B2B SEO

Let’s say, Jenny has launched a small clothing company, and she is growing instantly! She is getting lots of orders in a day and thus, she needs someone to deal with her finances. To find someone eligible, she goes to Google and looks for some companies. She clicks on the first result and contacts with them.

This is a small but effective example of B2B SEO strategies and how to work them. In the profound world of digital marketing, if you serve in the Business-to-Business (B2B) realm, SEO is and will be, your best friend. However, what is SEO? Well, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies in today’s world. Even though it is beneficial for both B2B and B2C companies, today we will focus on B2B SEO strategies. Before going into more details, let’s delve into the amazing world of SEO!

What Is B2B SEO?

B2B SEO basically stands for Business-to-Business Search Engine Optimization. What does it mean? B2B SEO consists of different strategies, from keyword analysis to page metadata, which will boost your website’s visibility and reachability. In other words, when you effectively implement B2B SEO strategies on your website, your website will rank higher on the search engine results pages, which in turn will return you as many decision-makers. Each category of SEO endeavor can help increase your website’s chance to reach your target audience. Let’s check them together!

• On-page Optimization: On-page optimization consists of the techniques used to optimize individual web pages to rank higher in SERPs. On-page optimization makes use of a variety of factors, such as title tags and meta descriptions, URL structure, and content optimization.
• Off-page Optimization: Off-page optimization refers to the techniques used to enhance a website’s search engine ranking via external endeavors. This includes link building, social media marketing, and brand mentions and citations.
• Technical SEO: Technical SEO stands for the approaches used to improve a website’s technical performance. These methods can be optimizing site speed and performance, mobile optimization, schema markup, and structured data.
• Content Optimization: Content optimization, Content SEO, refers to any strategic endeavor you implement to improve your content’s quality so that it can rank higher in SERPs and reach your target audience quickly. 

Your website may be skyrocketing in one of those SEO fields while falling behind in one another. With B2B SEO strategies, you can find what you are lacking or not. Hence, you can improve your website ranking in those areas.

 You might be wondering whether B2C SEO strategies are enough for you or not. Well, there are some significant differences to decide that. If you are wondering about those, stay tuned! Let’s move to the next title to discuss that.

The Difference Between B2B SEO and B2C SEO

Even though it seems like B2B SEO and B2C SEO are the same things, actually they are not. In basic terms, both aim for higher rankings on SERPs. However, it is not as simple as that sounds. There are some major differences among those two and based on your company type, you should choose the one that suits you. So, let’s learn about those major differences!

Sales Stages

When we compare the stages of the B2B sales funnel and the B2C sales funnel, it seems like they save the same steps. However, the time and detailed work they spend on these stages is different. In B2B SEO, the person who buys the product conducts comprehensive research in the “research” stage. That means, the potential customer gathers a lot of information in that stage before making a decision. 

It is actually a process in which the buyer and seller share information with one another constantly. The potential buyer looks for comments about the company, the demo versions’ availability, informative videos, and negotiating contracts with the company. Hence, it can be understood that B2B SEO is a time-consuming process compared to B2C SEO. Since this process takes a lot of time, each step in the sales funnel should be prepared diligently. Website owners should create detailed and informative content about each step in the funnel so that they reach their potential customers quickly.

Low Volume – Longtail Keywords

One of the biggest differences between B2B SEO and B2C SEO is the keywords they are aiming for. In B2C SEO strategies, you aim for high-volume keywords because you want to be the number one result in most searched words. However, when it comes to B2B, things are a little different. 

In B2B Search Engine Optimization, you also spend your time and effort on low-volume keywords. Why though, you might be saying. Well, even though these words are low volume, these keywords give you a clue about your audience. These words show you the specific research your target audience is doing. In other words, the people who use those keywords are the most interested ones in your product because they use those specific words. These low volume highly specific phrases are called Longtail Keywords. 

For example, an interested and motivated decision maker would be looking for “How to use AI SEO tools?” or “the benefits of AI SEO tools” instead of asking a broad and high-volume question such as “What is AI”. That shows the person who knows and does research about this specific topic will be more likely to engage with your content and your product. Thus, creating content for that specific longtail keyword and linking your product will help you reach your target audience quicker than a high-volume keyword. 

