When it comes to B2B marketing, search engine optimization is more than buying a subscription to any of the popular SEO tools or making a few one-time updates to your home page. If leveraged correctly, it can be a key component of your inbound lead generation flywheel.

Getting a blog post ranked at the top of Google might be an excellent way to enhance your brand’s image among your best prospects, but you need to focus on converting those prospects to qualified leads if you’re going to make the most of your B2B SEO efforts in 2025 and beyond.

Contrary to what you might have been told by the SEO rumor mill, an effective strategy is much more about what kind of content you’re ranking for your desired keywords, and it’s much less about just bombarding the search algorithms with high authority backlinks.

The content on your site needs to be actionable and detailed, but above everything else, it needs to be easy to digest.

Fortunately, there’s a playbook you can follow to have the search engines deliver consistent leads and generate a healthy return on the time that your marketing staff puts into your company’s SEO efforts.

If you’re looking to improve your B2B SEO Strategy in 2025, then you’re in the right spot. We’ve got the actionable steps you can take to increase your rankings and bring in more traffic.

What Is B2B SEO?

Before we dive into how you can design an SEO campaign for your brand, let’s quickly look at what B2B SEO is:

B2B SEO involves optimizing website code and content to rank well for high-value keywords, attracting business clients searching for your products or services. It connects your brand with prospects actively seeking solutions and ensures they are ready to convert at the time of purchase.

How Your B2B SEO Strategy Should Evolve in 2025

With SEO always changing, it’s critical that your B2B SEO strategy must always be evolving.

So, how should yours evolve in 2025?

Go Back to the Basics

One of the best ways to ensure your SEO strategy works in 2025 and beyond is to go back to the basics. This includes creating high-quality content. Content plays a central role in SEO, necessitating you invest in expert writers.  

Besides content, some basic SEO principles to re-visit include:

  • Internal linking: Internal links are an excellent way to build topical authority and pass link juice to other pages on your site.
  • Meet search intent: Understanding search intent helps you create content your users find valuable. It also helps improve your conversion rates.
  • Image SEO: Optimizing your images ensures faster load times, which is a critical component of Google’s Core Web Vitals (more on this shortly). It also helps you rank high for image searches.

Neglecting these SEO basics can cripple your strategy, no matter how well-executed it is. So don’t just focus on high-level SEO tactics, focus on laying a good foundation first.

Embrace Emerging Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has brought some fantastic advancements in SEO tools. AI-powered SEO tools are becoming more reliable and helping streamline processes and speed up the execution of tasks.

As we step into the future, embracing these revolutionary tools is a great way to speed up your SEO strategy and give yourself an advantage over your competitors.

Forget About Tactics, Focus Your Attention On Customer Research

As time goes on, tactics like optimizing meta descriptions and LSI keywords have continued to matter less and less. In 2025, things are no different.

Your target customers are getting fed up with boring and “optimized” content and experiences and what they want is you.

Your unique business model. Your unique value proposition. Your unique solution set.

So give them what they want. Learn what keeps them up at night. Learn how they make purchasing decisions. Once you develop true empathy and uncover their needs, you’ll know exactly what to make.

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Do B2C & B2B Require Their Own Strategies?

Everyone uses the same search engines to find information on the internet, right? Google reigns, and maybe people use Bing (yikes!), but essentially, there are few players who dominate.

So is there a need for B2B brands to design SEO strategies that are different from their B2C counterparts?

Yes and no.

Yes, because the core principles for ranking are the same for both B2B and B2C brands. Of note, the basic SE (search engine) principles that you must get right for both include:

  • On-page SEO. These are the factors that users interact with most and focus on optimizing content. These include the page title tag, meta description, and H1 heading tag. 
  • Off-page SEO. Refers to activities that take place away from your website but influence how it ranks. An example would be receiving a linked mention from a reputable website back to yours. 
  • Technical SEO. Technical SEO describes all technical and website code-related considerations that help Google (and other search engines) efficiently and accurately crawl, index, and understand your website.

These three form the basic foundation of every SEO strategy and are the main overlapping factors of B2B and B2C.  

However, despite these similarities, B2C and B2B brands require different SEO strategies. That’s because of the major differences between them. Examples include:

  • Different target audiences
  • Search volumes for B2B are low to zero
  • Buyer journeys for B2B are longer and more complex

To increase your chances of ranking, driving traffic, and converting, you must design an SEO strategy tailored to factor in these differences.

A chart showing the difference in SEO for b2b and b2c.

What You Need To Consider Before Launching Your Campaign

Before you launch your B2B SEI campaign, you must realize that B2B SEO isn’t at all like B2C SEO. 

