B2B SEO Explained to Rule the SERPs and Dominate the Market

Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO, is a systematic method to make your business rank on search engines. SEO is an organic method to outrank your competitors and establish your brand authority.

I strongly believe that good SEO is a blessing in disguise for any business. It helps you save on paid advertising and also brings incremental results in the long run.

In today’s digital age, SEO can be broadly classified into B2C and B2B SEO. The only difference between these two categories of SEO is the target market (audience). With B2B SEO, businesses target other businesses (who serve customers). 

On the other hand, with B2C SEO, businesses directly target the customers for their products/services.

In other words, B2B SEO is the science of reaching professionals via search engines. These professionals include freelancers, small businesses, solopreneurs, startups, and even big corporations.

In this guide, I will break down the best B2B SEO strategies. By consistently implementing these strategies, your B2B business will successfully climb Google’s rankings and help you become a thought leader in your industry. 

Elements of B2B SEO

Strong organic visibility across all buying cycle stages is a proven way to accelerate growth. A proper B2B SEO strategy can help you cut down your spending on digital ads and give you a profitable customer acquisition channel in the long term.

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to determine the success of your B2B SEO strategy is to see how often someone actively researching the product or service that you’re offering reaches your company’s website. 

But before you learn the B2B marketing techniques, you need to know the basics that will define the efficiency of your B2B SEO strategy. 

#1. Search Intent Analysis

B2B businesses should focus on keywords/topics that match the queries of their target businesses. You should create a topic cluster that covers anything and everything that will help you reach your customers.

#2. On-Page SEO

Your content needs to be optimized for the search engines. This includes the content on your website pages, blogs, and more. 

On-page SEO mainly includes keyword placements of primary and secondary keywords, optimization of title tags and meta description, adding alt text to images, and structuring the content in a reader-friendly way.

#3. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is synonymous with backlinks. However, when creating backlinks, most marketers only focus on the number of backlinks, not quality.

If your page has high-quality links from other websites (especially websites with high Domain Authority), Google views you as a topic expert and rewards you with a higher ranking.

#4. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is mainly about the backend optimization of your website – for example, crawlable XML sitemap, fast load speed, fixing broken links, and a mobile-friendly website design.

These are the primary elements of an effective B2B SEO strategy. As a marketer, you must ensure that these elements go hand-in-hand for the best results.

Best B2B SEO Strategies for Businesses

According to Sagefrog’s Marketing Mix 2023 report, 49% of B2B companies have an SEO strategy to achieve their marketing objectives. Content Marketing (which is itself a part of SEO) closely follows at 43%.

Now, let’s see some of the best B2B SEO strategies that can help you easily reach your customers and make them come to you saying, “Hey, I wanna buy this!” 😉🛒

Create a Buyer Persona

Buyer Persona is a representation of your target customer. This representation is created by collecting data from existing customer profiles and market/competitor research.

Why do you need a buyer persona?

Because a buyer persona gives you a deep dive into your customer’s minds and allows you to understand their needs, budget, and their buying behavior. 

If you don’t know where to start, here are a few factors that will let you create a buyer persona:

• Demographics: Gender, age, income, etc.
• Behavior: Consider customer interactions with your brand, their buying patterns at your offline stores (if any), their preferred communication channel, etc.
• Objectives: Understand your audience’s search intent and, most importantly, what need your product/service fulfills for them. Pay attention to their pain points.
• Budget: Understand what is your target audience able or prepared to spend.

A detailed buyer persona will help you create an accurate market segment for your product/service. In fact, according to Braze Magazine, a segmented audience gets 200% more conversions than a broad audience.

Understand Your Sales Funnel

Talk with your sales team, collaborate with your sales/marketing executive, and understand your sales funnel. Consider at which stage the customers buy, at which stage they enter, what’s the biggest exit point, and more.

Dive deep into your sales and analytics data and find answers to questions like – average time to purchase, retention rate, do exit customers come back, etc. With such knowledge, you can begin your SEO keyword research with confidence.

An optimized sales funnel can help you minimize drop-offs, boost conversions, and also give you a chance for after-sale interaction.

Do Extensive Keyword Research

If you want maximum results from your B2B SEO strategy, you must put a lot of time and effort into keyword research. Primarily, focus on your target customers’ queries and find low-competition keywords around those queries.

Multiple keyword research tools are available in the market, such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Spyfu, Mangools, Keywords Everywhere, Ubersuggest, and more. You can use any tool you want.

Here’s how you can find relevant keywords for your B2B SEO marketing strategy. Enter a seed keyword – a broad search term that best represents your niche. For example, “sales funnel builder.”

You can create topic/keyword clusters according to the intent of the keyword. Search intent is mainly classified into four categories:

• Informational: Users want to learn more about something (e.g., “what is a sales funnel builder”)
• Commercial: Users want to research a brand or product (e.g., “best sales funnel builder,” “best free sales funnel builders”)
• Transactional: Users want to complete an action, like a purchase (e.g., “buy Clickfunnels,” buy Builderall”)
• Navigational: Users want to find a specific page or site (e.g., “Clickfunnels affiliate login page”)

Any keyword tool will give you thousands of matching keywords. You can sort them according to keyword difficulty, volume, CPC, etc. Once done, export the list of keywords you need and start creating content.

Curate Compelling Content

After you have got your list of low-competition keywords, you should start creating content. I suggest you create monthly/weekly content clusters. The clusters should include your target keywords and address your customers’ queries.

Content clusters are a great way to organize content ideas and uninterrupted content production. Blogging is the best way to garner consistent traffic and eventually become an established brand in your industry.