Low Conversion Rate

The more decision maker spends time on sales stages, the more it leads to a low conversion rate, as a result, we can say. Since the decision-maker spends so much time conducting comprehensive research on the thing they want to get, they engage with a lot of content on your website. However, this engagement does not necessarily mean that the decision-maker business will buy your product or service immediately. Thus, it can end up with a low conversion rate for your website. That’s why you need to use a B2B SEO strategy focusing on content creation to increase the conversion rate on your website. 

Content Creation for B2B SEO

When you create content for B2C, you tend to write or create engaging, interesting, inventive, and eye-catching content. However, when it comes to B2B SEO, your focus as a company is creating informative, data-driven, and professional content so that the decision-giver can decide upon your service. You will need different types of content for each stage in the sales process.  That means, your content should be detailed and specific based on the needs of the stages. For example, someone who is looking for an accountant firm will not search for just “accountant companies”. Probably, they will specify it and mention their area, i.e., “accountants for restaurants”. If you give that service and rank higher in those searches, you need to create specific content for that purpose.

Overall, even though there are some other differences between B2C and B2B Search Engine optimization, the four we mentioned are the most important ones. When you analyze those steps, you can decide upon what you need and start to improve your website! However, if you are already looking for ways to form a B2B SEO marketing campaign, let’s move into our next chapter in detail!

How to build your B2B SEO campaign?

Since we understand the differences between B2C and B2B SEO, it is crucial to create an effective B2B SEO Campaign. Reaching a lot of decision-makers can be hard and take a lot of time. However, when you have the correct strategies and effective tools, you can turn this process into a benefit. Without taking your time, let’s discuss the B2B SEO strategies to create campaigns.

1. Determine your audience

What lies at the heart of SEO is knowing your audience. In other words, in order to create effective SEO strategies, you need to know and understand who your target audience is. To do an effective B2B SEO, you need to know your market, your rivals, your decision-makers’ profile, and the stakeholders in other companies you are reaching for. Thus, you need to conduct comprehensive research to analyze which people you are reaching for. 

To help with this process, you can create buyer personas so that you can have an idea of the people you aim for. Buying personas are hypothetical people who have common features with the people you qualify as potential customers or decision makers. For example, “Nancy, a content writer, among 20 to 40 ages with 5-10 years of experience” can be one of the buyer personas for your company. 

2. Create SEO-Optimized Landing Pages

While attracting other businesses, you should not overlook your main goals in SEO and key performance indicators. That means, you need to create SEO-optimized product or service pages. We know that you want to rank higher on SERPs and become the number one result for your audience. However, we cannot say that every way that goes to success is possible in this situation because our main goal is getting discion-makers not visitors. 

To create SEO-optimized landing pages, first, you need to analyze what are those on your website. Landing pages, or product pages are the web pages that describe your service or product, majorly highlighting its benefits, usage areas, reasons to choose that company, and multiple CATs (call-to-action). For many B2B companies, these are called “pillar pages” in which they touch upon a specific topic, for example, “What is B2B SEO?”

To optimize landing pages, you need to look at their keyword analysis, meta descriptions, title tags, internal links, and so on. You don’t know how to do those? Don’t worry, that’s the topic of the next titles!

3. Perform Keyword Research

To be able to optimize your landing pages, you need to conduct comprehensive keyword research for your website. How? You need to use a reliable and high-quality keyword rank checker available for you. 

Dopinger’s Keyword Rank Checker is a tool used for analyzing the rankings of keywords based on their search engine results. With that, you can look for your websites’ and your competitors’ ranking on SERPs. That tool includes different metrics such as current ranking position, past ones, changes over time, competitive analysis, and volumes of keywords. 

Thanks to the keyword rank checker, you can find the words needing optimization. As we said earlier, to conduct a successful B2B SEO, you need to find low-volume keywords for your website. To find those, you will need a keyword rank checker. As you can see, the tool shows you the volume, and popularity based on the date you choose. Moreover, by clicking on Volume, you can change the layout starting from highest to lowest or vice versa.

