An effective business-to-business (B2B) SEO strategy is essential for positioning your product or service in front of the right audience.
In this article, I'll walk you through how to build an effective B2B SEO strategy that contributes to your business goals.
What you will learn
- What B2B SEO is and how it differs from B2C SEO
- Why your business needs B2B SEO
- How to execute a successful B2B SEO strategy
What is B2B SEO?
B2B SEO (search engine optimization) is a digital marketing strategy involving a set of practices to rank a B2B website higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
The goal is to rank high for keywords that prospective companies' decision-makers might search for while at work, whether they're looking to buy a product or service related to their company or find relevant information.
This means that a B2B SEO strategy revolves around business-related keywords.
What is the difference between B2B SEO and B2C SEO?
The key difference between B2B and B2C SEO lies in their application.
Both types follow the same general principles and processes like keyword research, on-page optimization, etc.. However, there are three considerable distinctions are separating B2B SEO from B2C SEO:
B2B SEO has a different audience profile
B2B SEO targets a smaller, more specific audience than B2C SEO. Instead of focusing on a wide range of individuals sharing some demographic similarities, your audience primarily comprises decision-makers at your target companies.
Besides, business decisions often require the input of several individuals from different departments. This means that your audience profile might not be as homogenous as that of a B2C business.
You'll need to tailor your strategy to several demographic groups while focusing on their joint business interest.
Finally, B2B customers often don't spend time on the same platforms as individual consumers. While an individual might go on Instagram or Facebook to find information, a manager or C-level executive will head to LinkedIn instead.
This difference is crucial to understand because it informs your content strategy and tells you where to position your offer.
B2B companies have more complex sales funnels
A typical B2B sales funnel is significantly more elaborate than a B2C funnel, and business customers tend to spend more time in them. There are several reasons for this, most notably:
- B2B products are more complex and require thorough reviews.
- A B2B customer's decision can impact a significant part of their company, not just them.
- B2B products might require buy-in and approval from several stakeholders.
Because of the above circumstances, your sales funnel needs to provide extensive support to B2B buyers.
Such support is typically ensured through high-quality content that educates prospective customers, teaches them about your product, and builds their confidence in the purchase decision.
B2B SEO targets more precise keywords
While B2C keywords can have a massive search volume, B2B ones are often less searched for.
They're typically more qualified, though, mainly because a B2B customer is more likely to start their search out of the need to buy something or solve a specific problem.
For example, think about the keywords "wireless headphones" and "inbound lead automation software."
Even without extensive SEO expertise, it's easy to assume that the latter is searched for less frequently.
The higher business potential of B2B keywords further strengthens the importance of quality content.
You have a chance to draw in a qualified lead right from search results and generate high-quality organic traffic, but you must ensure the content helps leads move through the funnel effortlessly.
Why does SEO matter for B2B companies?
Marketing yourself through Google is crucial to B2B success. While you can resort to paid ads, organic traffic is a much better long-term investment.
Each page that ranks well can draw in your target audience for years without hefty investments, which does wonders for your bottom line.
To enjoy these benefits, you need a robust SEO strategy. Without one, prospective customers are likely to stumble upon your competitors before they see what you have to offer.
As you'll see later in this guide, high-quality content is the backbone of such a strategy.
Combine SEO with value-packed content, and you can build a largely passive stream of leads.
How to build your B2B SEO strategy in 7 steps
B2B SEO might seem overwhelming at first glance. I'll try to simplify the process for you by putting it into 7 easy-to-follow steps.
1. Build your persona
A customer persona informs virtually every aspect of your SEO strategy, from the keywords you'll use to the pain point you'll drill into with your content.
You need to pinpoint decision-makers in your target businesses so that you can tailor your SEO efforts to them.
These decision-makers should be accurately represented by your persona. Specifically, you'll want to include the following information:
- Demographics (age, gender, etc.)
- Professional characteristics (industry, skills, etc.)
- Likes and interests
- Online behavior
A particularly important aspect of a B2B buyer persona is their position within a company. It directly influences your messaging and content strategy, so you must know who you're selling to.
