SEO is one of the most important digital marketing channels to get traffic to your website. The Internet is flooded with material on how to design SEO strategy, but only a few people talk about B2B SEO strategy. Whether you are into B2B or B2C business, designing an effective SEO strategy is vital for you.
In this article below, we will be discussing how to design an effective B2B SEO strategy. Designing an SEO strategy for B2B businesses is not a piece of cake. Although it is quite the same as the B2C SEO strategy, it differs in a few technicalities.
It is essential to consider the critical differences in B2B and B2C SEO strategies. We will be discussing them later in this article.
SEO content strategy is pretty much the same, but it mainly focuses on writing high-quality content. It also includes building a solid backlink profile and sharing your content on social media channels to increase traffic and viewership.
How to Create an SEO Strategy?
An effective SEO strategy is really important for your business to improve its ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). A smartly created SEO strategy answers the following questions for you:
- Where do you stand right now?
- Where do you want to see yourself in the foreseeable future?
- What are the methods that will help you reach there?
You have to design your strategy to cater to each of these questions in different steps of your SEO plan.
A conventional SEO strategy contains steps that mainly include an on-page SEO, a strong backlinks profile, i.e., off-page SEO, an SEO audit checklist, and detailed analysis and overview of keywords.
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What is B2B SEO?
Business-to-Business or B2B Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy designed to help those websites dealing with B2B businesses rank higher in the search engines like Google and Bing.
Although the fundamental principles of B2B and B2C SEO are the same, the main differences arise during the research and analysis of keywords. In the B2B SEO strategy, we emphasize those keywords that business personnel or decision-makers search during business operations.
The Difference between B2C and B2B SEO
As discussed above, B2C and B2B SEO are pretty much the same, but they do differ in the following ways:
1. Volume of Keywords
In B2B SEO, low volume keywords are targeted, while in B2C SEO, keywords with high volume are targeted by SEO strategists.
- Content Publish
The content published in B2B SEO is designed for decision-makers of organizations. On the other hand, B2C SEO content is curated for a broad audience.
- CPCs of Keywords
The cost per click (CPC) of keywords for the B2B SEO strategy is relatively high compared to the CPC of keywords in B2C.
- Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is used to target a broad audience in B2C marketing, while in B2B strategy, minimal or no social media marketing is used. Instead, you can put your efforts into blog posts and email marketing.
- Content Type
Content has to be highly tactical in B2B strategy because decisions are made on a rational basis. On the other hand, in B2C marketing, content can be emotional and fun, along with being informative.
A 7-Step B2B SEO Strategy
To help you grow with your B2B SEO strategy, we have put together a 7-step B2B SEO strategy. Using this strategy, you can boost traffic to your website from search engines.
1. Create Buyer Personas
Creating buyer personas is one of the most critical steps of strategy for B2B SEO. A buyer persona depicts an ideal customer based on historical qualitative and quantitative data.
The more you know about your audience, the better you can target them and bring them to your website. You have to identify different buyer personas and plan your SEO strategies accordingly, Rather than creating a single strategy for every buyer out there.
Whether you are an existing business or want to create a new strategy for a new business, you can not ignore the importance of designing buyer personas.
2. Understand your Sales Funnel
Before going to the next step of conducting keyword research that your buyer personas are searching about, you need to understand how your unique business sales funnel works.
One of the key points to consider in your SEO strategy is the touchpoints of your customer. Look out for the following points for understanding your sales funnel better:
- Talk with your sales team. Question them about their perception of the sales funnel of the organization. Also, what touchpoints they consider the most important, and more.
- Dive into the data analytics tools using your sales and marketing data and determine how customers find your business.
- Ponder upon the critical stats like customer lifetime value (CLV), customer retention period, and why customers leave the organization.
Learn more about data analytics: How to Design Kickass Digital Marketing Strategy with Data Analytics
3. Conduct Keyword Research around your Personas
Once you have designed a sales funnel. In every step of the sales funnel, watch out for search queries that people use to identify businesses like yours.
Detailed keyword research is the backbone of any B2B SEO marketing strategy. A good SEO strategist puts a lot of effort into this step. Look out for keywords that the decision-makers are likely to use.
You must conduct a robust competitor analysis to conduct keyword research that matches your buyer personas. You can use tools like Keyword Magic Tool by SEMrush to identify the keywords your buyer personas are looking for.
4. Design a Keyword Strategy to Target Buyers
Once you have identified the queries and problems that your personas are facing and you know how to provide them with the relevant solution. Now it’s time to design a keyword strategy to target buyer personas at different stages of your sales funnel.
Use the topic clusters approach to keep your audience on your website by linking the different topics. Topic clusters are focused around a single topic. Also, it offers multiple internal linking opportunities to keep visitors on your site.
5. Create and Optimize Product or Service Landing Pages
Don’t drift away from the goal of your SEO efforts, i.e., to generate traffic on your website.
Although the above steps are essential for your B2B SEO strategy, the ultimate objective is to bring a quality audience to your website that converts.
For that, you have to build strong landing pages for your products or services. These service landing pages should be designed in such a way that they strongly pitch to the reader that comes on your page to find a solution to their B2B problem.
All in all, create a landing page experience by considering curating high-quality content that genuinely sells your product.
6. Build a Scalable Content Strategy
While creating a strong sales page comes at the last stage of your sales funnel, a strong content strategy is before that level. In this step, a strong content strategy is designed to increase your business’s visibility and awareness in customers’ minds.
For this reason, curating content that drives high traffic to your website is essential in a B2B SEO strategy. Thus, creating a scalable and robust content strategy involves using different formats of content generation and tactics that might include:
- Blogs
- Newsletters
- Emails
- eBooks
- Case Studies
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Research Studies
7. Promote your Content to Earn Backlinks
Backlinks are still critical factors in an SEO strategy, whether B2B or B2C.
When it comes to earning backlinks for your website, promoting the content you have created in the last step is the most important.
Promoting your content might include sharing content on social media and spreading it through email outreach. Each content you share or promote has a backlink that drives traffic to your website.
When we talked about promoting your content, we didn’t mean to share it on social media. You can use the following ways to boost your content to earn backlinks:
- Make a journalist write an article about your latest study.
- Earn backlinks to your website by utilizing the opportunity of broken link building.
- Get your content or service pages linked to resource pages.
- In your existing piece of content, link your new content as a reference guide.
Ending Notes
Designing a B2B SEO strategy is very different from B2C. At the same time, it is vital, and many brands do not realize its importance.
In this article above, we have discussed the key concepts related to B2B SEO, how it is different from B2C SEO strategy, and what are the steps involved in designing an effective B2B SEO strategy,
If you still have questions regarding any step in the process of B2B SEO strategy or, in general, digital marketing for your brand, contact us. Our SEO experts have more than ten years of experience in the industry. We will design the best SEO strategy for your B2B operations to generate high-quality traffic to your website.
