Search engine optimization drives organic traffic to your site so businesses that are looking for solutions such as yours can easily find you. B2B SEO is a digital marketing strategy that will help you rank higher in search engine results such as on Google. SEO is a complex topic that depends on multiple factors. However, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The following comprehensive guide will walk you through setting up a winning B2B SEO strategy.
Understanding B2B SEO: Key Differences from B2C
The ultimate goal of SEO, whether B2C or B2B, is to make a sale. However, the process for making sales to a business is significantly different than selling directly to customers. As a result, your SEO strategy will necessarily be different as well. Understanding these differences will help you craft an effective B2B SEO plan to establish trust and build your company’s authority.
The Audience
The most obvious difference between B2B and B2C marketing is the audience. When you’re selling to an individual customer who is looking to buy products or services for their personal use, you typically only have to convince one person that you can solve their problem.
When you’re selling to a business, though, your audience is a larger group that’s buying your product or service for a professional purpose. Your expertise and authority are more important because they’re relying on you to help improve some aspect of their business operations. There are usually more people involved in making purchasing decisions, so you’ll need to convince multiple stakeholders of your value proposition.
The Purchasing Process
The process of selling to individual consumers is much simpler than selling to businesses. Most individual sales are less expensive and require less analysis. For some products, sales come primarily through impulse purchases, but even those that call for more thought and comparison are still driven more by emotion. An individual often buys something because it catches their eye rather than because it fills a specific need.
Businesses will have a structured process in place for making purchasing decisions that starts with recognizing a need. A committee may evaluate different options based on factors such as credibility, requirements, costs, features, and the potential for long-term relationships.
Sales Cycle Length
Individual customers can make instant decisions about purchasing. A B2C SEO strategy is designed around a short-term sales cycle that can go from hearing about a product to purchasing it in a matter of minutes.
The typical sales cycle for B2B customers ranges from one to five months and is methodical and knowledge-driven. Multiple stakeholders add to the complexity and time, since more people are involved in the selection and approval process.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Because your strategy will be different with B2B SEO, your KPIs will be different as well. B2B SEO goals include establishing authority, building trust, and generating leads that will result in long-term relationships. These KPIs include marketing qualified leads (MQLs), customer lifetime value (CLV), and lead velocity rate (LVR).
B2C KPIs are more immediately centered on sales and include metrics such as conversion rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), cost per acquisition (CPA), and social engagement.
Developing Buyer Personas for Effective B2B SEO
Although the specifics of marketing to businesses will vary from those of selling to individuals, the fundamentals remain the same. You need to fully understand your target audience to meet their needs. Creating an accurate buyer persona will help you craft content that resonates with the decision-makers.
Your buyer persona should be thorough and comprehensive to keep everyone in your organization aligned as far as who you’re selling to and how you plan to reach them. If you already have an ideal customer profile (ICP), you may think your job is done. However, a buyer persona serves a different purpose than an ICP. An ICP is primarily used in lead nurturing activities.
A buyer persona goes deeper, allowing you to optimize all elements of your sales funnel, not just leads. It gives you a greater understanding of your customer’s pain points, their favorite features and benefits, and the driving factors behind purchasing decisions. Your buyer personas are fictionalized versions of your ideal customers, but they’re based on research and data obtained from your real customers and industry insights. It should include the following elements:
- Demographic information such as industry, company size, job title, and location
- Psychographic information such as goals, challenges, priorities, and fears
- Behavioral attributes such as preferred communication channels and trusted sources of information
- Decision-making attributes such as their role in the purchasing process and what drives their decisions
Here are the steps for creating a viable buyer persona for B2B SEO tactics.
Find Your Best Customers
Start by looking at your existing customers, particularly the ones who are your advocates. You want more customers who will happily pay for your top-tier products and services. Choose your customers with the greatest CLV, as they’re easier to sell to and less likely to churn.
Conduct Research and Analyze Data
Collect information from a variety of sources, including surveys, interviews, feedback, data from internal teams, and industry insights. Analyze the data you collect and use it to segment your customers into categories based on characteristics such as job titles, organizational information, and personality traits.
Flesh Out the Details
Refine your personas by mapping out the decision-making process and identifying factors such as their key roles, how involved they are in the overall process, their most significant pain points, and how they prefer to communicate. Using this information, fill out the details and create a visual representation of each persona, remembering that you may have several different ones. Keep these buyer personas top of mind in all of your marketing activities, including SEO. You should update them regularly as trends change and you gain new data.
Conducting Comprehensive Keyword Research for B2B Markets
Targeting the right keywords will be the primary driver of your B2B SEO marketing strategy. While you want to drive traffic to your website, you want it to be the right traffic. Generating a lot of views from unqualified traffic will only consume resources, time, and money.
