B2B SEO Strategy: Drive Organic Growth with Industry Best Practices

While most B2B marketers know that search engine optimization is an effective way to drive traffic, it’s often overlooked for the quick wins of the paid media.

Many businesses avoid SEO because they think it takes time or that there are no guaranteed results.

However, 70%-80% of all searchers^[i] ignore paid ads and jump straight to organic results.

Moreover, according to Forrester^[ii], 74% of B2B clients conduct 50% of their research online before making a purchase offline.

SEO not only has one of the biggest impacts on driving constant traffic to your website but can also drastically increase the value of your content. So, it’s time to make SEO a priority and learn the best B2B SEO strategies to drive organic growth.

From creating detailed buyer personas to developing a content strategy and earning backlinks, we’ll discuss major SEO strategies that can help strengthen your B2B brand.

Let’s get started.

Effective B2B SEO Strategies

1. Develop Detailed Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are a crucial component of any effective B2B marketing.

90% of companies using buyer personas have been able to create a clearer understanding of their customers.

A detailed study of your target audience is the first step towards developing buyer personas. The best way to get an elaborate picture of your audience is to talk to your customer-facing employees.

Since they’re always in direct contact with your ideal audience, i.e. your existing clients, they’ll have the best insights into the lives of your target audience.

You can also leverage tools like ‘Make My Persona’ to create detailed buyer personas.

Creating thoughtful and elaborate buyer personas is crucial for businesses as it helps understand the existing and prospective customers better.

Knowing your audience well helps you connect with them better and tailor your content and business messaging to meet their specific needs.

2. Thoroughly Understand Your Sales Funnel

Did you know 68% of companies have not identified a sales funnel and about 79% of marketing leads are never converted into sales?

An effective sales funnel provides a useful framework that helps you analyze your business and identify areas for improvement.

Moreover, your marketing and sales team can work collaboratively on finding answers to questions like:

a. How did customers find out about your business?

b. Which are the most successful touchpoints of your sales funnel?

c. Gathering key statistics like customer lifetime value, customer retention rate, and when and why leads chose to opt-out.

3. Do Deep Keyword Research

A comprehensive keyword research is undoubtedly significant in creating an excellent SEO strategy.

But 39% of the B2B marketers cite keyword research as one of the main challenges in implementing effective SEO.

This is usually because many B2B marketers only compare the volume and competition of the target keywords.

It’s a good start but unfortunately, it’s not enough!

Choosing the highest searched keyword to compete for leads you to make questionable decisions. Remember, you should choose keywords that help you drive traffic, not convert.

This challenge can be resolved by targeting buyers at different stages of the sales funnel. You can categorize keywords that align with every phase of the buyer’s journey.

This way, you can market your content better when you know what content do your buyers consume at a particular stage.

4. Optimize Your Landing Pages For Conversion

“Landing pages need to look appealing, but most of all they need to convert.” – Russell Brunson

It’s crucial for businesses to land users on a page that provides a great user experience, and encourages them to take action.

Here are the best practices that can help you optimize your landing pages for conversion:

a. Use unique and long-form content

b. Use keywords appropriately

c. Use prompts and placeholders

d. Avoid long forms

e. Create compelling CTAs

5. Create A Scalable Content Strategy

A scalable content strategy connects real content to real people. In the B2B marketing industry, content creation boils down to providing the target audience with a multitude of content formats.

Publishing high-quality content in the form of blog posts, case studies, podcasts, webinars, etc will help you target different demographics that consume media differently.

If you’re producing content that your audience is looking for, you’re well on your way to making a better connection with your audience.

6. Earn Backlinks

“Having backlinks not only helps improve SEO, but it also fosters brand recognition.”

They say, don’t stop after creating top-notch content, market it on your social media handles, and look for ways to earn backlinks from other credible websites.

Backlinks have a huge impact on search engine rankings. This link-building practice signals to Google that a resource finds your content valuable enough to link to it within their own content.

Earning backlinks implies that a website has created content that can be referred to by the users and is worth ranking on the SERPs.

Here are some top strategies to earn backlinks:

a. Reach out to industry-related influencers to promote your content.

b. Create high-quality content that’s worth linking to.

c. Find backlink opportunities with top referral sources.

d. Form partnerships by using outbound links.

e. Work with strategic partners on their partner pages.

Key Takeaway

A comprehensive SEO strategy for B2B businesses doesn’t have to be complex. It’s basically the same as B2C SEO, excepting you are targeting a very specific demographic.

If you follow the above B2B SEO practices, your website is more likely to rank higher on the search results, leading to more organic traffic and qualified leads for your B2B business.

Need Help With Creating an Effective SEO Strategy for Your Business? Contact Us!

References

^[i]Organic vs Paid Search

^[ii]Forrester