An effective strategy for B2B SEO should aim to reach potential customers wherever they happen to be online - on and off the website.
SEO should ensure that a business is always under the radar of prospective customers, whenever they are online searching for answers to questions related to the business’s product or service.
This can be achieved through a combination of on site and off site SEO strategy built on extensive research about customer challenges and motivations.
Below I have outlined a 6 step process to build such an SEO strategy.
- Customer Research. Knowing your customer is the vital ingredient to any marketing strategy and SEO is no different. Customer research should come before keyword research as SEO tools don’t always provide the whole picture.
- Keyword Research. This is standard for SEO. The information obtained from the Customer Research step provides a great starting block for the Keyword Research process.
- Optimise Homepage & Product Pages. Once Customer and Keyword Research is complete, you will have the information needed to optimise all key pages on the website. It is important to ensure pages with higher buyer intent (e.g. product/service pages) have the best chance of ranking as these are the pages that have the biggest potential to drive revenue.
- Content Marketing. Content is essential to bring in organic traffic. The primary focus during the content creation process is to think how you can help your prospective customers. You will have this information from the Customer Research step. Content should be customer-centric and not sales-centric. People can spot a sale a mile away these days! But if you help prospective customers with your content, rather than selling to them, you build trust which in turn generates sales when they are ready to buy.
- Link Building & Digital PR. Both these improve a website’s visibility off site. The Customer Research conducted in the first step, will have revealed which websites prospects visit. These websites should form the basis of any Link Building and Digital PR work, to generate awareness of the business in the right places.
- Reporting & Analysis. If you don’t understand what is or isn’t working, then you have no insight into what needs changing to bring about improvements. Reporting and analysis provides a roadmap to continually improve the performance of the strategy.
This is a brief summary of what an effective B2B SEO strategy should include. I go into this in more detail, in a blog post I recently wrote here: https://alkane.marketing/blog/b2b-seo-strategy/
If you are a B2B business and interested in exploring the potential of Search Marketing (SEO & PPC) message me and we can have an introductory chat.
