SEO for B2B Marketers: Best practices from three SEO experts

We know that organic website traffic is the elixir of a B2B marketing strategy. At the heart of making it happen is a solid understanding and implementation of SEO (search engine optimisation) best practices.

Make sure you're implementing these following tips from three experts in the field to keep your organic traffic levels rising month-on-month.

The essentials

From Google

Your website needs to be found online by search engines and your potential customers too. Aside from making sure your web's sitemap has been submitted to Google, and is being frequently crawled by bots, you need to ensure your site is as optimised as possible. This includes making sure each web page includes:

• A focus keyword or phrase that explains the page contents, which can they be used to:
• Write an optimised meta title, meta description and heading, as well as including it in the web page body
• Include it in the URL of the web page and add it to the alt text of the images on the page too
• Link internally to the page where possible, from other pages and articles, etc

As Google say themselves, "Search engine optimisation is often about making small modifications to parts of your website... they could have a noticeable impact on your site's user experience and your performance in organic search results."

The research

From Moz

To take your SEO to the next level, research is required to understand what your buyer personas are searching for, who are they listening to, and how you can get them to your website. SEO experts Moz give their opinions on all three:

1. Keyword research: "You need to know the words and phrases that searchers are actually using to solve problems or to get answers to the problem that they are having. Those should be problems that your organisation is actually working to solve, that your content will help them to solve. What you want here is a primary keyword and hopefully a set of related secondary keywords that share the searcher's intent."
2. Influencer research: "When you have a specific list of people and publications who are going to help you amplify it, you've got to earn solid links, mentions and word of mouth across the web and across social media so that your content can be seen by Google's crawlers and by people as highly relevant and high quality."
3. Website research: Your website needs to "look great from a visual, UI perspective and look great from a user experience perspective, letting someone go all the way through and accomplish their task in an easy, fulfilling way on every device, at every speed, and make it secure too. [Website] Security is critically important."

The content

by HubSpot

Writing blog articles on your website is a crucial part of your digital marketing and SEO strategy. Blogs that cover your area of expertise not only position you as a 'thought-leader' in the mind of your future customers, they also increase your organic traffic and presence on search engines - providing they're done correctly. To blog effectively, you need to think about topic clusters, something HubSpot have explained in the following video:

HubSpot, one of the world's leading sales and marketing platforms, has revealed that B2B companies that blog 16+ times per month, get 3x more website traffic and 4.5x more online leads. A lot of content - but a great reward.

The next steps

with Yellowstep

SEO for B2B firms is a constantly evolving topic. We have created a free Digital Marketing Diagnostic online tool that will assess your marketing performance. This includes looking at your SEO strategy. Take the Diagnostic today to see what improvements you can make to your strategy.

Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash