How Important is Your SEO for Your B2B Marketing?

In a word: very.

If you operate in the business-to-business space, SEO—search engine optimization—-is an essential aspect of your modern marketing and, in many ways, your business’ potential success. Let’s review what SEO is and how to use it to your business’ advantage.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO, especially in the B2B sense, uses a collection of practices to more effectively connect those interested in your services to your business by making your website more likely to appear in relevant online searches. 

To effectively take advantage of SEO, there are a few important aspects to focus on, as we’ll touch on again later.

First, let’s focus on a more fundamental question:

Why is SEO So Essential in the B2B Space?

Businesses can see three primary benefits from investing in their SEO:

1. Search engine optimization helps you get interested eyes on your business and its website.
2. Search engine optimization helps you build your business’ reputation and implicit trustworthiness.
3. Search engine optimization helps you boost your qualified leads by putting you in front of those seeking what you offer.

In short, search engine optimization is a great method for attracting prospects and drawing them in to learn more about your services.

What Kinds of SEO Do Businesses Have to Focus On?

Generally speaking, SEO is broken down into four different types:

On-Page SEO

Your on-page SEO measures how well your website is built based on modern users' preferences and search engines' priorities, aiming to make every page as visible as possible and worth viewing. This means you are focusing on elements like:

• Meta tags (tags that hint to search engines what a page contains)
• Keyword optimization (how well you are incorporating certain terms into your content, seen below)
• Internal linking (how well you are tying your website’s content together)
• Images (ensuring that images used are formatted and indexed appropriately)
• Schema markup (structured data meant to tell the search engine what the page contains)

Off-Page SEO

Your off-page SEO activities are any efforts you make to signal to the search engines that, yes, this website is reputable and worth presenting to searchers that don’t appear on your website itself. Instead, it borrows somewhat from the juice that other sites have accumulated. As such, your focus would be on things like:

• Link building (having other reputable websites include a linked reference to your website somewhere on their pages)
• Guest posting (Contributing content to other websites while sharing a path back to your own)
• Brand mentions (Doing something that earns your business some form of public acknowledgment online, again linking to your website)
• Social media (sharing valuable content on various social media platforms as a means of enticing viewers back to your website and showing the search engines an active presence)
• Local SEO (maintaining your business’ presence on various other sites to help attract localized searches)

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to how well (or, in other words, how compliant with best practices) your website is built. Search engines have clear preferences regarding this element, as it is arguably the most important—the better your technical SEO, the more relevant all your other efforts will be. Some of your technical focuses should be:

• Site structure (An organized website is more likely to be indexed quickly and accurately)
• URL structure (Similarly, a set pattern for your URLs to follow helps tell users where they are)
• Removing duplicate content (either by eliminating unnecessary pages, using a “noindex” tag, or condensing them in a canonical URL)
• Improving navigation (Breadcrumb-style navigation helps you play nice with both SEO best practices and solidify your site structure)
• Pagespeed (How quickly your website and its pages load can make a surprising difference in your ranking)

Content

Finally, the content you share on your website is key to your SEO strategy. Posting content regularly keeps your website active and updated while signaling to the search engines that you want to focus on a particular topic. When working on your content, you should:

• Strategize your topics (Dedicating content to specific topics helps you target certain search engine queries and keywords)
• Keep it fresh (Focusing on new or unique topics and content formats helps your ranking)
• Understand your audience (Shaping your content to what your audience will be searching for will help make the connection)
• Provide value (Producing accurate, up-to-date, and detailed content that is well-written helps get the attention of the search engines)
• Incorporate keywords (By adding keywords to your headings and throughout your content, you signal the search engines that your content is relevant to that keyword)

SEO Tactics for B2B Organizations to Improve Their Rank

Below, we’ve shared some straightforward and logical ways for a business-to-business company to improve its search engine optimization.

Focus on creating a user-friendly, mobile-optimized website.
Google rewards websites that provide a great user experience. The more usable your website is, the more favorably the search engines will consider it.

Share content that answers questions.
With your audience in mind, identify the questions they’ll be asking and share content that addresses them. An effective way of doing this is to create FAQ pages that apply to an audience residing in a central location and answer questions they are likely to have.

Highlight your community.
By discussing local events and optimizing for your service area, you can boost your local visibility (ergo, your visibility to your target audience). Membership in your local chambers of commerce can allow you to do so and help you generate very valuable and relevant backlinks to your website.

Socialize on social media.
One of the most apparent uses for social media nowadays is the utility it gives businesses trying to connect with their target audience… regardless of whether they serve consumers directly or provide goods and services to other businesses. Decision makers of either kind use these platforms, and that is who you need to be talking to. Social media can help you gently introduce your business and its services to these targets and open the door for them to engage with you more.

We’re Here to Help Managed Service Providers with Their Marketing

From your website to the content you put on it and your business social media, we can help you better market your managed services. Give us a call at 888-546-4384 to learn more!