To begin with, B2B and B2C SEO strategies have one common difference — the target audience. They target different types of buyers. B2C brands target direct consumers while B2B brands target decision-makers in other companies. And in many cases, this means your strategy should not just target a single individual but everyone involved in making decisions in the organizations you’re targeting.

Ranking at the top of Google is a goal for many businesses. The problem is knowing how to do this and ensuring you rank for what your clients are searching for.

To create a winning B2B SEO strategy, you must know what best practices will get your posts to the top of the SERPs. However, this isn’t good enough. You must also choose the right terms to rank for.

It doesn’t do your business any good if you rank at number one for terms your clients are searching for. You might get some traffic from random high search volume keywords, but that traffic won’t result in sales because it’s not your ideal customer profile, and they aren’t interested in what you have to offer. 

Your strategy must include these four vital steps if you want to increase your leads through organic searches. 

  1. Know your target audience
  2. Know what they’re searching for
  3. Create valuable content (and the right kind of content) that offers real value to your audience
  4. Track your results and test for continued optimization

When you follow these actionable SEO tactics, you’re following the best practices to rank your site on the search engines. (BTW – filler content is dead.)

1. First Things First, Focus on Your Ideal Client

You don’t necessarily need to worry about targeting the CEO of every company you want to work with. Within each business are various decision-makers based on their level of expertise.

For example, if you’re selling Facebook ad strategies, you should target the marketing manager. The company’s CEO isn’t worried about their social media advertising, but their marketing manager most definitely is. Marketing managers worry about a lot, let’s be real!

Only once you know who you’re creating your content for, can you determine what they’re searching for.  

Any effective B2B marketing plan hinges on you being able to define your ideal target audience. Here are a few tips to help you do that:

Clarify Your Core Offering

The first step to defining your ideal target audience starts with some introspection.

Get deep, get zen! 

You need to be clear about what exactly you offer, the problems you solve, and why your audience should pick you over your competitors.

When communicating your offering, be careful to do it from your customers’ perspective, as this will help you to clearly express why it’s a perfect fit for them.

Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is a description of the company (not individual) that will benefit the most from your product. A few factors that can help you determine your ICP include:  

  • Budget/Revenue: Can the company afford to pay for your solution?
  • Industry: Are there certain industries that particularly need your product?
  • Average size of the company: Is your product for any size business or are you targeting companies with a particular minimum threshold of employees?
  • Legality: Are there any legal issues restricting some customers from using your product (e.g., age, local government restrictions)?

This is not a comprehensive list. You can tailor it more according to your product, business model, and target market. Making an ICP can actually be enjoyable! It helps you better understand your client and will definitely reveal any holes your product might have.

Create Targeted Buyer Personas

Once you’re clear about what you offer and the pain points you solve, the next step to identifying your ideal target audience is to build a buyer persona. While this is easy for B2C brands, it can be complicated for B2B. This is because you need to factor in, not just the decision-makers, but the people they’re making decisions for. In summary, you’ll need to discover:

  • What your ideal customer looks like.
  • The problems they solve in their organization.
  • The typical size of their teams.
  • What a typical buying process looks like.

Creating a targeted buyer persona will help you create a laser-focused experience and messaging that will help you get in front of the right audience, thereby improving your conversion rates. While it may sound complicated, you can easily create your buyer persona using a tool like Hubspot’s Make My Persona tool.

2. Low or Zero Search Volumes

One of the big differences you’ll notice between B2C and B2B SEO is that B2C search terms usually have very high search volumes while many B2B search terms have low to zero search volumes.

One reason for this is that, on average, b2b products and services are more expensive and thus have less frequent purchases. It’s also because B2B brands have a very small target market and high average customer lifetime values (CLV). This translates into fewer people searching for your target keywords. Also, sometimes your zero-volume may still be under Google’s radar due to it not trending yet.

Does this mean you can’t leverage B2B keyword research to build effective SEO campaigns?

Not at all!

Despite SEO tools not always returning high search volumes for B2B keywords, capturing search traffic from low or zero-volume keywords can be very lucrative. 

That’s why you must factor these keywords into your B2B SEO strategy.

How do you find lucrative low or zero-volume keywords?

Here are a few tips:

  • Involve all stakeholders in your keyword research. Departments like sales, customer support, and others that are customer-facing can help you pinpoint keywords customers use as they interact with them.
  • Include trend analysis tools in your research. Trend analysis tools like Google Trends and Pinterest Trends, just to name a few.
  • Follow trending conversations in forums and communities. Niche forums and communities are an untapped goldmine for zero-volume search keywords. That’s because users ask questions and discuss topics related to your brand and product.
  • Google Autocomplete and People Also Ask: Google’s autocomplete and people also ask features are also a great place to dig up low-volume keywords searchers type into the search engine. These are long-tail keywords you can play around with and come up with better keywords.

