Search engine optimisation or more commonly known just as ‘SEO’ is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Optimising your organic search ranking is essential for any successful B2B company.

According to HubSpot, 70-80% of search engine users are only focused on organic results (compared to paid) with Google equating for 94% of all web traffic. But it’s not just enough to rank on the first page, being number one gains the highest website traffic and click through rate from users. If you follow these five B2B SEO strategy tips below you’ll be well on your way to claiming number one spot.

1. Find your keywords

You’ll need some help from SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and SEMRush for this. These handy B2B marketing tools allow you to see what your business and your competitors currently rank for and offer suggestions for related keywords in a manageable spreadsheet format. It’s good practice to:

  • Go for keywords where the search volume is relative to the current online presence of your company. E.g. If you’re someone like Apple you can go after any keyword you like! But if you’re a small engineering firm currently ranking for only a handful of keywords we’d recommend targeting those with a volume between 50 – 300.
  • Select broad keywords your competitors are currently ranking for because (as long as the word isn’t specific to the company name) there’s no reason you can’t be on page one too!

2. Add keywords to your website URLs

After your keyword research is complete it’s time to implement these into your current website, it’s optimal to choose one keyword per page to include in the URL. The URL is important as it adds authority to the overall domain and is also a ranking factor. One target keyword should be chosen to accompany each webpage and be included in the URL. Now you don’t have to be a web developer to update this, depending on your web hosting platform (eg WixWordPress etc) there will be an easy to use menu with an overview of all the pages and options to edit the URLs accordingly.

3. Write helpful and engaging content

The most important aspect of a successful SEO strategy is constructing quality content that solves the searcher’s query. Google’s search algorithms are surprisingly accurate in sifting through the countless amount of posts and displaying only the most informative and helpful pages at the top. A good technique is to think of how to optimise your web pages and content to provide the most value to the viewer whilst also including your target keywords, Moz has a great article here to assist you. However, be careful not to ‘overstuff’ your keywords into your web pages as Google may penalise you for this!

4. Include multiple products/services pages

Splitting up your existing services/product page into individual pages is a great way to boost your website’s organic ranking. This is due to the opportunity to rank for more keywords and by making these pages helpful and descriptive it will improve the overall user experience. For example, if you’re a broker who specialises in several forms of lending; such as equipment, property, business etc. It is best practice to create an individual page per service with an optimised keyword on each page rather than grouping them together on one page. This increases your business’s chance of ranking whilst providing more information and value to your customers.

5. Link building

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own, this works for SEO in a similar way to word of mouth and is one of the most important factors in Google’s search algorithm. However, you must obtain quality, relevant backlinks in order to improve your SEO. Some useful ways to obtain backlinks include:

  • Writing guest blog articles. This helps you expand your content to a new audience whilst establishing links back to your company’s website through the content.
  • Utilise infographics to build links. By creating high-quality content with value to other businesses/websites this can lead to the promotion of your infographic across the web and create many important links.
  • Analyse competitors backlinks for opportunities to capitalise on. By finding the sites and pages driving the most traffic to your competitors’ websites you can create guidelines in order to emulate their success. SEMRush offers a great competitor backlink analysis tool for this process.

Another important link building technique for your company is to link internally. This assists Google to understand your website structure and establish a hierarchy for the most important pages on your site.

Final Thoughts

While SEO may seem intimidating and you may find yourself confused about where to start (especially in the B2B market), if you follow these five easy steps above you will be well on your way to optimising your website and creating a solid foundation on which to continue your efforts.

However, SEO isn’t a one-time solution, remember to continually review and refine your efforts to make sure your SEO practices are still relevant as your business and Google’s algorithm grows.

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