Developing an SEO Strategy
Beginning SEO may sound daunting but with the right strategy, you can succeed it all depends on if you are sticking to it. Google is constantly changing the way it indexes and ranks pages in search results. With that said, there are ways to succeed with B2B SEO. It all comes down to creating a strategy and sticking to it.
Before we discuss ways to improve in B2B SEO, let’s take a look at some onsite SEO.
Onsite optimization in SEO is the backbone of your strategy
Two elements of basic website infrastructure must be in place for B2B SEO to be effective.
- The first element is a blog. A blog should answer the users’ questions. It is the bait that draws in repeated and new traffic.
- The second element of infrastructure is an area on your website dedicated to your educational content. This area is usually your “Resources” or “Library.” Longer form content (guides, white papers, webinar recordings, ebooks etc.) lives here.
Now that we have the basic infrastructure set up, we can move on to building upon our SEO practices.
Proven B2B SEO Practices
Let’s start with a few B2B SEO best practices
Best Practice #1: Title tags should be unique for every page.
In search results, search engines will highlight your keyword phrases if a user has searched for those terms. This increases visibility and click-through rate.
Best Practice #2: Keep title tags at 55 characters or less in length, including spaces
It is more appealing and allows the system to know exactly what the blog pertains to.
Best Practice #3: Identify relevant keywords that are being searched
Your prospects want actionable knowledge from your content so give it to them. How can you help them? Well, the best place to start is to learn what they are actually typing into search engines. So take the time to learn how to do keyword research effectively.
Best Practice #4: Share your blog
One of the best ways to boost your content’s rankings is to gain links from other websites. Making it easy for users to share your content will get it in front of a much larger audience. Share, share, share.
Time for Content Creation
To be strategic, you must first understand what prospects need to know. What are their pain points? What are they most interested in? What kind of questions are they engaging the search engine with? The answers to these questions should be high-level “issues” that will shape your content strategy in the coming future.
The best way to go about getting to your issues is to consult with the people in your firm who converse daily with your prospects and clients. These are usually the same folks that are in some way involved in the business development process.
These higher-level issues will encompass a number of different “topics.” Let’s use this post as an example:
What is the issue? It could be “How to attract new business” or “ business development.” These are rather broad issues and there are numerous topics that could be covered by this particular post. Like “SEO for lead generation” or “targeting the right audience.”
Create a list of different issues and specific topics that fall under each. At this point, you’re ready to begin keyword research. Let’s use the “targeting the right audience” topic to come up with a few keywords that we could consider. Here are a few I found:
- audience targeting
- targeted marketing
- market segmentation
Use one keyword to formulate a title for your blog post. (Best practice #5: Insert your keyword as close to the beginning of your title as possible)
Once you have a list of usable titles you are ready to start creating content. Use each topic as a separate blog post. You can then create a comprehensive guide based on a high-level issue with several blog posts serving as the basis for each chapter or section of your guide, which you share in your Library.
Promoting your content—Amplification (off-site SEO)
The final piece of your B2B SEO strategy should focus on content promotion.
If you are just posting a blog on your website every week and not promoting it, you are limiting your chances to drive additional traffic that may lead to content downloads and conversions.
Promoting your content strategically will not only get it directly in front of influencers and decision-makers but will also lead to natural links coming back to your domain. Again, a major, if not the most important factor Google uses to decide rankings.
Here are a few popular methods for promoting your content:
Start Using LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn is a great resource for B2B marketing, but many companies fail to use LinkedIn Groups. By identifying highly relevant groups and sharing your content within those groups, you are exposing your content to a much larger audience than just the followers of your company page.
Let’s say your company page has 800 followers. The total possible reach if you post to your company page is going to be—you guessed it—800. Now you post to your company page as well as to Group ABC, which has 58,000 members, and Group DEF, which has 5,000 members. Your total possible reach is now 63,500.