Building a successful B2B SEO strategy is all about targeted efforts and careful planning. It is more than braving fierce competitors and dealing with sharp customers. It is also about putting up a fight with a lot of misinformation. Choosing from a sea of lead generation techniques, and figuring out which will work best for your business is daunting. Every B2B SEO agency is going to claim that they are the best B2B SEO agency and their strategy is the ultimate. To begin with, you must cut out the noise and find a B2B SEO agency that offers you a customized strategy suitably cut for your organization, product, industry, and target audience. The thumb rule is – more leads mean more sales. If you want business growth, then expand your pipeline. This blog will help you grasp the theory of B2B sales strategy that will pave the way to high-quality lead generation and exponential revenue growth.
Importance of SEO for B2B companies
You cannot do without a full-blown B2B SEO strategy and here’s why:
- Targeted approach – It allows your business to identify and target buyer personas, optimizing content and improving B2B SEO sales.
- Better customer understanding – It helps the SEO team to get a clear understanding of customer requirements and behavioral patterns, thus facilitating effective and personalized communication.
- Improved efficiency – It helps streamline the SEO process by optimizing content, resulting in increased traffic to the website.
- Consistency – It helps maintain consistency in providing valuable B2B content that brings constant traffic to the site and maintains high ranking on search engines.
- Performance analysis – —A structured SEO strategy allows easy establishment of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for performance analysis and allows adjustments when needed.
- Competitive advantage – A solid B2B SEO strategy defines your value proposition and addresses customer requirements, thus setting you apart from competitors.
- Builds client relationships – It helps build regular engagement and understanding with clients and fosters trust and loyalty over time.
Fool-proof Action Plan for Effective B2B SEO For Lead Generation
Creating an SEO strategy for B2B brands requires you to pay attention to each and every detail. Even the slightest of mistakes can hamper your action-plan, causing irreversible damage to your online presence. Take a look at this brilliant strategy that will help you build a powerful B2B SEO strategy for effective lead generation!
- Create buyer personas
The first step is to create buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your potential customers. You have to identify your ideal customers by categorizing them into multiple segments by analyzing their pain points, content preferences, business goals, etc. Buyer personas allow you to create content tailored to each persona, which is likely to deliver results in terms of conversions.
For example, your potential customer segments are HR recruiters and Sales Managers. This categorization gives you a better understanding of each segment so that you can create content that is tailored to resonate with each of these personas.
Now, how do you create buyer personas? Begin by gathering information from your target audience through interviews, surveys, market research, etc. This data will help you frame your desired buyer personas. Make sure that you keep updating these personas based on evolving customer needs and likings and create content accordingly.
- Keyword research
Keyword research is a vital aspect of B2B SEO strategy. During keyword research, you should focus on these crucial factors:
- Buyer persona – See what keywords each buyer persona uses to search for products and content.
- Search intent – See the buyer persona’s intent while he is searching. Refer to each buyer persona and ensure that your content syncs with that specific persona’s area of interest.
- Identify keywords for all funnel stages – B2B SEO implies that you must create content for all stages of the sales funnel. For this, you must identify relevant keywords for each funnel.
As different funnels require different content types, here’s a breakdown of the kinds of content that go for each funnel:
- Awareness stage – Blog posts, guest blog posts, landing pages, infographics, website home page, podcasts, social media posts, and videos.
- Consideration stage – eBooks, emails, interactive content, webinars, live video, and product features page,
- Decision stage – Customer case studies, competitive analysis, plan overview, FAQs, pricing page, and pitch deck.
- Retention stage – Tutorials and help centre articles.
3. Sales funnel optimization
Once you clearly understand the B2B sales funnel, you must optimize it to make your SEO strategy successful. The truth is that B2B customers do not purchase overnight right after reading a compelling blog post. They spend considerable time, even weeks and months, researching and comparing options before making the final decision. Your funnel optimization strategy is the catalyst in making or breaking this deal.
The best practice is to ensure that the keywords, as well as the content are mapped to their relevant funnel stage for accurate targeting. Here’s how you can optimize the B2B sales funnel for effective B2B SEO:
- Understand the buyer’s journey, sales funnel, and sales cycle.
- Create content for each funnel stage.
- Create relevant and helpful content that enables buyers to move from one stage to another, leading to conversion.
- Target the right keywords to bring the right traffic to your site.