You can avoid this by identifying and targeting relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for. Keyword research will help you attract the customers you want and decrease your bounce rate, which will drive up your rankings.
Here’s how you can find the keywords you should be targeting.
Understand Your Niche
You know your product, but you need to understand how your customers search for your product. Survey your existing customers to get a feel for how they found your product or service and the thought process behind their decision to choose you. You can also generate keyword ideas by visiting forums where buyers discuss products in your niche, doing competitor research, and analyzing reviews.
Identify Seed Keywords
Seed keywords are short, broad terms that capture the main functions of your product or service. What are the basic terms people will type into the search engine to find your business? These are also called short-tail keywords, and they’re a good starting point for your keyword research. Make a list of them to refer to later.
Do Competitor Research
Find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for. This information will make it easier for you to determine what keywords are already working in your industry. You can do this by putting your seed keywords into Google and seeing who turns up in the top positions. You can use SEO tools such as Semrush, Moz, or Ahrefs to analyze competitors’ websites and learn what keywords they’re using to attract customers.
Create a List of Your Most Relevant Keywords
Take your list of potential keywords and determine which ones are most relevant to your product or service and your customers’ search intent. Using a tool such as Google Keyword Planner, you can find keyword volume and difficulty. Ideally, you’ll find keywords with a high search volume and low keyword difficulty.
You can also easily find long-tail keywords by typing your seed keywords into Google and seeing what autocomplete suggestions are offered. This is a cheap and easy way to generate trending keywords in your niche.
Group Keywords by Search Intent
In addition to knowing what keywords your target audience is using, you need to know why they’re using them. Understanding user search intent is critical if you want to create valuable content that will attract them to your website.
Search intent falls into one of the following categories:
- Informational intent is when a user wants to find out more about a topic
- Commercial intent is when a user wants to make a purchase but is conducting research
- Transactional intent is when a user is ready to make a purchase
- Navigational intent is when a user is looking for a specific website
Creating High-Quality, Intent-Focused Content
Once you’ve identified keywords based on intent, use them to create content that will deliver value to your target audience. For many keywords, there’s fierce competition for the top spots that drive the highest traffic. To rank, you’ll need to create authentic content that delivers more value than your competitors.
Understand Customer Needs and Pain Points
Your buyer persona will help you with this step. What issues are your buyer personas struggling with? What makes their jobs harder, and how can your product or service make it easier? Break this down even further by mapping out the buyer’s journey and identifying their questions and needs at each stage: awareness, consideration, and decision.
Create Content for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
For buyers in the awareness stage, create informational content that answers their questions and highlights how your services and products can help with their problems. This can include blog posts, videos, or white papers.
In the consideration stage, buyers know they’re interested in a solution similar to yours, but they’re shopping around. This is a great time to steer them to content such as case studies that demonstrate your expertise.
Once customers reach the decision stage, they’re ready to make a purchase. Offer up keyword-rich content such as product comparisons, demonstrations, and pricing pages that will convince them that your solution is the best option.
On-Page SEO Best Practices for B2B Websites
On-page SEO refers to all of the front and back-end components of your website. Optimizing these will help you climb up Google rankings for your chosen keywords. Google is constantly crawling through your website, looking for indications that will tell it what your site is about and who it’s relevant to. Specifically, it includes the following elements:
Content Elements
Include your keywords naturally in all of your content. You obviously want to avoid keyword stuffing, as Google will ding you for it and today’s internet sophisticates will find it off-putting. Instead, just naturally include keywords where appropriate, including high-priority positions such as in titles and subtitles.
HTML Elements
If you use your keywords in your titles and subtitles, they’ll already be included in two important HTML elements on your page. You can tell if keywords are included in HTML elements by viewing the source code. From Google, you can click “More tools,” then “Developer tools” to open up a window to view the HTML code.
Other places you should include keywords in HTML elements include the meta description, which shows up immediately under the page title in Google search results, and alt-text. Image alt-text is a description of the images on your page. Make sure these descriptions are relevant and include your keywords.
Your page URL should also include your keyword and be simple to understand. Using your page title as the URL is usually a simple and effective option.
Technical SEO: Ensuring Your Site’s Health and Performance
Optimizing the technical aspects of your website makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index it. Technical SEO, also called off-page SEO, includes the following factors.
Site Architecture
Site architecture refers to how your website pages are linked to each other. Setting up an efficient site structure lets search engine crawlers quickly find and categorize your content. This is fairly intuitive. Your home page should link to category pages, which should link to individual pages on your site.
