SEO in one-line means optimizing the website to rank better in search engines. We all know this, but why is this so difficult and what difference will it draw when we speak about B2B SEO.
Firstly, what does B2B SEO mean?
It refers to the science of reaching professionals through search engines. When we talk about B2B search, it means a company executive is searching for another company.
You could be anyone; from a company providing HR solutions to a digital marketing agency. You need to understand that there will be company professionals searching for your services.
Target Specific Keywords
SEO will not change for you; you have to bend your ways accordingly.
Let’s suppose you are a company selling corporate gifts. Do you know what is the volume of the keyword ‘gifts’ in India?
110,000.
At the same time, do you know the volume of the keyword ‘corporate gifts’ in India?
6,600.
See the difference here. Low volume keywords with specificity are your way to go in B2B SEO.
Be keyword specific. If you are into B2B services, it already cuts you off from so many aspects. You only need to channelize to the services you are skilled at and that alone will make all the difference.
Pro tip: use product names as keywords and go for longtail keywords, it will filter you above in SERPs.
Optimize Your Website Content
A critical part of B2B businesses is that one company executive is searching for another company for its services & products. It is not a general shopping spree, which follows a normal online buying procedure.
Understand the situation here –
It is not as simple as a 14-year-old kid buying a video game online that will get delivered to him in the next 6 to 7 days.
We are talking about B2B services here, it’s largescale, long term, and lengthy in process.
For example, if you are into HR solutions and a startup company that has recently set up an office in the city is now looking for HR solutions, biometric devices and other CRM software to get installed in their workplace.
There are high chances that the company’s executive will primarily perform an online search for companies providing HR solutions. They will be having endless queries regarding your services, facilities, pricing module, user interface, accessibilities, offers, and whatnot.
Before making a proper call, the company will go through a detailed search about all the companies they can contact, regarding these services.
You are not the best of them; you are just one of them.
Yes, they will also be comparing your services and pricing policy with others.
If the company personnel visits your website, they must be delighted by your content. Your website should replicate your presence in the market.
To delight clients, your On-page SEO needs to be strong
An SEO is primarily divided into two parts –
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
Let us simplify these terms as frontend and backend of the website.
Off-page SEO is something, your client won’t be able to see, it is all about backlinks, indexing, social bookmarking, and link building process where you work from the backend.
A visitor mostly gets to contemplate the On-page SEO.
- Title – this must be clear & concise with the topic and purpose of the page.
- Alt Tags – labeling with proper names and renaming the images uploaded to the content helps Google find you in a better way. Relevance is important.
- Headings – helps the audience to understand the websites on various levels.
- Subheadings – used for division of content on a webpage.
- Descriptions – most people will only read this part and make up their mind, whether the page serves their purpose or not. It needs to be optimized perfectly.
- Images (not the stock images) – do not use stock images, try making some good infographics from reliable sources, it will give your viewers a broader perspective of what difference will you bring to them.
- Page formation – make it easy for your audience to search and see everything easily on a webpage. The irony is many websites do not have a search option.
- Text breaking – text breaking lets the user digest your content. Breaking the text helps in reading the content else it will become monotonous.
- Keywords and the overall experience of the website denote how well you have worked on every page and how good is your On-page SEO practices are.
You need to optimize the content of your website in such a way that it should answer all the queries of your potential client.
– Your blogs must have inviting images. A header image can make or break the deal for you.
– Use of infographics to share information can help your client to understand what exactly he is looking at and what to expect from it.
– Create quality landing pages.
– Every page should be well researched.
On-page SEO is not a single page thing. When you perform guest blogging you create backlinks to different pages of your website. It can be the home page, services page or the blogs page.
Give importance to each page, every page must be perfectly optimized in accordance with your content on it.
A website shouldn’t just be your digital address, but a whole delight experience for your clients.
Pro tip: your website is your playground, cover every inch of it.
There will be a whole lot of discussion that’s going to take place before any steps to be made. The person in authority will speak to you, and then the managers will talk to you, then someone else and then someone else. It will be a long process and it may happen that you’ll have to wait for weeks to hear back from them.
B2B services are often significant investments and are for a long term period, so this whole process is inevitable.
Serve Crisp Content
Don’t tell me you think, they will be reading your blog from start to end?
No. absolutely not.
They are company professionals who are ace in their field and are too busy to spend so much time on your website.
