Organic search continues to be an invaluable marketing channel for business-to-business (B2B) organizations looking to capture relevant non-branded search demand and manage their brand reputation.
This article provides an overview of why SEO is different for B2B businesses and four tips to help drive B2B SEO success.
What is B2B SEO?
B2B SEO is a marketing strategy used to improve the organic search visibility of B2B businesses. Many B2B companies see organic search as a way to build their brand and drive sales.
B2B companies use SEO to create and position content to align with the relevant search interest and intent of their target audience.
How is SEO different for B2B companies?
SEO for B2B businesses is different in several ways.
Target keywords have lower search volume, are longer tail, and contain more industry-specific jargon than business-to-consumer (B2C) target keywords. You’re not just trying to capture one searcher, but a collection of searchers called a “buying committee” that has the influence and power to buy your product or service. The sales cycle is much longer and more difficult to measure compared to B2C.
From Visibility to Profit: 4 Ways B2Bs Can Maximize Organic Search
With the above differences in mind, here are four tips to help you achieve success through B2B SEO.
These tips are based on over a decade of experience in the B2B space with a focus on using organic search marketing to generate revenue.
The tips will work for organizations of all sizes and are applicable on both the agency and client side.
Tip 1: Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
To determine which keywords to rank for in organic search, you first need to understand your target audience. A great way to understand your target audience is by creating an ideal customer profile (ICP).
An ICP allows you to understand your target audience by first identifying the key traits of your best current customers. These key traits are then used to generate a profile that summarizes what an ideal customer is like for your business.
Once you understand your ideal customer, you can more easily research and identify keywords that you believe align with your ICP’s interests and search intent.
Depending on the size and complexity of your business, you may need more than one ICP. For example, many companies market by industry, so these types of companies will need an ICP for each industry market.
ICPs can contain different types of key traits depending on your company’s products or services. However, some common traits are annual revenue, number of employees, industry, geography, expected sales cycle length, and key people.
Key people have an overview of the purchasing committee and the end users of your company’s service or product. These personas should contain pain points that people encounter that will be solved by your product or service.
Pain points are great information for keyword research and content ideation to develop content that appeals to searchers based on your business needs.
Account-based marketing (ABM) practitioners use KPIs as the foundation of their strategy. You can also use ICPs to position your SEO program ahead of your competitors.
ICPs will help your organization track search demand, hopefully bringing in the best prospects and ultimately the most revenue.
Dig Deeper: Do people really matter in content marketing?
Tip 2: Create content for the entire buying committee
Many B2B marketers fall into the trap of focusing all of their marketing efforts on targeting only senior leaders in organizations. Senior leaders, however, are often the last people in the buying process.
A larger procurement committee extends from senior leaders to end users, who could be managers, analysts, or even entry-level employees.
Every member of a buying committee has some impact and influence on the buying process, so creating content that captures the searches of all members will only increase the likelihood that your brand will be known, considered and bought .
Invest in content creation for the entire marketing funnel and buying committee.
How a CEO searches and how a manager searches is different because they have different perspectives and different problems to solve. Do the research and identify the keywords that best align with the needs of the different buying committee members.
Dig Deeper: B2B Keyword Research: A Complete Guide
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Tip 3: Measure revenue impact
Measuring the revenue impact of organic search traffic is critical to the success of your SEO program. It shows that SEO is not an expense but an investment in future cash flow.
If you haven’t already, reach out to your customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation teams to start the discussion.
Partnering with these teams will allow your organization to better understand and optimize organic search traffic for more revenue.
The impact on revenue can be measured by:
Directly from closed and won deals from leads who submitted an online form after entering your site from an organic search listing. By contributing to the sales funnel of organic search traffic, which shows potential future revenue from deals when they close.
Contributing to the sales pipeline is especially important in B2B organizations that have longer sales cycles that can range from 6 to 12 months.
Attribution models must be reviewed and used consistently to properly measure revenue impact. Organic search is just one of dozens of possible traffic sources, and it’s usually one of a dozen or so different touchpoints before purchase.
It’s important to choose an attribution model that takes into account the impact of organic search on the customer journey to ensure that organic search gets the credit it deserves.
Dig Deeper: How content SEO helps increase sales
Tip 4: Integrate and set clear expectations
SEO should touch almost every marketing and sales function within a B2B organization.
Website, content, analytics, CRM, marketing automation, paid search, business development, go-to-market, executive leadership, PR and brand teams interact directly or indirectly with SEO.
Making sure SEO is integrated and has clear expectations with all of these stakeholders is important to B2B SEO success.
Without stakeholder alignment, SEO will be misunderstood, underutilized, blamed, and potentially forgotten.
If done correctly, SEO will improve your website, make your content more engaging, increase your brand awareness, generate more relevant traffic, inform the naming of your products and services, and ultimately increase income
Setting SEO expectations through clear goals among different stakeholders will help integrate SEO into your B2B organization. Don’t let SEO get left behind and underinvested.
Promote awareness and understanding of SEO throughout your organization. Conduct regular SEO education meetings with key stakeholders, share performance data with these groups, and develop ways to add SEO to their workflows and procedures.
Dig Deeper: How to use SEO education for stakeholder management
B2B SEO success means contributing to the bottom line
For SEO to be successful in your B2B organization, it needs to generate revenue. SEO success should not be measured only by keyword rankings, inbound links, page speed, etc.
SEO success should be measured by its contribution to your organization’s bottom line. If you’re not progressing your SEO program to be considered a long-term revenue-generating function, you’re doing yourself and your organization a disservice.
Hopefully, the four tips in this article will help you make SEO an investment in your organization’s future cash flow.
Dig Deeper: B2B SaaS SEO: Mapping Your Keywords to the Customer Journey
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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