So, just because the keywords you’re uncovering have less than 10 searches doesn’t actually mean they’re useless. On the contrary, they can be your most profitable. After all, it’s not just about traffic to your site, it’s about making a sale from your content. 

3. Complex Buyer Journeys

Another important factor to consider as you draw up your B2B SEO strategy is that B2B buyer journeys can be pretty complex. For one, there are multiple decision-makers involved. And your SEO strategy must try to accommodate them all.

Another complexity in B2B SEO is that B2B buyers don’t just read a blog post and immediately convert. And unlike B2C buying journey’s, the B2B buyer journey isn’t linear and requires you to create content for multiple touchpoints across different platforms.

The high price tag on most B2B offers also adds complexity to the buyer journey. Because of it, they go through multiple pieces of information across different web properties to ensure they have enough information to make an informed decision. This means your SEO strategy must be designed for buyers at every stage of the buyer journey.

Speaking of the complexity of the B2B buyer journey, you must realize that it also includes offsite touchpoints as well, with typical examples being social media and SaaS directories.

And when it comes to making a buying decision, research shows that most B2B buyers go through most of the buyer journey on their own. Only 17% of the time on the buyer journey is spent with a sales rep. This means no sales rep to guide them along the major part of the buyer journey. Their only guide is the content they find online.

That’s why you must ensure that every piece of content you create is a sales rep. It must fully answer the user’s questions and concerns on that particular topic. It must also lead them to the next stage of the buyer journey. Most importantly, it must be discoverable in search. After all, if your customers can’t find your content, they can never know about you and your fantastic product or service.

This is why your B2B SEO strategy must be aligned to your buyer journey. If they work in tandem, the impact is greater — you will dominate the SERPs and, ultimately, the industry.

A few tips to help you align your B2B SEO strategy to your buyer journey include:

  • Define your buyer journey
  • Understand your ICP’s pain points
  • Create content for every stage (and step) of your buyer journey (ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu)

With these 3 considerations in place, you’re well on your way to a winning B2B SEO campaign. The alignment of your B2B SEO to your buyer journey will also result in improved conversion rates.

4. Long Sales Cycles

Because of the complexity of the B2B buyer journey, it can only be expected that the sales cycle tends to be long as well.

This is one of the big differences between B2B SEO and its B2C counterpart.  

One of the drawbacks of the long sales cycle is that showing the ROI of your SEO campaigns can take longer. It can also require more work to dig through historical data and use it to determine your ROI.

To succeed in genertating sales in the B2B industry, you must build relationships with your buyers. This is another reason the sales cycle can be so long. And this is why your content must be designed for discoverability. More importantly, it must be crafted to build trust with your audience.

However, if you’re an early-stage startup, driving sales fast can make the difference between success and failure. That’s why you must leverage SEO to shorten the sales cycle.

How do you do that?

  • Zero in on high-priority keywords. Bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) keywords are targeted at users who are ready to buy. As a result, they lead to shorter sales cycles and higher ROIs on your campaigns.
  • Focus on problem-solving topics: Topics geared at solving user problems (focused on the job-to-be-done framework) are a great way to attract users who are ready to buy. This is because they’re actively looking for a solution to their problems. If your content helps them see that your product can help them easily solve their problems, they’re more likely to buy.
  • Understand that different visitors are at different stages: The visitors to your website are at different are stages of the sales cycle. Because of this, you must craft content that caters to all stages from awarenes to post sale.

Shortening the sales cycle not only helps you recoup your costs and start making profits fast but also makes it easier to determine your campaign’s effectiveness.

How To Create Your Own Effective B2B SEO Strategy In 2025 & Beyond

Ready to implement your own effective B2B SEO strategy?

Fantastic.

Here are the 11 key considerations you need to develop your SEO plan and scale your organic sourced revenue.

Let’s dive in.

1. Competitive Gap Analysis

One of your first stops when creating a B2B SEO strategy is to run a competitive gap analysis. This is critical as it will help you identify your real competitors and how they’re performing in search. Doing so will help you better position yourself for success.

Other benefits of running a competitive gap analysis include:

Helps You Reverse Engineer Successful B2B SEO Strategies

Despite being your competitors, you can a learn a lot from studying their campaign. It also helps you identify strategies that don’t work so you don’t waste time and resources on them.

Reveals Keyword Gaps

A competitor analysis helps you see keyword gaps you can exploit to drive more traffic to your site. A good example is zero-volume keywords competitors aren’t targeting.

Gives You a Glimpse Into Your Competitors’ Site Health

Conducting a S.W.O.T analysis on your competitors’ sites helps you identify technical SEO comprises. This will help you target these on your site so you have am edge on the user experience front. It also helps you see where your site needs improvement.

