If you want to make the most out of your B2B SEO efforts, you need to focus on converting your prospects into qualified leads, rather than just getting a blog post ranked at the top of Google.
You should not believe everything you hear about SEO from other people. It is more important to have good content that is relevant to the keywords you are targeting than to just get a lot of links from other websites. Your content should be something that people can use and it should be easy to read.
There is a guide you can follow to make sure the search engines produce regular leads and get a good return on the investment your marketing team makes in your company’s SEO.
If you want to improve your business-to-business SEO strategy in 2022, you’re in the right place. We have the practical steps you can take to improve your rankings and get more traffic.
What Is B2B SEO?
Before we look at how you can design an SEO campaign for your brand, let’s take a quick look at what B2B SEO is. B2B SEO is a marketing strategy that helps brands improve their search engine rankings and visibility in order to attract more B2B customers.
B2B SEO is the practice of creating web pages that rank highly for queries related to your product or services made by your target customer.
If you want your business to succeed, you need to make sure that it is visible to potential customers who are looking for the services you offer. If you have a great product but no way to get it in front of potential customers, you’re not going to be successful.
Do B2C & B2B Require Their Own Strategies?
Most people only use a few different search engines to find information on the internet. Google is the most popular, followed by Bing. There are very few other search engines that people use frequently.
Do B2B brands need to design different SEO strategies than B2C brands?
Yes and no.
Yes because the core principles for ranking are the same for both B2B and B2C brands. Of note, the basic SE (search engine) principles that you must get right for both include:
- On-page SEO. These are the factors that users interact with most and focus on optimizing content. These include the page title tag, meta description, and H1 heading tag.
- Off-page SEO. Refers to activities that take place away from your website but influence how it ranks. An example would be receiving a linked mention from a reputable website back to yours.
- Technical SEO. Technical SEO describes all technical and website code related considerations that help Google (and other search engines) efficiently and accurately crawl, index, and understand your website.
The three main factors of SEO are the same for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. These factors are important for every SEO strategy.
What’s the Difference Between B2B SEO & B2C SEO?
The main difference between B2B and B2C SEO strategies is their target audience. B2C brands target individual consumers while B2B brands target corporate decision-makers. In many cases, this means your strategy should target not just one individual but everyone involved in making decisions in the organizations you’re targeting.
How To Create A Winning B2B SEO Strategy In 2022
The goal of many businesses is to rank at the top of Google. However, knowing how to do this and ranking for the terms that your clients are searching for can be challenging.
You can’t just rank for any terms and expect to win. You need to do your research to figure out which terms will actually get you to the top of the SERPs.
If you’re not ranking for terms that your clients are searching for, it won’t do your business any good. You might get some traffic from random high search volume keywords, but that traffic won’t result in sales because it’s not your ideal customer profile, and they aren’t interested in what you have to offer.
If you want to increase your leads through organic searches you need to include these five vital steps in your strategy.
1. Proper Keyword Research
No SEO strategy for businesses that sell to other businesses (B2B) can work well without first doing proper research on the keywords that are most important for ranking in search engines. This is because ranking well for relevant keywords is mainly about creating content that is optimized for those keywords.
With that being said, we should run our keyword research based on the following principles:
- The keyword should be relevant and popular for your target audience. This is mainly measured by monitoring monthly search volume.
- The keyword should be relevant to your brand and product/services. Not all keywords that are popular with your target audience are going to be relevant for your brand.
- Depending on your available budget and timeline, the competition for the target keyword should be manageable. The more popular the keyword/query is, the heavier the competition, so finding the right balance is key.
2. Content Development
B2B SEO is all about the content. Your SEO results will only be as good as your content. Strong, high-quality content can improve your ranking on the search engine results pages (SERP), even without any specific SEO optimizations.
The secret to good SEO is not to focus on Google and other search engines, but instead to focus on how to provide value to your target audience with the content.
While content development for B2B can be a very broad subject on its own, here are some best practices to follow:
- Do a quick Google search for your target keyword and check the highest-ranking pages on the first page. These are your competitors, and your job is to develop content better than them. Analyze their structures, flow, length, and check their readability, and aim to develop something better while focusing on your target audience.
- Make sure your content has a clear structure: intro, challenges, solutions, conclusions. Make sure your posts are non-promotional.
- Include your target keywords naturally throughout the content. Again, focus on delivering valuable information for your human readers.
