8 B2B SEO Best Practices to Leverage Your Strategy

‘Let me google it’.

Google has become our go-to place to look for answers. Whether that’s a cooking recipe for tonight’s dinner to the latest software we need to get our job done.

In Google we search, and in Google we trust.

However, as a business, how can we make our product, services, or content appear in the Google search engine results pages? The answer, before you google it, is search engine optimization = SEO, and there are some winning best practices we’ve discovered over the years.

Without a strong B2B SEO strategy, you won’t be on the Google search engine results–or in any other search engines’, but Google has over 90% of the market. Without appearing on the search results, you basically don’t exist. When was the last time you bought or read something that wasn’t on Google? Exactly, case in point.

With SEO, you’re trying to answer three key questions:

• What does the searcher want?
• How can I give it to them?
• How can I let Google–or other search engines–know that I have the answer?

In this article, we’ll understand what B2B SEO is and how you can make a flawless strategy that gets you where your users are looking.

Ready to make it onto the Google map? Let’s do this.

Why is SEO Important for B2B?

SEO is crucial for business to business because without it, you’ll simply won’t be where your target audience is looking.

Imagine if you had no marketing whatsoever and only relied on word-of-mouth advertising. That’s exactly how it would be if you didn’t pay attention to B2B SEO.

Now, imagine you’re creating high quality content–the kind of content that is insightful, well-written, and really targeting your audience’s pain points–but you were printing it out and keeping it at your desk.

Without anyone seeing your content, it won’t matter how good it is. It would just be a pile of paper somewhere. That’s exactly how creating great content but not paying attention to SEO is like.

Search engine optimization is what allows your amazing content to be found by your target audience. It’s the science that works like the most accurate dating match: finding the perfect couple between your content and your ideal customer–a match made in marketing heaven.

SEO is based around three pillars that work together to get you to the top of the search results. Those pillars are:

• Technical SEO. The technical aspects that make your page indexable and to rank higher by search engines: site speed, information architecture, accessibility, redirects, crawl budget, and more.
• On-page SEO. The specific things you can make on your page and content to let search engines know what your page is about and give it a better ranking: keywords, URLs, meta descriptions, content quality, images, links, and others.
• Off-page SEO. The efforts outside of your page that can help you rank higher: inbound links, authority of inbound links, link building, and more.

Additionally, besides helping your content to be found, B2B SEO allows your brand to become a thought leader. After all, in B2B your content, readers aren’t just looking to be entertained, or see one article of yours before they make a decision. No. They want to know you are a reliable source, that you know and understand their problems, and that you’re an expert in the subject.

What’s the difference between B2B SEO and B2C SEO?

To really understand why a B2B SEO strategy is so important for businesses and how to make it work there are three key things we need to understand. 

First, different from B2C where you’re targeting the person that will probably make the final decision of buying your product, in B2B you have multiple decision makers to convince. This also means there is a lower conversion than in B2C. B2B SEO is about the long game, not the quick wins.

Second, in B2C, the more people that see you the better. Instead, in B2B you want your specific target audience to see you. So, the quality and targeting of your readers is better, not the quantity. Which is why you’re better off targeting low-volume keywords, rather than high-volume ones.

Third and last, in B2C your brand is important, but in B2B it’s crucial. In B2C, someone might buy a pair of headphones just because they are cheap enough, regardless of the brand they are. Instead, in B2B and due to the long line of decision makers that usually have a say before a purchase, your brand and your thought leadership are essential for them to make a decision.

Here are some important B2B SEO statistics to look at:

• Paid search and social media marketing accounts for 10% and 5% of the traffic to B2B and B2C sites. Instead, organic search–accomplished with SEO efforts–drives 51% of all visitors
• The first page of SERPs accounts for 71% of all traffic
• Long-tail keyword searches have a click-through rate of 3% to 5% higher than generic keyword searches
• 50% of visitors are more likely to click a result if the brand appears multiple times in SERPs
• 45% of large companies invest more than $20,000 a month in SEO. Instead, most small businesses invest less than $1,000–worried about the budget you’ll need. Worry not and learn how to set up your B2B marketing budget.