For example, let's assume your offer is a high-ticket data storage solution. In most cases, the solution should be marketed to an organization's CIO (Chief Information Officer). Their expertise lets them evaluate the product, while their seniority enables decisions regarding more significant investments.
When you know that you're targeting a CIO, you can do some research to find other relevant data points.
If you need help creating a buyer persona, you can use a free tool like HubSpot's Make My Persona. It's an easy-to-use web app that guides you through a questionnaire about your target persona, helping you check all the necessary boxes. Once you fill it out, you'll have a rich prospect profile to use as a reference point.
Due to the aforementioned cross-department decision-making process specific to B2B sales, you'll most likely have more than one persona. In the above example, your product might also need to be approved by the CFO because of the high investment, so you'd need to find a way to show them it's justified.
This means you'll need to take different approaches with your content—for example:
- A CIO will want to know about the product's features and technical details, so your content should focus on that.
- A CFO will be budget-oriented, so the content tailored to them should discuss the product's cost-effectiveness and potential ROI instead of being too technical.
These nuances define various SEO processes, such as keyword research and on-page SEO, so make sure to have well-defined customer personas.
2. Outline your marketing funnel
Different tactics within your SEO strategy should be aligned with the corresponding stages of the sales funnel.
As mentioned, the B2B funnel is pretty elaborate and complex—it consists of the following stages:
- Awareness—The prospect first learns about a product.
- Interest—The product piques the prospect's interest as a potential solution to their problem.
- Consideration—The prospect starts learning more about a product to see if it can solve the problem.
- Intent—After obtaining the necessary information, a prospect shows intent to buy it.
- Evaluation—The prospect compares the product's benefits and shortcomings (or compares it to other options).
- Purchase—The prospect turns into a customer.
- Post-purchase—The prospect is using the product and gets the final confirmation of whether they've made a good decision.
- Advocacy—Ideally, the customer is happy with the product and becomes the brand's advocate.
Note that a prospect might not move linearly through the funnel.
For example, they might uncover a product's alternative in the evaluation stage, which brings them back to the interest stage of the new product's funnel.
Your SEO and content strategy needs to make sure this doesn't happen to your product. In other words, you should create a specific type of quality content for each stage so that the prospect keeps moving through the funnel without going back.
For example, an informative blog post about employee time tracking might raise awareness about the tracking software mentioned in the post.
If the prospect becomes interested, they should be targeted with content that elaborates on the product, such as an article about the benefits of using such software.
Content should focus on the product's usability during the intent and evaluation stages. An in-depth review or product comparison would work great here.
If the purchase is made, the next stage is to create content that removes cognitive dissonance and buyer's remorse (e.g., tutorials on how to get the most out of the software).
Outline your funnel as precisely as possible to create a precise content structure that guides prospects through the buyer's journey.
3. Choose your keywords
Whether you're selling to individuals or businesses, keywords are the lifeblood of SEO.
If you want decision-makers to see you on Google, you must understand what they search for and ensure your content ranks as high as possible for those search terms.
To find your target keywords, think about your core offering and ask yourself what someone who needs it would type into search engines.
For example, if you sell office supplies, "printer cartridge" could be a potential keyword.
What you should do now is Google the keyword and analyze the search results to see what your audience wants to know.
The first place to look is Google autocomplete. As you can see in the below image, Google offers various popular suggestions related to the keyword:
Each suggestion can be a keyword you'll target with the right type of content.
For more ideas, you can scroll down to the People also ask section. Here, you'll see questions that people have related to the keyword, which you can use as both topic ideas and additional keywords.
Finally, you can go to Related searches to uncover more relevant keywords. There aren't too many, but they can serve as a solid starting point.
Keep in mind that not every keyword suggestion you stumble upon should make its way to your content.
You need to zero in on those with the highest ranking potential by looking at three factors:
- Keyword search volume—The higher the search volume, the more traffic a keyword can bring.
- Ranking difficulty—High-volume keywords are often hard to rank for due to the amount of existing content targeting them, so avoid them until your website has some authority (even if this means targeting low-volume keywords first).
- Business potential—A keyword's business potential is reflected in its ability to bring qualified leads that are likely to convert, so this metric is particularly important for B2B SEO due to the extended sales cycle.
