A Comprehensive B2B SEO Strategy that will give you the Best Results

Not gonna lie, business is hard. There’s always so much to do that 24 hours in a day seems like 5 minutes. It takes so much effort and patience to get to where you are. Here’s the catch though, there’s nothing more rewarding than getting the results you wanted. This is exactly what happens when you get into B2B SEO, too.

What is SEO for B2B?

To put it simply, the literal meaning is search engine optimization for business-to-business set up. SEO for B2B is a series of boosting strategies – both on-site and off-site – made to your online assets so that they are aligned with Google’s goal. Basically, the objective here is to make your content and your website more accessible, relevant, and valuable. If you do B2B SEO successfully, you will be able to increase the quantity and quality of organic traffic to your website. You will have a more cost-efficient source of leads and a higher chance of conversion.

How Does SEO for B2B Works?

SEO for B2B is highly effective if you understand the ranking signals. While there are several factors for you to rank, there are three aspects that will affect the SEO performance more than others. These three categories are:

1. On-page non-technical SEO

This refers to optimizations done to your content.
For example: proper use of keywords, making meta descriptions, and optimizing titles and headers.

2. On-page technical SEO

This refers to technical optimizations done to the website.
For example: improving load speed, implementing responsive design, fixing AMP, SSL, SML, etc.

3. Off-page SEO

This refers to any external aspects (outside of your website) that will affect your SEO results.
For example: backlinks, a.k.a links that lead to your website.

Once you understand these aspects, you will be able to make sound decisions in creating a flawless SEO Strategy. There are two approaches to search engine optimization in your business: B2B and B2C.

B2B SEO vs. B2C SEO

How is SEO for B2B different from B2C? SEO has one objective and that is to increase and improve organic traffic. But there are different approaches depending on who you’re targeting. Which brings us to the question, who is your audience? Identifying who your audience is will lead you to the right direction in planning your SEO strategies. Your approach will either be other businesses needing your products or services, or direct consumers who will buy directly from you. So, what’s the difference between business-to-business and business-to-consumer approach? Check out this straightforward comparison table below.

	B2B	B2C
Target Audience	Made for decision- makers	Made for a broad audience
Target Keywords	Low-volume	High-volume keywords
CPC for Keywords	High CPCs	Low CPCs
Nature of Content	Highly tactical	Emotional and fun
Social Media Marketing	Minimal or less social media promotion	Actively promoting on social media

Based on the table above, you’ll see that it involves your audience, content, keywords, and promotion. Seeing it side-by-side allows us to draw a line between the two approaches in SEO and see how different they actually are. To summarize, a B2B SEO strategy should be informative, specific, and professional. On the other hand, B2C SEO should be appealing to people’s emotions, easily accessible, and memorable. There are so many more aspects to learn about but these will really get you to the door and bring you the results you’re looking for.

Do this B2B Strategy for Best Results

Want to improve your online presence and generate quality business leads? Here’s how!

1. Search Intent Discovery

If you’ve been following our blogs for a while, you’d know that identifying your audience is crucial to making marketing strategies like this one. You have to find out what your target audience is searching for and why they’re searching that. You can do this through market research, buyer personas, analytics, and many more.

2. Proper Keyword Research

Keywords play a massive part in improving your SEO. They aren’t just any normal words, they are words and phrases that searchers use when typing into the search engine. The key to using the keywords that will give you great results is to choose relevant and popular keywords for your target audience. The question is, how do you know if they are relevant and popular? Look at the metrics. These are measured by monthly search volume and keyword difficulty. According to Semrush, you’ll want to use keywords that have high volumes without overly competitive rates. At the same time, maintain a healthy balance between low-volume and medium-volume keywords.

3. Content Development (with Target Audience in Mind)

When folks say, “content is king”, you gotta believe them because no matter how much effort you put into optimizations, none of them will be able to pull up the ranks of weak and low-quality content. Your SEO performance will depend on your content’s strength so it’s important to develop a thorough content plan. A good content strategy starts with knowing your audience. Then, everything else will follow. Here are a few other things you could do to help you with content planning.

1. Read other articles

Type in a keyword and check the articles in the results
Observe how they wrote their content – format, readability, length, organization of thoughts, and information
Take note and make an even better article

2. Create a clear structure

Outline the flow of your article including your introduction, pain points, solutions, conclusions, and other relevant information
In B2B content, avoid hard selling and sounding promotional

3. Insert keywords naturally

Avoid overstuffing as this can affect your ranking
Use keywords as if they are truly a part of your content, not just inserted there for the algorithm (even though it is)
Distribute keywords throughout the article
Use keywords on headers, too

4. Use links to your advantage

Use external or outbound links to prove claims and points mentioned in your content
Use internal links to lead to other pages in your website

5. Include other forms of media such as:

Images
Infographics
Charts and tables
Illustrations
Videos
Different forms of media keeps people engaged, especially the visual folks

4. Implement On-Page Technical SEO

We’ve covered a little bit about on-page non-technical SEO earlier in the content development section. Now, we must focus on the technical stuff such as:

Ensuring optimal load speed
Include mobile-responsiveness
Site must use https instead of http
Fix any crawl issues
Apply structured data markups

These are just some of the things that need to be done. When optimizing your website, always remember to make sure that your audience can consume your content easily and navigate through your website seamlessly. While you’re at it, also see to it that search engines can understand your content and all the other elements in your website.

5. Reach Out for Link Building

Link building is a must in SEO for B2B. Backlinks or inbound links remain to be the most important ranking factor, thus helping your site rank higher in the SERPs.

Guest blogging
Social media links
Linkable or downloadable assets
Broken link building
Unlinked brand mentions
Round-ups and listicles

Final Thoughts

The concept of search engine optimization is still the same as before, but with a few slight differences when comparing B2B to B2C. As a business owner, marketer or content specialist, you have to understand where you and your brand stands so you can create the best SEO and content strategy that will bring great results.