Reveals Backlink Opportunities

Backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors search engines use to determine which content to serve users. The more backlinks you have, the better your content will rank. Running a competitor analysis is an excellent way of checking sites that would be willing to give you backlinks

Helps You Identify High-performing Content

Another benefit of running a competitive gap analysis is that it helps you identify the type of content that works well in your industry. Doing so will help ensure that your content marketing. It also helps you identify content gaps you can fill. Both are essential to helping you drive traffic to your site.

These are just some of the reasons why you must prioritize running a competitibve gap analysis as you develop your B2B SEO strategy. It’s a foundational element that helps ensure you get the best ROI out of your efforts.

2. Consider Search Intent When Choosing Keywords

Traditional SEO practices might tell you to target a keyword with a search volume of 50,000 searches per month. However, in the B2B market, you don’t need hundreds of thousands of page views. Instead, you need to focus on a small, specific, and targeted audience. 

Your audience is the decision-maker in their company. Your audience has a specific question in mind when they begin their online search.

For example, in the B2C market, if someone is searching for “shipping costs,” they’re probably trying to mail their Aunt Margaret a sweater for Christmas. But you’re targeting the business that’s calculating their shipping costs for 25 pallets of printing paper! Aunt Margaret is nowhere to be found in this interaction. 

This takes a different approach, and your keyword research goals will be different from your B2C competitors. So, when it comes to SEO marketing and organic traffic, the basic concepts are the same. For you, however, you’ll want to ensure that the keywords you choose have the right intent for your target audience. 

3. Auditing Your Existing Content 

Another critical element to consider when developing a B2B SEO strategy is running a content audit.

A content audit refers to the systematic process of reviewing the content on your site. Doing this enables you to have a birds eyeview of your content and optimization efforts so you know how well your content strategy is performing.

A few tips for running effective content audiots include:

  • Take an inventory of your content: Create a list of all your important content assets, including URLs, metadata, category, length, e.t.c..
  • Collect and analyze data: Collect important data on each URL. Examples include search position, pageviews, social shares, backlinks, e.t.c. Analyze this data against your benchmarks. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Analytics, among others.
  • Develop an action plan: Once you’ve assessed your content, you need to devise an action plan based on your goals, benchmarks, and the conclusions you’ve drawn from the analysis. This can include deleting some pieces of content, consolidating some, or creating new assets based on your findings.

The purpose of the content audit is to help you fine-tune your strategy and find ways of optimizing it.

4. Audit & Optimize Your Website’s Technical SEO Factors

Your website is at the heart of your B2B SEO strategy. As such, you must invest time and resources to ensure it’s optimized to rank high. To do so:

Pay Attention to Your Core Web Vitals

One thing Google aims to do is to give users the best possible user experience. This is where Core Web Vitals come in. These are a set of metrics Google uses to allow developers to know how users are experiencing their web pages. The three core metrics Google uses as their Core Web Vitals are:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP basically has to do with page performance factors like load speed.
  • First Input Delay (FID): FID measures how long an interactive element on your page takes to respond to a user’s input. It measures your website’s responsiveness.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift: CLS measures the stability of elements on your web page, especially when scrolling. 
Graphic showing 3 of the most important aspects of website speed.

Getting these right is now more important than ever as they contribute to Page Experience, one of Google’s ranking factors.

Sort Out Your Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves ensuring your website is technically optimized. This is important as it makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content. This helps ensure they serve your content to users who input the relevant search terms for your content.

 Again, it also plays a role in giving visitors a positive user experience (UX). 

A few factors of technical SEO you must get right include:

  1. Optimize your page speed
  2. Make your website easy to crawl
  3. Ensure there are no broken links
  4. Make your website mobile-friendly
  5. Avoid duplicate content
  6. Ensure your website is secure
  7. Implement structured data 
  8. Create an XML sitemap
  9. Optimize your URL structure
  10. Disavow spammy/toxic backlinks

Getting your technical SEO is crucial to your strategy as it lays the foundation for the success of your website. You may have the best product or content, but if your technical SEO is poor, you’ll struggle to rank.

5. On-Page SEO

Human beings are naturally curious, and asking your prospect a question can be a great way to hook their attention and get that initial user engagement.

You’ve probably seen headlines like “Why Is Everybody Talking About ____?”, and there’s a reason that so many publications use them. As any great copywriter will tell you, the main purpose of the headline is to get the reader to stop and read the line that follows.

When people see a question on the search page, they instinctively want to know the answer. After all, a question that popped into their head is what got them to submit their search query in the first place.

The searcher’s curiosity can mean more clicks for you, but just make sure that your landing page actually answers the question in your headline.

