Where do you start when building a B2B SEO strategy? First you need to understand the real difference between planning for B2B and planning for B2C.
Once the differences between these two worlds are clear, we can lay the foundations for the strategy itself. A small spoiler: finding keywords through keyword research is not a strategy on its own.
A concrete plan includes understanding the target audience and its goals, studying the buying process and monitoring results continuously.
Differences between B2B and B2C SEO strategies
You might think there is only one kind of search engine optimisation (SEO). So why talk about B2B SEO?
The truth is that the distinction matters, because B2B and B2C are two separate worlds.
In B2C, the customer journey usually involves only the end customer. In B2B, by contrast, decisions are made by several stakeholders and involve the company at more than one level.
As a result, the B2C sales cycle is shorter and more linear. Purchases also have a strong emotional component, even if they are later justified with "logical" reasons.
In B2B, buying decisions are examined from several angles and take into account the views of several departments, the budget and the objectives.
In both cases, to close a sale you need to win the customer's attention and trust, but with companies it is not enough to win over a single person. To outline the right SEO strategy for B2B you need a clear view of the funnel stages and content suited to each of them. At the same time, remember that there is no single buyer persona: several roles within the company are involved.
At Visilay, to lay the foundations of an effective SEO strategy we look at the target's decision-making path, so we can match the right content to each context.
We then plan different types of content for each stage, studying the competition and keeping the funnel stages in mind. Below is an example of how different semantic clusters and content types can be mapped to each stage.
Let's look in detail at the essential steps for building a B2B SEO strategy.
How to develop a B2B SEO strategy
"Content is King": how many times have you heard that? But is SEO really only about content?
Unfortunately, no. Creating the most complete and useful resource in the world is not enough if everything else is missing. By everything else I mean a well-structured content plan aimed at the right audience, a technically flawless site and strong off-site signals.
So, to understand how to build an effective SEO strategy, we first need to take a step back and look at the different areas it covers.
What SEO means: who are we optimising for?
When we think about SEO, we think of all the work needed to make our pages appeal to search engines.
In reality, counter-intuitive as it may sound, what we should be doing is creating content that is valuable to people. To judge whether a piece of content is good, it helps to answer the questions suggested by Google for self-assessing how useful your resources are.
Remember that SEO can be broken down into several elements:
- Technical optimisation
- Content
- Authority
On one side there is the technical element, which makes sure content is presented in the right way and is "readable" by search engines. You also need to make sure the site is fast and accessible across devices (desktop, mobile and tablet).
Optimisation proper covers all the measures that allow search engine bots to read the content, "understand" what it is about and file it in their index.
This category includes SEO audits, which show whether there are crawling or indexing problems, as well as site speed optimisation and setting up monitoring tools such as Google Search Console.
In early 2020 Google also introduced Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics that measure the user's experience as pages load.
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): measures how long the page takes to load. It marks the point at which the main content has probably loaded.
FID (First Input Delay): shows how long it takes before the page becomes interactive. This metric has been replaced by INP (Interaction to Next Paint).
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): shows whether the page is visually stable by measuring how much elements move while the page loads.
These metrics are further evidence of how much the experience of people visiting our site matters.
The PageSpeed Insights tool lets us analyse Core Web Vitals for the desktop and mobile versions of our website.
With the CrUX dashboard you can also generate real-time overviews of Core Web Vitals and record them month by month to track changes over time.
Understanding the audience and search intent
Alongside the technical side there is the content itself, what real people, in other words our target audience, will read.
With SEO we are reaching our audience while they are looking for answers. They may be at different stages, for example:
- exploring a topic (this covers all informational searches);
- looking for a brand: branded searches happen when people already know a company's name but want to find the right website (these are called navigational searches);
- making a purchase decision (commercial or transactional searches).
In practice we simplify this into exploration and evaluation stages, because the buying funnel today cannot be seen as a linear process: it has many touchpoints. The purchase path is not a predictable straight line but a complicated journey that begins with a trigger (an impulse or idea that sparks interest in a topic) and ends with a purchase decision.
This process is known as the messy middle and is represented by this loop:
This loop is not a one-off either: a single purchase may take several rounds of exploration and evaluation before a final decision is reached.
To act on this, as well as understanding how buying processes are changing, we also need to identify the who and the what.
Who: who is our audience? For a company in particular: which job role are we addressing?
What: what do they need?