Furthermore, you can analyze your competitors once you click on the keyword you want to see results. There, you can see where your content ranks, who your competitors are, and so on. This is a really effective feature for B2B SEO marketing strategies. Since we need to focus on specific longtail keywords, we can see who ranks higher from us, how they achieve that, in which areas we need improvement, and so on just by clicking on the word itself!

Hence, to perform successful B2B SEO strategies, you should use a keyword rank checker in which you can both analyze yourself and your competitors. Seeing the popularity of the keywords can give you an idea about where to optimize, in addition to giving clues about your target audience and what they are searching for.

4. Implement Structured Data on Your Site

According to Google, the engine works hard to understand the content of your page. To “help” Google, you can give explicit clues about your webpage so that the engine can read you easily. What are those clues? Of course, Structed Data! Structured data is a way of providing information on the website and classifying the content you have. This is generally the standardized version of it. For example, on a product page, what is the product, what are the benefits of it, how can you buy it, and so on can be your structured data.  

You might be thinking how can I know my structured data? Well, don’t worry. Again, we have a tool for that. Structured Data Testing Tool is an important tool for B2B SEO strategies. This tool can help you how to improve your structured data.

Under the structured data part, you can see Schema.org items, open graph items, and microformats that are present on your website or webpage.

You can ask why do I need to implement structured data to my website? Well, it eases the job of search engines. This way, it can recommend you to your target audience more quickly and in higher rankings. For example, Rotten Tomatoes implemented this strategy on their 100,000 landing pages and they received a 25% higher click-through rate. When you implement structured data to your website in B2B SEO strategies, you can increase the rate of gaining “customers”! 

5. Perform Technical SEO Audit

As we mentioned before Technical SEO stands for the technical improvements made on the website. These improvements can be site speed and performance, mobile optimization, schema markup, and structured data. Before adding or changing anything on your website, we definitely recommend performing a Technical SEO Audit on your website. 

If you do not know how to perform one, the Structured Data Testing Tool we mentioned earlier gives detailed information about Technical SEO on your website. You can analyze your mobile optimization there and understand what is going well on your website and what needs to change. Hence, we can say that blindly changing anything on the website will not result in any benefits because you won’t know whether it was working or not earlier. Thus, conducting and performing an audit can help you see what needs to be done in your B2B SEO strategies. 

6. Improve Page Speeds

Not only in B2B SEO but in overall SEO strategies, page speed is something crucial for website performance and ranking. Thus, you probably won’t want to ignore that. No matter how optimized your content is if it takes forever to load, it will rank lower and lower due to that problem. Just imagine yourself as a customer. If a page loads slowly, you will probably leave it. However, we do not want our potential customers to leave our website. How can we make our web page faster? Well, let’s learn the strategies, then!

• Optimizing Images: You can compress some pictures without sacrificing the quality. You can also choose the suitable format for the pictures. Moreover, you can make use of lazy-loading pictures, which appear as the person scrolls down the page.
• Minimizing HTTP Requests: You can decrease the number of elements on your page, for example, scripts, stylesheets, and images. You can also combine multiple CSS and JavaScript files into one file and minimize them.
• Enabling Browser Caching: These caches will enable the page to load faster when the potential customer is re-visiting the web page. 

7. Off-Page B2B SEO Strategies

When it comes to B2B SEO strategies, Off-Page optimization has become more crucial than ever. Off-page SEO simply deals with the promotion on other websites and the content in third parties. How can we do effective off-page optimization? Well, these are done through link-building, social sharing, and paid promotion. Off-page optimization on B2B SEO strategies helps you to create credibility among other websites and potential decision-makers.

In B2B SEO, acquiring relevant traffic is significant if you want to rank higher. In normal cases, we believe that high traffic will result in a higher ranking. However, when it comes to B2B SEO, this activity should be relevant to your niche because, in the end, we want to attract potential business partners. Thus, when you give backlinks, advertisements, or promotions you should be careful about the quality of the link you are getting and the relevancy of the website you are being promoted on.