Why Does My Company Need a Storefront if it Has a Website?

Nowadays, B2B marketers tend to think of their websites as flagship stores sitting on the Internet’s version of 5th Avenue, Google. The problem with this belief, and the analogy, is that Google is not a single street at all. It’s more like a sprawling bazaar with main streets and back alleys. There’s a main street for thermal oxidizers on page one, but there are also back alleys for niche products from smaller businesses that you may only be able to find if you type in a long-tail keyword like “rotary regenerative thermal oxidizer,” “horizontal gas thermal oxidizer,” etc.

Sure, Google is more democratized than 5th Avenue. A bit of SEO savvy can get you to the top of page one, but access to the best SEO professionals costs money. And if you don’t spend money on SEO, your company will gradually relinquish the top of page one to competitors willing to invest more financial resources in SEO.

Don’t get me wrong. SEO is extremely important, and your business should invest to rank high on Google for your most important keywords. But your investment is no guarantee you will rank high. Or maybe you’ll rank high today only to slide down to page two tomorrow. So you can’t put all your eggs in one basket and expect your website to do all the lead generation work on its own.

Like all investments, spreading your risk and being in as many places where your target market is hanging out is a good idea. It’s why your business has social media profiles, attends trade shows, and runs ads on specialist media. Your shop in the Google bazaar, while important, needs help from other “shops” your target market visits. It’s the fundamental reason why, if your business deals in B2B environmental technology, agritech, energy tech, or medtech, you need a complete storefront on XPRT with your full product catalog and other key content. Let’s take a closer look.

You reach buyers you may not be reaching on search engines

XPRT’s mission is to help industry buyers find cleantech, agritech, and energy tech solutions, so we have a built-in audience of over 800,000 registered professionals interested in your products. They like XPRT’s clean and filterable lists of suppliers and products. Here’s an example for thermal oxidizers. They also use Google but may not have found your business there. In fact, they may have found one of XPRT’s thousands of result pages there.

And even when buyers contact your competitors on XPRT, some ask us to match their requests to similar suppliers, in which case you’ll have the opportunity to compete for the buyer’s request even when they haven’t found you directly. The more content on your storefront, the more likely it is we’ll match requests to your business.

You will not be penalized for duplicate content

Even if the content on your XPRT storefront is the same as on your website word-for-word, Google will not penalize you for duplicate content. This is a myth! The reality is Google chooses the best page to display in its results when it detects two identical pages. So if your website isn’t up to par, your XPRT storefront actually gives you a second chance to appear in Google’s search results. In other words, your profile on XPRT can help fill in the gaps of your own SEO so that buyers have a better chance of finding you.

XPRT storefronts are optimized for lead generation

All pages of your storefront on XPRT have simple-to-use lead generation forms making it easy for buyers to get in touch. It may even turn out that the pages on your XPRT storefront convert better than on your own website. In addition, your XPRT storefront contains gated content, such as downloads & videos, for registered XPRT buyers only, which generates leads for your business you may not be generating with your own website.

It may be easier to publish on XPRT than your own website

Every XPRT storefront comes with a free CMS you can use to publish unlimited content. In fact, it may be easier to publish and update content on your XPRT storefront than on your own website, depending on how your organization is structured and what technology you’re using to publish your website.

We optimize XPRT Premium storefronts for search engines

For our XPRT Premium members, we dedicate resources to optimizing content published on your storefront to maximize your chances of appearing at the top of XPRT search result pages. Your optimized pages also have a greater chance of performing well on Google search results.

Don’t have a business profile on XPRT yet?

Take a couple minutes to publish your basic company profile. You will then be able to publish unlimited content, such as product catalogs, white papers, case studies, news stories, downloads, videos & more.