SEO is essential to any business wishing to succeed online, and this isn’t different when it comes to the B2B segment. And yet, they have their own particularities to address in terms of target audience and budget, just to name a few of them.
With so many options and limited reliable research, it’s understandable that some B2B experts may struggle to choose the right SEO strategies. Here are some key features of SEO that can benefit any B2B digital marketing campaign.
Things to consider: the difference between an SEO strategy for B2B and B2C
First, it’s essential to know the difference between building an SEO strategy for a B2B business versus a B2C business. Even though the aim may be the same (to rank as high as possible in Google Search results), the approach to achieving this can differ.
That is to say, in general terms:
- Most of B2B businesses hope to build a long-term relationship with their clients while most of B2C businesses are happy with a one-off purchase.
- Many B2B businesses deal with highly-priced products or services, meaning that the decision-making process is much more carefully handled by the client.
- As a consequence of the topics above, B2B clients are particularly interested in the company experience, team, reputation, and background, hardly focusing on their products only.
- B2B clients are also more likely to be happy with a company that shows up a bit lower on Google Search as long they feel that they are the most trustworthy.
So let’s see know how you can adapt the most known SEO strategies to a B2B content keeping these topics above in mind.
Invest in high quality and specialized content
How to bring people to visit your website is just the tip of the iceberg. Before you start adding SEO features, you will need to analyse the quality of your content as well, so to verify if it offers the following specifications:
- Information that provides to your client what they need to know so to make the right decision to their own businesses – it has to cover your company and your products and services as well;
- The correct amount of jargon, so they can notice that you know your industry, but they still can understand what you are saying;
- How they can contact you and what takes to buy your product;
- Any added value offered by your company, such as extended warranty, delivery service, technical support, and customer service.
So if you have already written your content, check if it meets your client’s expectations. If you haven’t done it yet, keep them in mind all the time. This is the only way that you will ensure that your visitors will become your clients in the future.
Find the best keywords
If you want to make sure that potential clients will be searching for your product online, you will need to find out how they look for it. As basic as it sounds, you need to know what they type in the search bar so you can use exactly the same words on your SEO features.
There are a few ways to find out this valuable information:
- Using Keyword Search Tools
There are several web-based keyword search tools available that you can use to get to know your clients’ favourites keywords and keyphrases, such as Ubersuggest, KeywordTool and Google Keyword Planner.
With them, you will not only check if the words or sentences you chose are trending in your industry but also see a list of suggested alternatives.
- Contracting a specialized SEO services provider:
If you think it is too much for you to handle and if you have the right budget on your hands, you can count on an SEO firm or consultant to search the best keywords for you.
You can either contract them to take charge of the whole process, or you can just pay for a recurrent service so to get your keywords evaluated (just check the recommended frequency you should be doing it as the scenario changes very quickly on the internet).
Moz has a comprehensive list of SEO services providers, and Josh Steimle can walk you through a few criteria you should consider before signing a contract.
- Asking them directly
Another thing that you can do is just ask your current clients, those that came to you through Google Search, what they did to find you online.
As most of the B2B purchase processes are long and demand several meetings, face-to-face included, you don’t even need to create a survey for it.
You can just casually ask about it as if it were part of small-talk, and leave the questionnaires for inactive clients if you think it is worthwhile.
Final thoughts: what else you should consider
In order to get noticed by the search engines, you will have to do more than just create a great website and add the right keywords to your meta-descriptions and headlines. You will need to be aware of a few more things, such as these below:
- Search engines love mobile-optimized sites, so should be yours;
- Apps have been considered as the next essential when it comes to SEO, so spend some time thinking if this is something you could offer to your clients;
- Websites that provides better user experience rank higher, and one of the things analysed by search engines is how long your visitor stays on your site – so provide resources and features to keep them there for a while;
- Fresh content is another favourite criteria, so you might want to add a blog to your website or anything else that can ensure that you will have new content published in a reasonable frequency.
Having said that it is time for you to review your digital marketing plan and see how an SEO strategy can help your B2B business to achieve its goals. As you can see, this is possible to be done, as long as you keep in mind the particularities of your industry and of your target audience.