6. Build Out Solutions Pages

This is the fundamental rule of B2B SEO. The keywords here are “for your prospect.” To put it simply, don’t confuse “a compelling purpose” with what you think the search engines will be interested in.

Too many B2B companies try to guess what the search engines want instead of figuring out what their prospects need to hear before taking the next step in the customer value journey.

While it’s true that search algorithms use factors like content length to determine how highly a given page ranks in 2025, meta-characteristics like the number of words on your landing page are far from the only factor that determines whether you reach the top of page one or you stay buried on page three.

The algorithms are designed to reflect what your visitors want, and they aren’t designed to be a test of how well you can game the system.

Above all else, user engagement is the most important metric to optimize for. User engagement, however, is highly contextual to the type of content that is featured on your page.

If you’re sending prospects to a video sales letter, for example, then the search engines will be keeping a close eye on how long users spend watching the main video, how they interact with the video player, and whether or not they leave your page without taking further action.

Basically, if the video sucks and they leave, you’re going to get penalized by the Google gods.

As more and more users respond to the content on your page in ways that indicate they like and trust your company, your landing page will climb up the search rankings faster and faster.

Don’t make the mistake that most of your competitors are making. Design your landing pages to sell your prospect on moving to the next step in the buying process, and forget about trying to outsmart the engineers at multibillion-dollar technology giants.

If there’s one thing you can be certain of, it’s that all of the shout-outs, link campaigns, and slick SEO tricks in the world won’t help you if your visitors hate your landing page. Treat your prospects with the same respect that you would show them if they visited your business in person.

7. Create Valuable Resource Content That Educates & Empowers Prospects

At the heart of any SEO strategy is a great content strategy. And B2B SEO isn’t any different. You need to create the content your clients are searching for. This is the key to improving your rankings and getting found organically and consistently.

This step is where you’ll combine all the research you’ve done in the previous two steps. You’re creating content that’s written specifically for your target buyer and answers the questions they’re asking the search engines. 

There’s a reason that Google earmarks billions of dollars for research on artificial intelligence every year, and it’s not so you can spend your day stuffing keywords into your articles in ways that a real human being would never want to read.

The algorithms that companies like Google use are designed to crawl the web and figure out for themselves what your content is actually about. Again, you’re not going to outsmart the thousands of software engineers that any of the large search companies employ, so have faith that your content will rank higher if you just write like you are having a conversation with your ideal customer.

The language your ideal customer uses will certainly vary from industry to industry, but your content must sound natural for the search engines to even consider ranking it highly these days. This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many companies fail to heed this warning.

Using analytics tools like Google Search Console in tandem with Google Analytics can give you crucial insights into the language that your users and prospects are using to find and engage your website.

6. Build Industry Relevant & High-Quality BackLinks

Backlinks have always been and will always be an integral part of any off page SEO effort. So what exactly are backlinks, and why are they important to your overall campaign?

A chart showing 6 tips on building high quality backlinks.

Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. They’re crucial to your SEO strategy because they are votes of confidence that your content is valuable. According to some studies, links are among the top three ranking factors search engines consider. Besides ranking, backlinks play an important role in your B2B inbound marketing strategy as they also help drive traffic to your site.

For your backlink strategy to be effective at boosting your SEO, you must build industry-relevant and high-authority backlinks. A few ways to do this include:

  • Publishing valuable resources like original research. Use a simple survey tool like Survey Anyplace to create an industry-relevant survey. The published results will be a powerful link magnet. Look at your upcoming content calendar and create questions based on all the themes you’ll be writing about.
  • Create helpful tools and calculators. People love tools that make life easier and will link to them to add value to their content.
  • Guest post on relevant blogs. Guest posting is the practice of creating a piece of content to be published on another site. Doing this wins you a backlink from the website you publish on. And hey, maybe you’ll make a new friend along the way.
  • Publish valuable content. Publish valuable content like ultimate guides on a regular basis. The more value you pack in the content, the higher the chances that other publications will link to it.
  • Leverage partner pages. Get listed on the partner pages of other businesses you partner with. 
  • Email outreach. This is a link building strategy that involves sending emails to relevant publications to include a link to your resource. For this to work, your resource must add value to their audience. 

To keep your rankings, you must make building backlinks an ongoing part of your digital PR and B2B SEO strategy. 

8. Increase Credibility Through Barnacle SEO (Business Directory Listings) 

Another way you can boost your B2B SEO is by using barnacle SEO. 

What is Barnacle SEO?

Barnacle SEO gets its name from the barnacle, a crustacean that attaches itself to rocks, ships, and whales, among others. You may also be familiar with Barnacle Boy, Mermaid Man’s fantastic comrade.

What does this have to do with your B2B SEO strategy?