Getting to the top search engine results pages will always be a priority for businesses. To do this, you’ll need to create content and amazing B2B SEO strategies.

By using the right B2B SEO strategies you’ll be able to:

• create the content that your ideal customer is looking for
• have your content be seen by the right people
• convince multiple decision makers and improve conversion
• improve your brand’s awareness and thought leadership

Now that we’ve seen why it’s so important, let’s see how you can develop a bulletproof strategy.

8 B2B SEO best practices to use in your strategy

According to HubSpot, Google’s search algorithm uses more than 200 factors to rank websites. This means that getting on top of the results is not an easy feat. However, it isn’t impossible–just look at this result and how we’ve managed to be at the tippy top of the results page.

Here are the 8 B2B SEO best practices you need to include in your B2B SEO strategy to make sure you’re doing everything you can to succeed:

1. Create buyer personas

Unlike social media, where you’ll be shown things that might be interesting to you and you’ll actually end up following more than ten accounts of cute puppy dogs–without you ever intending to use Instagram like that. In SEO, it is all about user intent.

If you’re not showing the user what it is they’re looking for, they’ll either leave your site as quickly as they got in, or simply scroll on by.

Creating buyer personas should be your first step when designing a winning B2B SEO strategy which is an abstract representation of who your ideal customer is. It’s made based on quantitative and qualitative data from thorough market research.

Of course, most businesses will have a set of different buyer personas as they are not catering to only one type of customer. The more specific you can go with each, understanding their pain points, their online behavior, and more, the better you’ll be at creating a SEO strategy that addresses each of these elements.

2. Focus on keyword research

Now that you understand who your ideal customer profiles are and you’ve set up your buyer personas, you’ll need to focus on keyword research.

Keywords are the main element that will let search engine crawlers know what your site and content are all about. Additionally, keywords are how people communicate to search engines what they want. After all, that’s what you’re typing into the search bar.

There are a few things to consider when doing keyword research:

• Different keywords for different stages: You need to find the specific keywords that people are using to drive them through your whole sales funnel–see the image below to understand how each stage can change the content you want to show and the keywords would be logically changing too
  
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• Focus on long-tail keywords: the more niche you can go on B2B SEO, the better. After all, users will come to you with very specific problems that your business is solving. Which means that the more narrow you can go the better. Instead of ‘SaaS SEO’ go for ‘SaaS SEO Competitive Analysis.’

• Use tools to your advantage: keyword research is not rocket science, but that doesn’t mean it should be entirely done manually. There are plenty of tools out there designed to help you find what other URLs are ranking for, what people are looking for, find the volume high volume keywords, and much more.

To name just a few keyword research tools you have:

• SEMrush
• Google Search Console
• Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
• KWFinder
• Google Keyword Planner
• Moz Keyword Explorer

You can have great content, but if the keywords you’re using on your titles, meta description and copy do not match the search intent, you’ll be wasting your time.

Keep in mind that related keywords are also important to consider. If you fill everything with just one main keyword, Google won’t be as impressed. Instead, if you’re talking about SEO and you mention things like:

• search volume
• google search console
• organic traffic
• landing pages
• XML sitemap
• buyer persona
• SEO marketing
• and so on…

Google will see all of these related keywords as a sign that you really are talking about SEO and that you know your stuff.

We know it all sounds a bit daunting, but fear not. It’s possible to have great keyword research and an optimum SEO strategy with the right tools and knowledge. However, if you want to leave SEO in the hands of the experts. Check us out–a B2B SEO agency created to do all the heavy lifting for you.

3. Create great quality content

“Content is king, but only when quality is the cloak it wears.”

This phrase couldn’t be more accurate. Content is like the sausage–or veggie sausage–of a hot dog. You can have the hot dog bun, but unless there is a sausage it won’t be a hot dog. Also, if the sausage isn’t great, it doesn’t matter how many sauces or toppings you put on the bun, it won’t be a great hot dog.

This means that unless you have a well-thought-out content marketing strategy and execution, your SEO strategy will only take you so far.

How do you make sure you have a killer content strategy?

