Business to Business (B2B) SEO is slightly different from regular SEO. Search engine optimization is a huge component to a companies’ long term success. SEO helps to gain more traffic to a companies website and to reach more customers.
There are many strategies you can use to optimize your site to appear in search engine results more frequently. B2B SEO involves companies reaching out to other businesses or executives in companies. In this article we will explore what B2B SEO is, strategies, companies, and more.
What is B2B SEO?
Before you become a B2B SEO expert, let’s first dive into what SEO is:
What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of growing website traffic by making the site appear more on search engines. SEO usually involves tweaks you can make to your website to improve its rankings when someone uses search terms related to your business in a search engine. We will talk about specific SEO strategies later in the article.
Three Components of SEO
There are three basic ingredients that make up the essence of SEO. These include: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. There are several differences between on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO deals with everything on a website. This includes the content you put up and the things you can control. Everything including the words and photos you put on your website matters because they can be used by search engines to determine if your site should rank higher.
For example, if you are putting up an article, the title and headings are important alongside all the keywords you use. That’s why the words you use can determine how well your website performs.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is everything that happens outside of your website. Link building is a very important aspect of off-page SEO. If any other web page has linked to your website, then that would be considered off-page SEO.
An example can be that you guest blog on another website and in your article, you linked back to your own website. That’s why it’s always good to link internal pages within your own website, because the more links you create the more search engines recognize it. Having backlinks also establishes trust between search engines so they can recommend your website in search results.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves the technical aspects of a website to improve its search ranking. It’s basically the things that go on behind the scenes. An example is the website code and how efficient it is. Search engines have crawlers that go through your websites and analyze each piece of information.
If something is too slow or the website has a bad user experience, the robot will send feedback back to the search engine. Make sure you have no dead links, your site is fast, and your website can be crawled easily with no errors in code. Technical SEO is technically a part of on-page SEO, but involves the back end of the website.
B2B SEO vs B2C SEO
There are mainly two types of SEO, Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C). Business to consumer involves a company reaching out to the general customer or public.
Business to business SEO involves a company reaching out to professionals and higher executives in a business. Essentially, B2B means you are selling to other businesses or people with higher roles within companies. Since you’re not selling to the general people, the specific keywords B2B marketers use will be much narrower and should yield less results on a search engine like Google. This is because specific companies looking for services will most likely be looking for something in specific, and your detailed keyword will allow them to find you.
Lastly, since you are selling to businesses, your marketing strategies should revolve around the ideas of leadership and branding. People and companies will be putting trust in you, so a B2B SEO strategy displays that your company shows great values.
Therefore, the SEO you will use will be slightly different from the B2C strategies.
B2B SEO Strategies
When formulating strategies for your B2B company, there are three questions to ask.
- What is your target audience looking for?
- How will you satisfy your target’s desires?
- How will you convince search engines that you are satisfying your target audience?
B2B SEO services are built around answering these three questions. Here are some strategies that can help answer these questions:
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords!
Keywords are extremely important, and you should determine which keywords are working for you and which can help you achieve a higher search ranking. A reminder is that a keyword is a phrase or word that people put in search engines when looking for something.
You should first determine which keywords are working best and ones that you can improve on. This is all done by doing keyword research. There are many paid tools that can track the most effective keywords. One paid tool you can use to track keywords is Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. This tool is great because it provides organic traffic research, a backlink checker, and more.
When determining keywords for B2B SEO, you should prioritize quality over quantity. A keyword with 50 high quality results is much better than one with 50,000 low to mediocre results. Since business to business SEO relies on many individuals’ approval, a more specific keyword will gain the attention of specific companies based on their needs.
Content Control
When creating content for a B2B company, it must align with what businesses and high executives want. This type of content should be sales-free and aimed to further educate the consumer. Here are tips when creating and controlling the content you put out.
Pillar / Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content and pillar pages are pages that give the person reading it an in-depth overview of whatever service you can help them with. Having pillar pages and cornerstone content is a professional and organized way to show other businesses what services you can provide for them.
A great example is Adobe’s Complete Guide to Lead Generation. This page not only helps gain leads on consumers, but is also a great place for people to learn everything about your service. Having a page with “Complete Guide” (or another phrasing) of what you are selling is a great pillar page to include in your website.
Be Empathetic
Content should be focused on the person whose searching for it. Your goal is to understand the user and fulfill their desires.
Make a Content Calendar
Content calendars ensure that fresh content is being released on a regular basis. It’s also a place to organize content and prioritize certain jobs over others. Also, a content calendar allows you to keep content coming and be a pace setter for the whole company.
Content Doesn’t Need to Rank
If a search engine prefers a post with a certain amount of words to rank your content, don’t let this be a burden. Yes, getting your content ranked is important but not necessary all the time. If you post something that is still enlightening and positive for your business, it should still be posted. Not everything you create has to be SEO work.
The SEO strategies of content and keywords are essential in becoming a successful B2B company. Next, we will talk about B2B search engine marketing.
B2B Search Engine Marketing
Like SEO, search engine marketing (SEM) is used to help customers find you through search engines. Here are tips to SEM success:
SEO
Using SEO strategies discussed above for your B2B business is the pinnacle of SEM. SEO improves your sites relevancy and yields more website traffic in the long term.
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is where your company pays an amount of money to a search engine for every time someone clicks on your advertisement. A PPC campaign is a great way to market your website or service. Budget and service type are factors that can affect certain PPC plans.
Appearance
When a site appears in a Google search result, the consumers eyes first go to the title. If the title isn’t appealing or extremely vague, then the user will go to the next search result. That’s why the title you choose to appear by should give off as much information as possible.
A good example is “SEO Design Chicago | #1 in SEO | Website Design | Digital Advertising.” SEO Design Chicago for example will catch people’s attention because of all the keywords they used and the way they chose to organize it. A bad example would be “Chicago SEO Company.” This gives no information on what the company provides and can be misleading.
Best B2B SEO Companies
There are several B2B SEO companies out there. It can be hard to find the best SEO company to help your business. The team at SEO Design Chicago specializes in B2B SEO. Our experts at SEO Design Chicago would love to answer any questions you have about B2B SEO. We are a full service B2B SEO agency. If you need help with B2B SEO, contact us today!
In this article we discussed business to business (B2B) SEO, different B2B services and strategies, search engine marketing, and the top B2B companies. B2B SEO is much different from business to consumer SEO because you are targeting companies and higher executives. By using the strategies introduced in this article, emphasizing keywords, content and SEO, you are taking the first steps to becoming a successful B2B business.
Contact Us Today!