How are you going to deal with this?
The person will look for the valuable information you can provide them.
Data – data is the key to impress them with SEO centric images, backlinks to highly reputed websites, use of infographics, pie charts, and statistical figures, these will make them stop their random scrolling and stop to look at that beautiful image you posted there.
Pro tip: Your content should be crisp and on point.
Your webpage formation will definitely meet the eye of the user. If it is a blog page then the content must be properly aligned and clearly visible.
Use of proper headings, subheadings, illustrations and text breaking is significant while writing content. If you will just copy-paste long written paragraphs from one tab to another without proper formatting, it will look ugly and without proper spacing, it will look like a giant text wall to the eyes of the user which he will surely ignore and leave your website.
For example, you can look at this same blog, where I’ve used effective formatting guidelines using multiple headings, subheadings and text breaking after every five lines.
If you’ve reached here and still reading the blog, this is one of the main reasons, you didn’t leave.
Social Media Platforms
A lot of strong SEO backlinks are generated from your social media activities.
I always advise companies to be where the people are, this is not the age of outbound marketing, organizations have started practices like inbound marketing and influencer marketing and have highly integrated it in their content marketing strategy, which essentially brings a lot of organic traffic and engagement to your services.
One thing that social media marketing helps you do is create a name for yourself. On average, people spent 142 minutes a day on social media platforms.
Video content being praised and demanded, there is a huge crowd waiting for you on social media platforms expecting high-quality posts and fresh content from you and are willing to return the favour with huge organic traffic and high engagement rate.
Who knows, you might produce the next viral video with your content ideas.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
AMP is an open-source coding standard for publishers to get their website load easily on mobile devices as much of website content is usually heavy and may take a lot of time to load.
Optimise your website for mobile view. Remember, responsive design is very important, your target audience can be anywhere and would like to open your website on different devices let it be on smartphones or tablets.
Whether it is B2B or B2C, a good website is always a great experience.
People are impatient and would not like to wait for your website to load. The optimal load time of a website should be around or less than 5 seconds.
Google works hard to give the best experience and search results to its users. If AMP is not implemented on your website, your website may take a lot of time to load and I don’t have to tell you how important a good load speed matters to Google and thus it affects your ranking factor in SERPs.
SEO Is Something But It is Not Everything
I want you to understand that business runs on data, and as per business point of view, your audience is your client and who is not your client is a potential client.
Huge sets of data are being stored in company CRMs and getting inaccurate with each passing day. Services like data scrubbing, email appending, and CRM cleaning are very necessary for your company.
SEO brings you qualified leads if done properly, but the cleaning of CRM, scrubbing, and using data mining services for email scrubbing, tech append is important and plays a key role in B2B businesses.
I expect you to connect with a good data-mining company with services like manual data mining services and total data solutions.
Driving Sales
This is the area you need to highly focus on, what good does all this content, knowledge, and data will bring to your business if it will not collect qualified leads or drive sales.
B2B SEO basically have only two purposes –
- Creating strong SERP and social presence.
- Driving sales.
If your SEO strategies are not fulfilling these two goals properly, you need a makeover.
Let me tell you how to do it –
- Write engaging content – people always tell you to write something innovative, but creativity is subjective, simple writing ideas can work for you but not in the long term scenario. You need to come up with ideas, brainstorm, and work relentlessly on them.
- Try to answer the queries of your clients, there are millions of people digging the internet for answers, be helpful to them with your content. If you write to attract you might fail to engage, but if you write to answer, the audience will engage with you automatically.
- Do not be dormant on social media. Post regular updates & promotional content. Over time you will be able to see that a huge number of people have started following you. If you can observe that there is less organic traffic to your website try answering queries of customers through social media platforms. Follow pages and accounts of great value and knowledge. Leave your website’s and article links on relevant posts and measure the effect.
- Social media platforms are a great way to communicate with your clients. If you will post quality content and users like it, they will obviously share it among their friends & family, which is a great way of getting backlinks, organic traffic, and brand building as a whole.
The use of an impressive and subtle call to action defines whether you were able to make a lasting impression on your audience or not.
To make your CTAs more effective, you may offer lead magnets, They are a sure-shot way of getting people to sign up for your email notifications or subscribe to your newsletters.
All of this being discussed, I believe I’ve been able to guide you through the gardens of B2B SEO contemplating every fruit & flower (areas & aspects).