Develop an effective B2B SEO strategy with these 4 tips

It’s not always easy to run a successful B2B marketing campaign. For starters, you need the right mindset, strategies and the tools to succeed.

You also need funding.

If you’re a startup, you can opt for a small business loan so you have the budget to create a professional-looking website, run paid ads, etc. 

However, if you’re looking to run a successful B2B SEO campaign. 

You don’t always need huge funding.

With the right strategies, you can dominate your industry and win against your competitors even though they have deeper marketing pockets.

In this guide, we’ll share with you reliable tips on how to develop a winning B2B SEO strategy for your business.

Let’s get started.

B2B SEO: A brief overview

Business-to-Business (B2B) Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the online practice of using multiple tactics to increase the chances of your web pages and content reaching the decision-makers of potential client companies. 

Essentially, B2B SEO focuses on techniques to create and optimize web pages, including social media marketing channels. 

The goal is for the pages and content to show up at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when people search for topics or keywords related to your brand, products, and services.  

An effective B2B SEO strategy should help bring someone actively researching services and products your company offers to your company website. It should place your business in front of B2B clients who want or need your company’s services. 

4 B2B SEO strategy development tips

Having all elements of your SEO approach working together seamlessly, from your target keywords to reliable SEO tools, is crucial to achieving an effective strategy. 

Below are four ways to help you develop a solid SEO strategy for your B2B company. 

1. Create relevant and valuable content for each sales stage

Optimize your SEO efforts by creating relevant content for each sales stage.

Start with one content piece for each stage and implement your SEO strategies.

Below are the buyer’s journey stages and the appropriate content you can provide and optimize to amplify your SEO efforts.  

• Trigger or awareness. Run email, paid, and social media advertising (among others) to raise awareness about your brand, products, and services. 
• Review. Provide more information to your prospects by offering brochures, customer testimonials and reviews, webinars, product videos, website landing pages, etc.
• Purchase decision. Give your prospects evidence that your company can be the best fit for them by publishing case studies, delivering your pitch or presentation, and sharing your best practices and tools. 
• Engagement. Streamline the onboarding process with training materials, support resources or references, and more. 
• Relationship management. Deliver memorable, satisfying customer experiences via direct email and email communications, webinars, social media content, and customer events. 
• Renewal. Keep your clients engaged and encourage renewals via newsletters, infographics, whitepapers, and podcasts. 

Ensure every content in the sales stage is relevant and provides value to your target audiences while optimizing them for better visibility and higher SERPs rankings.

Streamline creating and managing your website, social media, and other content using modern and sophisticated apps. 

For instance, Vista Social’s advanced social media marketing (SMM) platform gives you the tools to plan, create, and automate publishing your content seamlessly. 

The platform’s features include TikTok marketing tools, a content calendar and scheduler, bulk uploading options, and reporting and analytics.

2. Develop buyer personas

A key aspect of B2B market research, which is a critical part of your SEO strategy, is to create buyer personas. 

Similar to a customer persona, a buyer persona allows you to create a profile of your ideal client. 

You’ll get a good idea about your target customers—their wants, preferences, interests, the industry they work in, their jobs, social media channels they’re active in, etc. 

All this information is vital for creating content your potential clients find relevant and valuable, which can drive them to your website.  

Leveraging the information to improve your content’s quality, which can help amplify your SEO efforts. 

Use handy digital marketing software such as a buyer persona generator.

HubSpots’ MakeMyPersona tool lets you create customizable buyer persona templates quickly.

The intuitive buyer persona generator is easy to use, and you can share the template with your marketing team members. 

3. Promote your content to get backlinks

Ensure you have great backlinks (the links from one website’s page to another). More backlinks can make your site come off as more authoritative. 

While this aspect of B2B SEO can be challenging since you have little control over it than your on-page SEO efforts, there are ways to build backlinks effectively. 

One approach is to create a B2B social strategy that includes promoting your current content. 

Promote your valuable and high-quality content, making them highly shareable and link-worthy and helping you gain links organically.   

Your strategy can also include providing services or content in exchange for backlinks, such as guest posting. 

Besides getting backlinks, establish a content tracking approach to determine if your content performance and promotion efforts are successful. It can also give you insights into whether your SEO efforts drive results.

4. Optimize your web pages and website

The biggest part of your SEO strategy is your technical and on-page SEO. 

Depending on your website’s design, your site might already have built-in SEO features and enhancements. You might also need to work with developers to improve your site’s SEO.

Some of your SEO strategy’s on-page and website optimization tactics should include the following. 

• Optimum page load speed to meet the Google ranking factor that requires fast load times. It can also help you deliver a good user experience to your website visitors.

Use PageSpeed Insights to assess your website’s current page load speed and get recommendations on how to improve it.

• An XML sitemap (a file listing your website’s essential pages) to ensure Google and search engine bots can find and crawl them for page ranking purposes. 
• Compressed images to reduce their file sizes. Uncompressed images have large file sizes that slow down your page’s load speed.
• Image alternative (alt) text or the written copy that displays in place of your web page images when they fail to load. 

Alt text allows search engines to crawl and rank your web pages better. It also provides meaningful descriptions for screen-reader software that blind and visually-impaired people use to read content on the web, improving your site’s accessibility. 

• Internal links or links to other pages within your website can help Google bots better understand and rank your site. It also gives more visitors valuable information by leading them to other related and relevant content and pages. 

For instance, include an internal link to your article on “Tips to Find the Best Computerized Cash Registers” in your blog post about “Starting a small retail business.”

• The keywords you want your web pages to rank for, including repeated yet natural use of your primary keywords. 

Use your target keywords in your informative headers and utilize variations (and secondary keywords) for further search targeting and readability.  

Additionally, optimize your page title tag, URL structure, and meta description (among others). 

Amplify your B2B SEO with a solid strategy

Your B2B SEO strategy doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should help you gain your expected results.

Learn from the time-tested tactics in this guide to help you develop an approach that can take your SEO efforts to the next level.

Once you nail your SEO strategy, you’ll get sustainable, organic traffic, which helps support your marketing initiatives long-term.  

28/03/2022