September 24, 2024 • 8 min read

B2B Search Engine Optimization – How it Can Help Your Business Grow

In the intensely competitive B2B marketing arena, you need every edge to succeed. Getting your brand to the top of search engine results pages is critical, both for ensuring your brand is the first that new prospects encounter and for maximizing visibility to your entire target audience. A strong B2B SEO strategy can help you achieve that goal, but building and executing a strategy from scratch can be daunting.

Over our years in the B2B marketing sector, we’ve learned quite a few things, including what works well and what doesn’t. Read on for a few impactful steps you can take to elevate your B2B search engine optimization.

Build a complete buyer persona for better B2B SEO

B2B search engine optimization is similar to B2C SEO in a few major respects. For instance, you need to build a buyer persona: an avatar of the average person most likely to convert or buy from your brand. But in B2B marketing, which usually involves a lower typical number of clients, ensuring that the persona is comprehensive and deeply accurate is vital.

In other words, you need to know more than just what your B2B customers want from a product or other solution. You need to know:

Their specific pain points for their daily workflows/responsibilities
Their budget constraints
Their time preferences (long-term vs. short-term partnership)
The specific features or inclusions they want with a product or service

That information will help you effectively optimize your keywords, your content, and even your services or offerings (in the long run, at least). And in any B2B sector, customers may have varying priorities.

Imagine you’re marketing to a few different organizations in your niche. Of course, you aren’t marketing to companies but rather to specific individuals within those organizations. Those target prospects could be:

Chief executives
Middle managers
Department heads (such as HR managers, project managers, etc.)
Other decision-makers for the company

Each possible buyer will have different goals and an overall different persona. Make sure you know who exactly you’re marketing to as you improve your SEO and other marketing efforts.

In B2B SEO, keyword intent is everything

SEO success in the B2B arena is often contingent on performing thorough and highly precise keyword research. After all, B2B keywords are frequently more specific than their B2C counterparts and have much lower search volumes, which is a difference that yields both advantages and challenges as you pursue stronger SEO.

For instance, a B2C company might target a broad keyword such as “home loans.” That keyword is directly related to the kinds of financial products they offer to consumers – targeting it could yield benefits in brand awareness, traffic generation, and conversion, though the brand will face a tough fight with many other B2C companies offering the same products.

On the other hand, a B2B company in the same general sector (in this example, finance) may target a much more specific keyword, such as, “home loans for investment property.” That company, which provides real estate loans for real estate investment firms, may need to connect with a lower number of prospects to drive traffic or generate interest.

However, just because some B2B keywords are usually very specific doesn’t mean they aren’t highly competitive.

In fact, the reverse is often true. If you and a handful of other companies in the same niche are competing over the same few dozen targeted keywords, finding opportunities in keyword strategy is critical. In our experience, you can elevate your B2B keyword optimization by:

Finding keywords your competitors aren’t using and weaving them creatively into your copy optimizations

Focusing on keywords that directly match your target customer’s search intent and needs, as we’ll explore below

Different stages, different keywords

You can potentially give your SEO strategy a boost by targeting keywords based on where a prospect is in their buyer’s journey. For instance, informational keywords are those used by people trying to learn something, while transactional keywords are used by searchers who already have the intent to buy. Here are a couple of examples of each:

Informational – “what is…” “how to …”
Transactional – “buy product online…” “affordable product for business” “product sale for business”

Essentially, tailoring your keyword strategy to where a prospect is in their journey maximizes the likelihood of those keywords resonating with them. For the best results, we recommend using a blend of keywords for different buyer journey stages across your web presence.

Keep an eye on the SEO competition

The battle to capture every lead in a B2B niche can be fierce, so it should come as no surprise that ongoing competitor analysis is crucial. Your market is narrow, so it’s smart to regularly research competing companies to discover keyword opportunities – and to find new ways to create B2B content and improve your overall visibility.

Take a look at competing websites every so often and take note of:

What they do well – Do they have an amazing site function or feature? Are keywords Artfully woven into page copy? Is there an image strategy you think is excellent that you can emulate?
What they do poorly – Is the website not optimized for mobile users? Or perhaps a competitor isn’t targeting keywords you know have the potential to yield results?

Your research can inform your long-term SEO strategy and enable you to keep pace with competitors in your market. For example, if a close competitor for your B2B audience has missed a recent keyword shift, jump on the opportunity and use that keyword in your content to take advantage of the gap!

Gear site pages to niche audiences

Specificity is a powerful tool in B2B marketing. So, to give your B2B company a visibility boost, you might tailor distinct pages to target separate audience niches.

For instance, you can create blogs or service pages that are specifically written, formatted, and otherwise targeted to certain groups. Need some examples?

You build local landing pages for specific geographic audiences or markets. This strategy not only boosts SEO with relevant, local keywords but can also effectively communicate to local audiences looking for brands that feel genuine and authentic.
You write a blog post for prospects who are already aware of your brand but who need a little extra information about the value or authority you bring to the table before they’ll convert.
You create separate product or service pages for every single one of your offerings.

This SEO strategy has the potential to result in massive visibility improvements, provided that each page you create is properly optimized with keywords, layout, formatting, and so on.

Not only will creating and optimizing distinct pages for specific groups help you catch new prospects, but it will also raise your ranking in the eyes of Google’s all-important algorithm. Each page will make the others more likely to appear to searchers, leading to a compounding effect that can skyrocket your brand’s overall visibility.

Don’t forget technical SEO for your B2B site

Technical SEO is a core part of any basic SEO strategy. But in our experience, it might even be more important for B2B marketing than it is for B2C companies. Remember, your site’s technical SEO – its site functionality, navigability, and usability – impacts whether its pages will appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Furthermore, in B2B niches, where authority and trust matter greatly, issues with technical SEO can lead to lower prospect trust in addition to reduced Google favorability. Technical SEO should be integrated into the B2B website development process from the ground up, ensuring that every new feature or design decision supports both search visibility and user experience.

It’s also wise to practice ongoing technical SEO checks and rechecks, examining your site’s SEO for:

Broken links that lead to nowhere
Page errors in terms of informational accuracy and text quality (i.e., typos)
Outdated keyword SEO – recall that new opportunities and gaps can appear frequently, so we recommend updating your keyword SEO often
Mobile optimization if your target audience is likely to browse your site on a mobile device

Your B2B clients are likely to be pickier than the average B2C customer, and poor technical SEO can lead to a similarly poor user experience. That’s as good a reason as any to pass over your brand. Don’t forget this key element of B2B SEO to prevent this from affecting your company.

Boost your B2B SEO strategy

Effective B2B SEO will make your brand more visible than ever. Infinity’s strategists, SEO experts, and analysts have the know-how and the industry insights to catapult your company to the top of Google – and it all starts with a phone call. Get in touch today to discover what our integrated agency can bring to your B2B business.