Ideally, you'll focus on keywords with a solid search volume that still don't have a high ranking difficulty.
These are typically long-tail keywords with a more specific focus than a broad keyword, meaning there's less competition targeting them.
You can do the keyword research manually or use a keyword research tool.
For instance, Surfer's Keyword Research found 74 keyword clusters related to a B2B keyword like "customer segmentation software'.
You can also see the keyword difficulty and average search volume for each keyword cluster.
This way you can easily make an informed decision which keywords to target.
4. Build a content strategy
After choosing the keywords you'll target, you should use them to build a scalable content strategy that maximizes the visibility of your web pages throughout the funnel.
The easiest way to do this is by building content or topic clusters—groups of topically related content that consist of two types of pages:
- Pillar page—Your pillar page will typically contain long-form content that offers high-level yet extensive information about a specific topic.
- Supporting pages—Each pillar page should have the corresponding supporting pages that discuss specific aspects of the overarching topic on a more granular level.
For example, if you're selling email cleanup software, a pillar page can be something like "The Ultimate Guide to Achieving Inbox Zero." The guide could cover various subtopics, such as:
- Benefits of a clean inbox
- Inbox cleaning tips
- Best tools for cleaning your inbox
While these subtopics would be discussed in the pillar article, you can create a supporting page for each that explores it in more detail. You'd then use internal links to connect the pillar and supporting pages, creating a cohesive content hub.
But how do topic clusters affect SEO?
By writing about a topic a lot, you position your site as an authority in it.
Each piece of content supports the other.
Using Surfer's Topical Map you can see how that looks like.
At a glance you can see which topic clusters have been covered and which not.
Focus first on the clusters where you already have some authority before jumping to new clusters.
You can also see the clsuters in a table, together with the keywords that fall under each as well as relevant data like search volume and keyword difficulty.
This way you can build topical authority and become the go-to source of relevant information.
5. Create helpful content
Content creation and blogging are essential for B2B SEO. They let you build authority and trust by providing high-quality educational content to customers, which helps move them through the sales funnel.
While writing content, you should pay particular attention to its helpfulness.
There are two reasons for this:
- Your content needs to help prospects make important business decisions and give them confidence that a purchase decision is justified.
- Google released the helpful content update in 2023, emphasizing that helpfulness is essential for ranking high.
To meet Google's helpful content update, you need to check several boxes, most importantly:
- Providing valuable, original insights or research
- Ensuring there are no stylistic or spelling issues
- Presenting information in a trustworthy manner
- Focusing on the target audience and their pain points
- Demonstrating depth of knowledge and/or first-hand experience
Besides meeting these criteria, your content must be tailored to your chosen keywords to communicate relevance to them. Perhaps most importantly, it needs to meet a user's search intent.
There are four types of search intent, and understanding them is crucial for both SEO and understanding your sales funnel. Each content piece must meet one of the following intent types:
- Informational—The user wants to find information about a topic.
- Navigational—The user wants to visit a specific website.
- Commercial—The user is considering a product and is looking for more detailed information.
- Transactional—The user is looking to make a purchase.
Each intent type corresponds with specific content types. For example, a how-to blog post can satisfy informational intent, while a "tool vs tool" blog post focuses on commercial intent.
By matching your content type to search intent, you can help the reader fulfil it quickly—which is what Google is all about.
Leverage AI writing tools
Manual content writing can be time-consuming and prevent you from scaling your B2B SEO strategy.
The easiest way around this is to use a capable AI writing tool and automate the process.
You can get content in minutes instead of hours or days.
You can head to Surfer AI, follow the steps laid out by the tool and in under 20 minutes you will have a fully optimized article ready.
And if you're worried about Google punishing you for taking a shortcut, no worries—the search engine doesn't care about how your content is written.
As long as it provides tangible value to the reader and follows the helpful content guidelines, you should be on the safe side.
5. On-page optimize your content
On-page optimization is essential for connecting a web page to the search query. While there are several ways to do this, proper keyword usage is the most important.
Specifically, you need to place your keywords in the following components of a web page:
Page title and meta description—Page titles or title tags define how your headline will appear in search results, while meta descriptions provide short content summaries. Both elements need to contain the primary keyword you're targeting to ensure consistency and relevance.
