What Are the Core SEO Practices for B2B Professionals?

For B2B companies, SEO plays an essential role in customer acquisition. Building organic brand visibility and traffic throughout the entire sales funnel can help you meet your potential clientele no matter where they may be in the purchase process. But when it comes to SEO practices, what best practices and strategies B2B professionals should you focus on? 

This guide will help you refine your SEO B2B strategy. 

The Inherent Challenges of B2B SEO 

Search engine optimization is a complicated process for every brand, but it becomes especially challenging due to the inherent obstacles a B2B enterprise faces. For instance, common SEO obstacles in the B2B space include: 

• A longer, more complicated sales cycles
• More stakeholders involved in the decision-making process
• A higher price point
• An intangible product— such as a SaaS—that a prospective client may not even know they need
• Low volume keywords 
• Low conversion rates 

As a result, your B2B SEO strategy shouldn’t be designed to convert organic traffic into sales. Few new visitors will be ready to buy immediately. Therefore, your content and SEO efforts should be geared toward relationship nurturing with tactics like establishing thought leadership, introducing your product or service, and brand building. 

The Four Pillars of SEO Practices for B2B 

So, what comprises the core aspects of B2B SEO? 

Here are the four pillars you should build your entire strategy upon:

1. Content SEO – The content on your website is the engine that drives all of your SEO efforts. And your blog rests at the center of it all. When optimizing B2B content, the blog should include high-quality content that’s structured around answering questions related to user search intent, solving their pressing problems, and presenting solutions to their pain points. 
2. On-Page SEO – Dozens of factors go into a search algorithms page ranking equation. By tweaking on-site SEO, you can improve a page’s ability to communicate with Google and thus increase its visibility and traffic. Common on-page characteristics include:   
   • Keywords
   • Title tags
   • Meta descriptions
   • Alt Image Text
   • Link building 
   • Headers 
   • HTML
   • Geotagging
   • Industry  
3. Off-Page SEO – This is the practice of increasing your site’s authority, trust, and relevance by having it communicate with other trustworthy websites. There are several off-page tactics you can deploy to promote your content to earn backlinks, including: 
   • Link building
   • Citation building
   • Brand building
   • Social media 
   • Content marketing 
4. Technical SEO – This is the process of making sure that the website aligns with the search engine’s technical specs. Factors that go into these rankings include a site’s mobile responsiveness, page speed and performance, and image optimization. 

Best Practices for Improving B2B SEO 

If you want to drive the most value from your B2B SEO campaign, consider the following tips: 

• Create buyer personas – This is one of the most fundamental steps of B2B SEO and content creation. You need to know who your target audience is, what they want, what type of messaging they respond to, where they exist online, and so forth. Doing so will help you identify keywords and craft unique content that resonates across every stage of their sales funnel. 
• Match content with search intent – What is the ultimate goal of someone who may be searching (even if they don’t know it yet) for your services? All of your SEO content strategies should be centered around this question. Your goal is to find prospective buyers, entice them to click through, and then hold their attention by providing high-quality content. 
• Perform competitor research – What are your competitors doing? How are they reaching other businesses? Scouting out your competition enables you to identify keywords you should target or speak to certain focuses that they fail to address. 
• Build a keyword strategy to target buyers at different stages – If the prospective buyer is not at the right point in their sales journey, it may not resonate, even if you craft high-quality content. That’s why it’s important to perform keyword research and then build out content topic clusters. Doing so enables you to demonstrate the breadth and depth of your expertise while targeting prospects at various stages.  

Semgeeks—A NJ SEO Company

SEO isn’t a quick-fix strategy, especially for B2Bs. It takes time, trial and error, and persistence. It requires a hands-on approach with constant monitoring and optimization.

Think of SEO like a garden. If you water it and give it the proper nutrients and care it deserves, it will bloom over time.  

Need an SEO gardener? 

At Semgeeks, we’re an AdWord agency that can help you cultivate the perfect B2B SEO strategy—one that includes technical SEO, voice search optimization, strategic link-building, local SEO, and more. 

If you’re ready to start driving organic traffic to your site, let’s talk. 

Sources: 

Search Engine Journal. 12 Essential On-Page SEO Factors You Need To Know. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/essential-factors/#close

Ashley Rodriguez

Lead SEO Strategist

Ashley Rodriguez is a SEO Strategist with a degree in Marketing from Sam Houston State University. With a passion for top of funnel awareness, she is able to provide insight and direction regarding strategic planning and initiatives, while driving improved results and organic visibility for all web properties. In her free time, you can find her at the beach or watching sports.