What Is B2B SEO?
Business-to-Business (B2B) SEO describes a strategy to increase organic search engine traffic to a business’ website and improve its page rankings. B2B SEO strategy puts a business' website in front of people who are actively looking to engage with the services or purchase the products that a business offers.
B2B marketing emphasizes businesses’ buying and selling goods and services from one another. It is fundamentally different from B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing, which involves individual consumers buying from a business.
However, the basics of SEO for B2B remain the same. B2B SEO strategy emphasizes:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Content
- Technical SEO
Because SEO for B2B targets a different audience (meaning businesses, as opposed to direct consumers), it must incorporate the purchasing habits and needs of businesses directly.
Building Your B2B SEO Strategy
Establish Your Buyer Personas
A business must understand its customers, even when those customers are other businesses. A buyer persona describes the characteristics of your ideal customer. Different data points about customers can be used to draw up your buyer persona and figure out who typically engages with your products and services.
Many businesses have more than one buyer persona for their typical customers. By creating and figuring out different buyer personas, your B2B SEO tactics can target different personas. In order to create a buyer persona, look at customer data such as:
- Business type
- Size of business
- Total revenue
- Company size
- Company location
Among these data points and others, you may see trends and similarities that help you begin to sketch out your different buyer personas.
Understand Your Sales Funnel for Lead Generation
Understanding the ideal path that buyers take to become customers is critical to any marketing plan and to B2B SEO. To understand how your business’ sales funnel works, you’ll have to connect marketing and sales ideas. To do so, a salesperson or team can often describe how a new customer goes from discovering your business to actually purchasing a product or service. After that, keyword research can begin.
Your company’s existing sales data, no matter how extensive, can point to how companies find your business and become customers. Key information includes:
- Average time to purchase
- Average customer retention period and rate
- Lifetime value of a customer
- Reasons or indicators of customers leaving
Find Keywords to Target Buyer Personas
After better understanding customers, you’re ready to find target keywords. Keywords underlie SEO for B2B. By homing in on keywords and search queries that people use to find your business, you can generate more leads, convert more customers, and make your business more easily discoverable.
Keyword research can help you to locate and narrow down the search queries that people are using to find your business. Depending on their stage within the sales funnel, people may use different search queries and terms that lead them to your company.
Fortunately, there are many keyword research platforms and tools that can shed light on keyword rankings, search volume, and other qualities that reveal which keywords are best suited to your company. Popular keyword research resources include Semrush, SpyFu, Ahrefs, and others.
Map Out Your Keyword Content Strategy
Locating keywords is essential for all SEO strategies for B2B businesses. But once that fundamental step is complete, keywords and new knowledge must be put to use to be effective. While there are different ways to do this, topic clusters are one key tool for B2B SEO.
- Topic clusters provide content linked around a central topic or idea
- They often use a pillar page, which provides a hub for this specific content
- Cluster pages, which cover subtopics, link back to a pillar page
Topic clusters aren’t the only way to leverage keywords, but they provide an organized means of demonstrating topic knowledge while naturally working in keywords that can draw in site visitors and customers. Topic clusters can also share more info on topics and ideas that pertain to people at different stages of the sales funnel, underscoring their adaptability.
Capture Leads with Landing Pages
While the best B2B SEO strategy for 2023 will improve your site’s organic traffic and drive many new businesses to your company and its website, your site’s main goals shouldn’t be overlooked. Even sales and service landing pages optimized for SEO must still provide useful information that answers prospects’ questions.
Landing pages can act as pillar pages for a topic cluster, which can already play a key role in B2B lead generation SEO. But be sure that a landing page still has these qualities:
- Contains concise, useful information that answers questions
- Features clean design that separates content sections
- Combines visuals and texts
- Contains a clear CTA
A successful landing page can contain these qualities and still act as a hub for content that successfully generates leads.
Create Your B2B SEO Strategy with Us
Understanding, leveraging, and maintaining SEO for B2B requires staying on top of strategies, insights, and resources in an ever-changing field. At My Creative Mark, we specialize in helping businesses grow and finding the right strategies to propel companies forward.
For B2B companies, a big part of success involves B2B SEO tactics. We’ll be glad to share more about our knowledge of SEO for B2B and how our strategies can enhance your sales and business. Strategy breeds success, so contact us to learn more about what we can provide.
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