For business-to-business (B2B) enterprises, organic search is a priceless marketing avenue, allowing them to tap into pertinent non-branded search interests and uphold their brand’s standing.
This piece furnishes insights into the distinctive nature of SEO in the realm of B2B, along with four valuable tips to steer your B2B SEO endeavors toward success.
Understanding B2B SEO
B2B SEO is a marketing tactic employed to enhance the organic search presence of business-to-business (B2B) entities. Numerous B2B firms regard organic search as a means to bolster their brand and generate sales.
Through SEO, B2B companies craft and optimize content that aligns with their target audience’s pertinent search interests and intentions.
Distinguishing B2B SEO from the Rest
The approach to SEO varies significantly when it comes to B2B companies. Here’s how:
- Target Keywords: B2B SEO tends to focus on keywords with lower search volumes, longer-tail phrases, and a higher prevalence of industry-specific terminology than target keywords for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies.
- Audience Complexity: In B2B, you aim to capture individual searchers and engage a “buying committee.” This group holds the authority and sway to make purchasing decisions for your product or service.
- Extended Sales Cycle: The sales cycle in B2B is typically more protracted and challenging to gauge compared to B2C, where transactions often occur more swiftly.
Turning Visibility into Profit: 4 Strategies for B2B Organic Search Success
Considering the distinctions mentioned earlier, here are four strategies to guide you toward success in B2B SEO.
These insights draw from more than a decade of B2B experience, specifically on harnessing organic search marketing for revenue generation.
These strategies are versatile, suitable for businesses of all scales, and relevant whether you’re on the agency side or the client side.
Tip 1: Crafting an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
To identify the right keywords for organic search ranking, you must profoundly understand your target audience. One highly effective method for grasping your target audience’s intricacies is developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
An ICP serves as a window into your target audience by initially pinpointing the defining characteristics of your most valued existing customers. These vital characteristics are the foundation for constructing a profile that encapsulates the quintessential traits of an ideal customer for your business.
Once you have a clear understanding of your ideal customer, you can more seamlessly undertake research to pinpoint keywords that resonate with the search interests and intent of your ICP.
Depending on the size and intricacy of your enterprise, you may require multiple ICPs. For instance, businesses operating across various industry sectors may need a distinct ICP for each market segment.
ICPs can encompass an array of key traits tailored to the nature of your company’s products or services. Nevertheless, some universal traits include annual revenue, employee count, industry, geographic location, expected sales cycle duration, and critical personas.
Key personas represent the buying committee and the ultimate users of your company’s products or services. These personas should outline individuals’ challenges that your product or service can resolve.
These identified pain points serve as valuable information for keyword research and content ideation, aiding in developing content that can attract searchers based on their business needs.
ICPs are foundational for account-based marketing practitioners (ABM) and can provide a competitive edge to your SEO program. Ultimately, ICPs empower your organization to target search demand effectively, attract the most promising prospects, and maximize revenue.
Tip 2: Tailoring Content for the Complete Buying Committee
A common pitfall for many B2B marketers is concentrating their marketing efforts solely on organizational senior leaders. However, it’s essential to recognize that senior leaders typically come into play at the latter stages of the buying process.
The buying committee in B2B settings comprises a broader spectrum, ranging from senior leaders to end-users, including managers, analysts, and even entry-level employees. Every member of this committee wields a degree of influence in the buying process, making it imperative to craft content that can capture the attention of all these stakeholders. This approach enhances the likelihood of your brand becoming recognized, considered, and ultimately chosen.
Investing in content creation that spans the entire marketing funnel and caters to the diversity of the buying committee is crucial.
A CEO’s search behavior and perspectives differ from a manager’s as they grapple with distinct issues and priorities. Conduct thorough research to pinpoint the keywords that most aptly align with the distinct needs of various buying committee members.
Tip 3: Assessing the Financial Impact
Evaluating the financial impact of organic search traffic is pivotal to your SEO program’s success. It’s crucial to demonstrate that SEO isn’t merely an expenditure but a strategic investment with the potential for future revenue growth.
If you still need to embark on this path, consider initiating discussions with your customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation teams. Collaborating with these teams will equip your organization with the insights to comprehend and optimize organic search traffic comprehensively, ultimately driving increased revenue.
The measurement of revenue impact can occur through:
- Direct Attribution: This involves tracking revenue generated from closed deals from leads who submitted an online form after landing on your site from an organic search listing.
- Sales Pipeline Contribution: This metric indicates the potential future revenue from deals in the sales pipeline, offering valuable insights, especially for B2B organizations grappling with extended sales cycles that span 6 to 12 months.
It’s crucial to consistently review and apply attribution modeling to gauge revenue impact accurately. Organic search is just one among many potential traffic sources, often representing one of several touchpoints leading to a purchase.
Selecting an attribution model that thoughtfully recognizes the role of organic search in the customer journey is pivotal to ensuring that organic search receives its rightful credit in contributing to the bottom line.
Tip 4: Integrate and set clear expectations
SEO should touch almost every marketing and sales function within a B2B organization.
Website, content, analytics, CRM, marketing automation, paid search, business development, go-to-market, executive leadership, public relations, and brand teams interact directly or indirectly with SEO.
Ensuring SEO is integrated and has clear expectations with all these various stakeholders is essential to the success of B2B SEO.
SEO will be misunderstood, underutilized, blamed, and potentially forgotten without alignment with stakeholders.
If done correctly, SEO will improve your website, make your content more appealing, increase your brand awareness, drive more relevant traffic, inform the naming of your products and services, and ultimately increase revenue.
Setting SEO expectations via clear goals across the various stakeholder groups will help integrate SEO at your B2B organization. Do not allow SEO to become siloed and underinvested.
Make SEO known and understood across your organization. Hold regular SEO educational meetings with key stakeholder groups, share performance data with these groups, and develop ways to add SEO to their workflows and procedures.
B2B SEO Triumph: Driving Revenue
In the realm of B2B, genuine SEO success is synonymous with enriching your organization’s bottom line. Success in SEO should extend beyond conventional metrics like keyword rankings, inbound links, and page speed.
The genuine yardstick of SEO achievement is its capacity to contribute directly to your organization’s financial success. If your SEO program isn’t evolving into a lasting, revenue-generating asset, you might inadvertently hinder your personal and your organization’s growth.
With the guidance of the four tips outlined in this article, you can elevate SEO into an enduring investment that fuels the future cash flow of your organization.
If you need help with challenges or clarification, consider exploring our monthly SEO packages, where our industry experts can assist.