Mobile Optimization
Mobile searches account for almost 60% of all internet traffic, so it’s no surprise that Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites. Your site should be easy to read for people who are searching the web on their smartphones or tablets.
Performance and Speed
Improving your site’s load speed will also help improve your rankings. People will bounce quickly if your site is slow to load. You can improve your site’s load speed in several ways:
- Reduce page size
- Avoid unnecessary third-party scripts
- Compress images
- Fix broken internal links
- Validate your XML sitemap
- Set up data schema to enable rich snippets
Building Authoritative Backlinks for B2B SEO
Backlinks are links from other sites to your content. This signals to Google that other people trust your site as a reliable source of information. Specifically, backlinks build your site’s credibility and authority. They also drive more traffic to your website so you can generate qualified leads.
Because backlinks depend on other websites linking to your site, it may seem like it’s out of your control. However, there are steps you can take to make your content more valuable and encourage other sites to link to it.
While having a lot of backlinks is good, it’s also important that they come from authoritative sites within your industry. Sites with a high domain authority are more credible so their backlinks are more valuable. Links that come from leading websites in your industry will help you more than an equally credible site from an unrelated industry. Here are strategies for building authoritative backlinks.
Focus on Creating High-Quality Content
The most important strategy for link building is creating valuable content. Other sites will naturally link to your site if it provides value to their readers. This includes content such as novel research, in-depth analysis or guides, and visual content.
Ask Directly
Emailing websites directly to ask for links is a common strategy, but you’ll probably be one of many, particularly if you’re emailing a very popular site. You’ll have better odds of getting a response if you do some research ahead of time. Comb through their website to find a place where your content will fit. In your email, link to your excellent, relevant content and point out how your link will benefit their readers.
Guest Post
Contributing to an industry-specific blog will give you the opportunity to link back to your site. Networking is the best way to land guest posting slots, so attend industry events and make connections.
Rebuild Broken Links
Broken links hurt SEO, so finding broken links on a target site can help you both. If you find a broken link, create high-value content that can serve as a replacement. Reach out to the site owners to let them know about the broken link. Offer your content to fix the link.
Join Industry Listings
Make sure your site is listed in industry directories and associations. These provide low-effort quick ways to generate backlinks.
Publish Your Own Content
Share your content on your own social media channels. Although these are lower-quality backlinks than other types, they’ll still help. Sharing your content on platforms such as LinkedIn and Medium also offers the chance that others in your industry will pick it up and share it.
Collaborate With Others
Work with others in your niche to create content that’s valuable to both your audiences. Working with someone who isn’t your direct competition will give you each access to the other’s audience. You can expand your reach and build valuable backlinks.
Leveraging Content Marketing for B2B Lead Generation
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive organic traffic and generate leads. Creating narrowly focused content that speaks directly to your target audience builds your reputation and authority and will make people more inclined to trust your products and services. To generate the most leads, your content should address the problems and pain points of your audience.
Your content marketing strategy should incorporate the following elements:
- Specific objectives
- Audience insights
- Types of content
- Distribution plan
The following step-by-step guide will help you create your B2B SEO content strategy.
Establish Your Goal
Determine what you want to achieve with your content. You might want to increase your traffic, generate more leads, obtain more backlinks, or increase sales. Whatever you choose, be specific. Set SMART goals, those that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
This will inform the direction of your strategy and let you know if you’ve met your goals or not.
Choose What Type of Content You Need
You can create a wide range of valuable content, and doing so will help you reach a wider audience. Blog posts, videos, podcasts, and infographics can all be valuable. Which is best will depend on who you’re writing to and what stage of the buyer journey they’re in. If your audience research shows that your potential customers prefer articles or podcasts, focus on creating those.
Build Topics Around Your Keywords
Choose relevant topics based on the keyword research you’ve done. Not every piece of content needs to be a sales pitch for your company. Instead, concentrate on delivering actionable content that your audience will find useful. If they’re searching for answers and you provide them, they’ll naturally seek you out when they’re ready to make a purchase.
Consider Your Sales Funnel
Create content for customers in every phase of the conversion funnel, including:
- Top of the funnel (ToFu)
- Middle of the funnel (MoFu)
- Bottom of the funnel (BoFu)
These stages correlate to the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. Your ToFu content should generate interest, get your audience’s attention, and move them along in the funnel. Your MoFu content should nurture your leads and guide them toward becoming qualified customers. BoFu content should aim to turn potential customers into buying customers by showing them why your product is the best choice.
Fill Out a Content Calendar
Your content calendar will help you execute your content marketing strategy. It will help you stay on track with your content strategy and provide accountability. You can use it to assign tasks so that everyone knows who is responsible for what. Setting deadlines will ensure consistency in your content marketing efforts and keep your content fresh and relevant.
