These days, businesses consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a key component in their marketing strategies to get more leads and drive more traffic. It has been tested for years that properly done SEO contributes to the success of the overall business operations. It’s a cliche, but each and every business wants to be N1 on the Search Engine Result Page.

Is it possible? Yes! Do you need to put in lots of effort? Comparably, yes! Is it worth trying? Absolutely yes! All the efforts in SEO will result in lots of traffic and new leads. Obviously, SEO does NOT work as advertising, and the results are rather seen in the long-term, but it is as important as other branches of digital marketing. In fact, around $65 billion is annually spent on search engine optimization.

Depending on the type and the niche of your company your marketing strategies can be targeted towards other businesses or, directly, customers, or all together. B2B usually refers to the type when the business is offering products or services to other businesses. For instance, if you are a marketing agency, you are most probably working B2B, as you offer your marketing services to other businesses that might not have their own marketing department. It is obvious that the two segments – businesses and customers – have different buying habits and characteristics. Hence, it is important to know your target very well to adjust your strategy for reaching them.

Exactly the same is the case with SEO. You should clarify whether you are targeting businesses or customers, directly with your SEO strategies. By the way, for SEO it doesn’t really matter whether you work from home or you have a team sitting in the office. When you have a better understanding of your target audience, you write high-quality content and build good links, that’s what matters for the success of your strategy. Of course, be it an SEO targeted to customers or businesses, it still remains SEO, so you should take into account what is SEO used for and how it is done.

What is B2B SEO?

Let’s see what SEO is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. To put it more clearly, SEO specialists optimize the website or page for the search engines to easily find your page and show it on SERP results based on the query on the search bar. SEO consists of technical optimization, what is on-site, and what is off-site. These include optimizing the content on the webpage and link building. Search engines pay quite a lot of attention to whether your webpage is linked to other authoritative pages or not. Basically, in SEO these branches should work together in harmony and the successful results are based on those.

We once tackled what B2B is and what nuances B2B marketing carries. B2B stands for Business to Business, and in comparison with B2C – Business to Customers, where the target is the customer segment, here, other businesses are targeted by another business. Let us pretend, you are a consulting agency and you offer business consultations to other businesses or startups. In this case, you have B2B services and if you want to make more profit out of your business, then your marketing strategies should lean on B2B characteristics.

It is obvious that businesses and customers have different approaches when they make a purchase, or simply become a lead. It is also obvious that you should take care of your page’s technical aspect to be SEO friendly.

• This also includes proper web hosting for WordPress, or whatever your webpage is built on.
• Make sure your domain is also secured.
• If you have website chatbots, make sure they are operating smoothly and are not causing any bugs or making the website heavy.

It is also important to have on-page and off-page SEO done properly, just peppered with the necessary steps to target B2B with your strategy.

Complete B2B SEO Strategy to Increase Business Productivity

Before you start thinking about getting more leads and driving more traffic from the B2B sector, make sure you have your B2B SEO strategy well planned. Planning is important and you don’t want to mess up with unplanned actions. In SEO, everything is intertwined and you would want to have a nicely structured journey with all aspects of SEO to ensure your goals are met and the results are measurable. Properly done SEO works nicely designed business cards – it’s the face of your website in front of search engine bots and you want it to be promising for the bots to index your pages.

There are various B2B SEO strategies that businesses implement, but their key component is to have properly done SEO targeting the B2B spectrum. Here is the strategy we offer:

• Target the right audience for your niche
• Complete a detailed keyword analysis
• Don’t forget about the power of content
• Link Building is an essential part of SEO

For a better result, everything should be done properly in your B2B SEO strategy. But if your goal is to have a perfect B2B SEO strategy, then you should carefully plan your content, do keyword analysis, pay much more attention to link building and from where you get your links, and, of course, find and target the right audience.

Here is the part, where we say: research, research and, again, research!

1. Target the right audience for your niche

Your efforts will not be paid if you make them towards the wrong audience. Choosing your target audience is one of the first things you should do when planning your B2B SEO strategy. Narrow down your audience, find your real buyers. Let’s take the example, where you are a consulting agency. Write down all the services you offer; business consultation, mentorship, eCommerce marketing, leadership, IT related, finances.

Let us say your scope of expertise is offering consultation to IT / tech companies for everything, marketing, sales, finances, etc. Moreover, you have your services only offline, and you are based in LA, California. Then your target audience would include all the IT companies, maybe the newly opened ones in your area. You can of course later grow your audience using different tactics, but initially, you should clearly acknowledge your target audience. Remember, it is so important to know who you are targeting before you target and put so much effort into it.

2. Complete a detailed keyword analysis

The choice of keywords is also significant. You should definitely know which keyword you want to rank for and which keywords are the most relevant to you. That is when you do your keyword research and the analysis of your previous keywords. You can use different tools for your keyword research and analysis.

As your target is to have businesses becoming leads for you, then you should most probably have long-tailed keywords, where you would push them to take steps. When you already have your keywords, and they are being used for a while, you can simply analyze them to see how much traffic, or how many leads are coming from those keywords. All in all, you can adjust, change or replace your keywords based on the results of the analysis.

3. Don’t forget about the power of content

Where should you use your keywords? Right, in the content. The quality of the content is extremely important. The content you provide on your website should be relevant. Your titles should represent the content and vice versa. The content should be well written with smooth transitions. Most importantly, it should be written in an easy way, remember you are not defending a thesis, you are writing for a large audience having a different background and you aim to be understood at least by the majority of them.

Make sure, you also have your headings well planned, if there are images, then provide their meta descriptions, and so on. Basically, when you write the content you need to make sure that search engine crawlers will not face difficulties when they go through your page, your content and the bots understand the meaning of what you say on that specific page.

4. Link building is an essential part of SEO

You have your target audience, you know your keywords, you have written the content, but there is something missing. What’s that? Ah, yes, the backlinks. Search engine bots spare a lot of attention and importance to the links that you have on your content. If the links you have included are “good” links, meaning that they are relevant to your business, are from high authority websites and are natural to be included, then it would positively affect your SEO strategy. So, link building is extremely important.

Let’s say one of your clients has a blog article on its website about business consulting. They might have stated your company name in their article, but forgot to give you a link. You can write them and ask to insert a link to your company’s website there. This is just an option for link building. You can use many other strategies for link building, but it is important to place your links smoothly, look natural and relevant to the content. Search engines highly value the quality of the links.

In brief

Having a B2B SEO strategy is important to drive more traffic and get more leads. There are many strategies to serve the needs of B2B SEO. One of them is to clearly decide the target audience relevant to your business’s essence, research keywords and analyze the existing ones, create top-notch content, which is cohesive and precise, and get high-quality links from relevant websites. Following this strategy would, of course, assist in succeeding in your B2B SEO needs, but you will need to make sure that other components of SEO are also taken into account to have better results.

If you need further support driving traffic with your current SEO strategy, get in touch with our SEO Agency today!