Read our blog to discover how you can create a B2B SEO marketing strategy to help boost your tech brand's sales.
An SEO marketing strategy is your overarching approach to improve your SEO rankings to drive more organic traffic. When thinking of SEO, you might only think about keywords and backlinks, which are crucial components of a good SEO strategy.
However, a true SEO marketing strategy goes beyond individual tactics; it’s a holistic approach to how you present your brand online.
Your SEO marketing strategy puts you in control of what searches your brand appears in and which content your audience sees at different stages of their customer journey. In addition, a solid SEO strategy helps you control how your value proposition and overall brand compare to your competitors on the search engine page results (SERP).
This blog will take you through the fundamental steps that help create an effective B2B SEO strategy for your brand. Read on to start your planning process.
The first step to building your strategy is to determine what you want to achieve from it. Without clear goals, you have no way of measuring ROI from your SEO activities.
Begin by identifying your marketing goals, then work backwards to set your SEO objectives. For example, do you want to;
Next, it’s time to investigate how your competitors do online to give you an idea of how to do better. Conduct competitive analysis to investigate your competitors’ organic search rankings, blog strategy, online reviews, backlink profiles, and so on. Also, dig into their social media, user experience, target audience segments, differentiators and USPs.
Alternatively, take your analysis a step further with a technical SEO audit and analyse competitors’ site health, technical SEO implementation, mobile friendliness and page speed.
Conducting this research gives you the insights you need to create an SEO marketing strategy that enables you to outrank your competitors on the SERP.
Keyword research is foundational in any legit SEO strategy. One of the best ways to find keywords your target customers search for is to start typing a keyword into Google’s search field. Google will populate a list of suggestions to help you get started.
Use the suggestions to compile a list of about ten words and terms related to your product or service. Then, use an SEO tool (Google's Keyword Tool, Ahrefs, Semrush or GrowthBar) to research your words/terms, identify their search volume, and find variations that make sense for your business.
We recommend creating a list of 10-15 broad search terms (short-tail keywords) relevant to your business that your target audience searches for. These terms will become your content pillars.
Finally, use your keyword tool to find 5-10 long-tail keywords that dig deeper into the original pillar keyword.
If you need more details about keyword research, you can find them here.
Getting one web page to rank for several keywords can be next to impossible. Luckily, there’s a trick you can use to increase your chances of one-page ranking for multiple keywords.
Use the pillar keywords you collected in the last section to create a page or post that provides a high-level overview of that topic. Incorporate the long-tail keywords you found as well.
Your pillar pages can act as a table of contents on your website, giving visitors a description of the main topic and briefing them on subtopics your other posts will elaborate on.
Ensure the number of topics you base pillar pages on align with your business needs, such as the number of products or services you sell. Doing so will make it easier for prospects and customers to find your brand in search engines no matter what keywords they use.
For your B2B SEO strategy to be as effective as possible, you must deliver a good experience for your audience throughout the sales funnel.
Aim to provide value for customers researching broad search terms, asking more specific questions mid-funnel, or comparing services and brands at the bottom of the funnel. Failing to be present in every funnel stage gives your competitors opportunities to fill the void instead.
A great way to ensure your SEO strategy caters to customers at the top, mid-level, and bottom of the purchase funnel is to consider their pain points at each stage. Then, map out keywords for each pain point. Finally, address the fears and concerns that may keep people from taking action.
Content is one of the top SEO ranking factors. According to Hubspot,
SEO-based content marketing helps prove your relevancy to Google and other search engines. In addition, SEO content helps you deliver a superior customer experience right when your audiences seek answers to a specific question.
High-quality, SEO-optimised content has the power to generate tons of strong backlinks (other pages linking to your content) and satisfy your customers simultaneously.
Learn more about how to create a content marketing strategy.
Even the most groundbreaking content won’t generate organic traffic if it’s not optimised for keywords your target audience actually searches for. So, consider on-page and off-page SEO when building your strategy.
On-page SEO is the optimisation that happens on the page, including titles, headings, anchor text, image alt text, plan for featured snippets, search intent, and so on.
However, search engines also value what others think of your brand, so you must also prove that others see you as an authority. This is where off-page SEO comes in.
Off-page SEO (or off-site SEO) refers to actions you take to improve your SEO outside your website. Examples of off-page SEO actions include link building, getting your branded content published on third-party websites, creating content for others, etc.
This part of the SEO marketing strategy planning is a complicated undertaking requiring expertise, technology and processes. If it sounds too complicated or time-consuming, consider outsourcing the task to SEO experts.
SEO isn’t a quick fix but a long-term investment. Because the perfect SEO marketing strategy can take a lot of time and effort, it’s important to measure and track your progress. Doing so helps you understand the success of your process and identify areas for improvement.
There are several ways to measure SEO effectiveness. The easiest way is to monitor your web pages’ organic traffic using your preferred web analytics tool (SEMRush, Ahrefs, Google Analytics, etc.). You can either set up a folder directly in the tool or export the data to Excel or Google Sheets.
In addition to organic traffic, remember to track other data, such as indexed pages, conversions, and SERP rankings. This step allows you to recognise your success and identify areas of opportunity.
Google’s ranking algorithms are smarter than ever, meaning there are no shortcuts or easy ways to cheat the system and rank higher faster. Instead, the best way to build a solid SEO marketing strategy is to focus on the real humans who make up your customer base. Create content that adds value for these people.
In addition, ensure your SEO strategy helps you address your individual business needs, such as increasing customer acquisition or boosting brand recognition. Keep your strategy metrics-based to help you ensure it continues to align with your business goals — even as your company grows and evolves.
Finally, building an SEO strategy is a challenging and time-consuming endeavour. To ensure you get the desired result, consider outsourcing the process to SEO experts like CopyHouse.
Our team of trained SEO and content marketing professionals have the expertise, tools and experience to build an SEO marketing strategy that’ll give you the result you need.
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