Promote Your Content
After you’ve put all that effort into creating your content, you want to make sure it reaches your target audience. Some content promotion avenues include:
- Notifying your email list
- Sharing your content on social media
- Paid advertising
- Industry or professional association blogs
Monitor Your Results
Determine what KPIs align with your goals and track your metrics so you’ll be able to measure your progress. We’ll go into more detail on analytics in the next section.
Utilizing SEO Tools and Analytics for Continuous Improvement
One of the advantages of digital marketing is that you can easily track your results and course corrections. SEO tools and data analytics allow you to see how individual elements of your website are performing and make changes to optimize performance in specific areas.
User Behavior
Analyzing user behavior on your site can give you insight into where customers are falling off and what content is most engaging. Google Analytics can provide data on your audience interactions and content effectiveness.
The Audience Report will tell you where your audience is coming from, what types of devices they’re using, and whether they’re new or returning visitors.
The Behavior Flow Report helps you visualize how your audience navigates through your site. You can use this to identify high-traffic landing pages and find out if your audience is losing interest along the way.
Conversion Metrics
The specific conversion metrics you measure will depend on your goals and your conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy. In Google Analytics, you can set conversion goals, such as:
- Form submissions
- Content downloads
- Newsletter signups
- Event registration
These micro-conversions often generate leads that result in sales. You can also use these metrics to focus on improving your conversion rates. A/B testing allows you to evaluate different elements, such as headlines, CTAs, and layouts to see which perform better.
Technical SEO Audits
Tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console can help you conduct a technical SEO audit on your website to find areas for improvement. Key areas you should audit include:
- Robots.txt files to make sure you’re not blocking important pages from search engine crawlers
- Your XML sitemap to make sure your sitemap is updated and submitted to Google Search Console
- Index coverage to find pages that have errors or aren’t being indexed
- Canonical tags to prevent duplicate content
- Largest contentful paint (LCP) to measure how fast your main content loads
- Page load speeds
Google gives a higher ranking to more secure websites, so check to be sure that your site uses HTTPS instead of HTTP, that you’ve installed an SSL certificate, and that you’ve updated plugins or software that could compromise your site’s security.
Adapting to Emerging B2B SEO Trends
B2B SEO marketing is a rapidly changing field. You’ll need to stay updated with industry trends to make sure your strategy remains effective. Some new and emerging aspects of B2B SEO strategy include the following.
AI-powered Search
Search engines have started incorporating generative AI (artificial intelligence) into their responses along with traditional search results. You can adapt to this trend by focusing on natural conversational keywords to align with how decision-makers interact with AI.
Voice Search
As people use virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa more, the number of voice searches is increasing. You can adjust to this by optimizing your content for long-tail natural-sounding keywords. When you’re creating content, focus on answering specific questions. Use FAQ schema to increase the chances that your content will appear in voice search results.
Zero Click Searches
Business leaders are typically in a hurry and looking for fast answers. A zero-click search is when a user finds the answer they’re looking for in the search results and doesn’t click on a link. These usually occur with simple questions about basic facts that can be easily answered. While zero-click searches only account for about 25% of desktop searches, they can still result in less traffic. However, appearing in zero-click searches can bolster your brand’s credibility.
You can improve your chances of showing up in a zero-click search by using a heading for the question you’re answering. Provide a clear, concise answer to optimize for featured snippets. Content structured with headings, bullet points, and numbered lists also improves your chances of being pulled into featured snippets.
Visual Search and Video Content
In addition to voice searches, users are also relying more on visual searches using tools such as Google Lens. Video content plays into the desire for more visual content and often performs better than text-based content.
Tap into this trend by creating content such as video tutorials, product demonstrations, and case studies using descriptive titles, tags, and transcriptions. Embed videos on your landing pages to increase engagement with your audience and the amount of time visitors spend on your site. Pair videos with compelling visuals that are tagged with descriptive alt-text to improve visual search results for your content.
Topical Authority
With so many websites to choose from, search engines prioritize those with a depth and breadth of authority on a specific topic. Your B2B SEO strategy should reflect this. Create clusters of content that revolve around a pillar, an in-depth guide. Support your pillars with additional content such as blog posts, FAQs, and case studies.
Make sure your content is internally linked throughout. Regularly update your content and create new content to maintain your authority.
Drive Organic Traffic and Generate Qualified Leads With B2B SEO
Keeping up with all of the elements involved in a comprehensive SEO strategy can be difficult. However, the rewards are significant, as it’s one of the most effective online marketing strategies. Top-ranking pages drive traffic to your site and generate leads that will increase revenue. Using SEO tools and tracking your progress with data analytics can make your job easier and improve your search rankings.