It is not enough to only get a blog post ranked at the top of Google. You must also focus on converting those prospects to qualified leads.
It is not necessary to have a lot of backlinks to rank high for certain keywords. The content on your site must be interesting and easy to understand.
If you follow a few simple steps, you can ensure that your company’s SEO marketing efforts pay off with a consistent stream of leads and a healthy return on investment.
Looking to improve your B2B SEO Strategy in 2022? Here are some actionable steps you can take to increase your rankings and bring in more traffic.
1. Proper keyword research
The success of any B2B SEO strategy rests on research to identify the most relevant and effective keywords for that particular audience.
With that being said, we should run our keyword research based on the following principles:
- The keyword should be relevant and popular for your target audience. This is mainly measured by monitoring monthly search volume.
- The keyword should be relevant to your brand and product/services. Not all keywords that are popular with your target audience are going to be relevant for your brand.
- Depending on your available budget and timeline, the competition for the target keyword should be manageable. The more popular the keyword/query is, the heavier the competition, so finding the right balance is key.
2. Content development
B2B SEO success is entirely dependent on the quality of your content. Your SEO performance cannot make up for weak content.
This means that optimizing your content will not help it rank higher if it is weak or low quality, but if your content is high quality and relevant, it stands a chance of ranking higher without optimization.
To determine if a piece of content is good for SEO, we should focus on how it can provide value to our target audience, not on what will please the search engines.
While content development for B2B can be a very broad subject on its own, here are some best practices to follow:
- Do a quick Google search for your target keyword and check the highest-ranking pages on the first page. These are your competitors, and your job is to develop content better than them. Analyze their structures, flow, length, and check their readability, and aim to develop something better while focusing on your target audience.
- Make sure your content has a clear structure: intro, challenges, solutions, conclusions. Make sure your posts are non-promotional.
- Include your target keywords naturally throughout the content. Again, focus on delivering valuable information for your human readers.
- Include external/outbound links to prove claims and points in the post. Also, make sure to link your own content (internal links) and maintain a healthy internal linking structure.
- Don’t forget to include other forms of media (images, infographics, charts, video) to keep your readers engaged.
You’ve done a great job creating high-quality, relevant, and valuable content. But there’s more to do, as we’ll discuss below.
3. On-site technical optimizations
It’s important to make sure your website is running smoothly and all the pages are loading properly when you’re trying to implement SEO for B2B. This way, your audience will be able to read your content without any issues.
Also, you could ensure Google and the other search engines can index your site.
While technical SEO is a pretty deep subject, and you can check out our previous guide on the technical SEO checklist to get started, here are some important areas for you to consider:
- Optimize each page for the target keywords that have been identified in the keyword research stage. Make sure to naturally include the focus keyword in the page’s title/heading, META description, and URL beside the body of the content itself.
- Make sure your site has an optimal load speed. According to Google, more than 50% of users will bounce when the page loads in more than 3 seconds. Bounce rate is now a B2B SEO ranking factor.
- Make sure your site is mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive. Remember that more and more people are not accessing websites exclusively from their desktop devices. Again, if your site is not mobile-friendly, it can increase the bounce rate.
- Make sure your website is using HTTPS instead of HTTP (SSL certificate), if you are not using HTTPS, Google might brand your site as unsecured and Chrome might block your site from their users.
- Make sure your site can be properly indexed by Google, and fix any existing crawl errors
- Implement structured data markups (schema.org) so Google can understand all the different elements on your site.
To reiterate, remember that there are three objectives of technical SEO for B2B:
- Ensuring your audience can comfortably consume your content and use your website’s functions
- Keeping your audience for as long as possible on your site
- Ensuring the search engines can properly understand your site’s content and all the different elements in it
4. Link building, both in quantity and quality
The most important ranking factor in B2B SEO is still backlinks, but it’s now just as important to have high-quality backlinks as it is to have a lot of them.
We can’t just focus on getting a lot of low-quality backlinks anymore in our link building. Instead, we need to focus on getting high-quality backlinks from popular, relevant sites in our niche. However, this can be easier said than done.
So, how can we do it?
First and foremost, give them a reason to link your content, what we call the link hook. For example:
- Totally unique data or information (statistics, research reports, etc.)
- Aesthetically pleasing assets (infographics, beautiful photos, well-designed images, etc.)
- Engaging original stories
- Informative, actionable tips not available anywhere else
Again, your content is going to be the key.
No matter how great your content is, it’s worthless if no one sees it. That’s why content promotion is key to link building and generating traffic.
Use all available marketing channels such as social media, guest posting, outreach, and other methods to create backlinks while also promoting your content.
There are many tools that can automate the work quickly.
