How to Create an SEO B2B Strategy to Attract Organic Leads

Where should you begin to create an SEO strategy for B2B? First of all, it is important to understand what the real difference between the development of plan of action for B2B (Business-to-Business) is as opposed to one for B2C (Business-to-Consumer).

Once the differences between these two worlds have been consolidated, we can lay the grounds for the current strategy. A little spoiler: limiting yourself finding the keywords does not mean having a strategy.

A concrete plan of action includes the comprehension of the target and its goals, the study of the purchase process and the constant monitoring of the results.

Differences Between an SEO Strategy for B2B and one for B2C

You might think that the optimization for the search engines (SEO) is one and only. Then why talk about SEO for B2B?

The truth is that a distinction should be made between B2B and B2C because they are in fact two different worlds.

In B2C the customer journey involves, in most cases, only the final customer. On the other hand, in B2B decisions are taken by different stakeholders and thus engage the company on different levels.

As a consequence, the sale cycle in B2C is more linear and shorter. Further, purchases display a strong emotional component, even though in the end they are justified by “logical” motivations.

In B2B, however, the purchases are analyzed on the basis of different sources and take into account the opinion of multiple departments, the budget and goals.

In both cases, to finalise a sale it is necessary to obtain the clients’ attention and trust, but in the case of companies, it is not enough to win over a single person. In order to outline a correct SEO strategy in the B2B sphere, one should have clarity on the different phases of the funnel and create content that is suitable for each one of these phases. At the same time, it is important to remember that it is not a single individual buyer, but more levels of a company that are involved.

In Visilay, to lay the grounds for an effective SEO strategy, we take into consideration the decision-making process of the target, so to identify the right content for the given framework.

At this stage, for each phase, we design different types of content, whilst studying the competitor’s products and keeping in mind the different phases of the funnel. You can see an example of how we identify various semantic clusters and content types depending on the phase.

Let’s dive in to acquire a better understanding of what are the fundamental steps to create an SEO strategy for B2B.

How to Develop an SEO Strategy for B2B

“Content is King”, how many times did you happen to hear this sentence? But is SEO actually strictly content?

The answer, unfortunately, is no. Creating the most complete and useful resource in the world is not enough if everything else is lacking. And for everything else I mean a well-structured content plan addressed to the correct target, an impeccable website from a technical point of view and some excellent off-site signals.

Therefore, in order to comprehend how to create an effective SEO strategy, we have to take a step back and understand the different aspects to be faced.

What does it mean to do SEO: who are we optimizing for?

When we think of SEO, our mind goes to all the operations to carry out in order to make our sites more noticeable for the search engines.

Although it may seem contradictory, what we should do is create content which is valued by people. To understand whether the content is of good quality, it may be helpful to answer the questions suggested by Google in order to carry out a self-analysis as to the usefulness of the resources.

We should not forget that SEO can be deconstructed into multiple elements:

• Technical Optimisation
• Content
• Authority

On one hand, we have the technical component which focuses on ensuring that the contests are displayed in the correct manner and are “readable” to the search engines. Further, we should make sure that website is fast and accessible from all devices (desktop, mobile and tablet).

The actual optimisation comprises all the measures which allow the search engines bots to: read the contents, “understand” what it is they are dealing with, and classify all of it in their index.

This category includes the audit SEOs which allow us to gather whether there are any issues with scanning or indexing, but also to optimise the speed of the website and the configuration of monitoring tools such as the Search Console by Google.

At the beginning of 2020, Google has also introduced the Core Web Vitals, a series of of metrics which measure the user experience at the page loading.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): it measures the time necessary to load the page. In fact, it identifies the moment in which it is probable that all the main contents have been loaded.

FID (First Input Delay): it identifies how long it takes for the page to become interactive. This metric has been substituted by the INP (Interaction to Next Paint).

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): it allows to understand whether the page is visually stable by measuring the movement of the elements during the loading phase.

The introduction of these metrics is a further demonstration of how important it is to create an adequate experience for the people who visit our website.

Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool which enables to analyse the Core Web Vitals on the desktop and mobile versions of our website.

Further, the CrUX dashboard allows to generate real time overviews of the CWVs which can be recorded every month to evaluate the changes in time.

Understanding the Audience and the Search Intent

Besides the technical component, there is the actual content which real people, in other words our target, will be reading.

With the SEO we are, as a matter of fact, intercepting our target whilst they are in search for answers. The audience can be in different phases, for example:

• topic exploration (these are all informational searches);
• brand search, a brand search is carried out when the name of the brand is already known but you want to find the correct website (these are called navigational);
• purchase decision (commercial or transnational searches).

In reality, it is easier to differentiate between the explorative and the evaluative phases, in fact the purchase funnel today cannot be seen as a linear process but one that displays multiple touchpoints. This means that the purchase funnel is not a linear and predictable path but rather an intricate journey which is entered into following an initial trigger (impulse or idea which leads to developing an interest towards a topic) and is then exited through a purchase decision.

This process is defined as the messy middle and is represented in the cycle below:

It is also important to understand that this cycle is not self-conclusive; in fact, a single purchase may require multiple repetitions of the explorative and evaluative phase to then reach a final decision.

To move correctly besides understanding how the purchase processes are changing nowadays, we all should be able to identify the who and what.

