What are the most challenging aspects of growing a B2B business? Of course, you need to work on strengthening client relationships to boost retention and loyalty. You must also focus on improving the sales process to nurture leads and convert them into paying customers.
However, acquiring new leads by building a strong online presence continues to be one of the biggest struggles for B2B business owners. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) steps into the picture. When judiciously used, it can go a long way to help B2B organizations skyrocket online visibility and even drive conversions.
B2B vs. B2C SEO
From the perspective of search engines, there’s hardly any difference between B2B and B2C SEO. Irrespective of your target demographic, you still have to focus on the same steps, such as:
- Keyword research
- Competitor analysis
- Backlink building
- Technical SEO
However, from a business point of view, there’s a sharp contrast between B2B and B2C SEO. That is mostly because, unlike B2C organizations, B2B companies don’t target individual consumers. Instead, their target demographic includes key decision-makers in relevant businesses.
Depending on the type of product/service you’re selling, your target buyers could include CFOs, CMOs, sales managers, HR managers, etc. in a company. Reaching out to these senior officials requires a renewed approach to keyword research and content creation.
Also, it’s worth mentioning here that B2B businesses involve a more complex sales process than their B2C counterparts. It’s only natural considering that buying a marketing automation tool for your company would involve more deliberation and analysis than getting a new couch for your home.
So, how should you go about developing a B2B SEO strategy for your organization? Let’s find out.
1. Curate Your Toolbox
Building and implementing a B2B SEO strategy isn’t just about finding popular keywords and creating keyword-rich blog posts. Instead, it involves extensive research and analysis. From reviewing your website, evaluating your current strategy to monitoring your competitors’ target keywords – you need to perform various complex tasks.
Manually handling these steps can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Instead, you should look for useful digital marketing tools to simplify the process. Whether you want to add schema markup to different web pages or check a competitor’s inbound link profile, you’ll find various powerful tools to accomplish each task.
2. Identify Your Buyer Personas
Building any SEO strategy requires you to have a thorough understanding of the target audience. It’s all the more crucial when you want to target senior decision-makers and C-suite executives in an organization.
To begin with, you need to identify the type of businesses that’ll likely need your products/services. Next, you should look at their organizational hierarchy and find out which officials you wish to target.
As a ground rule, you should have a firm understanding of the challenges and pain points they’re going to face at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Next, you need to outline well-defined buyer personas for different segments of your target audience.
Simply put, a buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal buyer. It outlines their likes, preferences, aspirations, pain points, online behavior, purchase habits, etc. You can use online surveys and market research to create detailed buyer personas.
3. Map Your Keywords to the Sales Funnel
Keyword research is likely the most crucial step of every building an SEO strategy. It plays an even more important role in B2B SEO. That’s because you need to target specific, long-tail keywords that are relevant to your target buyers at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Make sure you thoroughly understand each step of the sales funnel before you get started with keyword research. Also, identify the needs and pain points of your target buyers at every step. Next, you need to find relevant and specific keywords for each stage. You should also understand the search intent associated with each keyword.
It’s worth mentioning here that you shouldn’t hesitate to target low-volume, high-intent keywords for the bottom of the funnel. While these keywords may not drive plenty of traffic, they’ll go a long way to help you attract buyers who are ready to make a purchase. That, in turn, will amplify the conversion rate and revenue.
4. Outline a Scalable Content Strategy
Irrespective of whether you’re promoting a B2B or B2C business, high-quality content plays a crucial role in your SEO strategy. However, when it comes to B2B SEO, you should focus on establishing authority with original and insightful thought leadership content.
Make sure you deliver meaningful and valuable content to attract prospects at different stages of the sales funnels. Also, don’t forget to update and optimize your service/product pages to engaged prospects at the bottom of the sales funnel.
SEO isn’t just useful for driving organic traffic to your website. It can be instrumental in amplifying sales and revenue for B2B businesses. Make sure you create distinct, well-defined buyer personas and deliver optimized, meaningful, and engaging content for each stage of the sales funnel.
What B2B SEO tactics are you using in 2021? Share your suggestions in the comments section below.