• Ensure you’re creating content that is relevant for your industry, keywords, and user intent
• Make your content available in the different formats and channels that your target audience is consuming information–it could be webinars, videos, podcast, blog posts, or more
• Tackle your content gap–the keywords and topics that your competitor is ranking for but you’re not
• Follow the 70/20/10 rule: 70% of your content is educational, 20% is for engagement, and 10% is self promotion
• If it’s not valuable content, better leave it out–don’t make the mistake of thinking more is always better, sometimes less but better quality is what will get you the right audience to engage
• Take inspiration from those in the first places of search rankings–see what you can learn from them. The length of their blog posts, the keywords used in their titles, the general format of their resources, and anything else that stands out.

Content creation is not easy, but it will be easier if you focus on providing value to your users. After all, in B2B you aim to prove you’re a thought leader in a specific problem and that you understand better than them the problems they are having.

When you focus on doing these things, and you pay attention to what users like in terms of images, white space, and whatever is working for your competitions, you’re staying on top of your content SEO.

4. Make your content accessible

Google and other search engines don’t disclose every single factor they use in their algorithm. However, increasing the accessibility of your site will always be a good idea.

We don’t mean only accessibility for those with some type of visual impairment–e.g. colorblindness for example–but the general accessibility of your site for crawlers and humans.

Accessibility checklist to make sure your content is as accessible as possible:

• Contrast: make sure your text, images, and overall layout has proper contrast so that is readable–for example, avoid yellow letters on a white background
• Font type: remember that part of the algorithm of Google and other search engines is seeing if people that click on your page actually stay on it. If your font is so fancy that it’s illegible, it won’t matter how good the keywords are or how fast the site loads, people will leave your site in a heartbeat.
• Heading style: this is both for humans and website crawlers. By using the right hierarchy of headings and styles of headings–h1, h2, h3, and so on–you let people and crawlers know what your page is about and how it is organized. This is especially important for humans as most people will skim a page until they find what they’re looking for. In fact, it has been found that 55% of the people that click your content read only 15 seconds of it.
• List styles: breaking your blocks of text with styles with accessible list styles makes it easier for people to take in the information
• Alternative text: for those with seeing impairments alternative text is crucial. It allows text-to-voice softwares to describe images to them. Additionally, alternative text can be another opportunity for you to include keywords and give those crawlers more information about your content
• Linking context: by anchoring more than just one word or brand, but actually including some contextual words can improve how search engines read the links in your content
• Mobile-friendliness: in 2021, it was found that over 63% of organic search engine visits came from a mobile device. This means that if your site is not mobile-friendly you’ll be losing some precious market share, and it will negatively impact your SEO efforts

If you’re in the SaaS industry and you want to learn more about how to make SEO-friendly content. Check our Best SaaS SEO Checklist for Creating Optimized Content.

5. Check the competition

Checking the competition is a key aspect of SEO. After all, if you’re trying to compete for that first page, you need to see what they’re doing that’s working, and how you could improve on it.

Obviously, you’re always aiming to provide original content. However, noticing the gaps that there are between your competitors’ content marketing strategy and yours is essential to understand what you could be doing better.

If you want to dig deeper into how to conduct and insightful competitor analysis. Check out our article and you’ll learn the eight steps to take in order to get the most out of your competitor analysis.

6. Don’t forget about backlinks

One way that Google and other search engines know how trust-worthy and relevant your page is, is by looking at backlinks.

Backlinks are the links on other websites that point back to your site. This lets Google know that your information is accurate and that you’re a thought leader–if you have backlinks from respectable websites, of course.

The more backlinks you have, the more traffic you get from Google itself, but also from the other sites where users will find your link.

In case you don’t believe the importance of back-linking, check these two statistics that paint a powerful picture:

• Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, Andrey Lipattsev, said that high-quality content and link building are the two most important signals used by Google to rank your website
• Over 90% of all pages get no organic traffic from Google, and this is mostly due to the fact they don’t have backlinks
  

Source

Backlinks are really important because it’s what gives more weight and authority to your content. Although the best way to get backlinks is simply to have amazing content, there are some other ways for you to get more backlinks through:

• Vendors and partners
• Brand mentions
• Badges
• Press releases
• Funding & investor updates
• B2B Podcast interviews
• Roundup articles
• Guest posts
• Original research
• Product reviews
• Conferences

If you want to learn more about how to implement some winning back linking tactics to give your site the chance it deserves. Check out our article 11 B2B Link Building Tactics & How to Implement Them and you’ll become an expert in a matter of minutes.

