords
He had started with keywords, the way everybody does, and aimed at the biggest ones in his category — which is the most crowded room in the building. The fix is the boring version: specific, low-competition phrases that a purchasing manager actually types, not the words a rival also bought.
The bigger miss was the photographs. Every product stood alone on white. Nothing showed the floor, the machines, the rows of finished goods, the people who made them. A B2B buyer is not choosing a product, he is choosing a supplier, and a stranger has to be able to vouch for you in about eight seconds without asking a single question.
The first three screens
A detail page is not a spec sheet. The first screen should name the fear — a late delivery, an inconsistent batch, a customization request that turns into a month of email. The second gives the numbers in a table so the reader can compare you without effort. The third shows somebody else who already trusted you, in their own words and their own photo.
Then the quiet part: a plain, unglamorous FAQ answering minimum order, lead time, payment and samples. He had been typing those answers by hand ten times a week. Putting them on the page cost an afternoon. And a short clip from the shop floor, posted wherever buyers already scroll, does more than any copy he could write about himself.
The part he wanted to skip
The sixth item was the one he would happily have skipped forever: look at the numbers every week. High impressions with low clicks means the title or the image lied to the reader. Plenty of clicks with no inquiries means the page promised something it never delivered. Pages with no traffic get new words, one internal link and another push — or they get deleted.
That is the same discipline a focus session runs on. You do not get to decide where your attention went; you only get to look at where it actually went. My timer says it out loud — the light dips the second my hand moves toward the phone. A website will never volunteer that. You have to sit down, in one unbroken block, and ask it.