Unlike B2C marketing, B2B marketing can be tough to navigate because you are trying to persuade not just one customer for a single purchase but many people of a company, who are professionals themselves, including shareholders, to make a single investment. Thus, you have to be more thorough and to the point with everything, right from title tags and meta descriptions to blogs and social media posts.
Whether you are yourself an SEO professional or trying to do SEO of your B2B website on your own, the following guide will give you a glance on the roadmap that will help you master B2B SEO.
1. Gather Data that is Clean, Concise, and Useful
Most SEO strategies include keyword research as the first step. However, when creating a roadmap to do B2B SEO, first of all, you need to collect data that is clean, precise, and useful. This data will help you make critical decisions when going further down the SEO process.
How to ensure that your collected data is precise and valuable?
There are three ways to make sure that you have clean and precise data that will make a difference to your SEO results:
Set up scripts properly: First, make sure that your website scripts that gather data are optimized and properly embedded so that they gather data every day. To keep the number of scripts minimum, stick to implementing those scripts that you can through Google Tag Manager.
Use filters: Implement filters to remove website sessions that are of no use to you. The main data that you don’t need includes: your client’s traffic, your office/remote worker traffic, and traffic from spam websites. Besides, you will also need hostname filters to make sure that sessions actually hit your website and not the host.
Create tangible goals: To reach your audience and make actual conversions, you will need goals that will grow your client list and overall revenue. When doing B2B SEO, focus on three goals: micro conversions, macro conversions, and online reputation management.
- Micro conversion goals might include downloading your white papers, research articles, or case studies and signing up for your weekly or monthly newsletters.
- Macro conversion goals might include attracting leads in different ways like filling the contact form, using your service/product/concept for a trial basis for free or at a reduced price, or requests for demos.
- Online reputation goals, as the name suggests, are those that create a positive brand image and build trust among your clients and customers. When your business is already considered as an esteemed player in the market, other businesses that need services and products like yours will be readily willing to become your client or partner.
2. Evaluate the Technical Health of Your B2B Website (Technical SEO)
Once you have complete information that is devoid of any random, meaningless data, it’s time to assess the technical health of your website. Anything that impacts the indexation, crawling, or traffic coming to your B2B website is critical for your B2B SEO.
What to look for when doing Technical SEO for a B2B website?
To ensure that the technical health of your website is in the best condition, you need to focus on the following:
Fixing Crawler Issues
Crawler Issues can bring down your website. These issues can include Page Not Found errors (404 errors), duplicate content, and slow website speed.
Slow website speed and 404 errors negatively impact user experience, which ultimately shows in your leads and conversions. Work with your website development team to boost the speed of your website and ensure that the website code is clean. Keep the number of scripts as small as possible. Don’t forget to optimize all the images and videos uploaded on your website.
Duplicate content on a website must be removed from your website. When similar content appears in two or more locations, search engines do not know which URL they should display in the results.
Even if your website has the same blog posted twice or the same webpage content for two different web pages, it is going to create problems for you. The same goes for two instances of your website available.
Optimizing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
We have seen numerous B2B websites that stuff keywords randomly in title tags and meta descriptions. Many websites even have just a list of keywords in place of sensible sentences. Though it is done in the hopes of making a website rank higher, it is simply a bad practice. It is not going to make a positive impact on the image of your brand in the eyes of online searchers.
To the surprise of many, content in meta descriptions is not directly related to search engine rankings. Meta descriptions are for search engine users so that they can quickly scan and figure out which link is more useful to them. The sole purpose of adding compelling and useful meta descriptions is to increase click-through rates.
Thus, the only thing that can work in the case of meta descriptions is content that online searchers can understand and use to determine whether a website link is beneficial for them or not.
The same thing happens with the title tag because a title tag has nothing to do with your online position but can influence whether an online searcher will choose you or your competitor.
Since your target audience includes other businesses that will consider several options and different factors before they finalize their choice, your website must look professional in every way, including title tags and meta descriptions.
3. Focus on Thorough Keyword Research
Now, when your website is in its best condition, your next step should be intensive keyword research.
While doing B2B SEO, you must understand that the customer shopping journey can be very long. B2B purchases are usually big investments, and thus, businesses take their time to check out different options, conduct rigorous research, weigh down the pros and cons, and discuss them with their shareholders. Businesses need to ensure that everybody (including managers, financial advisors, and shareholders) in the decision process is on the same page before they finally decide to choose a business and make the deal.
Hence, when creating a list of keywords, you will need to consider keywords that will target the complete customer shopper journey, right from having a problem to making a purchase.
To better understand this, let’s assume you are a private label skincare product company. You will need not only the keywords like ‘private label skincare service’. To put an idea of starting a skincare business in the mind of an individual who is already planning to start a business but doesn’t know what industry to choose or where they can earn great profits, you should include keywords that focus on clearing their doubts or equipping them with useful information like ‘Is skincare business profitable?’.
You can first figure out seed keywords by reaching out to your clients, and then slowly work your way through different means like Google Search Console, YouTube search bar, B2B marketplace websites’ search bars, and other keyword tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner.
4. Create Content Strategy and Develop Content That People Want to Read
When creating your content strategy and writing content for a website, remember one thing: you need content for people who come online to research and shop, not for search engines.
Websites that have content created just for search engines and have poor quality content are not going to benefit from such content for the long term.
Also, don’t try to create irregular inbound and outbound links that are not relevant to your company and your audience.
When a large number of users come to your website only to find crappy content and bounce back quickly, it is going to get the attention of search engines like Google, and they can penalize or even block your website.
Yes, many websites have been penalized and banned for real. For those who don’t believe in websites getting banned from search engines, check out this news article.
So, stick to creating relevant and useful content for your target audience, instead of search engines.
Here are a few tips that you can keep in mind when creating relevant content.
- Create content that provide answers to the questions of your target audience.
- Write content that solves the problems and issues faced by your target audience and can be solved by your business.
- Develop content that equips your audience with information it must know before making a deal or purchase.
- Curate content that keeps them up to date on your industry trends and innovation that will eventually help or make their lives easier.
When building a content strategy, again, keep in mind the customer’s entire journey because you need to follow customers through the complete sales funnel. It will also give you ideas on what topics to write about.
5. Optimize Conversion Rates at Different Points
Writing and posting great content is not enough. Though sad, it is true. To ensure that you get real conversions, you need to focus on three types of conversion optimization.
Search result pages
It starts with your title tags and meta descriptions because these are the first two things that a user sees when making queries and finding answers online. So, ensure that your title and meta descriptions are nicely written. Online users should be able to see what to expect from the link if they click on it.
Information seekers
This optimization can be done when your potential customers are in the beginning phase of their journey. You can do this by helping them gather the right information they need. Sometimes, people don’t even know if they are actually facing a problem until you make them aware of the problem and present a solution to that problem. So, consider this aspect as well.
Lead-based
This type of optimization is needed at the stage when a buyer knows that they have a problem and are ready to find its solution. Or, at the stage when they have found that you can be helpful to them and ready to sign up for your newsletter, take a product demo, or anything that a customer does right before making a purchase.
When doing optimization, don’t rely on guesses. Use heat mapping tools and A/B tests to find out what is working for you and devise and refine your B2B SEO strategies accordingly.
Though these steps don’t include everything that needs to be done for B2B SEO, they will set you on the right track and help bring measurable and effective results.
