B2B SEO
Learn More About What B2B Search Engine Optimization.
If you were wondering how your clients find your business, 99% of them find you online. Some may be referrals but your prospective clients will still check you out online before calling or filling out a form on your site. B2B SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the best marketing tactic for long term growth that you can invest in right now to grow your client base and keep those current relationships strong.
Not All B2B SEO is Created Equal
Everyone and every marketing agency seems to offer some sort of SEO package online. But all B2B SEO isn’t the same. You’ll need to work with an SEO company that understands the true ROI & intricacies of strategic SEO in the B2B space and that offers SEO services tapered towards your TYPE of B2B business.
What is B2B Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Simply defined: B2B Search Engine Optimization directly related to the B2B space is 4 things. Education, Visibility, Reputation & Communication of your USP (Unique Selling Point). If you’re a CMO of a B2B company and you’re wanting to gain visibility at the top of Google’s search results page (which is where you need to be), you need to have better SEO. If you want to take the buyer down the journey of educating them on all of their options, you’re going to need content that represents different parts of the sales funnel. If you want people to see your positive reviews and leave you more, your business needs better SEO. If you want to communicate & answer online client FAQs and explain why you’re different, you need B2B SEO. To add to this, there’s a plethora of additional pieces to SEO strategy that you must take into consideration in order to do it well. Some of them include but aren’t limited to:
- Website Content Strategy
- Gaining Links from Reputable Sources
- Technical Web Coding, Site Speed & Hosting Related Items
- Knowledge of Local SEO Best Practices
- Knowledge of the many Google Algorithm Updates
- Online Reputation
Why Do You Need Better B2B SEO?
Get More Visibility
When your website and online presence is enhanced by using B2B SEO best practices, you’ll be able to gain more visibility for people searching four your products and services. In case you don’t know by know, 99% of all searches are started online. Even people who have been recommended your B2B brand are very likely to search your company name or product name online before reaching out. When your competition has better visibility than you, you may be losing out on millions of dollars of revenue due to your potential clients going with your competitor.
Beat Your Competition
B2B digital marketing is tough. You’re not the only B2B business in your area that does the same thing. When someone searches for your type of product or service, the top 3 position on the 1st page of Google get around 20 – 30% of all of the clicks and calls. Are you even a choice? There’s a good chance that your competition is improving their SEO internally or working with an SEO Agency. Don’t get left behind or let the “other guys” take all of your regional market-share. What’s the ROI of B2B SEO? Take a look at our calculator here
Lower Cost Per Acquisition
You should know how much it costs you to acquire a customer. If your marketing team isn’t measuring this, they should be. B2B SEO can help you lower the costs of customer acquisition by generating tons of “free” website traffic over time that will ultimately add more people into your sales funnel that you would have previously had to pay for via pay per click or other paid media tactics.
Improve B2B Reputation
By being more visible, you’ll automatically have current and past customers give you and your business more online reviews which will act as a snowball affect from a Local or Regional SEO perspective. Even outside of Google, there are tons of niche B2B directories where you can receive online reviews. Having a higher review average (out of 5 stars) will also give you a “leg up” against your competition. Studies have shown that online reviews are one of the biggest Local and regional SEO factors for B2B brand.
B2B SEO Pricing?
SEO services can run the gamut based on who you work with. You can expect to pay for the agencies expertise, size of the agency and amount of services they offer. Some companies do basic SEO services that may not truly affect your bottom line or generate more patients. This is why we recommend working with an SEO agency that has working knowledge of the businesses selling to businesses space. Note: We suggest staying away from companies that focus on you paying for a specific number of keywords. Read more about SEO costs here.
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B2B SEO Factors at Play
There are HUNDREDS of ranking factors at play when optimizing your B2B company online. Whether you’re a one man, local business or a large enterprise, you share one thing: Google is continuously updating their search algorithm making ranking on the first page of Google a moving target. We eat, sleep and breath B2B SEO and can truly say that you have to focus on it FULL TIME to understand all of the intricate detail and keep up with the continuous updates. Below we will go through some of the major topics affecting your website’s optimization on Google.
What Are B2B Focused SEO Tactics?
Being able to understand the local search landscape is one thing. The other is being about to master B2B SEO specific factors. It’s one of the biggest differentiating parts that set a B2B SEO agency, like us, apart from your generalist agency. Tactics such as:
- Niche Citations
- Optimizing your Google My Business Accounts
- Writing On-Page Content by REAL B2B product specialists
- Generating Online Reviews from clients that are Your Biggest Fans (Get those referrals!)
- Generating B2B Focused PR and More!
B2B SEO vs General SEO
What are the differences between optimizing your website with typical SEO best practices versus optimizing with a background in B2B Online Marketing? In this post we are going to break it down for you.
We’ve also created an easy to compare SEO chart showing you the differences. See below.