7. Don’t forget about internal linking

Although back-linking seems to be an important sauce in our SEO hotdog build, we can’t forget about internal linking. Especially, since it is the one in charge of letting Google and search engine crawlers find, index, and understand all the pages on your site.

When used properly, internal links can organize and give page authority to your important pages.

Best practices for internal linking:

• try to use keyword-rich anchor text
• link to important–pillar–pages
• avoid using the same anchor text for different pages
• use Google Search Console to audit your internal linking
• place links higher up in your copy–avoid a closing statement with all your links
• make your internal links ‘Dofollow’ links–these are links that are indexed and crawlers will include in their searches
• when linking to the same page on one piece of content, keep in mind Google will only take into account that first anchor text
• help Google understand your site’s architecture with internal linking

8. Technical SEO is just as important

Now that we’ve mentioned some on-page and off-page SEO best practices, you can’t forget about technical SEO.

Quick reminder: technical SEO refers to all those elements that make your page easier to crawl and index.

Some important elements you should be including and optimizing in your BSB SEO strategy:

• Meta elements: meta tags–titles, descriptions, and other–are places in the code of the site and let crawlers know what the page is about at a deeper level than on-page titles and copy
• Page loading time: if people have to wait for your page to load, they’ll likely move on to another that charges quickly–has it not happened to you? To make sure your page is loading at the right speed make sure all elements in your page–images, videos, and others–are optimized.
• CTAs: Call-to-actions are the way that users will engage on your page. It can be to move around your site through the different content that you have, to the precious ‘sign up’ button. Making sure they’re all correctly places and linked is super important.
• Schema markup: the way you choose to present your site on the SERPs can send a powerful message to both search engines and people. Making sure you’re providing all the relevant information on the result snippet can make users feel much better about clicking your page because they see it has the information they’re looking for.

To understand these elements and many others that you should be thinking of when you think of technical SEO, head over to our technical SEO guide–see how internal linking works? 😉 

Now we’ve covered the elements and practices that will help you implement your SEO strategy like an absolute SEO expert. Let’s look at proof of how all of that works in one amazing B2B SEO success story. 

Winning examples of B2B SEO in the real-world

MailChimp: A monkey-climb to success

Thanks to their thoughtful and valuable content–as well as great tools and technical SEO–they’ve jumped to SEO success. Their Ahrefs’ Domain Rating is 93, with 18 million backlinks that come from 46 thousand linking websites. They have 17.9 million monthly visits, and they’ve made it to the top of crucial high-volume keywords like ’email marketing’, ’email automation’, and ’email tools.’

Nathan Latka: a year to see results

Nathan Latka signed up to our SEO Management service and we increased his organic traffic by 568% in 12 months, dethroning giants such as Owler, Crunchbase, and Profitwell. He now has multiple crucial SaaS keywords on the first SERPs. 

Additionally, getlatka.com gets 10,500 monthly organic visits according to Keywords Everywhere, and ranks for a total of 9690 keywords. All thanks to a 12-month SEO marketing plan. 

Final thoughts on B2B SEO best practices

Now that you know what to do to improve your chances of ranking on the first page of Google, all you have to do is keep on optimizing, keep on looking for link building opportunities, and have patience.

SEO is something that takes some time to show results. Make changes, and keep checking and analyzing your key sites and business metrics to see if you’re on the right course or if you need to readjust.

Your site’s online visibility and traffic is key for the success of your business, so keep working on it until you see results, and then keep working on it. SEO is an ongoing practice and you’ll be tweaking and improving it for as long as Google and search engines exist.

However, remember what’s the most important thing here: your audience. Create valuable content first, and then focus on the rest and you’ll see your business climbing higher.

B2B SEO best practices FAQ