A Guide to SEO for B2B Companies

B2B stands for business-to-business, which essentially means transactions between two business organizations. B2B marketing refers to the sale tactics used by one commercial enterprise to sell its products or services to another commercial business. And while there are multiple ways to reach out to businesses to market your products, you need SEO to gain more visibility to reach out to your target audience.

In its essence, SEO is the combination of various tactics used to gain more visibility on search engines and, ultimately, incremental traffic. And when it comes to B2B marketing, SEO is the best way to generate and nurture quality leads with sustainable, long-term results.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how a B2B business can reach out to its target audience using SEO.

How Does B2B SEO Differ from B2C SEO?

Although B2B and B2C are vastly different in terms of business model, target audience, and marketing techniques, they don’t quite differ from each other when it comes to SEO. Google doesn’t evaluate what kind of business or website to rank against a specific search phrase; it simply follows the content quality, authoritativeness of the source, and user experience to rank sites on its SERP.

So, B2B and B2C SEO follow the same route, as Google’s algorithm is standard for both kinds of businesses. Here is a comparison table between B2B and B2C SEO:

 

	B2B SEO	B2C SEO
Keyword Targeting	Targets low-volume keywords	Targets high-volume keywords
Preferred Marketing Channel	Primarily uses content marketing	Focus on social media marketing
Cost-Per-Click	Keywords have high Cost-per-click	Keywords have low cost-per-click
Marketing Goal	Conversion-oriented marketing tactics are applied	Brand awareness and higher reach are the prime focus
Content Type	Needs to be compelling	Needs to be engaging

 

SEO For B2B Businesses

SEO for B2B differs in certain fine aspects from that of B2C. The end goal of every SEO campaign is conversions, and with B2B, you’re marketing your content to decision-makers.

Your target audience is likely an entrepreneur like yourself, and the kind of content and marketing techniques you use to target them will differ from when you’re reaching out to the end consumer. Having said that, here are some basic SEO guidelines for targeting B2B companies:

• Understand the Buyer Persona

With B2B, your buyers are another business, so it’s important to understand their challenges and needs before you start with any kind of marketing campaign. Understanding how your buyers think, act, buy, and search for products and services related to your niche will help you create targeted content designed to convert them. The buyer persona analysis is also required for what SEO experts call ‘search intent’ or ‘user intent.’

Search or user intent refers to the specific query searched by a user and why they did so. What exactly are they looking for?

Google recently updated its guidelines to reward content that satisfies this user intent. In other words, you’ll be rewarded for creating content that contains relevant information that the user is looking for.

Customer interviews, surveys, and online analytical tools can help you gauge their online behavior and the driving factor behind their purchases. Knowing your buyer better will also help you to create content and marketing strategies for all stages of the sales funnel.

• Focus on Attaining your Marketing Goals

Every business has different goals for marketing its products. Some may want higher brand awareness, while others look to increase their sales and profitability with digital marketing mediums. For a B2B business, the end goal could be converting leads to repeat buyers, compelling them to download your content, or simply obtaining their information for email or other marketing campaigns.

Whatever your end marketing objectives are, devise your SEO campaign accordingly, with relevant landing pages, clear-cut calls to action, and content that influences your prospects to undertake the desired action.

• Keep in Mind the Product Life-Cycle

Every product has a life cycle; its introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. The life cycle of any product heavily depends on the industry, and most products fail due to the heavy cost required for introducing them, which outweighs sales during this initial stage. And by the time the product attains maturity, sales start to decline, and profit margins diminish rapidly. Needless to say, whatever your B2B offering is, it too has a life cycle.

By knowing the stage of your product, you can create content accordingly and market the product to buyers that are best suited for the stage. An example would be how SaaS providers target the ‘early adopters’ during a product’s introduction stage.

• Targeting the Right Keywords

Targeting keywords for B2B SEO is a little more complex than B2C SEO. Because your prime target audience is decision-makers, you’ll need to factor in their search intent if you want to gain any ground with your SEO strategy.

In B2B SEO, the keywords you’d generally target will consist of low-volume searches, as only a specific group of businesses would be searching for them online. Thus, if your keyword selection doesn’t align with the user’s search intent, it’s quite likely that you’ll see no improvement in organic rankings for those phrases.

• Link Building

Link building is perhaps the most complex yet vital part of your SEO strategy. Be it B2B or B2C, Google looks at qualitative and relevant backlinks as a major ranking criterion on its SERP. However, it should be remembered that low-quality and/or irrelevant links will do you no good. Only include links from high-quality and relevant sources, like industry leaders related to your own niche.

The best way to acquire links for your content is through networking, reaching out to niche-related content creators, and publishing data-rich content that makes readers use them in their content.

SEO Success is Important for B2B

SEO requires a holistic plan of action that looks at all aspects of marketing and technicalities to deliver success. SEO offers great benefits to every kind of business nowadays, not just B2B. Only when your visitors have a great experience on your site and engage with your content will they convert into your customers.

SEO isn’t just required when you’ve decided to sell; it’s also a great tool to build a brand from scratch with a long-term vision that intends to fulfill your end marketing objective. And this is exactly what it does for a B2B.

Contact Brampton SEO specialists today for a detailed consultation session if you want more information on how SEO can help your B2B business grow.