The Importance of SEO in Your B2B Marketing Strategy

In the competitive, high-stakes world of business-to-business commerce, winning at SEO for B2B is absolutely essential. Your ability to outrank and outperform the competition with research-driven B2B search engine marketing strategies and conversion-focused content has the power to establish your brand as authoritative and trustworthy, propelling you to the top of client shortlists.

Take steps to make sure your company lands among the top search results and unlocks a new B2B lead generation stream, driving a flurry of clicks and targeted traffic to your website to increase conversions. Since 65% of businesses say generating traffic and leads are their biggest challenges, you can get ahead of the game by mastering SEO for B2B.

Whether you’re tackling B2B search engine marketing internally or outsourcing to professionals, we’ll explore how tactics from a site-wide SEO audit to creating better content can help you wield the power of SEO.

Outsourcing SEO: Why You Want an Agency

SEO isn’t intuitive; it requires expertise and experience, familiarity with search engine algorithms and their updates over time, and a high-level, strategic framework with clear milestones and goals. If your team doesn’t have a resident SEO expert, outsourcing SEO to an agency is the best move.

It’s easy to make mistakes in SEO as a beginner or amateur, and many of these blunders can deliver a devastating blow to traffic, clicks, and conversions. From penalized rank position due to keyword stuffing to behind-the-scenes errors like slow website load times, handing a beginner the reins of your SEO strategy can be an expensive mistake.

Outsourcing to an SEO agency could be a cost-effective choice if:

• You want to generate more leads from organic search
• You believe your website should look more professional
• You’re focused on driving long-term growth and ROI
• You’re not reaching your search ranking potential

Outsourcing enables you to work with a team that offers a diverse, broad skill set, brings collective years of specialized experience, and charges a fraction of the cost of hiring in-house.

GlassDoor data shows just how expensive hiring an in-house SEO specialist can be—with a base salary average of up to $94,000/year and annual bonuses, benefits, and training costs tacking on an additional $8,000, you could sink six figures into bringing an in-house SEO specialist on.

Look for an SEO agency that specializes in B2B. This industry faces some unique challenges, and B2B clients tend to do more research during the buying process than other consumers because they’re responsible for a company’s budget, not just their own. Learn how to pick the right SEO agency to set your company up for success.

The Pillars of SEO for B2B Businesses

The basic pillars of B2B search engine marketing for businesses should inform and drive every strategy and goal you develop. Perform a site-wide SEO audit, target the highlighted technical issues, and then focus on creating SEO content and building high-quality backlinks.

SEO Site Audit

This website checkup analyzes where you currently stand with search engines, using tools and metrics to determine what’s holding you back in search engine results pages (SERPs) and how you can improve. A site-wide SEO audit is the best way to take the temperature of your B2B company and create a strategic plan to course-correct your way to better ranking positions.

Fix Technical SEO Issues

Fixing any errors identified during your SEO audit is key to optimizing your website for search engines. An experienced agency can pinpoint problems that hurt your ability to rank in search results and implement targeted solutions to get you back on track.

At CSP, we’ve been performing technical SEO audits and addressing rank-limiting issues for over a decade. These are some of the most common issues we see for B2B companies:

• Crawlability & indexing issues
• Slow website & page load times
• Broken links & redirect errors
• Unoptimized images & metadata

Look for an agency that knows how to balance technical aspects with the user experience to start working toward achieving top-ranking positions in search results.

SEO-Focused Content

Technical aspects ensure people can find and get to your site, but SEO-focused content will drive them toward converting. Asking these questions will always point you in the right direction.

• What is your target audience looking for? Know your buyers to create targeted content that boosts conversions: their demographics, pain points, average budgets, and needs.

• How can you create relevant content that answers their needs? Over 70% of clients prefer tailored articles to advertisements when making purchase decisions; 82% view brands more positively after reading custom content. Rely on your industry expertise to craft compelling, relevant content that answers prospects’ questions, addresses common pain points, and positions your authority in the space.
• How do you balance content written for your audience and content written to rank on search engines? Never sacrifice the user experience for SEO with keyword stuffing, duplicate content, or unnatural phrasing to chase keywords. Use keyword research findings to direct your content topics, write in your brand voice, and prioritize the user experience to ensure you create relevant, informative content that holds value for buyers.

High-Quality Links

Backlinks signal your site’s authority to search engines and prospects, indicating that credible pages find your content compelling enough to reference and link to. Going after high-quality links from authoritative websites can boost your B2B site rank and help search engines show your content to more users.

Purchasing links in bulk can be tempting, but it will only hurt your ranking potential and flag your site to be penalized in search results. Instead, build links with outreach or hire an SEO agency like CSP to obtain high-value backlinks for you.

What SEO Can Do For You

In B2B, assessing tangible benefits and ROI enables you to be successful with a new strategy. So what can SEO do for your company?

• Increase online visibility & brand awareness
• Drive targeted traffic & leads that convert
• Generate momentum for marketing campaigns
• Increase clicks without hurting conversion rates
• Outperform & outrank competitors
• Improve the effectiveness of other traffic sources
• Promote long-term growth & momentum

With a variety of traffic-boosting, competition-squashing, and revenue-generating benefits, a better question might be “What can’t SEO do for you?”

If you’re ready to start winning on SERPs, lean on our expertise at CSP. We’ve been partnering with B2B firms for over a decade and offer specialized experience to achieve your SEO for B2B goals. If you’re looking for additional SEO help with your B2B business, talk to one of our experts today.