B2B Content Marketing
This is obviously a big one as most agencies aren’t able to write at the level needed to satisfy the “sniff test” of B2B practitioners or people who know what they are looking for when researching a potential company. Also, Google is continuously updating their algorithm. Recently, the “Medic” update affected many B2B websites that had badly written and inaccurate sub-pages. One thing that should be asked when working with a b2b focused digital agency is, “Do you have people writing for me that have actual B2B backgrounds?”
Awareness of Competition
When you’re optimizing your website both onsite and offsite, being aware of the intricacies of the space you’re in helps tremendously. Knowing who the major and minor players are, what keywords to focus on and what backlinks to obtain are very important.
Deep Understanding of Question Searches
People are Googling very specific things. Knowing about your niche and optimizing your website for both broad terms like “xxxx manufacturer” and specific terms like “what is the difference between xxxx brand and xxxx brand” are important. See the example of Google’s Featured Snippets below.
Schema Markup
Schema is basically the language that Google speaks. When adding schema markup code to your website, you’re basically communicating directly with Google telling them what sections of your website are all about. You can tell Google that you’re a manufacturer, what niche you are, reviews, etc. This will both improve the way Google crawls your B2B focused website and ultimately improve the UX (user experience) when seeing search results and ultimately landing on your site.
Watching Trends
The B2B experienced SEO practitioner you work with will be focused on the B2B space so closely that they are aware of trends in different specialties. It’s impossible for your generalist agency to be that granular day in and day out. Utilizing tools like Google Trends (below), Google Alerts, subscribing to B2B news organizations, they will be able to catch things that you as a busy professional wouldn’t normally catch. Then, they will be able to react on your behalf from an online marketing perspective.
Google Algorithm Updates
Any good B2B marketing company will know about the Google algorithm updates. However, in 2018, there was a series of updates commonly referred to the Medic Update. This core algorithm update seemed to affect a majority healthcare and medical type websites, as well as some B2B sites, that offered advice to patients or prospects. An SEO company that has hands on experience dealing with the recovery of these updates is essential as there are a lot of tests & variables at play that will be different for each and every medical brand / location. Staying on the “heartbeat” of updates and how to recover specific to the B2B space is important so you can not only recover faster but stay ahead of other competitors that were also affected.
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Content Marketing for B2B Businesses
Every marketing agency these days can write content for blog posts or web pages. BUT, do they have the acumen it takes to write or create quality content specifically for your specific B2b niche? Probably not. We have years of expertise in writing complex topics for B2B businesses of all types from all over the USA. This includes writing:
- Blog Posts
- Video
- Long Form Pages
- Product Explanations
- FAQ Pages
- Video Transcription and more!
Why should I continuously update my website’s content? Simple answer: Google wants you to.
Google doesn’t care about the business owner; they care about the end user searching for a solution.
Sites that are stale and have outdated content will fall off the first page of Google pretty fast, especially with all of the competition out there creating more…..and better content daily.
Mobile First Marketing
If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices at this point, you’ve been living under a rock. Google is now showing about half of it’s search results from its mobile first indexing. This is huge as more of your competition optimize for mobile, they are going to push your indexed web pages further down into the 2nd page or further.
Are you not sure if your B2B website is optimized for mobile? An easy way to see if by using Google’s mobile friendly checking tool here.
There are also a ton of other online directories that are all optimized for mobile devices. They already take away market share on Google from your actual website. So just to compete with these sites, you’re going to have at the least be mobile friendly.
The mobile preferences from Google are always changing so make sure that whomever you partner with when it comes to Mobile SEO, they understand the changes and how to help you stand out from the mobile optimized crowd.
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Link Building for B2B Businesses
Backlinks (links from other websites to your URL) are one of Google’s most important ranking factors that many of your competitors aren’t paying attention to. Yes, content is important but having a diverse backlink profile consisting of local news sources, blogs and other websites that look reputable in Google’s eyes is the difference between your site being on the bottom of page 1 / top of page 2 on Google and being #1 in the Maps or #1 in the Non-Map Organic results.
Working together, we will initially analyze your backlink profile then take a look at your local or regional competition’s profile as well. This will give us a good idea as to the target “hitlist” or websites that we will want to obtain a backlink from. This process is a manual one but much needed and it has resulted in us helping all of our clients rank higher than their competition.
Our Link Building Process for B2B businesses includes the following steps each time….
1: Get a firm understand as to who your audience is.
2: Make a shortlist of websites that are targets.
3: Write content that goes above and beyond your normal website content.
4: Within those target sites, fond ones that would be a match for your phenomenal content.
5: Reach out manually.
6: Promote on Social Media.
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Technical SEO for B2B Businesses
Code Optimization for Better Website Speed
Ongoing Monitoring
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Local SEO Specific
There are 3 main areas that we suggest a new or existing B2B company focuses on when it comes to Local Search Engine Optimization. 1: Google My Business Optimization, 2: Online Local & Niche Directories and 3: Online Reviews.
Yes, we know that not all B2B companies are going to want to focus aggressively locally. However, laying a strong foundation with these suggestions will ensure that Google sees it and it does play into your regional or National SEO strategy.
