How To Do B2B SEO: The Complete Guide

Is your B2B company looking to expand its brand through an organic search? If you don’t know what you’re doing, getting to the top of the search engine results pages might be difficult. 

Big businesses often invest huge sums of money into SEO with little to show for it. Fortunately, there are tried-and-true tactics that help them rank higher.

The question is: Where should you showcase your brand and value proposition? and what methods would you use to collect and arrange data?

That’s where B2B SEO comes in. Your digital strategy and target audience will be defined by the answers to these questions, and let me help you with that. 

Having said that, what exactly does B2B SEO involve? In this guide, you will learn exactly that and more!

What is B2B SEO?

B2B SEO is a digital marketing strategy to help b2b pages rank higher on the search engine.  

SEO is an important element for your business. You want it to be successful, and you cannot do it without good SEO practices. But how do you know if SEO is working properly? 

An SEO campaign works only if organic traffic is generated via the search engine results page (SERPs). However, in the case of B2B companies, this kind of paid marketing does not generate much revenue. 

As a result, they need to use other marketing channels like PBNs (paid search like banner ads) and affiliate programs.

What is the Difference Between B2C and B2B SEO?

The term “search engine optimization” is commonly used to refer to both B2C and B2B SEO.

The main difference between the two is that, in B2B, you’re dealing with a small business, and you’re marketing to other small businesses. In B2C, you market directly to consumers and generally don’t need to deal with other businesses or industries.

There is also a big approach between B2B SEO and B2C strategy. But while I want to discuss everything here, let’s focus on doing the right B2B SEO.

First, here are the several challenges that make B2B SEO differ from B2C:

Complicated Sales Funnels

The sales funnel of a B2B campaign is different from the sales funnel of a B2C business. In B2B marketing, make sure your audience gets what they need to make the sale before getting to the point where they need help.

There are several ways to accomplish this, such as using a funnel model or emails to promote a product. This is to ensure that you get to tap the right market with all your marketing efforts.

But to make sure that you tap the right market, you have to conceptualize a compelling strategy. And here is where your SEO comes into play.

Over the past few years, there has been a surge of websites and apps that help customers navigate the buying process from awareness to action. Not only does SEO help you raise your site’s rankings in the search engines, but it is also a powerful tool for bringing visitors and customers to your website.

You can even create a database from your website’s visitors, and from there, you can create an effective business sales funnel.

Ready to scale your organic channels? Drop me a line and I’ll show you how much revenue potential you’re missing out on from SEO

The Need to Reach Multiple Decision Makers

B2B purchases are long-term investments that have to be weighed up by the buyer. The buyer needs to be convinced about the ROI of the investment before they commit to it.

If you are in the B2B space, you have to sell your products or services compellingly. You can create your target audience’s expectations by creating a viable campaign specifically targeting your market.

Some executives, practitioners, and managers approached the decision with very different problems in mind. This will make you expect them to search Google for a very different inquiry.

B2B company will need to make pages that are optimized for:

1. Answering planned questions from the practitioners, like, “How will I increase my email open rates?”
2. Answering high-level questions from others or your executive stakeholders, like the questions, “How to scale my marketing teams?”
3. Lastly, answering various questions for the managers, like “the best practices of email marketing,” “what is the best email marketing software,” etc.

This will depend on the product or service you are selling or offering. The range of your buyer’s persona can get wider, too. 

There are many clients out there that are targeting many different personas when they initiate an organic search. Of course, the need to target more people is still possible.

Lower Volume of Keywords

As you get more complicated sales to funnel, there are a lot of different search terms your target customer searched for. Meaning, you can find lower volume keywords than the B2C marketer expects.

B2B SEOs need to analyze and work with keyword research skills. It needs to adapt what the audience wants and needs and find the search queries to adapt with their intent. 

It is all about looking for the right keywords to make you target your target consumers with content. This will push them through the funnel’s next stage.

Lower Conversion Rates

One of the other challenges of a B2B SEO is lower conversion rates compared to B2C. Successful B2B SEO strategies attract the right site traffic that is looking for a particular product or service on offer.

Know your audience, demonstrate how your product will be the solution to their problem, and well-designed strategies—these will surely give you success in B2B.

The Need To Demonstrate Your Expertise

Consumers love to pay attention to the company they are buying from, and B2B consumers shop differently than anyone. 

B2B consumers want to see the confidence of your business and the value you offer before inquiring. They also want to make sure whoever they inquire about will surely give them the right solution for their business needs.

