8 Steps B2B SEO Strategy To Drive Traffic And Value (Free SEO Checklist Included)
B2B SEO Strategy to Drive Traffic
You should ensure that your B2B website is optimized for search engines so that it can rank higher in the SERPs. For this, follow a B2B SEO strategy. It is a series of steps to ensure that your website ranks higher, thus increasing traffic.
Implementing SEO will help your website
to gain presence and visibility on the search engine results page. It helps to improve the traffic to your website when a user types in a query. For B2B businesses the customer or user is a business.
Owning a website and competing with established companies requires that you follow the right strategy, hence it is called B2B SEO strategy. An SEO strategy is required if you have a more professional audience, complex sales funnel, lower conversion rates or a small specific audience.
Creating a successful B2B SEO strategy
The key points of a B2B SEO strategy are as follows:
1. Publishing new content
One of the reasons why your website is not ranking and the competitor's is that your website may be missing some important topics that drive traffic. You should check out the niche that is working well for the competitor.
Your keyword should align well with the content. When you publish content where the users want to make a purchase those primary keywords will be different than the ones you use in the content to provide information to the user about your brand. Therefore keywords should be chosen based on relevancy and what type of content you are going to publish.
2. Doing keyword research
The click-through rate of the pages in the search results decreases as you move down the results. A major portion of the traffic lands on the pages showing in the top 3 positions on Google. When your pages start appearing in the search results it means your keywords are ranking.
The pages that rank from the 11th to the 20th position on Google have keywords that we say are at a striking distance. You can research, analyse and work on the keywords that are at a striking distance. Targeting this set of keywords may improve the traffic to your website.
Once these keywords rank you can find your next set of keywords at a striking distance. You can put in continuous efforts to gain traffic.
3. Optimizing the pages
Google crawlers should be able to easily crawl, navigate and find your website. In the B2B SEO strategy if you have a page A that links to a different page B on the same website then when the Google crawler crawls page A it will be able to find the linked page B.
Due to this when the user lands on page A, the user can be directed to another page linked to page B. This will help to reduce the bounce rate and increase the average session duration. Google will reward such a page.
Benefits of B2B SEO strategy
The target audience of the B2B businesses is small and consists of CEOs, CMOs and CFOs. It is difficult to get the consent of such an audience. Therefore the keywords that you target and the content you create should be to the point and execute like a pro. The benefits of a B2B SEO strategy are as follows:
- It helps to increase brand awareness.
- It is a more cost-effective method than paid marketing.
- It leads to expansion in the market share.
- It leads to a better conversion rate in the long term
- It gives a Return on Investment from the organic trust.
Implementing a B2B SEO strategy
- Create a buyer’s persona which is the depiction of an ideal customer and is created based on research and qualitative and quantitative capabilities. A business can have different buyer personas each targeting a different product line.
- A sales funnel is used to describe the user's journey. The B2B sales funnel is more complex and keywords that fall at the bottom of the funnel are the target keywords. These are keywords the users search for while purchasing a product. To find these keywords you should start with a seed keyword and then find the other related keywords.
- You should analyse your competitors who are already ranking on Google. Find out the points that lead to their success. You can find out key metrics like the average customer retention time, the average purchasing time, the lifetime value of a customer and the flow of the customer from landing on a page to leaving.
- One of the most important steps of B2B SEO is keyword analysis. It forms the foundation for the SEO plan. The B2B business keywords can be informative, comparative or descriptive. Do a thorough competitor analysis which includes immediate competitors and SERP competitors. The keywords with a highly relevant intent and Cost-Per-Click (CPC) are the ones you should go for. For B2B businesses the relevant keywords will have a low search volume.
- Do gap analysis to find the missed opportunities through competitor analysis. You can find the content topics that drive good traffic to your competitor. You can create similar content which is more exhaustive to get ranked in the SERPs.
- Implement off-page SEO. Look out for domains with a high domain rating (DR) that link back to your competitors. You should try to get backlinks to your website to bring in more traffic. Other options that an off-page SEO includes are the UX, navigation styles and more. Competitor analysis is the basic and essential part of B2B SEO strategy.
- You should support your pillar pages by publishing relevant content. For example, if you have a topic ‘Covid Supplies’ and the products listed are face masks, PPE kits, hand sanitizers and more. You can create individual pages for each of them and link them to the main page. This helps to build a scalable content strategy that can be easily updated.
- Google continuously updates its algorithms and new concepts and new areas come and user behavior also changes. There you have to update and re-optimise the existing content. Your pages also have to be curated as per the industry trends. This involves the following:
- New keywords to target B2B areas
- Metadata optimisation
- Adding Alt-text to the respective images
- Adding H1 tags
- Checking page speed performance
- Mobile-friendliness
- Using simple and easy website architecture
- Create and add content like blogs, articles, guides and more. These can be major contributors to traffic to your website. This will require research, time, and creating quality content. But consistency can help you rank higher. To add credibility to your publishing, interlink the different content, add Alt-text to images, author’s name and description.
Process for smooth B2B SEO
1. Monitor the performance of your published content and keyword rankings for the targeted keywords. Try to add any missing opportunities that you find. Add new semantic keywords by using the TF-IDF (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency) analysis and analysing the SERP competitors.
2. Your keywords are based on the sales funnel, changing time, search volume, search intent and competition. They change so you should look out for the changes and update your content accordingly.
3. Make a plan for the coming months so that you can easily align your workdays. You should search for trending topics in your niche, find opportunistic keywords, add new content formats, look for innovative ideas from your competitors and check if everything is aligned as planned.
These strategies once implemented will help you to rank higher on Google. If you are looking for B2B SEO consultants then check out Supramind.com, we offer SEO services.
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