Google My Business
Many of the local offices we have worked with have had a very messy Google My Business situation. Maybe they had worked with an agency before and the owner of that profile never made anyone at the business an Owner.
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B2B Online Directories
Technically Google My Business is a directory but there are other major players out there like YP and Yelp that you should also consider being on. Why? They share their data with tons of other sites online (see local search ecosystem below). If you can, you’ll want to come up with a uniform NAP (name, address and phone number) for your main business or HQ and submit those details to the major data aggregators. Working with your SEO company that focuses on B2B companies, they should be able to make a short list of other niche directories that will build a healthy profile or citations (links) pointing back to your business and main URL. There’s a growing list of them and you can see just some of the better ones here.
Online Reviews
When your business comes up in the maps results (ideally in the top 3!), potential clients will now be comparing you against the other competitors on two things: Proximity to the Searcher & Review Score. Studies have shown that proximity is very important for people BUT the review score can easily override that. For example, let’s say that in the example below, you were looking for an “commercial printing company near me”. You see in the example below that the 3 locations are close to each other, however the 1st office has no reviews versus 2nd office which is at a 4.7. I don’t know about you but if I was going to have some printing work done, I don’t want a commercial printer that has a no reviews working on my project.
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B2B User Experience (UX)
Why is a B2B website usability & UX crucial? One of the more important ranking factors for a website is the customer User Experience. Understanding your potential buyer’s behavior on your site is almost now as important as the content you add. Why? Because Google wants to make sure that the search results that are being served up are giving the searchers a good experience so they KEEP using Google…..ultimately so they can serve more ads:-)
- Are they finding the answer they needed in as few clicks as possible?
- How fast is your page loading?
- Are they leaving your site fast and going to another site?
- Are they staying on your pages for a long time?
Below is a sample of Google’s Behavior Flow data. The SEO agency you choose to work with should know this and make adjustments on your website accordingly.
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Video Marketing for B2B Businesses
Did you know that YouTube is the World’s second largest search engine? Video is a fantastic way for you to easily explain things about your services / products, introduce your staff or share your personality. You don’t have to have high production quality video either as most smartphones come with fantastic cameras. On the SEO side of video for B2B related businesses, it can really supplement what your SEO agency or internal person is doing for you. Many times, video comes up in the search results higher than organic text. Do you have a ton of video online or sitting around in a folder somewhere? Awesome. Now it’s time to optimize them and put them out there for extra “breadcrumbs” to get found.
Video is also a great way to brand yourself as the “go-to” company in your field. One easy way is to just shoot 40 – 50 FAQ videos in relation to the most commonly asked questions both about your business (or service offering). Overall, we highly recommend adding video as something you continuously do on a daily & weekly basis.
“We have seen a 300% increase in new clients year over year since working with DeTorres Group. They were able to find many different B2B SEO issues that our previous agency didn’t take care of.”
“Dustin and his team have been indispensable when it comes to optimizing my company online. It’s resulted in millions of dollars in revenue, new logos and my “brand” is now huge. I recommend his company to any B2B company unless you do the same thing I do in my area!”
B2B SEO Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What’s the difference between B2B SEO and just General SEO?
A: It all comes down to who you want to reach. You want to reach business professionals (b2b) searching for your product or service at the right time and place. You also want to make sure that they interact with the right content that represents the specific spot in the buyer’s journey they are in.
Q: Is SEO pricing packaged or is it custom?
A: We do have some packages that you can view but most of our clients have had us create a customized plan that fits the needs of their B2B locations. Wealso have some additional SEO services here. Read more about B2B SEO Pricing here.
Q: How long have you been doing this as a company?
A: Since 2008.
Q: I have an agency and I’m looking for a white label situation. Do you offer that?
A: Yes
Q: How many people do you have on your team?
A: We have 10 full time employees. Several are here in Orlando & Tampa and the rest are scattered throughout the United States.
Q: How do I know I’m choosing the “right” B2B SEO agency or consultant?
A: We suggest you ask for references, take a look at case studies and also check out online reviews of the agency or consultant as a part of the vetting process. Since B2B focus is obviously important, if they have any experience in your particular B2B niche, that would be a huge bonus.
Q: Why does my B2B company need SEO?
A: Almost every search begins online….even if your company has been referred. First off, are you even an option when people search for the terms that represent for your main products or service? Secondly, have you mapped out the journey that your ideal buyer goes on when determining which product or service to buy in your space? You should have content that reflects all parts of that journey in order to embed brand awareness but also to provide the best possible answers to their questions along the way.
Q: What are some of the best techniques for SEO in B2B?
A: At the least, you should be writing content that appeals to your target market. Other basic B2B SEO tactics include technical fixes on your site, domain authority improvements, competitive intel and especially the insight you can garner from PPC and other business segments.
Q: How long does B2B SEO take to work? When will I start to see results and an ROI?
A: Working with the right SEO professional as well as depending on the severity of your situation, you can start seeing results within the first 4-6 months. However, the needle will truly start to move normally in months 5+. There are a lot of variables at play here but these are generalities we have experienced since working in B2B SEO since 2008.