You need to be in a position to demonstrate your expertise. SEO helps you show them that you’re an industry leader, and they trust the right company by using the right words they need to see.

Having a good thought of leadership is the skill you need in persuading your target consumers. SEO can help you thrive in the market because, as we all know, we trust sites more when they are on the first page of the search.

There are many ways that you can put your people in positions as experts in their field. Here are the common tactics that you can incorporate SEO strategies:

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1. LinkedIn marketing
2. Guest posting
3. PR
4. Blogging
5. Video marketing
6. Podcast speeches
7. Webinars

Is B2B SEO Important?

Many online businesses want to rank better in search engines. It is because the Google algorithm has expanded, and there are many new things that it does. 

For example, if you’re an e-tailer, you can use the Google Shopping feature to make purchases from your website. 

However, this didn’t happen very often before Google launched it. Now, big companies like Amazon and eBay have become popular for people to buy products from them. 

Since they’re impacting the market, large companies like Amazon and eBay must compete by offering their products at competitive prices. 

If you want to compete with them, too, then you have to do SEO (search engine optimization).

Reasons Why B2B Companies Needs SEO

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is one of many digital marketing strategy foundations. It improves your page visibility within the search engine result pages or SERP. 

The goal is to reach the first ranking position on Google. It is also done to boost your business’ online presence. 

The four basic pillars of SEO are the following:

1. Technical SEO: Making sure that search engines 
2. On-page SEO: To produce keyword-optimized content and also to improve the HTML tags
3. Off-page SEO: To build site authority with the use of backlinks from other websites
4. Content strategy: To get the target customers’ interest with your informational content

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is like any digital marketing: putting your brand. Instead of selling it to an individual, brands sell to those looking for industry products and solutions. 

The solutions can help your business to improve.

Advice for B2B SEO in 2021

This year is quite a rollercoaster, and everything you want to invest in is a risk. But the principles of B2B SEO don’t change enough.

Here is the specific advice for SEOs this year.

1. Publishing original research or content to get links. If you have established your audience and exclusive data, use it to publish the kind of stats that journalists and bloggers in your niche will recommend. 
2. If you represent a new product category, consider writing blogs or content that rank for terms in the category you’re deranging. Ranking for your new concept is not the main point; attracting the traffic from the old keywords.
3. Using YouTube is a plus, too, because it was also a search engine. You should consider putting the content of your high-performing SEO posts and make it a video. Also, try to make videos that cover the same category as your competitor’s other top SEO articles.
4. If you want to rank faster, you should contemplate distributing more. Try to get more exposure by promoting your product. Marketing your content and the business itself is a huge part of content marketing.
5. You also need to write your content or blogs that reflect your business objectives there. This is to inform your target audience on how their products or services will solve their problems. By showing them your objectives, it will make them think to click and sign-up.

Strategy: B2B SEO

Of course, there are strategies that you can follow to build a solid marketing foundation for your business. Here are the seven steps of the strategy process that you can do:

Building a Persona

The goal of this strategy is to build a persona for the target audience of your SEO. It is important to set a profile for your customer.

The more you know them and their preferences, the higher the success will be.

Most businesses create different buyer or customer persona. By knowing your customer, you get to know them, their needs and problems, where they hang up online, etc.

In this way, you can know what keywords you can use. You can also know what kind of things they search on different search engines.

Depending on your business, the decision-maker could be your product manager or the one in charge of your inventory.

Understanding the Sales Funnel

Sales or marketing funnels are one way to envision your consumer’s journey. More so, it would help if you analyzed it first before choosing the keywords of your buyer or the customer’s persona.

Some people are not familiar with the sales funnel. Nonetheless, here are some of the strategies that you can start to analyze your funnel. 

1. Consider initiating a talk to your sales team. You can ask them to explain the funnels, how it works, and many more.
2. Analyze your sales and data to know how your customers find your business.
3. Get the key stats of your business. Examples are the customer’s lifetime value, understanding the average customer retention, and time to purchase. You can also add the reasons why your customers leave or stop buying your product.

Conducting a Keyword Research 

In today’s competitive market, it’s all about getting your keywords optimized correctly for your B2B business. It would help find the perfect search queries that people are using to find the right business like yours.

Many B2C marketers focus their efforts on doing keyword research, primarily on commercial search terms. Any successful B2B strategy must also address the informational queries.

You can also use the SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool to find the perfect keyword your proposed buyer persona used. It will help you choose the right keyword and content that answers their questions, learn more, or find a supplier.

