Search engine optimization requires deep research, hefty work on your site, and constant monitoring to succeed, especially in highly competitive niches. It doesn’t produce results instantly either, so why are so many B2B companies heavily invested in it?

SEO can produce a high ROI because when you target specific searches, you expose your business to an audience of people who are in the market for your product or actively researching a solution.

Let’s take a closer look at how B2B businesses can use search to their advantage and share the best practices of B2B SEO.

Why B2B SEO Matters

There are dozens of marketing channels in B2B, from social media to cold email outreach. Many of them are outbound—where you talk to leads about your business. Those can undoubtedly bring in revenue, but inbound channels, those where leads seek your guidance, can do so with better ROI and the added benefit of building trust with your brand.

SEO is one of those channels. As you create applicable B2B content for leads, they will discover your business and grow to trust your advice before they even need your product.

In fact, 66% of decision-makers discover B2B products by searching for information on Google. Doing B2B SEO can put you on the radar of potential clients.

The sales cycle is longer in B2B industries. Often, it can take months of research before a lead reaches out. This is why B2B SEO differs from how it should be done in B2C.

In SEO for consumer products, you focus on the bottom of the sales funnel, ensuring your product pages are shown for the correct search queries.

In B2B SEO, you must dominate search result pages for keywords associated with all the sales funnel stages. When you do that, potential leads will discover your business, share advice and showcase your product or service, no matter their search.

How To Build Your B2B SEO Strategy

To excel in SEO for B2B businesses, you need a combination of research, technical optimization, and the creation of valuable content to cover all bases. Here’s where you start.

Define Your Audience & Their Pain Points

A good B2B SEO strategy starts with B2B keyword research. A great one starts with audience research.

In B2B, you’re working with a narrow, particular audience. Typically, B2B buyers are high and low-level decision-makers—CEOs, heads of departments, managers, consultants, and business owners. When you understand them, know their pain points, and can navigate their interests, you can create a better SEO strategy.

The basic on-page and technical SEO won’t be impacted by who your leads are, but the choice of keywords to target and the topics you cover will. It also affects the tone and style of your SEO blog content and landing pages.

To create a better understanding of your clients, gather data about them. Talking to your sales representatives and using CRM data are some of the sources of such data. You should also use marketing performance data to see which demographics are attracted to your business and which marketing materials resonate with them better. Conducting client interviews is another source of data.

When you have all the data before you, brainstorm with your team to create one or several ideal customer profiles. Focus on what information they will be looking for before purchasing with you.

Conduct Keyword Research for Every Stage of the Funnel

When you have an idea of who your best clients are, it’s time for keyword research. You need to find keywords that align with three central positions on the sales funnel: top, middle, and bottom.

Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) keywords are informational keywords. These are typically long keywords containing four or more words and can be phrased as a question. Here are a few examples.

• What is ERP software?
• Difference between ERP and CRM.
• How does ERP software work?

Users who Google these keywords are only beginning to take an interest in the topic and aren’t in the market for it yet.

Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) keywords have commercial intent. They are long and revolve around comparing solutions or learning information that leads to a purchase. These three keywords are MOFU.

• Best ERP software for manufacturing.
• ERP software list.
• Best ERP software compared.

People searching these keywords will typically not convert on the spot, but they’re close to making a purchase, and showcasing your solutions to them counts.

Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) keywords are shorter and transactional in nature. Typically, you may see brand names in these types of search queries.

• SAP ERP pricing and features.
• SAP ERP deals.

Traffic on these keywords is most likely to convert.

To find and sort keywords for all funnel levels, you’ll need SEO software like SE Ranking’s  Keyword Search Tool. This SEO tool lets you discover high-potential keywords and view hundreds of similar and related keywords with metrics like search intent, search volume, ad analytics, and keyword ranking difficulty estimates.

Align B2B Content with Buyer Intent

Once you have an extensive list of keywords, group and sort them by the funnel stage. Each stage will have a specific type of content aligned with customer intent at this stage.

TOFU keywords and content are covered mainly by blog posts and industry reports. Here, it’s important to do deep research into search intent. Analyze search engine result pages and read through the articles that rank high. Note the subtopics covered there. The odds are that people who Google this keyword want to learn about it as well as the main topic of the keyword.

