Amp Up Your B2B SEO Strategy This 2022

For B2B businesses — or any business for that matter — to direct quality traffic to their website, they need SEO. Above all, it plays an integral role in your B2B marketing. It lets you get your brand in front of the right people and drive potential clients to your website.

But how do you do B2B SEO right and how does it differ from B2C SEO?

Read on to find out and learn the top SEO strategies B2B marketers should use in today's competitive, digitally-enabled business landscape. 

Difference Between B2B SEO and B2C SEO

While these two approaches aim to generate leads and higher revenue, both differ in three areas; sales funnel, the volume of keywords, and expertise.  

Let's take a look at these differences one by one. 

Sales funnel 

A B2C sales funnel is simpler than a B2B. B2Cs aim to convince customers to make a direct purchase by launching short and enticing campaigns. That’s it. 

However, things change when we shift to a B2B's sales funnel. 

Unlike B2Cs, B2Bs don't prioritise getting a sale on the spot. Instead, it looks to build and develop client relationships. When done right, it can lead to a sure deal. 

Because of this, marketers need to go deeper in developing strategies in each phase of their sales funnel.  

After all, there's more thought and research involved for professionals considering a hosting service than a customer buying a pair of leather pants. 

Keyword volume 

Since the sales funnel of B2Bs is more complex than B2Cs, marketers have to find hyper-focused and low-volume keywords.  

Doing so helps you get in front of professionals specifically looking for a solution (your brand) to solve their problem. This requires dedication and rigorous keyword research skills. 

Establish expertise 

There's no doubt that customers will always consider a brand's reputation before making a purchase. But since B2Bs focus on selling products to professionals, it's crucial to establish themselves as primary thought leaders in their niche. 

This involves trying to convince your target audience why they should pick you instead of the competition.  

You can demonstrate your expertise by consistently publishing high-quality blogs, testimonials, and winning prominent awards. 

READ: 5 SEO Challenges Brands Face (+How to Overcome Them) 

Top 4 B2B SEO Strategies That Generate Quality Traffic 

It can be tricky to create a B2B SEO strategy if you don’t know where to begin. But don't worry, we've got you covered.  

Below are four strategies you can start with your B2B SEO journey. 

Create detailed buyer personas 

The first step to ensuring a successful B2B SEO strategy is to create your buyer’s persona. 

A buyer persona is a probable description of your ideal customers, such as their demographics, pain points, and their online platform preferences. You can derive buyer personas from your existing customer base or through market research.  

Personas help marketers and salespeople get an idea of what their customers like, how they behave, and what impacts their purchasing decisions. It guides brands in developing products and services their market prefers. 

Target the right keywords for the different phases of your sales funnel 

There’s no doubt that keywords are the foundation of any SEO strategy.   

But if you want to get Google’s attention, you need to use the right keywords — which is the goal of keyword research. It’s the foundation of a winning B2B SEO strategy.  

How to choose the right keywords? Understand what type of queries your buyer personas from the different stages of your sales funnel used to find a business like you online. With this, you can create topic clusters or pillar topics that will help you establish your industry expertise. 

Your keyword research should adhere to the following principles: 

• Consider keyword intent or the reason a customer enters a certain query on the search engine. It could be because they're gathering information or they’re ready to make a purchase. Depending on factors such as budget and timeline, the competition for the target keyword should be manageable.  
• The keywords should also be relevant to your products/services. This is because not all keywords that are popular with your target audience are relevant to your brand. 

Optimise your website for great user experience 

Providing optimal customer experience is one of Google’s primary ranking factors. That’s why it’s essential to optimise the aspects of your website that influence customer behaviour such as content, site speed, security, and images. 

Here are tips to boost your website’s overall experience: 

• Make sure your website loads fast. Statistics show that more than 50% of users will bounce when a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. You can improve loading speeds by upgrading your hosting plan, deleting unnecessary plugins, and resizing images. 
• Secure backlinks from high-authority websites. Backlinks signal users and Google that other brands trust your content. 
• Create content that resonates with your audience. And as much as possible, keep it free from grammar errors. 
• Don’t limit your content strategy to blog posts. Use multiple platforms to publish your content such as podcasts, webinars, videos, newsletters, and infographics. 
• Implement target keywords in your web pages. And apart from the website’s body, naturally include them in headings, meta descriptions, and URLs. 
• Create a structured sitemap. This lets Google understand the various elements of your website. 
• Secure an SSL certificate. Install an SSL certificate on your website. Doing this tells Google you prioritise user security and privacy. 

By applying these tips, you're also optimising your website to Google's Core Web Vitals. This update focuses primarily on three metrics, such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Display (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These impact a user's overall on-page experience.

Remember, providing an exceptional user experience generates higher traffic, leads, and conversions. So if you're interested to learn more about this update, feel free to register and watch our Google’s Crucial Core Web Vitals for Your Website webinar.

Build a seamless Mobile User Experience (UX) 

A recent report found that more than 55% of Google searches in the US were on mobile — with numbers expected to rise in the coming years.  This statistic alone emphasises the importance for brands to optimise their website’s mobile experience. 

A site's mobile UX value grew after Google enabled mobile-first indexing for all new websites since July 2019. Mobile-first indexing means that Google will primarily crawl the mobile version of a website (instead of the desktop version) to evaluate and rank its relevancy.  

Among the best practices for mobile responsive websites include: 

• Structuring data and metadata (page titles and descriptions) on both versions of your website. 
• Speed up its mobile loading speeds. 
• And possess the same content as its desktop version. 

Step up your B2B SEO game 

SEO can be time-consuming but if you commit and do it right, you’ll be reaping great rewards before you know it. Drive more quality traffic and conversions to your website with these four helpful B2B SEO strategies.