For most small businesses, it can be difficult to rank for relevant keywords as they’re already taken by bigger, more established websites. And that’s exactly where barnacle SEO comes to play. Like the barnacle, you can boost your SEO by “attaching” your website to other websites with higher authority.

While you may not rank for the keywords you’re targeting, being mentioned on a reputable site (usually third-party local listing sites) could get you a bit of link juice. It also helps you tap into the website’s traffic and potentially gain some leads.

But isn’t barnacle SEO the same as local SEO?

Fantastic question. While barnacle SEO may sound a bit like local SEO, they’re different. The main difference is that with local SEO, you’re optimizing your own website. With barnacle SEO, you focus on the SEO results of other websites. You target websites that are ranking well for the keywords

How Does Barnacle SEO Work?

So how do you execute a barnacle SEO strategy?

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  • Identify high purchase intent terms through keyword research. For best results, target long-tail money keywords. These are keywords that help generate traffic that’s ready to buy.
  • Find sites that rank for your target keywords. This can be done using your favorite keyword research tool.
  • Identify potential websites to target. Whittle down your list to those websites that are more likely to give you a link or mention. 
  • Look for opportunities to be mentioned or linked to. This could be an ad on the website, an opportunity to publish a blog post, list your services, e.t.c.   

While barnacle SEO may be the perfect way for small businesses to gain exposure and drive traffic to their site, it can also be useful for bigger brands and improve the SEO performance for SaaS companies.

Especially when you list your brand on business directories, you boost your brand awareness. This, in turn, results in more leads generated.

9. Align Your SEO With Offline Marketing & Sales Knowledge

This strategy requires thinking outside of the box a little bit, and that means your competitors are highly unlikely to do it.

After your sales reps get off the phone with a lead for the first time, what do you think that prospect does if they want more information? They’re usually going to open up their web browser, punch your company’s name into one of the major search engines, and take a good look at everything they find.

Knowing this ahead of time, you can plan some of your efforts around what prospects who are already in your sales funnel are trying to find out about your company.

In other words, SEO can actually be a highly effective lead nurturing tool. Most of the companies in your space will be putting all of their efforts towards ranking for lead generation terms, and they won’t bother trying to compete with you for terms that your existing leads are putting into Google or Bing.

For example, let’s say your company name is “NextGen SaaS”. How many of your competitors do you think are focused on ranking for the term “NextGen SaaS experiences”?

Anybody who is searching for a term like that is already considering purchasing from your company and is looking for some extra assurance that they will be making a good decision. Thus, a search term like that represents the perfect opportunity to swoop in and make sure that a Testimonials page from NextGen SaaS is the first page that this searcher sees.

The key here is to understand that B2B SEO can be a force multiplier for your existing sales efforts. The above strategy can work especially well if you’re selling a high-ticket product with a longer sales cycle. 

10. Test & Track Your Results

It has been said a dozen times, but it’s still true, search engine optimization is a long game. It isn’t something you publish once and forget about. You need to continually track your results and optimize each page to get better results. 

For example, if you have a page on page one but not at the top, do some further keyword research and update the content or on-page ranking factors for the page. Google rewards fresh content, so take the time to do this step, and you will see your results skyrocket. 

New competitors come onto the scene every day. So you can’t rest on your previous accomplishments. Be sure to test and track your results regularly to keep your top spot in the SERPs. 

Important KPIs to Track for Your B2B SEO Strategy

To effectively track the performance of your SEO strategy, you need to know the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. A KPI is simply a quantifiable measure of performance for an objective — in this case, your SEO. A few examples of KPIs you must track include:

  • Organic traffic. This is one of the most important KPIs to track, as an increase in organic traffic shows that your SEO strategy is working.
  • Search rankings. Search rankings are another KPI that directly shows the success of your SEO strategy. After all, SEO is all about visibility. 
  • Organic clickthrough rate (CTR). CTR is a metric that measures the ratio of clicks on your link to the total number of users who viewed the search results. A high CTR shows that your title tag is well-optimized.
  • Pages per session. The number of pages users visit per session are an indicator of the quality of your content. A high number of pages visited shows that your content is resonating well with your visitors.
  • Average session duration. This measures the amount of time a user spends on your site. It’s also an indicator of how well your content is performing.
Important KPIs to track

A few tools you can use to track your KPIs include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz, among others.

11. B2B SEO Is An Ongoing Effort

Let’s say your hard work is mega-successful. Your solutions pages have finally hit the top of the first page for your biggest keywords, and it’s bringing you leads left and right. Are you prepared to wake up tomorrow and see 15 new competitors climbing up the search results and threatening to outrank you?

You should be ready for that reality, and you should be prepared to deal with it every week. By the way, we’re not talking about the companies that you were worried about last quarter. We’re talking about companies that you weren’t even aware of until they started showing up out of nowhere.