Aim to post 2-3 blogs every week on your website’s blog page with the help of writing tools. This shows Google that your website is active and relevant. Focus on writing long-form articles as it helps in ranking and attracting more organic backlinks. 

Along with blogging, put some effort into link-building as well. This way, you will get the best results from your B2B SEO strategy.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

Multiple studies have concluded that site loading speed affects conversions. 

According to a study by Portent, a site that loads in 1 second sees 3X more conversions than a site that loads in 5 seconds and 5X more conversions than a site that loads in 10 seconds.

I suggest you upload images in webp format, as this file type renders high-quality images at a small file size – also, this is a Google-recommended file type for images. You can even resize the images for faster load speeds.

Also read: Here are some more hacks to make your website load faster.

For most B2B companies, landing pages are pillar pages. Hence, you also need to optimize landing pages for SEO – insert your primary keyword (or branded keywords)  in the titles and throughout the content.

Also, add title tags, write an optimized meta description, and also insert a few internal links for easy bot crawling.

Also, you must include a well-optimized contact form that quickly captures your visitors’ contact information. Keep it short and simple by asking for their name and contact information (preferably email address).

Use Schema Markup

Schema markup is the language for search engines that helps their crawlers read and understand the content on your pages. It is also called structure language, as it is a semantic vocabulary (code) that assists search engines in characterizing and categorizing the content of web pages.

In simple words, scheme markup gives context to your webpage. It lets search engine crawlers understand what’s on the page – the FAQ section, star rating, number of reviews, and more. 

Adding schema markup to your content is a proven method to improve SEO. Search engines look for the schema to grasp the structure and purpose of your website’s content.

Optimize Meta and Alt Tags

Your website’s title tag and meta description are called Metadata. Title tags are considered the most important ranking factor in search engine algorithms.

SEO titles are shown in the search results, so make sure:

• It includes your target keyword (especially at the beginning)
• The titles are under 60 characters
• Each title has a relevant heading tag (H1, H2, H3, etc.)

Meta description serves as a snippet of what your webpage is about. These descriptions have an impact on your search results and click-through rate. Your meta description must have the keyword the user is looking for. Otherwise, Google messes up the meta description by extracting a random sentence from the blog.

You can use an AI meta description generator to create meta descriptions in seconds. Also, ensure that all your images have alt text. Search engines reward overall strong user experience. 

Poor site performance will lead to fewer links, clicks, shares, and overall search visibility.

Build Quality and Relevant Backlinks

Building high-quality and relevant backlinks is part of an off-page SEO tactic. If done right, this one tactic can single-handedly boost your rankings to the top of the Google search results.

Here’s an interesting statistic: Google’s #1 ranked search result has 3.8X more backlinks than the rest of the top 10 search results. (Thrive My Way)

Google doesn’t consider all backlinks to be the same for SERP scoring. You need to have good, do follow backlinks from other authoritative pages for the same keywords. If this is the case, you’ll definitely see a boost in SERP rankings.

If your page has bad links (aka toxic links) from pages that are not related to your page or keyword, then that’s considered negative SEO. You need to remove these links ASAP, as they could harm your SEO rankings.

You can use a backlink tool to manage all your backlinks in one place and also find backlink gaps by comparing your website with a competitor’s website. 

Keep an Eye on Competitor Websites

One of the best B2B marketing strategies is to analyze what your competitor is doing and do it better yourself.

You can use powerful SEO software to save time and money and stay one step ahead of your competition. For example, with Semrush automation, you can cut down your SEO workload by 50%. Mangools provides a suite of SEO tools that help you in everything – from keyword research to content optimization.

If you have a WordPress-based website, you can use SEO plugins to manage all your SEO tasks right inside your WordPress dashboard.

SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Mangools, Hike SEO, or Woorank always help you to keep an eye on your competitor’s SEO strategies. You also get accurate and reliable data to make your business decisions.

Optimize GMB and Local Directories

Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business or GMB) is a free business listing on Google. It lets you fill in business details, location (headquarters address), services, products, and even photos of your business.

In simple words, Google Business Profile acts as your business’s social media profile on Google. It increases your visibility across Google services by showing your GBP profile in Google Search, Google Shopping, and Google Maps.

Google Business Profile is only for businesses that meet customers in person. This includes businesses with physical locations (restaurants, pubs, or grocery stores) and businesses that provide services in other locations (consultants or plumbers).

If you have an online-only business, you’ll have to stick to other Google tools like Google Ads and Google Analytics.

Registering your business on Google Business Profile and other local directories can help you immensely in local SEO.

Use Social Media for Social Signals

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) give you a variety of tools to increase your brand exposure and boost SEO. For example, Instagram Reels can boost your engagement for a better social media presence. 

Social media interactions can significantly impact your search engine rankings on Google. As people engage with your content on social media platforms, it can increase its reach and help you climb up in the search engine results rankings.

Social media has numerous benefits for B2B SEO. Combining social media and SEO can help you understand your audience better, improve user experience, and increase brand reach. This can help your business in the long run.

Incorporate the Latest Trends in Your B2B SEO

You should always incorporate the latest trends into your B2B SEO marketing strategy. Since the launch of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has captured almost every market possible.

If you want to stick with ChatGPT, you can use some ChatGPT plugins to help you with SEO and marketing. 

Other than that, you can always explore other AI SEO tools that will assist you in getting the work done and being one step ahead of your competition.

So, Which B2B SEO Strategy Are You Trying First?

In conclusion, there are many things you can do to improve your B2B SEO. 

Following the tips in this blog post can increase your website’s visibility and attract more qualified leads. You can combine various B2B marketing tactics together and amplify the results.

So, what are you waiting for? 

Start implementing these strategies today!

Next up, B2B buyer intent data platforms to supercharge your marketing.