For MOFU keywords, you’re likely to create a lot of case studies and comparison pages. Users who Google these keywords are interested in applying solutions to their problems. Your job is to showcase your solutions, either through a case study or by comparing your services to competitors.

Another form of MOFU content is free webinars or masterclasses. You’ll likely have to lead the users to them through other content, as few people will look for webinars specifically. Leave links to the webinar in TOFU content and advertise it to email subscribers. Webinars have a reasonable conversion rate, so it’s a form of B2B content marketing you want to invest in.

Finally, BOFU keywords are primarily used for sales-related content. Those are product and service pages, pricing pages, demos, free trials, and other landing pages. Getting them to rank well at first can be tricky, as there’s a lot of competition. So, while you’re working on optimization, promote them in other content.

Here, the understanding of your core audience and their pain points plays a significant role. The content on your landing pages should be optimized for keywords and aligned with customer expectations.

Optimize Technical SEO & Link Building

The previous two sections cover on-page optimization. The only thing you’ve left to do is technical and off-page optimization.

Technical SEO deals with aspects of the website's health, like security and performance. Both ranking factors can affect how well your website performs on SERP. They’re not the most potent ranking factors, but with most other factors being equal, search engines will prioritize sites that load fast and have a viable SSL certificate.

The easiest way to improve this aspect of B2B SEO is to run a website audit and fix the mistakes. Most likely, to improve Core Web Vitals, you’ll have to work on image and video compression and loading prioritization. Forcing some larger images and JavaScript files to lazy-load will improve the time it takes to load the critical content on the page. Do this for desktop and mobile platforms.

You should also make sure your SSL certificate doesn’t expire, but most platforms will take care of that for you. You just need to make sure the card you use works.

Off-page SEO deals mostly with link building and PR management. Google uses links pointing to your site as votes of confidence—the more links point to it, and the more trustworthy the sites that link to you, the more reliable your site appears.

That’s why one of the main tasks of SEO is procuring those links. There are a few best practices for that:

• Reach out to industry blogs and write content for them.
• Share press releases.
• Create unique content like research or case studies and promote them to earn links.

Since several research customers do happen outside of your B2B website, you also need to work on digital PR. This includes engaging with customer reviews on reviews like G2 and getting your company mentioned in high-ranking listicles of similar products.

Measuring SEO Success: Key B2B Metrics to Track

The last piece of the puzzle is measuring your successes and failures to learn from them and improve your B2B SEO strategy.

First, measure the standard SEO metrics. Here are the most important ones:

• Traffic volume
• Impressions
• Clicks and CTR
• New vs repeat visitors
• Positions for core keywords

You can track those with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Use an SEO tool for precise tracking of keyword positions and SERP for those keywords.

Next is technical health tracking—many changes to improve technical SEO, like changing the pagination structure, last for a long time. However, smaller mistakes can creep up as you add more pages to your site. Do a monthly or quarterly site audit to make sure everything’s fine.

You should also track link growth to your site. GSC can show top linked pages but won’t go into the details of which sites link to you. Use one of the B2B SEO tools to track which sites link to you and evaluate their quality. Note the progress with link building and consider disavowing links if you see an influx of poor-quality ones.

Finally, use a combination of your CRM and Google Analytics to track and analyze conversion rates. You should do this for all stages of the funnel. Track the conversion rate on the blog pages to the next funnel—webinar sign-ups and newsletter subscriptions. Track the conversion rate from those content pieces and landing pages as well.

If you see the conversion rate is below what you expect, try A/B testing to find a way to improve CRO.

SEO changes typically take a few months to register, so if you optimize a landing page today or build a link, it won’t be reflected in SERP instantly.

Summary

This short B2B SEO guide aims to give an overview of the best search engine optimisation practices in the B2B sphere. Follow these strategies and monitor performance, and your website will gradually climb up in the search rankings.

The next step is to educate yourself on the finer details of SEO. Consider attending webinars or getting a certification to improve your understanding of SEO workflows and execute your strategy better.