- Include external/outbound links to prove claims and points in the post. Also, make sure to link your own content (internal links) and maintain a healthy internal linking structure.
- Don’t forget to include other forms of media (images, infographics, charts, video) to keep your readers engaged.
3. On-site Technical Optimizations
It is important to make sure your website and all its pages are performing well, so that your audience can have the best experience possible when consuming your content. You also want to make sure that Google and other search engines can index your site correctly.
While technical SEO is a pretty deep subject, here are some important areas for you to consider:
- Optimize each page for the target keywords that have been identified in the keyword research stage. Make sure to naturally include the focus keyword in the page’s title/heading, META description, and URL beside the body of the content itself.
- Make sure your site has an optimal load speed. According to Google, more than 50% of users will bounce when the page loads in more than 3 seconds. On the other hand, bounce rate is now a B2B SEO ranking factor.
- Make sure your site is mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive. Remember that more and more people are not accessing websites exclusively from their desktop devices. Again, if your site is not mobile-friendly, it can increase the bounce rate.
- Make sure your website is using HTTPS instead of HTTP (SSL certificate), if you are not using HTTPS, Google might brand your site as unsecured and Chrome might block your site from their users.
- Make sure your site can be properly indexed by Google, and fix any existing crawl errors
- Implement structured data markups (schema.org) so Google can understand all the different elements on your site.
To reiterate, remember that there are three objectives of technical SEO for B2B:
- Ensuring your audience can comfortably consume your content and use your website’s functions
- Keeping your audience for as long as possible on your site
- Ensuring the search engines can properly understand your site’s content and all the different elements in it
4. Link Building, Both in Quantity and Quality
In SEO for B2B companies, backlinks are still the most important ranking factor. However, it is now just as important, if not more so, to have high-quality backlinks as it is to have a lot of them.
Getting a lot of low-quality backlinks is no longer enough for successful link building. It’s much better to get a few high-quality backlinks from relevant, well-known websites. However, this can be difficult to do.
So, how can we do it?
First and foremost, give them a reason to link your content, what we call the link hook. For example:
- Totally unique data or information (statistics, research reports, etc.)
- Aesthetically pleasing assets (infographics, beautiful photos, well-designed images, etc.)
- Engaging original stories
- Informative, actionable tips not available anywhere else
Again, your content is going to be the key.
No matter how good your content is, it is worthless if it does not reach anyone. Therefore, it is important to promote your content to build links and generate traffic.
Use a variety of methods to build backlinks and promote your content, such as social media, guest posting, and outreach.
5. Test & Track Your Results
This statement has been repeated many times, but it remains accurate: optimizing your website for search engines is a lengthy process. It’s not something you do once and then forget about. You need to constantly monitor your results and fine-tune each page to achieve better results.
If you want your page to rank higher on Google, do some additional research on which keywords to use and make sure your page’s content is fresh. Google loves new content, so taking the time to do this will pay off big time.
New competitors are appearing all the time, so you can’t just rely on your past successes. Make sure to keep testing and monitoring your results so that you can stay at the top of the SERPs.
Important KPIs to Track for Your B2B SEO Strategy
In order to gauge the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, you need to identify which key performance indicators (KPIs) are most relevant to your business. A few examples of KPIs you must track include:
- Organic traffic. This is one of the most important KPIs to track as an increase in organic traffic shows that your SEO strategy is working.
- Search rankings. Search rankings are another KPI that directly shows the success of your SEO strategy. After all, SEO is all about visibility.
- Organic clickthrough rate (CTR). CTR is a metric that measures the ratio of clicks on your link to the total number of users who viewed the search results. A high CTR shows that your title tag is well-optimized.
- Pages per session. The number of pages users visit per session are an indicator of the quality of your content. A high number of pages visited shows that your content is resonating well with your visitors.
- Average session duration. This measures the amount of time a user spends on your site. It’s also an indicator of how well your content is performing.
Big Takeaway
For businesses that follow ethical strategies and treat their customers well, the B2B SEO landscape has not changed as much as it might appear.
The algorithms used by search engines have become more and more favorable to legitimate marketing practices over time. As a result, businesses that have become used to relying on unsustainable tactics like keyword stuffing and using spammy links will find it much more difficult to get to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
As long as you build your online marketing campaign around a deep understanding of your most valued customers, then you can expect a high return on investment.
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