B2B SEO: A Complete Guide
A Complete Guide to B2B SEO
If your website does not show up on the first page of Google search results then you will miss out on leads and revenue. Business-to-Business (B2B) SEO is the online practice of using various strategies to help B2B website pages rank higher in the search engines like Google, Bing and more.
B2B SEO focuses on the keywords the key decision-makers within a company search for. The main goal is to create awareness and quality leads that will turn into sales opportunities. B2B is about one business buying from another. Therefore it is important to understand the way professional products or services are bought.
The sales funnel of the B2B companies is more complex. From the SEO perspective, it means more opportunities to earn targeted traffic by appearing at every stage. A lot of different content can be created at each stage to entice potential buyers.
As you create quality content your search engine ranking will begin to improve. This will help you build credibility and the search engine will put your content on the first page of the search results.
Effective B2B SEO strategies
You should first make your decision maker's persona to find out who you are going to target with your SEO. In B2B the target customer is a business. You need to decide who in that business you need to get in front of. The decision-makers can be product managers, CFOs and more.
You can use HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool to create the personas of your target audience.
You should find out how your audience searches for what you sell. Marketing funnels are a way to visualize the customer journey. You should find the bottom of the funnel keywords. They are the keywords people search for when they are ready to make a purchase.
You can use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to get insights into the keywords being used in your industry. You can do a competitor analysis and find out the keywords your competitors are using.
You can find keywords using the Google Autocomplete feature. When you type in a query Google automatically completes your search query. Google recommends keywords if a significant number of people are searching for them.
At the bottom of the search engine result pages, Google displays a list of keywords related to your search query. These are alternative keywords and using them in your content will improve your chances to rank higher.
You should find low-volume keywords as they are specific and have a smaller number of searches. The highly specific phrases are called long-tail keywords.
Find the top of the sales funnel keywords and topics as you will be creating content around them. People search for the top of the funnel keyword more than the bottom of the funnel keywords. The real value of SEO comes from the top-of-the-funnel searches. You can convert the top of the funnel searchers into customers down the road.
Create relevant content for each sales stage and optimize it. You should be specific in your content. The different content formats that you can create are blogs, videos, webinars, case studies, podcasts, newsletters and research studies.
Google wants to serve the most relevant search results to its users and therefore the content should follow the E-A-T guidelines. It stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Expertise means you should be able to show your expertise through your content. Authority means that your expertise is recognised by the industry. Trustworthiness means people should be able to trust that you are providing the right content.
You should optimise your product and service pages. You can create content at every stage of the sales funnel to drive traffic to your website.
To optimise your pages use image compression, create and submit an XML site map and improve the page load speeds. Your page title tag, meta description, URL structure, image Alt-text and page headers should be optimized.
You can create content around the top of the funnel keywords and topics to create awareness.
The landing pages usually use the keywords at the bottom of the sales funnel and their main goal is to drive a sale. You should create unique content otherwise you will run into duplicate content issues. The length of your landing pages should be around 1500 -2000 words. Using long-form content will help Google understand your page and the readers will get all the information they need.
You should use your keywords in the title tag, page header tags, page URLs and the content.
Blogging is an important part of the B2B SEO strategy. You should create high-quality content that people will want to link to. This will help your landing pages to rank higher in the search results. Blogs can help to establish your company as a helpful resource in your niche.
Most B2B companies write blogs about what they sell. This does not work. You can write blogs on shoulder topics that people will want to talk about, share and link to.
You can create ultimate guides as they work well. This is because they have all the information on a single page that a searcher may want to know.
Your content need not be boring and you should use a ’Business Casual’ writing style. This is the type of copy people will want to read.
One of the options to drive traffic to B2B websites is to create YouTube videos. It is much easier to rank them on the first page of search results than any other type of content. And YouTube is an established platform and your videos may show up higher in the search results. You can easily redirect traffic from your video to your website,
Backlinks are one of the main ranking factors and the more high-quality and authoritative backlinks you have, the better your organic traffic will be. Earning backlinks can make your content more authoritative.
For example, you can conduct a survey among your end-users annually. This will give you a good source of backlinks. You can develop helpful tools or calculators to get backlinks. You can ask your partners, suppliers and manufacturers to link to you.
Once you create content you will have to promote it. Your content should earn links from other websites and for this, you can use an email outreach strategy.
You can get your content linked to from the resource pages, get references as a recommended guide in an existing piece of content, ask a journalist to write an article on your latest study, use broken links opportunities and more.
B2B businesses have large transactions and the buyer does more research about the competition. Therefore it is important to add reviews on your website. If you have happy customers then ask them to write reviews on the industry-acknowledged review sites. When these review sites link back to your website you will also get a link.
The SEO tools that can be used for B2B businesses are Google Search Console, Semrush, Ahref’s, Majestic, Google Analytics and more. You should actually measure and monitor your SEO efforts. You should measure the number of backlinks you have, the amount of organic traffic coming, the rankings and the pages you are trying to rank, time spent by visitors on your website, bounce rate and more.
You will have to regularly optimize and update your web pages, develop new content and more. Supramind Digital is a B2B SEO company offering time-tested, SEO services including on-page, off page and tech SEO. Please contact us for details.
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