How to build an SEO Strategy for B2B Companies

We are in 2020 and the majority of activities are going digital, despite being needed more than ever there are still many companies that are struggling to make the necessary adjustments to their digital marketing strategy, right now, SEO must be a core part of it.

If you are asking yourself why you need a good SEO strategy for B2B companies, how to prepare them, and propose a good one? Here we share the main points needed to build yours. Let’s start with the basics.

What is SEO?

Decoding its acronym in English, SEO would be Search Engine Optimization. If you wonder how it works, very easy, you need to adjust and adapt the content according to some standards and keywords -mostly determined by google-, why? So that search engines have a sense of what you offer and match it to keywords people are looking for on the internet.

It sounds very simple but the truth is that it goes beyond improving the content, links, images, and codes, everything is in innovation and perseverance because we are talking about data and algorithms. So, What happens most of the time when the objectives of the companies are not well defined and clear? Well, you end up spending a lot of time creating content and receiving very little in return.

Goals of a good SEO strategy for B2B companies

Define your Target Audience and the platforms they use

Any good marketing team knows how to define the target audience of each of its clients and their corresponding buyer’s personas, as well as the desired customer experience for each one, but what usually drives no comments is that to create a good SEO B2B strategy that brings accurate results, you must also define the media that this audience frequents.

Remember that the buyer persona is the representation of the target audience of the company. The characteristics are shaped by demographics, needs, concerns, errors, and the motivations that lead them to make a purchase. If you have this for every buyer, you could more accurately measure the buying process for your product.

One piece of advice that we can give you is once you have a well-structured plan of the customer experience, with every content idea for each stage of their journey, you can expand the range of keywords that you have already discovered and assigned to a specific stage of the buyer journey.

Benchmarking

Another key point of a quality SEO strategy for B2B companies is knowing who they are competing against and what strategy they are using.

Once you identify all your competitors, it is important to take into account their weaknesses and strengths, because that way you can decode the strategy they are using. What we suggest you do is to study the following KPI’s:

• Domain and household authority, with the total number of referrals and backlinks.
• Positioning, keywords by which they appear in Google, and the pages that usually rank.

A couple of tools that can be used to measure these metrics are semrush, ubersuggest, or ahrefs. They can also help you with social mentions and the quality of your content, which also plays a very important role in an SEO strategy.

Content strategy according to different types of audience

Remember that keywords are discussed above and that they can be adapted to each stage of the buyer journey? Content strategy is a form of those stages. Likewise, every stage of the buyer journey must be related to the content and means of communication that users go to get information about the product.

How do I know which platform my client goes to for information? Using the search tools listed above, you can do a search on Google, or you can also search on social networks, it all depends on the type of company and the product you are working on, for example: if we have a project with an IT company that is going to launch a new application, it is probably best that they look for an influencer in their niche that promotes said application. 

To get to all that, you must be very clear about the keywords that your users use to then define the type of content and the platform in which you are going to place it. In addition to this, it is essential that we know the buyer’s level of knowledge and adjust the level of communication for each one.

Link Building Strategy

To develop a B2B content strategy to stand out from the competition, you need links. For those who are new to the subject, link building is a set of actions that sends external links, from other sites to a specific website, like your website or sources of information.

Why is it important to my B2B SEO strategy? Because links are one of the criteria that search engine algorithms take into account to order search results. Meanwhile, most of the search results, depending on the keywords you are using.

In addition to this, you cannot forget that these links can be the source of attracting the traffic, contacts, or sales you are looking for, only if, of course, the quality and the place you are placing your content is the right one.

How to generate links to a domain? We propose the most common:

Linkbuilding payment

It refers to the purchase of blog articles in which you get to an agreement with the site owner, to include your links into their website. Sometimes, if your content is useful, they might ask you to write in their blog directly.

Linkbating

Popularity can be generated organically, through the creation of valuable content that really contributes to users and, therefore, they are interested in sharing and making mentions. This is the cheapest way to get links, and also, one that should be included in your long-term strategy. This means that your content is so good, that others are willing to share it for free. 

To summarize, a good B2B SEO Strategy is based on the definition of clear objectives of the company, as well as the customer experience you want to provide, once you have those in place, you’re set to discover which keywords work best in every stage of your buyer’s journey. 

Of course, how to implement these marketing-based strategies can be quite complicated to understand for beginners, in case you’re interested, our team of experts is glad to help you out!