Alongside various lead generation software, search engine optimization is being used more frequently due to the ability to help almost any business with a web presence to gain more views and, when done well, achieve more customers for your business through capturing them in the funnel. While optimizing a business-to-business website follows many of the same rules of SEO that other sites follow, there are a few pieces more important to B2B SEO. However, the most critical aspect of any marketing strategy is to be honest with customers and to provide value — otherwise customers will take their business elsewhere and, in the case of SEO, search engines will penalize you. Ultimately SEO for B2B traffic purposes is a technical and complex process which requires a great attention to detail and patient approach to perfecting the algorithm.
B2B Search Engine Optimization Do’s and Don’ts
To make the most of your web presence, consider these tips on B2B SEO:
Do know your audience demographic? Your target audience is the biggest difference between B2B websites and other types. Aim your-content at the kind of customers you want to attract exactly, as an ideal customer profile. This is not a basic process. You need to utilize all data points available of the businesses who have interacted with your company at every stage of the sales cycle from prospecting, leads generated, customers, repeat customers and those who have churned. Understanding their thoughts and journeys to finding the information they desire will be the key to positioning your business in the most ideal situation in terms of SEO value.
You must create and implement a solid plan before jumping in to SEO. It is not a strategy which can be produced and seen results from over-night. This can’t be stressed enough as many marketers can become impatient with the slow results of their content ranking. One suggestion from Harold Davis’ Search Engine Optimization for narrowing down your focus is to create an elevator pitch – convey in two or three sentences what you offer, who you offer it to and why it is valuable. Use your pitch to determine which keywords are most important (plus you can draw on the pitch to create Meta information).
Do your research. Check out your competition for keywords by Googling phrases you use and variations of your phrases. Hire Strategic e-Marketing to find alternate ways your target businesses could be searching for what you offer. Surveying your customers and competition is also a valuable activity.
Do leverage your network resources. Using the groups you are already a part of, such as dealer networks or even local networks, can help you get more inbound links.
Do regularly add content. Blogs are a perfect example – just make sure the blog provides value to the reader in some way. The best content does not just rehash other content available online. Add something new to the conversation using your own perspective.
As with any strategy, there are a few tactics you shouldn’t use in B2B SEO marketing:
Don’t neglect Meta tags and descriptions. Here are a few suggestions: Rewrite title tags so the first three words are keywords, use keywords in your alt tags for images and make sure description and abstract tags are informative and enticing.
Do not purposely keyword-stuff your content. This is the concept of forcing words into the text which is not needed, in order to be found more visibly in the algorithms. Keywords are important but don’t overdo it or the search engines will penalize you. Your keyword phrases should sound natural in your content. For blog posts and articles, keyword density is usually safe at 2 percent as a base to go forward.
Don’t have full blog posts or articles on the home page. If you do, it may prevent your individual posts from being indexed and placing. Specific landing pages for certain keywords which are effectively optimized.
Don’t be overly aggressive with your optimization tactics. This mostly entails being honest about your intentions and not tricking users into clicking your link. Click-baiting is also penalized when obvious. This can be identified by the bounce rate of your content and the poor session times exposing your relevance to be ranking high up or on the first page of Google, Bing or Yahoo.