For example, Snov.io is an outreach automation software that allows you to conduct email address search of your target audience, check their validity, and craft email drip campaigns, all in one place.
5. Make sure your landing page serves a compelling purpose for your prospect
The search engines are not your target audience. B2B SEO is all about optimizing content for your target audience, not for the search engines. While it’s important to consider what the search engines will be interested in when creating your content, your main focus should be on creating compelling, relevant content that will resonate with your target audience.
If a B2B company wants to be successful, they need to focus on what their prospects need instead of trying to guess what the search engines want. Creating content that speaks to the needs of their customers will help them move further along in their journey.
Although it is true that search algorithms will take into account the length of your content when ranking pages in 2022, there are other factors that come into play. Meta-characteristics, such as the number of words on your landing page, are not the only things that search engines take into account.
The algorithms are not a test of how well you can game the system, they are designed to reflect what your visitors want.
More important than anything else is making sure users are engaged. But what counts as engagement will differ depending on the kind of content featured on your page.
The search engines will track how long users watch the main video on a page, how they interact with the video player, and if they leave the page without taking any further action, if you’re sending prospects to a video sales letter, for example.
If your video is bad and viewers leave, you will be punished by Google.
If your landing page is receiving positive engagement from users, it will rank higher in search results.
Do not replicate the same landing page design as your competitors or try to outwit the engineers at large technology companies. Instead, design your landing page to persuade your prospect to take the next step in the buying process.
The only thing you can be sure of is that none of the strategies mentioned will help you if your visitors dislike your landing page. Give your potential customers the same respect you would if they came to your business in person.
6. Answer common questions in your landing page’s metadata
Asking your prospect a question is a great way to get their attention and initial engagement.
The reason that headlines like “Why Is Everybody Talking About ____?” are so effective is because they stop the reader and make them want to read the rest of the text.
People tend to want to know the answer to a question when they see it on a search page. This is because the question is what led them to submit a search query in the first place.
If your headline piques a searcher’s curiosity, they are more likely to click on it. Just make sure that your landing page has the answer to the question in your headline.
7. Increase credibility through barnacle SEO (Business Directory Listings)
Barnacle SEO is a way to piggyback off the popularity of other, well-ranked websites to improve your own website’s SEO ranking.
What is Barnacle SEO?
SEO that is compared to a barnacle is named ‘Barnacle SEO’. This is because barnacles are crustaceans that attach to things like rocks, ships, and whales. You may also know Barnacle Boy who is a character from Mermaid Man.
How does this relate to your B2B SEO strategy?
It is difficult for small businesses to rank for relevant keywords as bigger, more established websites already rank for those keywords.
This is where barnacle SEO comes in to improve your website ranking. Like a barnacle, you can improve your SEO by “attaching” your website to other websites with more authority.
Although you might not be ranked for the keywords you are targeting, being mentioned on a trustworthy site (usually third-party local listing sites) could give you some link juice. This also allows you to take advantage of the website’s traffic and potentially get some leads.
But isn’t barnacle SEO the same as local SEO?
The quick answer: Barnacle SEO is any optimization technique that aims to rank a piece of content in Google without directly targeting the main keyword. While barnacle SEO may sound a bit like local SEO, they’re actually quite different.
Local SEO is about optimizing your own website, while barnacle SEO is about focusing on the SEO results of other websites. With barnacle SEO, you target website that are ranking well for the keywords you want to rank for.
How does barnacle SEO work?
So how do you execute a barnacle SEO strategy?
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Target long-tail keywords that are associated with high purchasing intent. These keywords will generate traffic that is more likely to convert into customers.
You can find sites that rank for your target keywords using your favorite keyword research tool.
Some website are better than others for backlinking. To increase the chances that a website will link back to yours, target websites that are 1. related to your niche 2. have a high Domain Authority score 3. are frequently updated with new content
Find opportunities for your website to be advertised, for example by buying ad space on other websites, or by writing blog posts that can be published on other websites. Alternatively, you could list your services on websites that offer opportunities for businesses to be featured.
Barnacle SEO can be a useful tool for small businesses to get more exposure and drive traffic to their site. It can also be helpful for bigger brands and improve the SEO performance for SaaS companies.
One way to help improve your brand awareness is to list it on business directories. This can result in more leads being generated.
Final tips
Even though the landscape of B2B SEO may seem to have changed dramatically, businesses that use white-hat strategies and treat their prospects well have not actually seen much change.
Over time, algorithms have become more and more favorable to legitimate marketing practices.
If your business has been relying on unsustainable tactics like keyword stuffing and using spammy links to get to the top of the search engine results pages, it is going to get much tougher.
As long as you have a genuine conversation with your customers online, then you will have a high ROI.