How to create a winning B2B SEO campaign

As a B2B SEO and marketing agency, we’ve strategically optimized many websites to not only rank well on search engines, but to effectively reach B2B audiences. This type of SEO requires smart strategies, reliable data and a content plan. We’re sharing some tips on how to create a winning B2B SEO campaign that have worked well for us over the years.

Find out what your market REALLY searches

This seems like an obvious point, however, it’s a common mistake, and can be a pivotal one. Let’s take, for example, something we at View Marketing and Creative offer: branding. We could assume people type ‘branding help’ into Google when they’re looking for this service. When we look at the data, however, this phrase gets 110 searches per month, whereas ‘branding services’ fetches 1900 searches every month. Getting past your own assumptions and user behavior is critical.

While there are instances where we may optimize for a keyphrase with lower search volume for other reasons, like competitive density, challenging our assumptions early by researching volumes for many variants of our topic is important.

Target searches for pain points

When you’re thinking about how to create a winning B2B SEO campaign, you’d be wise to optimize for specific pain points your target audience is likely experiencing. Let’s say someone wants more information on SEO. They may go to Google and search ‘SEO’, but they also may look for help with their ultimate goal: getting found on Google.

We can see that ‘how to get found on google’ and ‘get found on google’ have a combined search volume of 280. Because ‘get found on google’ is included in the ‘how to get found on google’ keyphrase, both can be optimized on one web page.

Building this content, then setting up internal links to service or offering-specific pages on your website can increase pages per visit and time spent on your website. This also captures people that may be in search of your offering but aren’t yet aware of you.

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Get specific

Something that almost universally holds true is the more general a keyphrase, the more difficult it will be to rise to the top of the listings on search engines. Because of this, you need to get specific with your target keyphrases.

Let’s go back to our ‘branding’ example. If we look at the term ‘branding’, it gets a whopping 29,100 searches on Google per month. Sounds like a winner, right? Not really. It also has a 93 difficulty ranking (on a scale of 1-100), meaning, unless you’re Wikipedia or similar, you’re going to have a big uphill climb to rank anywhere near page 1 on search engines. Also, some people are likely just looking for general information on what branding is… this is not the target customer for a branding firm.

Because View specializes in B2B marketing, including branding, let’s take a look at getting more specific with our branding keyphrase. In looking at the data, we find that ‘B2B branding agency’ receives 480 searches per month and has extremely low competition. Sure, there are far less searches per month, but they’re much more likely searches that our target client is doing and we have a great chance of moving to a top listing on search engines for this term. It would be our winner.

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“Advertise” on unicorns

Particularly high search volume keywords (5000+ searches per month) that also have low competition (under 15 KD) are unicorns - but they exist! Finding unicorns that you can build content upon in order to attract your target audience is a great technique for building brand awareness and funnel filling.

Let’s say you have a SAAS solution for schools. Perhaps administration makes the ultimate purchase decision, but you know that the decision is oftentimes pulled through or influenced by teachers. When looking at the data, there is a keyphrase, ‘teacher planner’ that gets 6600 searches each month and has incredibly low competition.

We could consider creating a section on the website with teacher resources that includes a blog called ‘Looking for the best teacher planner? These are our top 5 picks’. On this page, we’d design it to have ‘ads’ for your educational SAAS software.

Building a number of these high traffic landing pages essentially enables free advertising on your own site and allows you to then retarget these visitors with ads for your offering via Google Ads.

‍Leverage multiple strategies at once for optimal results

The best B2B SEO strategy should include a mix of tactical optimization activities. Think about a mix of funnel-filling content and sales-driven content. Mix content like blogs or insights that may be found by people who are currently in a research phase with product/service benefits pages for those who are specifically looking to make a purchase decision. 

Track and respond

SEO is not a one and done activity. Your competitors, publications, and other content generating sources are constantly evolving, growing their sites, optimizing. Once you optimize, you have to track and adjust to keep your gains and make new ones. Plan your content strategy- it can be blogs, case studies, commentary on the industry, product updates- whatever it is, it should add value to your visitors and be optimized for SEO. 

We love SEMRUSH and Databox for research and tracking. All of our clients reap the benefits of these powerful tools paired with smart B2B SEO strategy when they work with our team.

If you’d like to talk about your B2B SEO campaign and goals, let’s talk.

Want a FREE snapshot of your current SEO standing? Send us a note and we’ll send you a no-obligation look at how your URL is currently performing.