URL—Google's crawlers will index your page's URL to determine its relation to the web page's contents. Make sure to include the primary keyword in it, and avoid adding much additional text.
Header tags—The main header tag (H1) appears on the page as its title and should contain that primary keyword. Additional header tags (H2, H3, etc.) can break up the text, and you should place secondary keywords in them whenever possible.
Body content—Try to sprinkle keywords throughout the text as much as you can without forcing them in. Aim for a primary keyword in the intro, and use additional keywords naturally to further signal the content's relevance to the main search term and improve keyword rankings.
Using the Content Editor you can see which keywords are important to your content. You can also see how frequently you should use each keyword to communicate to search engines what your content is about.
Look at these keywords as a guideline on which aspects of the topic you should focus and how much in-depth to go into it.
And if you want your life to be even easier, use the Auto-Optimize feature inside the Editor.
Auto-Optimize naturally adds relevant keywords thought your content in the form of new sentences, paragraphs, and even whole sections.
7. Build backlinks for your B2B website
Link building is an essential off-page SEO strategy that increases your website's visibility by enhancing its authority. Google believes that if other authoritative sites link to yours, it must be reputable enough to rank higher.
The emphasis here is on having backlinks from authoritative sites.
If you have low-quality backlinks from spammy sources, they can hurt your SEO standing.
The easiest way to attract high-quality backlinks naturally is to consistently push out valuable content. Take Zapier as an example—its blog posts have attracted a total of 10 million backlinks from 66,000 websites, which are mind-boggling figures.
The only issue with natural link building is that it can take a while. To speed up the process, focus on shareable content and online tools (calculators, image editing tools, etc.).
Think about your offer and website to brainstorm ideas for such tools and offer them for free. This way, you can quickly get numerous websites to link to your site.
Another tactic you can try is to leverage partnerships with others in your niche. Give interviews, appear on podcasts, and collaborate with others so that they give you a backlink.
Little by little, your website will keep building authority and climb SERPs.
Key takeaways
- B2B SEO is a comprehensive marketing strategy that helps your website rank higher in search engine results and reach the right decision-makers.
- Unlike B2C SEO, B2B SEO doesn't target a wide demographic group—the focus is on a small number of decision-makers in your target companies.
- B2B SEO involves a more extensive and complicated sales funnel, which calls for a robust content strategy that lets prospects move through it more effortlessly.
- Without B2B SEO, you might miss numerous sales opportunities because leads can't find you in search engines (which means they'll most likely choose a competitor).
- The first step to developing a B2B SEO strategy is to define your buyer persona as clearly as possible. Besides personal characteristics, you need to understand their professional profile to determine which keywords to target and how you'll position your content. Remember that you might need more than one persona because business decisions often involve several stakeholders.
- You need to know precisely how prospects move through your funnel to target them with the right content at each stage. Every stage requires a different content type, so map out the funnel and plan your content accordingly.
- Keywords are the essence of B2B SEO, so ensure you're targeting those aligned with your prospects' search behavior. Aim for long-tail keywords with a solid search volume and low competition.
- Your chosen keywords inform your content strategy to draw in leads. Make sure the strategy is scalable, and create content clusters to simplify planning and build topical authority.
- Google prioritizes helpful, valuable content (which is also necessary for educating and engaging prospects). Provide unique insights, use credible sources, and focus on meeting the users' search intent.
- On-page optimization is essential for ranking high in SERPs. Include keywords in your page's titles, meta descriptions, headings, URLs, and body content.
- To position yourself as an authority, you need a strong backlink profile. You can attract quality backlinks by publishing shareable content and tools, as well as leveraging your partnerships.
Elevate your B2B SEO marketing
A successful B2B SEO strategy hinges on thorough keyword research, creating valuable and relevant content, and building a robust backlink profile.
By understanding the unique characteristics of B2B SEO, such as targeting decision-makers and navigating complex sales funnels, you can develop a tailored approach that effectively reaches your target audience.
By integrating these elements, you can enhance your search engine rankings, drive organic traffic, and ultimately achieve your business objectives.
