Why B2B Companies Need SEO

One of the biggest problems facing companies with business to business (B2B) as opposed to Business to Consumer (B2C) solutions is the fact that many B2B sites don’t have sufficient content on their websites to respond to desired search terms that folks are using to find them. What does this mean? Simply put, while consumer driven websites may get more daily searches from prospective customers, B2B sites get their fair share of their own niche of potential businesses or strategic partners, and in some cases shareholders who are on the Internet searching, using certain key words to find the B2B solution they are seeking.

Following are just a few of the steps that MarCom takes as SEO consultants to ensure that our B2B client websites are organized into the most logical, user-friendly architecture that responds to organic searches (e.g. comes up on the first page of Google).

1) Benefits of SEO Sooner- Not Later. Today, with so many companies and individuals swarming the Internet and putting up websites, blogs, and posting to social media sites, the search engines are running out of bandwidth for indexing websites fast and efficiently. What used to take a company just two to three months to be ranked by Google and other search engines for keywords that people are using, may now take eight months or longer. The longer you wait to do the proper SEO for your B2B site, the longer it will take to become ranked. The proof is that we can take a look at your competitors today, and in 3 or 6 months, we'll tell you how ahead or behind your SEO is while they become better and better ranked each month.

2) Keyword Analysis. No matter whether you’re are a B2C or B2B company, the first step is still a keyword analysis. BUT the differences are that a B2B company should not make keyword judgments, but rather create the gross list that is as inclusive as possible of the potential terms their actual prospects might use – and this would include vertical markets, potential strategic partners, the government in some cases, and even shareholders. As SEO experts, we then focus on generic keywords based on what these potential customers call things. You also need to think about whether or not searches will be about a problem they’re experiencing, or the type of company potentially offering solutions? And often times geography may play a role in what people are searching for.

3) Determine Relative Popularity of B2B Keywords. Once you’ve created the gross list of potential keywords, we will determine the relative popularity of these search terms to give us some idea of which search terms are used more often than others. The actual raw number of searches for a given search term doesn’t matter as much.

4) The Value Website Optimization. You can now figure out the search terms by which your site will be optimized. For each B2B solution, there will be one or two relevant search terms that rank highly, three to five more that place as seconds, and many others that also have good potential. You can include terms with lower search volume because in B2B , these may yield less search volume or not as much traffic, but more likely it will yield a more serious potential partner or investor. Website optimization is where most webmasters make their biggest mistakes such as universal tagging, repeating the company name, or NOT using key words in Meta, Alt and Description tagging. This requires a true and experienced SEO consultant for the best results.

5) Building Content to Accommodate Extra SearchTerms. B2B companies often have sparse website content, so they will need to find a home for all of their search terms. As always, each page of content should focus on a specific term. In other words, where else on your site can you create a credible landing page that is going to respond well to organic search for each of these terms?

6) Internal and External Link Building Strategy. Some of the pages might be directly accessible through your site's primary navigation, other pages may be in the sub-navigation, and others may only be accessible through text links in the body copy of pages. Always keep the landing pages for the most popular search terms closest to the home page. Never go more than three layers deep, or the engines won’t look there. Go for the least amount of clicks possible to get to the landing pages with the best key words. Landing pages related to less popular, more obscure terms (also known as longtail keywords) can reside deeper on the site.

7) Inter link Between Related Search Terms. If there are three landing pages for a given product page, a case study page, and a blog posting-make sure that the site visitor can easily get from the landing page to the other “related” pages.

8) Create Content and External Inbound Links. Articles, blog posts from external blogs, videos posted to YouTube or Google and the hundreds of other video sites, and bookmarks on Social Media websites must be created so there is activity generated TO your website from other places on the Internet. And this does NOT mean recripricol links, but just one way inbound links. This will help get your site ranked faster than anything. AND while we build these links, we can also add other versions of this same content with your keywords to pages of your website, so the search engines have a better chance of finding your B2B company among all of your competitors.

In summary, the faster you accomplish all of the above steps, and do them right, while continuing to build content and links, the better your ranking will be in the search engines. MarCom shoots for all of our clients to become ranked on ALL of their keywords, and then STAY in the first page of Google, Yahoo and other search engines. As things change, MarCom New Media will make sure we continue to stay up on all the latest SEO trends.