In a digital world where there’s a seemingly endless number of strategies for B2B lead acquisition and brand awareness, there’s one that truly stands out for its cost-effectiveness and long-term value: B2B SEO (search engine optimization, which yes, does really work).
When done right, B2B SEO enhances not only your overall content marketing strategy, but boosts your website and effectively makes leads come to you.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
B2B SEO is the process of optimizing web pages so they rank for terms being searched by key business decision-makers. The goal of B2B SEO is to not only reach these decision-makers, but delight them and prove yourself a valuable resource for their business needs.
Does your B2B Website have all 10? Learn the secrets to driving more traffic to your website, generating more leads, and ultimately increasing sales.
The biggest difference between B2C and B2B SEO is the target audience. The end goal of B2C (business-to-consumer) SEO strategies is for businesses to reach their target audience of consumers. The end goal for B2B SEO strategies, on the other hand, is for businesses to reach their target audience of business leaders and key stakeholders.
The type of content that’s created for B2C SEO and B2B SEO is different, too. B2C SEO content may appeal more to a buyer’s emotions and focus more on storytelling, whereas B2B SEO content may focus more on logic, hard numbers, and thought-leadership.
While the end goals for SEO and SEM (search engine marketing) are similar, their strategies differ. Key differences include:
Think of SEM as the channel to focus on if you need big results quickly (but you’re going to cough up some cash for it), and think of SEO as the free long-term strategy that may take some time to build.
There are plenty of B2B SEO strategies businesses can utilize to put the right messages in front of the right decision makers. Read on to learn the best strategies your business should use for maximum organic growth.
The first step to take in a B2B SEO strategy is to identify your target audience. The target audience for B2B content typically consists of business leaders, executives, and other business-decision makers. The goal of B2B, after all, is to market your business as a solution to another business’ problem.
Once you narrow down your target audience, put yourself in their shoes and think about their needs. Think about things like their:
Putting yourself in your target audience’s shoes and thinking about their needs helps you craft your messages—and sparks content ideas.
If you’ve created B2B content already, inventory it and analyze it. Identify key topics you’ve already created content around and how that content has performed. Ask yourself:
Analyzing the content that already exists is essential for SEO content planning. That way, you don’t accidentally cannibalize existing content and create more work for yourself.
While analyzing your content, it’s also crucial to look at your data and see how the content performs online already. Tools you can use to analyze organic search data include:
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Creating content to boost your B2B SEO is a smart move, but you want to be strategic about the topics you want to have authority in. Having authority in a topic means you want to be seen as an expert in that specific topic field. Typically, B2B companies that create content aim to have authority in their industries.
Building authority in specific topics is an extremely important element for SEO. For starters, “authority” is a key factor in Google’s E-A-T standards (more on that shortly)—the “a” in E-A-T stands for authority. Authority is also important for building trust with your audience.
Trust is important to have from both a content and consumer perspective. Statistics show that, according to a survey, a whopping 81 percent of consumers say they need to be able to trust a brand in order to buy from them.
Since the ultimate goal for B2B SEO is to boost your Google rankings and make other businesses come to you organically, and ideally have them turn into clients or partners of yours, it’s important to create authoritative, trustworthy content.
As previously mentioned, it’s incredibly important to keep Google’s E-A-T standards at the forefront of your content creation plan with B2B SEO. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. According to Semrush, E-A-T is a crucial way that Google looks at pages on the web, and how it differentiates between low-quality content and high-quality content.
So, how do you create E-A-T content? Keep these tips in mind:
Doing keyword research is another crucial element for your B2B SEO strategy. Keyword research is the process of looking up search terms (also known as queries) and creating content that ranks well for them. Important tips for keyword research include:
The structure of your content is an important pillar of B2B SEO to pay attention to. Content structure refers to how your content is laid out. If you’re writing a blog post or article, content structure includes:
Remember, at the end of the day, Google’s main job is to provide the best possible answers for search queries. Being strategic with your content structure will help Google better recognize your content.
For instance, instead of writing one long paragraph, break your piece up into scannable paragraphs. According to Medium, paragraphs that are too long (and too short) are not favorable for SEO. Instead, focus on paragraphs that have between 100 and 200 words each.
Does your B2B Website have all 10? Learn the secrets to driving more traffic to your website, generating more leads, and ultimately increasing sales.
As important content creation and on-page SEO are for B2B SEO overall, technical SEO is another crucial element to hone in on. Technical SEO refers to the technical elements of your website that help it rank higher on search engines. Some elements of technical SEO include:
Why is technical SEO important? Technical SEO helps you inform Google that your site is top-notch and easy to maneuver and, as such, is the best website to rank on the first search engine results page (SERP). If it’s been a while since you’ve checked on your website’s technical SEO and overall website health, take the time to perform a thorough analysis. Take a close look at your website design, too. The excellent content you produce will need a great home, after all.
Producing thought-leadership content can help your B2B SEO strategy on multiple fronts. For starters, it helps you build credibility and trust, which search engines can reward. It can also help with your business development and lead generation goals.
How? If other business leaders see your thought leadership piece, they may be impressed with your industry insights and thoughts. As such, they may be inclined to take action, whether that’s following you on social media, following your blog, signing up for your newsletter, or reaching out to you directly about your product or service.
Examples of thought leadership content include:
Landing pages are great ways to generate leads in B2B. A landing page is a page a web user lands on after clicking on an ad or coming from another specific campaign. Landing pages are beneficial because you can tailor your messaging directly to the user—you already have a good idea of their needs and intentions since they’re coming from a specific campaign. That also allows you to create a strong page call-to-action.
You should optimize your landing pages for SEO, too, so they have a better shot at ranking on the first SERP. Many of the same on-page SEO principles apply to optimizing a landing page compared to optimizing content, including:
Interlinking your B2B SEO content is a strong SEO strategy to incorporate into your content creation strategy. Interlinking your content means you add hyperlinks to your content throughout your pieces. When you interlink your content, you signal to Google that you have other relevant content within the topic you’re writing about, and therefore, have expertise in that area.
Interlinking content has other valuable SEO benefits, including:
Key tips to keep in mind when interlinking your content include:
Looking to take your business to the next level? Mediaboom is here to help. Sign up for a free consultation with one of our digital experts.
We get it—B2B leaders have a lot on their plate, and doubling down on B2B SEO can feel like an uphill battle. However, it’s an extremely beneficial organic strategy that, when done right, increases authority, ranking, and ideally, lead acquisition.
If you want to get a pulse on your current SEO performance, and learn how it can be improved, contact Mediaboom today for a free SEO evaluation. Our expert team will work with you to evaluate your current SEO strategy and explore where there’s room for growth, including with local SEO optimization and solutions.
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