A Solid SEO Strategy is Key for B2B Growth
81% of B2B purchase cycles start with a web search*. The majority of B2B decision makers utilize research across the web to make a purchase decision. It’s vital that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a component of your growth strategy. SEO is a cost effective opportunity for you as a B2B marketer to implement and provide value to your organization’s bottom line. It’s important to make sure your website experience and your SEO strategy is defined so that as B2B buyers are conducting their research, your business is showing up in organic search results for relevant keywords and search queries. A solid SEO strategy will aide in hitting your growth goals and ensuring that potential buyers can see how the solutions you provide will be a great fit for their business.
I worked for a B2B manufacturing company and SEO was one of our top priorities when it came to our marketing strategy. Our goal was to grow revenue by a specific percentage year over year and one of marketing’s objectives was to acquire new leads. SEO was an effective way to accumulate quality leads through the website. As we implemented our SEO strategy, we saw website traffic increase by over 30% within the first 6 months from organic search and so did the leads. These leads also had higher purchase intent because they pursued us, rather than the other way around. They were actively seeking solutions that our business provided. Our job was to make sure we were visible and they could see that. The power of SEO really helped to achieve our marketing growth goals.
How do you go about implementing a SEO strategy for your business? I usually recommend breaking your SEO strategy into 4 parts: Discovery, Planning, Management and Measurement.
In the discovery phase, this is where you need to understand and define what your SEO strategy foundation will be built upon. As a marketer, you need to be clear and fully understand your marketing and sales goals, historical benchmarks, historical conversions rates, your executive teams expectations and perception of SEO. This is the opportunity for you to make your case on why SEO is a great strategy + tactic to be included in your annual marketing plan. This is where you need to explain and connect the dots to your company’s revenue goals and how SEO will help get you there. It’s important to do your due diligence before diving full speed ahead into implementing a strategy. Seeing as how SEO is not an overnight process, you need to make sure you are setting the stage and the right expectations upfront. Using historical business data, forecasted data using industry averages paired with connecting the dots to growth is key before moving forward.
Within the planning phase, this is where the bulk of the legwork comes in. This is the phase where you dive into your current website, strategy, marketing collateral + content and processes to understand what can be optimized, built or deleted for SEO improvement. The first recommendation is to always start with an audit. Here are some example elements I always focus on in an initial SEO audit:
Keyword Research: do extensive keyword research based on your industry, products, services, competitive insights, trends, content topics. Document where you currently show up in SERP (search engine results pages) with these terms. Understand how competitive they are. Get a solid understand of the keywords you need to be targeting and optimizing and where your business currently stands.
Technical Audit: do an audit of your website to understand if you have any website related issues. Any broken links? Any broken pages? Duplicate content? Do you have a XML sitemap? Do you install a robots.txt file? Is your site speed optimal? Any crawl errors that may be preventing indexed pages?
Website Audit: Understand your site architecture, your URL paths, your content offering, your keyword optimization. Is your website experience tailored to your customers? It’s great if customers get to your website, the next step is to get them to convert.
On Page SEO Audit: Review your title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, alt tags, keyword utilization. Make sure all of these components are using best practices and are built to strategically optimize your website for elevated visibility within SERPS.
Mobile Audit: is your website mobile friendly? Does your website offer an ideal customer experience when utilized on a mobile device?
Off Page SEO Audit: Analyze your business and your competitor’s backlink profile. What type of digital PR or content opportunities are available for your business? Make sure all your third party listings are setup correctly and accurately. It’s important to identify and clean up all content and information about your business across the web.
I also would recommend doing a hearty content audit on your online properties. Is your content optimized for SEO? Is your content optimized to target and speak to your ICP (ideal client profile)? Do you have content that aligns with different stages of the buying cycle your potential customers might be in? Another recommendation is to do simple keyword searches that are relevant to your business. What type of content comes in search results? You should be identifying and using highly visible content as a resource and inspiration when it comes to understanding what your potential customers are interested in and might want to consume. Once you have audited your content, you should be planning on which content to create and which content to update month over month.
The management phase is the implementation and always on phase. SEO is an always on process and you must be consistent with your efforts to move the needle. Within your discovery and planning phases, you would have identified key areas of priority that need to be implemented. It’s important to plan what items will be executed during each month to increase your search visibility and the quality traffic to your website. It’s impossible to get everything done in Month 1, so planning out the work that will be implemented each month will be key to ensuring you are increasing your SERP (search engine results page) visibility overtime. Project management tools like Smartsheet and Asana can help keep your implementation process organized.
One of the most critical phases is the measurement phase. You will want to monitor month over month the traffic coming to your website from organic search. The goal is to see this traffic increase overtime. It won’t happen immediately but it should increase gradually within the first 4-6 months of implementing your SEO strategy. You will want to identify which pages are being visited by organic search. Are they the pages you optimized? Are they pages you thought would be ideal for your ICP? Are there different or additional keywords you should be prioritizing? What is the quality of traffic coming to your website? What keywords are providing the best quality traffic or leads? Are your leads quality? Do the leads from organic traffic have a higher conversion rate of moving to an opportunity? These are all great measures of success that should be monitored on a monthly basis. I would recommend looking at keyword movement, search engine visibility for specific keywords over a quarterly period. The reason being is it takes time for search engines to crawl websites after you make specific optimizations to your website. It’s very rare you will see movement over a month span. You might, but rare. It typically takes 2-3 months for movement to show. If you are looking at keyword movement month over month, you may not see much growth. Reporting this to your leadership team or board of directors could be mundane and will not paint the right picture. It is important to keep track of the keywords you are optimizing for, what tactics you are implementing specifically and how that affects movement over time. Are the tactics you are implementing tactics you should be replicating for other keywords? Now of course, if you are optimizing for keywords that have a lower search volume, you may have quicker success but these are all elements to analyze as you are implementing your SEO strategy for your business. If you are diligent about your implementation and strategic about what you focus on you will most likely see an increase of web traffic and leads over time.
Remember SEO is not a short game strategy, it’s about the long game. Investing and implementing in a SEO strategy will not yield results over night or even potentially for over 4 or more months. Implementing a SEO strategy will yield results over time and is one of the most cost effective and quality ways to generate prospects, leads, pipeline and new business within the B2B space.