Thanks to increased outsourcing opportunities, decreased overhead requirements, and the internet providing a reduced barrier to entry for many industries, it’s never been easier for somebody to go into business and start stealing your market share. This happens every day, but establishing your rankings as fast as possible does give you a first-mover advantage.

To keep your rankings high, you’ll need to constantly update the content on your most popular pages. Just making a few subtle tweaks to the introductory paragraph in your site’s best blog article can give you an edge over companies that don’t do anything at all, but you’ll also want to update any educational content to reflect new developments in your field.

For example, suppose that you have an article on smart home technology ranking at the top of page one for the search term “smart doorbells.” Whenever a major advance in smart doorbell technology hits the market, it’s a good idea to revise your article with a few sentences about the news if you want that page to stay on top. Even updating a page’s title when the year changes can have a large effect on how well it ranks. 

These aren’t the changes that will turn your leads into deals, but they will help your content get in front of more prospects. Of course, getting more eyes on your content will result in more deals, so making these subtle changes can be worth the effort.  

Some B2B SEO Statistics For You To Inspire You Before You Launch

Curious to see some real-life data on B2B SEO?

Let’s quickly look at some B2B SEO statistics to inspire yours.

These statistics are a great pointer to the importance of nailing your B2B SEO strategy. Your success as a SaaS Brand depends on it. 

For businesses that use white-hat strategies and treat their prospects right, the B2B SEO landscape hasn’t actually changed as much as it might seem.

In fact, the algorithms have become more and more favorable to legitimate marketing practices over time. For businesses that have become used to relying on unsustainable tactics like keyword stuffing and using spammy links, getting to the top of the SERPs is going to get much tougher.

As long as you approach your online marketing efforts like you are having a face-to-face conversation with your most valued customers, then the sky is truly the limit on your ROI.

B2B SEO Tools To Help You Get The Job Done

1. Understand B2B Web Topics with Google Trends

Google Trends shows you trends around a particular topic and what information people are looking for on Google. Here you find what people are searching for, how, and when it is (or was) most timely. Type in a keyword or phrase.

Google Trends will suggest some of the most popular related topics. From there, adjust the timeframe and geography-based on the information needed to track popularity over time. This is about patterns, hence “trends.”

Was the topic more relevant at one point than it is now? Did popularity recently spike? Is there seasonal interest?

Ease of Use: 1/5

Free Trial?: Yes

2. Learn Where You Currently Rank with Google Search Console

Google Search Consoleshows B2B SEO marketers how a site appears in a search, and the phrases users are entering to get there. This provides insight into the kinds of content you should include on your site, how your site is performing over time, and whether or not it is healthy. Find out what phrases people use to arrive on your site under the performance > queries tab. Sort these queries by clicking on the impressions filter from high to low.

You’re looking for terms with high impressions but low clicks. Your site is potentially relevant for these terms, but not quite enough to generate clicks. Update your title tags/meta descriptions, add updates to existing content, or create new content around these topics.

Ease of Use: 3/5

Free Trial?: Yes

3. Clean Up Your Web Site with Screaming Frog

Broken, missing, and duplicate pages hurt rankings. Screaming Frog helps you troubleshoot. This website crawler allows search marketers to dig into every URL on a website and analyze key SEO elements.

Screaming Frog can discover broken links, see what redirects are in place or missing (301s, 302s, etc.), analyze HTML titles, meta descriptions, and heading tags, find duplicate pages, generate sitemaps, review blocked URLs and more.

Go Directives > noindex, and make sure the number of pages is 0. “No index” tags prevent search engines from including your web pages in their results.

Ease of Use: 4/5

Free Trial?: Yes

4. Develop Strong Keywords with Google Adwords Keyword Planner

As part of the initial keyword research process and ongoing work, every B2B search marketer should use it with Google Ads Keyword Planner. This tool can be used to spark keyword ideas, determine which are most relevant based on volume and competitiveness, and build a targeted keyword list to guide efforts.

Having access to important data like search volumes and estimated bids helps online B2B marketers better align their B2B SEO strategy with the keywords and themes that provide the most opportunity for business.

Ease of Use: 3/5

Free Trial?: Yes

5. Analyze and Plan B2B SEO Strategy with Google Analytics (GA4)

Google Analytics 4 is widely accessible and a reliable system for improving rankings and appearing in the right searches at the right time. If you know how to use it, the tool will have a genuine impact on the growth of your business. Here are the basic steps:

STEP 1: Set up a dashboard.In the main navigation, go to customizations > dashboards. Add important metrics. These are based on benchmarks that define the performance of your brand using terminology common to your industry, products, and services. You should already have a good handle on this, but your digital services provider can help you flesh it out.