Who: who is our target? In the specific case of a company, to which corporate function are we referring to?

What: what does it need?

Each content of the blog and each page of the product that we will create will have different answers to these questions.

To understand the target, there are some practical methods, such as:

• conducting market research;
• outlining the profiles of the buyer person.

It is important to understand what the needs of our target are, the goals they are aiming at, but also what is their language.

In the identification of the buyer person, we can help ourselves with the use of Artificial Intelligence. For instance, using tools such as Delve.ai which provides a generator of buyer persons based on data processed by AI. Alternatively, specific prompts such as ChatGPT and other LLMs can be used to create such profiles.

In the B2B sphere, the target is even harder to understand than in B2C. In this case, referring to a marketing agency specialised in B2B can really make the difference. For example, in Visilay in order to identify the correct target we analyse the buyer persons in order to create an advanced segmentation of the audience that takes into account the various decision-makers.

Creating Suitable Content to Address the Searches

Having identified the audience to address, we should dive deeper into the comprehension of the intent of the search.

Tools of key word search such as SEMRush or Ahrefs can help us evaluate the volume of the searches; however, for each content, focusing strictly on the keyword is not enough, it is also important to analyse the intent.

For an in-depth analysis of the intent, it can be useful to classify the keywords by search intent and understand how they align with the various phases of the funnel.

Having clarified the what and thus the topics to be discussed, we should move to the how.

In order to address a search intent, we have to create the right content. To do that, we begin from analysing the current SREP so to create content which is better than the previous one, or one that addresses the topic from a different perspective.

In a B2B strategy, next to blog articles, you can also develop case studies, reports and whitepapers.

Beyond the Content: Technical Factors and SEO or Off Page

So far, we have talked about the understanding of the audience and the intent of the searches. These steps are fundamental in order to understand how to structure valuable content for our audience.

Besides creating the content, however, we also have to “pack it” in the right manner so as to make it user-friendly for the readers and also well-structured for the search engines.

We will thus need to consider the technical factors which we mentioned above.

Beside the content (see on page) and the technical factors (technical seo), we also have to think of everything that happens outside our website and, in some cases, outside our control.

Here the SEO off page controls come into the picture, in other words all the signals that the search engines take into account and are not related to our website, for instance:

• backlinks that point to our website;
• content shares through social media or newsletters;
• PR activity and brand mentioning.

In order to monitor some of these factors such as the backlinks and the shares on social media, tools such as the backlink checker on Ahrefs come into help. This is a tool which is available both for free in a limited version and also as integrated in the site explorer of the Ahfres suite.

The above-mentioned strategies are some of the SEO off page signals which can contribute to improving the authority of the website in the eyes of the search engines.

Analysing the Right Metrics

Although the metrics analysis is the last step, even before defining an SEO strategy, we should ask ourselves what are the results that we are expecting to get.

The goal of improving the positioning of our website on the search engines cannot be strictly based on the organic traffic. In fact, increasing the generic organic traffic rather than the target one is not simply useless, but it also drifts us farther from our goal.

What we should aim at is intercepting the searches of our ideal target and have a greater strategy which will be able to guide this specific audience towards a transformation into leads and from leads into a client.

In Visilay, when we focus on the organic growth of the clients, we do not stop at the mere increase of traffic, but thanks to a work of analysis, we intercept the ideal target. Here are two examples of organic traffic increase:

With SemRush we can monitor the increase of traffic and brand traffic. The Sistrix toolbox give us a complete overview on the traffic, divided into the subfolders and subdomains of the website.

Obviously, the process cannot be concluded with a single search and a single content. It is for this reason that we should not think of SEO as a distinct and separate strategy from the entire marketing plan viewed as a whole.

The goal definition phase is one of the most important ones. It is for that reason that in Visilay our SEO Specialists work in close contact with the marketing strategists so as to have a broader view and set up definite business goals.

In this context, in fact, the SEO should be viewed as part of a multi-channel strategy which helps us intercept the audience, but one that cannot bring results without a well-structured sale funnel, lead nurturing systems that keep you in contact with the clients or ads retargeting strategies.

Developing a B2B SEO Strategy: Recap

Let’s recap the essential steps to correctly develop an SEO strategy in the sphere of B2B.

• Target study: it is necessary to clarify the audience we refer to. In the case of companies, we should keep in mind the decision makers.
• Understanding of the search intent: it is important to understand what the audience is looking for, the level of awareness and the messy middle phase that they are in.
• Content creation: the contents should be structured in a way that answers the search intent, taking into account the target and all the elements of analysis mentioned so far.
• Optimisation of technical factors and off page SEO signals analysis: everything that is not “content”, should not be left to chance. For the already existing websites a technical analysis of the website can be conducted to identify the issues. Additionally, all the off site factors should be monitored.
• Results analysis: it’s time to draw conclusions. In this phase, it is important to identify the goals of an SEO strategy correctly and thus the metrics to focus on.

This is exactly the approach that we adopt when we develop a B2B SEO strategy. Instead of aiming at a traffic increase just for the sake of it, we begin from the definition of a wider lead generation strategy which could generate qualified leads.

For this reason, our B2B SEO services include an audit of the initial situation, the creation of a plan of action to intercept and convert the leads and the measurement of the conversion rate.