For a brand to dominate search results, the B2B marketer must understand the tools, how they work, and how to use the data they produce to make informed decisions. This is an iterative process that involves paying close attention to trends and responding accordingly.
Let’s start with the first steps and work our way through. You might not do these tasks in this order every time, but it helps to see the progression to develop a strategic approach to your site’s B2B SEO.
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 (GA)
Google Analytics 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. Boost Inbound Links (and New 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’re interested in getting help with ramping up your own SEO campaign, RevenueZen is a proven B2B SEO Company and we’d love to help you out every step of the way.