STEP 2: Check reports regularly, perhaps twice a month. Pay attention to how your site is trending with a focus on organic traffic. Find this here: acquisition > all traffic > source/medium > and then filtering by “organic.”

STEP 3: Separate types of traffic.SEO is mostly about organic traffic coming to your site. It’s important to review these results separately from other marketing channels like paid ads or social media. That way, you’ll be able to make strategic decisions about where you apply resources.

On that note, make sure you know how to distinguish yourself and employees from other traffic. Google Analytics allows you to filter out you and your employees, so your visits don’t artificially inflate the numbers.

Go settings > views > create view > title it “internal filters” > then select “filters” from the menu > add filter > name it > select “exclude” > “traffic from ip address” > enter your ip address. (can be found with a google search)

STEP 4: Analyze engagement.Engagement is how Google judges your site’s performance. To evaluate how people are using the site, keep track of bounce rate, avg session duration, and pages visited.

Ease of Use: 4/5

Free Trial?: Yes

6. Find Inbound Link Opportunities with MOZ Link Explorer

Moz Link Explorer helps B2B search engine marketers build high-quality inbound links to their website. This tool allows SEOs to research a site’s backlink profile and dig into competitive backlink data. This can uncover new link building opportunities and potentially harmful links.

Ease of Use: 3/5

Free Trial?: Yes

7. Buzzsumo; Out With the Bad, In with the Good

Distinguish effective content from ineffective with BuzzSumo. This tool allows marketers to better understand what content is working (or not), and tailor strategies accordingly.BuzzSumo can be used to evaluate what content gets shared most and generates the most backlinks.

Based on the content that has proven successful in the past, B2B SEOs can make more educated decisions about what content to publish, when to publish it, how to format it, how long it needs to be, etc.

Ease of Use: 2/5

Free Trial?: Yes

8. Maintain Momentum with Semrush

SEMrush can be used across SEO, PPC, and social media efforts. SEMrush provides keyword performance and position tracking, keyword analytics for organic research, backlink analysis, domain vs. domain comparisons, site auditing of on-page content and technical elements, and more.

Ease of Use: 4/5

Free Trial?: Yes

Big Takeaway

When it comes to B2B SEO tools, they won’t magically build a strategy for you, but the insights you get from these tools can be gamechanging.

Always start your research and analysis process with a combination of data gathering and using your own internal knowledge about your customers. From there, you can begin to put together a plan based on facts, versus your own instinct.

9. Optimize Your Content with MarketMuse

With over 4 million blog posts written a day, the competition for attention online is getting stiffer. MarketMuse gives you an edge by helping you optimize your content for greater visibility.

Designed for B2B content creation, MarketMuse is an AI-powered content optimization tool that can help you create optimized B2B content at scale. It helps you with keyword research, create content briefs, run content audits, and more. It also has a powerful content optimization feature that helps ensure your content features the necessary keywords and internal links. It also helps you format your content for easy reading.

For larger content teams, in-house or agencies, MarketMuse also comes with a built-in project management tool to help streamline your content creation process.

Ease of Use: 4/5

Free Trial?: Yes

The Rise of AI-powered B2B SEO Tools: Is the Future Here? 

As B2B SEO tools continue to improve and evolve, a new breed of tools is fast cropping up — AI-powered tools. While many tools like MarketMuse, INK, Frase, and SurferSEO have been using artificial intelligence for some time, a new generation of AI tools has taken the industry by storm. Examples include ChatGPt, ChatSonic, and Character AI, among many others.

But are these tools the future of B2B SEO?

As powerful as these tools may be, they are just that — tools. They may help users cut down the time it takes to perform their SEO tasks, improve rankings, and more, but they aren’t going to take over SEO. Well, not in the near future, anyway. One of the reasons for this is that search engines like Google frown on content created by robots, and they can detect it. 

While AI can create factually accurate content, it still needs a human touch to give it personality and help increase engagement and conversions. 

So, should you invest in AI-powered B2B SEO tools?

By all means, yes.

However, make sure you’re always within the SEO guidelines prescribed by Google and other search engines. Any tool that empowers you to “game the system” may get you quick results, but they’re also bound to get you penalized. As a result, you’ll lose more in the long run than your short term wins. 

If You Need Help, Reach Out For A Free Growth Strategy Workshop

Your product is awesome, but is your growth strategy keeping up?

Let’s fix that. Our free Growth Strategy Workshop is designed to help you cut through the noise and get clear on what really drives results.

In just one session with our CSO Ken or VP of Strategy Lauren, you’ll walk away with a no-BS roadmap to scale—whether you’re ready to work with us or just want solid advice.

Ready to dive in or just testing the waters? We’ve got you covered.

You’re already juggling enough. Let us handle the growth game plan so you can get back to, well, being the genius behind the product.

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