SEO Best Practices for B2B Organizations
SEO isn’t just about ranking for keywords in search engines. Instead, SEO is about how you can optimize the chance your company or business will be found by your target personas for different search queries and on various sites throughout the search engine’s network.
That means if you want to optimize your B2B website for search engines, it should be ever-present in organic search results, paid search and digital placements.
Why is this so important, now more than ever?
- 61% of B2B decision-makers start the decision-making process with a web search. (Demand Gen Report)
- 77% of B2B buyers say they won’t even speak to a salesperson until they’ve done their own research. (CEB)
SEO Can Always Help Your B2B Organization
Even if you’re operating in a highly specialized niche or selling a product that is catering to an extremely targeted market, SEO can help you.
Even if your resources are concentrated on other traditional marketing channels, SEO can help you gain more leads at a cheaper rate.
The key is, you need to apply an effective B2B SEO strategy. Once you do, you’ll see the results for yourself. So, what are these strategies?
SEO Best Practices for B2B Organizations
#1: Think About Your Target Audience
Here’s how you can go about doing it:
- Spend some time researching and analyzing your target audience.
- Gaze into the current websites that are ranking for your selected keywords to get a better understanding of how you can approach related topics.
- Create content that specifically answers your targeted personas’ queries — which will indirectly help you with your target keywords.
#2: Focus on Personalized Content
Quality content is the strength of B2B SEO. However, in order to make sure the content actually helps you rank for the targeted keywords, it’s important to keep the needs of your potential customer at the forefront. Understand the needs of your targeted audience and create targeted content such as news, blogposts, and articles, using the pain points.
Remember, SEO and content marketing must work hand-in-hand, so never underrate the importance of their combined power.
#3. Voice Search
The way people search for information online is changing. Increasingly, people are using voice search on their smartphones, tablets or voice assistants (like the Amazon Echo or Google Home devices) to search for information on the internet.
Also, it has been found that more than 90 per cent of B2B decision-makers do their online research with their mobile device before saying yes to a purchase. Since people using mobile are more likely to use voice search, it can be safely said that it matters for B2B SEO — and that the importance of B2B companies accounting for that will only increase.
#4: Advantage of Schema Markup
Schema markup plays an important role in improving search engine visibility and increases your click-through rate. It will increase organic traffic and the number of leads. While the benefits of schema markup are several, the best thing is that it helps to grow your business online.
#5: Optimize Your Meta Descriptions
B2B websites should not neglect the importance of optimizing meta descriptions on their websites. These descriptions are not only a necessary place to weave in your important keywords, but also a great way to get more people to click through to your website.
#6: Mobile SEO Strategy
Mobile usage is increasing day-by-day, which means you should optimize your B2B website for mobile to target a larger audience. Without a proper mobile SEO strategy in place, you won’t be ranking for your target keywords when your prospects search with their mobile devices.
#7: Always Track Google Updates
In order to get consistent traffic, conversions and revenue from organic search rankings and visibility on your B2B websites, you must stay updated on any algorithm changes or update Google makes. For example, if a change means that Google is not showing your up-to-date information about your website, then you need be on top of that and fix it as soon as possible.
Need a hand with your SEO? Flawless Inbound maintains a full team of SEO experts capable of taking your B2B needs to the next level. We’ve helped more than 70 B2B organizations across Canada and the US achieve SEO success — in combination with a full program of sales and marketing campaigns.