SEO - What should B2B companies be focussing on?

Often, these key activities and strategies are very different to the tactics that B2C companies employ for several reasons. Whilst the ultimate goal of both B2B and B2C SEO is to drive more sales, the success of each campaign is measured very differently, due to the difference in how businesses and consumers make purchasing decisions. A B2B sale has a much higher number of ‘touch points’ during the sales process. With this in mind, B2B SEO activities should align to satisfying each touchpoint (or stage of the funnel) in the customer journey.

What Is The B2B Sales Funnel?

The B2B sales funnel has five distinct stages. 

Awareness/Lead Generation

This stage addresses the moment in which your potential customers discover that they have a problem or a need that you can fulfill. At this stage, you want to educate your potential customers as to why you can help solve their problems as well as collect information or contact details so you can nurture these leads later on and build a relationship with your potential customers. 

Consideration/Lead Nurturing

Once your customer has been exposed to your content, you need to build that relationship, giving them more insight into what you can do for them. At this stage, you should offer testimonials, ebooks, white papers, reports, case studies, webinars, and guides. 

Preference

At this point, your customer makes an enquiry. A face-to-face meeting or Zoom call is a good idea, as it lets you show your experience and expertise, and build a rapport. Make sure you’re differentiating between yourself and your competition. 

Purchase and Closing the Sale

Make sure you’re keeping in touch and displaying expertise through email marketing. The B2B sales cycle can be a long process, so you need to stay in your customer’s minds by communicating with them. 

Loyalty/Retention and Referrals

After the sale, establish a long-term relationship. The best customers are repeat customers. Deliver on your original promises, and send out content to customers to make them aware of your other products and services. 

Read more about the B2B sales funnel here. 

What activities should you focus on? 

With this in mind, here are four things that your SEO strategy should address:

Demonstrate Thought Leadership

B2B buyers want to know that they’re buying from the company that is the best for their needs and that it can offer the right solution before they even get in touch.

You need to be able to demonstrate your expertise. You can do this with thought leadership. Thought leadership is a type of content marketing where you tap into the talent, expertise, and passion in your business to answer the questions that your target audience might have. 

There are lots of ways to position yourself as an expert in the field, including:

• Blogging
• PR
• Guest posting
• LinkedIn marketing
• Podcast appearances
• Video marketing
• Webinars or speaking at conferences

Create Landing Pages For Each Of Your Services

Each of the services that you offer should have its own SEO-optimised landing page. These pages should contain some in-depth information about the service to help your potential customers make a decision, find your services, and see your expertise. For example, if you’re an accountant, you should create separate pages for each of your services, such as accounting services and payroll services. 

Demonstrate EAT

EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These are elements that Google expects to see demonstrated in your content to show your potential customers that you have the credentials to be able to solve their problems.

Expertise focuses on the level of knowledge the writer or author of your content has. Are you an expert in your subject? An expert opinion, or a dedicated expert writer who is responsible for your content can help you to satisfy this criteria. 

Authoritativeness focuses on the authority of your website’s content and the strength of your domain. You can build authoritativeness by building quality links by contributing to leading industry publications, quality blogs and news sources. The aim is to gain exposure for your brand, generating links back to your site as a by product.

Trustworthiness also refers to the creator of the website or web page content. Becoming a trustworth expert in your chosen field means that the content is more accurate and honest and much less likely to be spun or falsified. This improves the appeal of your content from a search engine perspective. You can read more about EAT here. 

Think Quality Over Quantity

In comparison to B2C, there are usually few searches made for B2B services and companies. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s not worth targeting these phrases, as these searches tend to be of higher quality. Try not to get distracted by concentrating on the search terms that have the most searches per month. Instead, you should be focusing on more niche terms that are the most relevant to your business. Concentrate on quality leads, rather than quantity. 

Focus On Consistency 

The reality of SEO is that once you have your strategy well underway, you will need to enter a phase where you continually work on optimising your content for SEO and work on your link building to improve all of these factors. 

Make sure you continue to look for different ways to improve all of the content that you create for your site. Keep looking for opportunities to earn authority links from quality sources. If you can do this, you can expect to see the organic visibility of your site, and your site’s traffic increase. 

While you’re working on this, you must remember to concentrate on your audience. Focus on what they need and the problems that they are looking to solve. With this focus, you can position your business as a solution to their problems. 

If you’re looking for more information or want to know how SEO can fit within your B2B marketing strategy, get in contact with the B2B marketing agency staff at Tiga today.