SEO for B2B

SEO for B2B Using Tried and Tested Strategies

Keywords are the foundation of effective SEO for B2B companies. Without laying the groundwork, your website will not show up in search pages such as that of Google’s when your target audience is looking for information on the products or services you offer. This translates to low traffic on your website and lots of missed opportunities. Here are a few tips to make sure you are showing up on Google for keywords you are trying to rank high on.

Don’t Skip Your Keyword Research

When your prospect searches online, they often use certain common terms or language. It is important to understand and analyze what these search terms are. When planning your SEO for B2B, keyword search tools can be a powerful ally to find new ideas for content.

Paid tools such as Moz are worth the investment. Moz shows you accurate search volume information, highlights how competitive keywords are and estimates click-through rates (CTR). These are useful metrics that allow you to choose which ones to prioritize.

If you are not ready for a paid subscription, Google also offers a free keyword research tool known as Google Keyword Planner. While it cannot show you the exact search volumes, you can still get information on what terms people are searching for that is related to your target keywords.

Understand Search Intent

Anyone who goes on Google to search for something has a specific goal in mind. When thinking about SEO for B2B, you must consider what your prospect’s purpose is when using these keywords. It helps to recognize where they are on the buyer’s journey. Are they looking for more information on a topic or are they ready to purchase?

Your landing pages must correspond to what the visitor is looking for. If they are still researching for information and you link them to a product page right away, this will not be a good user experience and will just result in high bounce rates for your website. Creating content for education purposes such as blogs and case studies will engage your target audience and help you build trust and authority in your industry. This will assist with brand awareness and keeps you top of mind when they have decided to buy.

Improve Internal and External Linking

Internal and external links within your content help boost your SEO for B2B. Internal links are those leading to other pages within your website while external links are those that land on other websites.

Why are these important? Contextual links within your site lead your readers to other related and valuable content that they may be interested in. While you are helping them in their research, you are also allowing search engines such as Google to understand what your content is about and how landing pages are related to each other.

The value of external linking sometimes come into question because logically, you wouldn’t want to send the reader away from your website to someone else’s page. SEO experts disagree. Outbound links lets users and search engines discover useful information. That being said, this can help you build trust, gain more organic traffic and even forge new relationships with other like-minded businesses.

Label Your Images

Images make your blogs more visually appealing, can improve engagement and helps you tell a story. But did you know that these images can also boost your SEO score? By adding alt text or tags in the HTML code, you are not only helping the visually impaired navigate and understand your site, you are also highlighting the context of your website for search engine crawlers to index appropriately.

Since search engine crawlers cannot view images as humans do, helping them understand what your image is about is important. Alt text can help them “see” your photos and help you rank on those keywords. Skipping this step can mean missed opportunities in your SEO for B2B efforts.

Optimize Google’s Snippet Preview

Notice the short description that appears under a webpage whenever you use Google to search for anything? Google generates titles and descriptions that are totally automated. It does that by looking into the content and other references we show online. These snippets of information are intended to provide the best info on how it relates to their search query.

To allow you some control on what shows up on the descriptions, the Yoast plugin on WordPress lets you create your own preview including other elements such as the slug, title and meta description. To hit the right SEO for B2B, make sure that your keywords appear on your title, the web address and within the meta description. Your preview must be concise and accurately inform users what your content is about. Think of it as a quick pitch to the reader that what you are offering matches what they are searching for. It is vital that your blogs have quality meta descriptions to optimize your chance of getting in front of your target audience.

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SEO for B2B Using Tried and Tested Strategies