The mysteries of search engine optimization. Sounds like a title of a novel. In the world of B2B SEO, this type of strategy induces a significant amount of anxiety in marketers. Primarily because B2B SEO strategy is a long-term affair. And if you work in a performance-based environment, the results had to be good yesterday. While there isn't a magical SEO strategy that can bring about results instantly, here are 5 good tips on how to speed it up.
Dec 01, 2021 ● 7 min read
B2B SEO is a marketing strategy with the goal of increasing a website's overall organic performance in the eyes of search engines, such as Google or Bing. A well-executed B2B SEO strategy is targeting an audience of decision makers in a company with usually low-volume keywords but high purchase intent. The goal with B2B SEO is that the user journey ends with a user buying a service or product.
The big question: how is B2B SEO different from B2C? Three main aspects define B2B SEO (and arguably makes it more complex):
Given these three aspects, B2B SEO focuses on bringing quality organic traffic rather than quantity. While the following tips can be applied to the B2C SEO strategy, it definitely benefits B2B more.
Your customer is not an individual. In B2B, your customer is a company. The people searching for solutions are also not direct customers. Your real customers are decision-makers inside companies.
While a marketing manager is definitely your target audience in terms of organic search, the VPs of Marketing, Sales, Finance, etc., make all purchase decisions. Your B2B SEO strategy should focus on giving your organic search audience tools to sell your product or service to their decision-makers.
Say you're selling an SEO tool for keyword research. An SEO specialist types in "keyword research tools" and gets search engine results filled with lists of best-best suited software. They click on your tool on that list and end up on one of your web pages. All your content strategy should focus on pain points that the specialist experiences AND how your tool solves them. That is how this SEO specialist will sell your product to their superiors.
As stated previously, in B2B, your target audience comes with clear intent. All business tools, business plan templates, digital or otherwise, exist to solve problems or cover business processes. With the B2B SEO strategy, you should focus on immediate solutions to these problems.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Why is intent so important? Because in low search volume keywords, the intent is very distinct and easy to capture.
Let's get back to our SEO tool example. An SEO specialist may type in "how to target keywords correctly" or "how to improve search visibility". Both these searches are extremely specific. The tool you're selling can provide solutions to these problems, and your content must show how, clearly and concisely.
If your target audience comes with the intent to solve a problem, offer a solution.
Note that you don't have to offer to buy directly. Your content can be informational - top of the sales funnel - that will lead the searcher to this conclusion: we need to buy this tool to solve our problem.
All SEO strategy includes keyword research. Many SEO tools offer such services—Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Search Console, just to name a few.
But here's the kicker: everyone is using them, doing the same thing over and over again. So what can you do differently?
Backlinko came up with a term opportunity keywords. These are keywords that aren't necessarily high volume keywords but have a high click-through rate. It's exactly what we talked about before. Super specific searches that a lot of people are clicking on but either the relevant content is lacking, or search queries are too narrow.
These opportunity keywords are what you need to look out for. Whichever industry you're targeting, find a target keyword that gets a lot of clicks and prep your landing pages to answer those search queries.
So you have your target audience, you defined their search intent, and you did your keyword research. Now what? Now it's time to create content.
As mentioned before, your content should focus on addressing the pain points of the business you're targeting. The form this content can take depends on your industry, but here are the standard options:
Usually, you want to employ a mix of these three, together with off-page SEO tactics. These can be social media, guest posting, influencer marketing and other initiatives that lead back to your landing pages.
Again, that's what every SEO specialist does. What you can do different is research your content competition and plug content holes.
When creating content, uniqueness is a challenge. More often than not, you will be competing with other websites that work in the same niche. That's why these two tips can seriously direct your content strategy into success.
So now you have your target keywords, target audiences with identifiable search intents, AND you created some valuable content. Job well done.
But there's always that extra spice to make this better. A successful SEO strategy always includes link building, and B2B SEO is no exception.
Backlinks build website credibility in the eyes of search engines. It improves your search visibility, organic search traffic and overall SEO strategy. There are several types of links that help boost your SEO performance.
An excellent digital marketing strategy consists of small actions done in tandem. Here are a couple more good ideas for your B2B SEO strategy:
Published on Dec 01, 2021
WRITTEN BY
Indrė Jankutė-CarmaciuIndrė is a copywriter with an undulating passion for reading and finding gems of information. Indrė writes according to a simple motto: a picture is worth a thousand words, but somebody had to write that phrase down for us to read it.
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