4. Create authoritative and helpful content
B2B SEO content demands premium quality content that’s not just helpful to the reader but also reinforces your brand authority and leadership. Potential buyers evaluate branding, authority, and expertise while reading the content before they make the buying decision. Mediocre content would not suffice in facilitating conversions.
Strategically place Call To Actions in your content, such as by adding lead generation forms where readers can give you their contact details. You can also give a free resource for downloading which will help you collect the email addresses of your leads. This is a great way to start an email marketing campaign where you can follow up your clients for sale.
5. Optimize content
Content on your website must be optimized. There is no other way about it if you want to reap the benefits of SEO. Here isare the basic SEO checklist for content that cannot be overlooked even if you write exceptional quality content!
- Identify target keywords
- Optimize title tag
- Write headline in H1 tag
- Mark up subheadings with subheader tags
- Write a meta description
- Add CTA in content
- Add target keywords to the content body
- Review content quality
- Improve navigation with internal links
- Apply schema markup
- Add engaging visual content
- Index your page
- Increase page speed
- Ensure your page is mobile-friendly
Following the above checklist will help your content become search-engine friendly so that it can index and rank the content for the keywords targeted.
Also, use HTML tags like title, meta description, heading tags, alt tags, etc. Follow the below rules for sure-shot top ranking on search engines!
- Structure content properly
- Add internal links
- Include images, videos, infographics, and other forms of media
- Cover all related aspects of the topic
- Link cluster and pillar pages for authority
- Show detailed author bios to highlight their expertise
- Enhance page load speed
6. Promote your content
It is integral to promote your well-written, optimized content or else it will fail to create an impact. Simply sharing new blogs on your social media handles does not benefit B2B SEO. You must use methods that enhance your content visibility and the best way to go about it is to acquire relevant backlinks. The higher the number of backlinks, the higher will be your ranking on search engines.
It is quite tricky to acquire backlinks, however, you can follow these techniques to master the art of getting relevant backlinks to your B2B website content!
- Guest post on relevant websites
- Request business partners to acknowledge your content on their social media handles
- Use your connections and network for backlinks
7. Monitor performance
Keep experimenting with different techniques to see what works best for you in terms of SEO. Track your B2B content performance on search engines and see if it succeeds in getting top ranking.
Go by the rule: Do more what works best for you
Analyze performance at the most granular level possible.
See what type of content works best in pulling traffic, which CTAs work, why a certain content is not ranking well, what kind of updates in content is backfiring, what kind of backlinks are working, and so on.
Use all of the above data to improve your experimentation and decision-making process.
Best Practices for B2B SEO
Let us take a look at some of the best practices for B2B SEO:
Use content campaigns
For example, a tech startup struggled to gain visibility through conventional B2B SEO efforts. It hired a B2B SEO agency to improve its search engine ranking. The SEO agency created a content campaign that focused on a broader keyword range that could attract a larger audience. They created content on an industry-related broader term, “Artificial Intelligence.” They created a comprehensive guide on the topic, “ How AI can improve your business?” This blog significantly improved the search engine ranking of the IT startup and garnered organic traffic to their website. That one blog continued to generate leads and foster revenue growth, even years after it was published.
Build trust with social proof
Show social proof of the greatness of your product and service on your website and social media handles. This can be done in the form of client testimonials, reviews, successful case studies, etc. Create an exclusive section on your website and dedicate it to highlighting real customer experiences and outcomes. This is a great way to build social trust so that people visiting your website will convert. Trust factor is essential to increase organic traffic and higher conversion rates, thus making it a vital SEO strategy for lead generation.
Cater to sales leads on smartphones
More than 90 % of B2B buyers search for products and services on smartphones. Optimize your website for mobile searches to attract a larger audience. Invest in a mobile-friendly website so that buyers can make quick purchasing decisions. This goes a long way in enhancing customer loyalty and building brand value. Nonetheless, smartphone optimization goes a long way in maximizing your SEO efforts as search engines prioritize smartphone-friendly websites and content.
Bottomline
If you want to unlock the secrets of B2B lead generation and SEO strategies, then trusting a reliable B2B SEO agency will give you the best results. You can overcome your sales challenges with the right sales strategy that will work like a lead magnet. Kreativ Street is the best B2B SEO agency that can be your best bet if you want to fine-tune your lead generation strategy to achieve the outcomes you are looking for. Our wonderful team will brainstorm and identify the most promising B2B SEO strategy to help you reach the top of search engine rankings and garner maximum ROI.