Every blog post and product page we create will answer these questions differently.
There are practical ways to understand the audience, such as:
- market research,
- buyer persona profiles.
You need to understand your audience's needs, the goals they want to reach and also the language they use.
Artificial intelligence can help with defining buyer personas, for example with tools such as Delve.ai, which offers a buyer persona generator based on AI-processed data. Alternatively, you can use targeted prompts in ChatGPT or other LLMs to build the profiles.
In business-to-business, the audience is even harder to understand than in B2C. Here a marketing agency that specialises in B2B can make a real difference. At Visilay, for instance, we analyse buyer personas to carry out advanced segmentation of the audience that takes the different decision-makers into account.
Creating the right content to answer searches
Once we have identified the audience, we need to dig deeper into search intent.
Keyword research tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs help us assess search volumes, but for each piece of content we need to go beyond keywords and analyse intent.
For an in-depth analysis, it helps to classify keywords by search intent and see how they line up with the funnel stages.
Once the what is settled and the topics are defined, we move on to the how.
To answer a search intent we need the right content. We start by analysing the current SERP, then create something better than what already exists or that approaches the topic from a new angle.
In a B2B strategy, alongside blog posts you can also produce case studies, reports and white papers.
Beyond content: technical and off-page SEO
So far we have covered understanding the audience and search intent. These steps are essential for working out how to structure content that is valuable to our audience.
Besides creating the content, we also need to "package" it properly so that it is easy for readers to use and well structured for search engines.
That means considering the technical factors mentioned earlier.
Beyond content (on-page SEO) and technical factors (technical SEO), we also have to consider everything that happens outside our site and, in some cases, outside our control.
This is where off-page SEO comes in: all the signals search engines take into account that are not tied to our site, for example:
- backlinks pointing to our site;
- content shared through social media or newsletters;
- digital PR and brand mentions.
To monitor some of these factors, such as backlinks and social shares, tools like Ahrefs' backlink checker help. It is available as a limited free version and built into the Site Explorer of the Ahrefs suite.
These are a few examples of off-page SEO signals that can help improve a site's authority in the eyes of search engines.
Analysing the right metrics
Although analysing metrics is the last step, before defining an SEO strategy we should ask ourselves what results we expect.
The aim of improving our rankings cannot be organic traffic alone. Growing generic, off-target organic traffic is pointless and even takes us further from our real goal.
What we should aim for is to capture the searches of our ideal audience and have a broader strategy that then guides this specific audience to become leads, and leads to become customers.
At Visilay, when we work on a client's organic growth, we don't stop at more traffic: through analysis we go after the ideal audience. Here are two examples of organic traffic growth.
With Semrush we can track growth in overall traffic and in branded traffic. The Sistrix Toolbox gives a full overview of traffic, broken down by the site's subfolders and subdomains.
The process obviously cannot end with a single search and a single piece of content. That is why SEO should never be treated as a strategy separate from the overall marketing plan.
Setting objectives is one of the most important stages. At Visilay our SEO specialists work closely with marketing strategists, so we get a wider view and can agree clear business objectives together.
In this context SEO has to be seen as part of a multichannel strategy that helps us reach the audience, but cannot deliver results without a well-structured sales funnel, lead nurturing to stay in touch with prospects, or retargeting for ads. When the traffic is there but the enquiries are not, isolate the breaking point before you change anything.
Developing a B2B SEO strategy: recap
Here are the essential steps for developing a B2B SEO strategy properly.
- Audience research: be clear about who you are addressing. With companies, take the decision-makers into account.
- Understanding search intent: work out what the audience is looking for, how aware they are and which stage of the messy middle they are in.
- Creating content: content must be structured to answer the search intent and reflect the audience and all the analysis covered so far.
- Optimising technical factors and analysing off-page SEO signals: nothing that isn't "content" should be left to chance. For existing sites, a technical audit can identify problems. You also need to monitor all off-site factors.
- Analysing results: time to take stock. At this stage you need to define the goals of the SEO strategy correctly and, from them, the metrics to focus on.
This is the approach we take when developing a B2B SEO strategy. Rather than chasing traffic for its own sake, we start from a broader lead generation strategy designed to produce qualified leads.
That is why our B2B SEO services include an audit of the starting point, an action plan to attract and convert leads, and measurement of conversion rates.
Further reading: how marketing channels change from one sector to another.
