B2B SEO

At its core, effective B2B search engine optimisation (SEO) generates important inbound leads from businesses that require the services and/or products your firm provides.

To drive those leads, your business needs to be visible in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords and phrases. As billions of searches are conducted every single day on Google alone, there is a significant opportunity here for your business to form meaningful connections with the right people at the right time. Don’t forget, search engines are now a primary research tool for buyers at every stage of the decision-making process. From the second an issue is identified to the process of selecting a business from which to purchase a solution, decision makers are turning to search engines.

So, the challenge here is to stand out from the crowd and discoverability is key if you want to maximise the full potential of your offering. A robust B2B search marketing strategy will help you to secure visible rankings that will enable you to drive those all-important additional leads and sales.

How to Get the Most Out of a B2B SEO Campaign

Although most SEO strategies are fundamentally the same (insofar as they work with the ranking factors search engines use to determine the order in which results are delivered to users), B2B SEO is markedly different to B2C SEO.

Unlike B2C SEO strategies, your B2B approach will need to be centred around the keywords that important decision makers are using while they are at work. In practice this often means:

– targeting low volume keywords

– publishing content created for decision makers, not a broad audience

– creating both practical and tactical content rather than leaning on drawing an audience in on an emotional level

In a B2B setting, your audience is unlikely to be a particularly broad demographic. Instead, everything you do should be catered towards appealing to and engaging with a small team of decision makers, which could mean CEOs, marketing managers or small business owners.

While B2C businesses will target high-volume keywords that are searched by thousands of people every single month, B2B businesses may do better to target keywords that are perhaps only searched for in lower volumes.

Additionally, the content created by B2B businesses is markedly different from B2C content. Keeping up with social media trends is always going to be a good move for B2C brands, but in the B2B world, investing in social media marketing typically won’t drive meaningful results. Instead, those efforts will be better invested into creating evergreen informative blog content and building a robust email marketing list.

Although every B2B strategy should be personalised to support the unique goals and objectives of every business, there are several core building blocks of a successful B2B campaign.

B2B SEO strategy:

1. Accurate Market Research

Before doing anything else, it is important to build an accurate and comprehensive picture of precisely who you want to find your website. In B2C settings this persona would be your ideal customer. In the world of B2B however, you aren’t targeting a person or a particular demographic, you’re targeting a business.

You need to identify the person within that business that you need to appeal to. So, you might be looking for someone who oversees inventory, marketing managers, a product manager, HR or someone on the finance team. Only once you know this important piece of information can you determine the keywords and phrases they are searching for.

2. Identifying keywords and phrases, questions, intents

It is often helpful to use the marketing funnel example as a way to accurately picture the customer journey. If informational keywords form the wide part of the funnel, buyer keywords form the narrower section. At this point, you will want to focus on identifying the keywords that decision makers are using when they are ready to purchase.

3. Identifying Informational Keywords

These keywords sit at the top of the marketing funnel and are the topics you will rely on to create informational content that will engage the right decision makers at the right times. These keywords will also help you to position your business as an expert in your field, which you can use in your direct marketing efforts to ensure that your business is the first that comes to mind when decision makers are thinking about the services and/or products you offer.

4. Optimising Service and Product Pages for SEO

Your on-page content should be optimised using a small selection of the buyer keywords you have already identified. Content on every page should be unique and, ideally, should be longer than a few hundred words. It is often much easier to rank well with pages that contain at least 500 words of well-optimised content.

There are a few reasons for this. Not only does longer form content help search engines to understand both the content and context of each page, but it also gives your audience something interesting to read and refer back to which will enhance the overall experience they have when engaging with your business.

Case Studies

We specialise in delivering B2B SEO campaigns that deliver measurable results tailored to specific business goals. We work with ambitious companies and brands, including tech PR agency CCgroup. They came to us when they wanted to invest in SEO and were keen for us to drive this important new channel and secure a spot at the top of SERPs results for tech PR. After conducting a thorough on-site audit, we executed a creative campaign targeted towards a specific audience using CCgroup’s expertise. SEO now drives between 50% and 65% of the group’s new business leads. 40% of leads are generated through organic, and it secured number one rankings for over 20 target keywords and phrases.