B2B SEO: What is it, and why is it important for B2B marketing?

Explore what B2B SEO is, why B2B service providers should consider including SEO in their marketing mix and how to create a winning B2B SEO strategy, hint: it takes a lot of research and analysis before the final step of creation.

B2B (business to business) SEO is a practice of optimising B2B websites to increase organic search engine traffic, improve keyword rankings and simultaneously expand the keyword profiles of these websites.

But is that it? The short answer is ‘no’, B2B SEO usually has one more goal (broadly speaking) – to generate leads and, consequently, sales and revenue.

However, you might ask – is it really that important to include SEO in your B2B marketing mix? It is if you want to beat your competition, be where your customers are searching and get great ROIs.

Let’s look at some numbers and statistics around B2B SEO to understand why you should consider incorporating SEO into your marketing mix.

1. According to Sagefrog’s 2023 report, 50% of B2B marketers incorporated SEO into their marketing mix. What does this mean for your business? Half of your competitors likely have SEO strategies in place to increase their organic search visibility and rankings thus, to level out the playing field, you should consider doing some SEO as well.
2. Enterprise Today research suggests that 95% of all traffic received by B2B businesses is via search engine results pages (SERPs), while 66% of B2B buyers use search when starting their research. Well, what does this mean for your business? As a B2B business, you want to be where your future customers are, and organic search is that place. But this is not all…
3. SEO tends to be more cost-effective in the long run, meaning better ROIs. Ahrefs, a trusted SEO site, compared how much they would have to spend via PPC to get the same traffic they are getting via an organic search for one of their blog posts and found that for 419,000 monthly visits, they would have to pay $548,000 per month, whilst SEO was an internal investment. What does this mean for your business? While SEO might have higher initial investment for services such as initial audits and reporting set-up (these are the essential steps in a good B2B SEO strategy), the ongoing retainer fees tend to be lower because there is no need to pay for clicks to Google or another platform, and you are only paying for the time SEO specialist spends providing recommendations which are designed to help your website perform better.

Now we know why it’s important to include SEO in your B2B marketing strategy; the next step is to understand how to do it well.

In this section, we will focus on three fundamental components of any good B2B SEO strategy:

1. Understanding your sales funnel
2. Research
3. Creation of the B2B SEO strategy based on your findings and data

Aligning B2B SEO efforts with your sales funnel

Your business growth or sales teams are the best people to talk to about the sales funnel. They are the ones talking to customers, and they have a deep understanding of what customers’ pain points are and know why the customers choose your B2B service vs the competitor or vice versa. Make a note of this information – it will come in handy when doing keyword research.

Another valuable insight your sales team can provide is the language your customers speak and the key terms they use. This is very important as a lot of B2B terms have very low monthly search volume (MSV) or none in the keyword research tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs and might be overlooked when doing the keyword research for optimisations, but that doesn’t mean these terms are not valuable – you want the content on your website to speak the language your customers are speaking. This is not to say that you won’t need to do keyword research at all, but rather that the keyword research conducted via one of the popular SEO tools might be quite small.

So now we know your customer pain points, why customers choose your B2B service as compared to the competition or not, and how the customers speak, the next step is to look at the data.

Conducting B2B keyword research and keyword mapping to the sales funnel

It wouldn’t be an article on SEO without a mention of keyword research. As noted previously, B2B keyword research can yield quite small results, which is absolutely fine. The B2B industry tends to have unique terms, abbreviations and expressions that may not be widely adopted by everyone using search engines, resulting in these terms having none or very low MSVs. However, it is still important to run the key terms provided by the sales team via SEO tools to check if they have search volume and their search intent. Some of the lower MSV keywords won’t have a search intent attached to them by the tool, but you can use a helpful cheat sheet by SEMRush below to help you decide:

Also, don’t forget to check the semantically related terms, as they might have higher MSVs, but be mindful that the underlying search intent and meaning of the keyword remain unchanged.

While doing keyword research, it is important to remember to categorise the keywords as you are doing this task, preferably by service if your business has multiple service lines and sales funnel stages and/or search intent. This will help you to determine which keywords are attributed to which sales funnel stage and, later, what pages your website has or doesn’t have to meet that user search intent.

Research and analyse your website data

The best place to start this is your website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console (GSC).

GA4 can provide some valuable insights when it comes to user journeys, conversion types and correlating landing pages, and more.

To explore how your users travel through your website from the landing page – a page on which the user lands from the search engine result pages (SERPs) – to the conversion page – a page on which the user performs an action that we track as a conversion event in GA4, i.e. form submission, calling the service centre, use the Path Exploration function. The Path Exploration functionality allows the mapping of the user journeys from any page to the conversion page. A good place to start would be to identify a high-traffic page. For this, we would use GSC to find a page that has a high number of clicks. Usually, it’s a homepage, but it could be any other page, and from there, map how your users travel through your website. Note any patterns, such as how users are navigating your website and are where any pages they keep coming back to or dropping off from.

The next helpful metric to look at is the conversion count – emphasis on only valuable conversions such as form submissions or phone calls – per landing page. This metric will help you identify which landing pages usually lead users to convert, meaning that they meet user search intent well.

Also, use GSC to understand what pages rank for which keywords and then compare this data with the landing page data in GA4. This will help you understand for which keywords these pages meet or do not meet user search intent.

Researching competitors and their SEO tactics

After the ‘internal’ research and analysis, the next step is to move to the competitors. Competitor research should be conducted before any good B2B SEO strategy is drawn. Looking at what competitors are doing, what keywords they are ranking for with what pages, how their content is structured and where your business is outperforming or underperforming on the SERPs will help you:

1. Get ideas on what could be improved on your site
2. Understand market saturation
3. Identify potential quick wins and long-term goals
4. Get an idea of what is achievable

Keep note of your findings, preferably in an Excel or Google Sheets, to make it easy to refer back to.

Tips for creating a good B2B SEO strategy

Now, there should be a ton of data collected at this stage, with patterns noted, competitor tactics explored and more. But how do we make it into an actionable strategy?

1. Transform your findings into actions, i.e. you found that competitors are outperforming your business for x3 high MSV queries and also that there is a page which could be optimised for these keywords, but it would require quite a bit of work, such as a full content brief and copywriter; the action would be – re-vamp an existing page to better target x3 high MSV keywords
2. Assign each action an effort and impact level from low to high, for the example provided previously, the impact level would be high, and the effort level would also be high. This should create an effort-impact matrix that will help to prioritise which actions should be taken first and which ones later.
3. Using this matrix, create a strategic roadmap which outlines when each of the actions will be taken and over what period.
4. Set goals for what each action should achieve and create a tracking system to monitor the performance.

At this point, you should have an actionable B2B SEO strategy with a clear plan, goals and timeline of when each action should take place. However, two things are worth remembering:

1. SEO takes time, and results are not immediate, so give 2-3 months before starting to report on the impact of optimisations. In the meantime, monitor the performance and propose additional changes if performance is not taking the desired trajectory or investigate why this might be happening – was there an algorithm update, or did something else have an impact on performance, is it a sitewide issue or just that one page is affected?
2. SEO is not a leaner process, and your B2B SEO strategy should be agile to accommodate changes in the business and industry-wide.