Understanding the importance of finding the right keywords that align with the phase of the sales funnel needs to be prioritized. Struggling to find the best starting point in finding B2B keyword research is common. And these are the questions that might help you:

1. How could we search for ways to overcome these pain points?
2. What are the main features of my product and service?
3. What are the keywords that drive the highest amount of natural traffic for my competitors?
4. What are the problems that my persona faces?
5. How am I going to find the solution?

Mapping Out A Strategy To Get Your Target Buyers

Use top clusters to understand and explore your expertise to own SERPs for topics. Topic clusters are groups of content revolving around a specific topic with the use of a pillar page.

Screenshot Link: https://www.semrush.com/blog/b2b-seo/ 

Making your keyword strategy map can also help you organize your SEO. More so, it will be easier for you to know your expertise.

In this stage, you have already chosen a keyword strategy that connects to your made buyer persona. 

Optimizing Your Services or Products Pages

Optimizing your landing pages is a must. Here are the three strategies for optimizing your B2B landing pages

Writing a Unique Content

Writing unique content will increase the ranking of your landing page. It will persuade your prospects to check your product or service when you post 100% unique content. 

Consider Writing a Long Content

Super short contents and pages are not enough to increase your rank. If there is not enough content for Google, it will not detect your site.

The recommended way to solve this is to write a total of 500-1000 words for your content. Make it up to 2000 if you can.

With longer content, you give your prospects interesting and compelling content to read. It will also improve your overall user experience.

Including a Smart Keyword Usage

Even though you can use it several times on your landing page, you should still use it strategically. Here are the places where you can insert your keyword:

• Your keyword in your page’s H1 title or title tag
• Your page URL that includes your keyword
• Using synonyms and variations of your main keyword
• Writing a unique meta description to increase the click-through-rate
• Putting your keyword high up on your landing page

Smart Keyword Usage can build and create more traffic, add depth to your page, and answer your target customers’ questions. 

So, It is best to note the importance of earning rankings and creating content to attract traffic and drive sales from your prospects.  

Building a Scalable Content Strategy

A sales landing page sits at the very bottom of any B2B sales funnel. You can find it in the action stage.

Having a scalable content strategy that drives the possibility to increase the funnel is vital for B2B SEO. In many cases, the content strategy involves your blog or your content hub.

It would be best if you built out your topic clusters with rank-ready content or blogs. It needs to answer the consumer’s questions, get them on your radar, and introduce them to your business.

Don’t focus on too low down the funnel. Otherwise, you are going to find your competitors are building awareness at an earlier stage than yours.

B2B marketing involves a host of different content formats and tactics. This will get you in front of your target audience; these include:

• Tools
• Newsletters
• Blog posts
• eBooks
• Videos
• Research studies
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Templates and checklists

Promoting Your Content and Earn Backlinks

In terms of earning links to your B2B brand, having content marketing is one of the most effective tactics. Content marketing allows your prospects to know your brand better and develop close relationships with your business. 

Nonetheless, once you’ve created content, you still need to put effort and time into promoting your page. 

For your content to rank up, linking it to other websites can work. And as a part of the distribution strategy, you can use email outreach to encourage people to check your page. It could be in the form of:

• A resource page
• A recommended guide
• An article

Best Practices 

One of the most important things about SEO is that the best practices remain constant even though algorithm adjustments occur regularly. 

Nonetheless, It is up to digital marketers to ensure that their company follows these guidelines for website optimization.

Your B2B brand should implement some tried and proven SEO best practices this year:

• Optimized your Service and Product Pages 
• Create a keyword strategy to target each buyer persona
• Understand Your Keyword Possibilities
• Create personas for your target audience

As you can see, a thorough B2B SEO plan doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Your brand will be more likely to appear in search results if you focus on the techniques above. 

Such practices may lead to more organic traffic and lead for your B2B brand.

Put it All Together

If it seems like designing a B2B keyword strategy is a lot of work, it is. With all of the jobs that must be specialized to succeed in an SEO campaign properly, it’s important to consider whether your internal staff has the time and training to handle it on their own.

More so, It is important to realize that B2B SEO does not happen overnight. Thus, SEO will never yield immediate results.

Nonetheless, with the help of a trusted partner, you can effectively rent a portion of their keyword specialists, content strategists, and SEO gurus by contracting with them, giving you access to expertise and experience you couldn’t gain on your own.

Let me know so you can start your blog off on the right foot.

Liked this article? Know more about SEOs, Sales, and Engagement:

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• How To Do Digital Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide [2021]
• How To Conduct A Technical SEO Audit In 2021: A Step By Step Guide

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