Run A Successful B2B SEO Campaign

While there are many ways to increase traffic to your website, running a strategic SEO campaign is the best way to gain long-term returns organically.

But first, what is SEO, and how does it work?

Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? On Google’s 2nd Page.

This is a very famous joke amongst digital marketers.

Studies show that a whopping 75% of users never scroll past the first page of Google’s search results. Businesses that appear on Google’s first page get the lion’s share of this traffic.

But how do you rank on Google’s first page?

That’s where SEO comes into play.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process to improve your website search visibility on search engines like Bing and Google. Employing SEO strategies will help you rank your website higher on Google’s search results.

SEO is the best way to build brand awareness and increase your authority in your industry. While it can help you accomplish a number of goals, the best benefit of SEO is that you get “free” traffic to your website week after week.

With the steps included in this guide, you can launch your own successful SEO campaign and achieve your business goals.

What is a B2B SEO Campaign?

A B2B SEO campaign is a long-term strategy that’s designed based on concrete metrics that focus primarily on increasing a website’s organic traffic from search engines.

It helps you boost the quality and quantity of traffic to your website by focusing on different SEO strategies like on-page optimization, SEO analysis, web audit, link building, keyword research, and many more.

SEO campaigns are a vital component of any business’s long-term growth strategy.

You may not attain returns as quickly as you would with paid ads. However, once your SEO campaign starts showing results, you’ll gain consistent results for months or even years to come.

How do you run an SEO campaign?

SEO is not about stuffing as many keywords as you can within your website; it’s about setting concrete goals and achieving tangible results. Therefore, crafting an SEO campaign that drives compelling results requires a fair amount of research and planning.

Even a well-planned SEO campaign takes a few months to show actual results. Additionally, running an SEO campaign with half the knowledge will simply bring an endless amount of frustration and no results.

This blog will give you detailed instructions about what Teranga does every day to run successful SEO campaigns for our clients.

What makes an SEO campaign successful?

The first step for running a successful SEO campaign is to evaluate your website and business.

Here are a few questions that’ll help you evaluate your business:

• What message do you wish your website to convey?

• What kind of visitors do you want on your website?

• What action do you want your visitors to take once they visit your website?

A successful SEO campaign aims at putting your website at the forefront of your target audience.

No matter how successful everything else in your campaign is, if you don’t have the fundamentals clear, it makes zero sense to bring in prospects looking for something your website doesn’t offer.

Or worse, not targeting prospects who are genuinely looking for what you have to offer!

Have a clear understanding of what success looks like for your company. If you don’t know, then there is no way you can know whether or not the strategy you’ve put together has worked or not.

How to launch a successful B2B SEO campaign?

Running an SEO campaign can seem like an overwhelming process, which is why we’ve broken down this process for you into eight actionable steps.

Step 1: Analyze your website

Step 2:Perform an SEO Audit

Step 3: Create specific SEO Campaign goals

Step 4: Perform Keyword Research

Step 5: On-page SEO Optimization

Step 6: On-page SEO Content

Step 7: Link Building

Step 8: Monitor your performance

Let’s dive a little deeper into each of these steps.

1. Analyze Your Website

Before launching an SEO campaign, reviewing where your website is currently at is essential. If you skip this step, your website may have lingering issues that will negatively affect the performance of your SEO campaigns.

Here is a checklist that you can use to analyze your website:

• Make sure your website is mobile-responsive.

• Analyze your site’s speed. It should load fast on your desktop and phone. You can use Google’s Page speed insights and GTmetrix to measure and improve your website’s page load time.

• Ensure your website has SSL enabled.

• Current ranking status. What blogs/pages are currently ranking on Google? You can incorporate this information into your SEO strategy.

2. Perform an SEO Audit

An in-depth SEO audit will identify any SEO-related issues that are affecting your website’s organic search performance. Furthermore, you’ll be able to understand how SEO issues are affecting your digital priorities, goals, and even revenue.

While an SEO Audit shouldn’t be “one size fits all,” here’s a list of the fundamental aspects that your SEO audit must cover.

1. Confirm that your website uses HTTPS. You can migrate your website from HTTP to HTTPS without affecting your SEO efforts for free using Let’s Encrypt.

2. Broken links. Identify and fix any broken (internal and external) links.

3. Check your page titles, URL structure, meta tags, and meta descriptions. You can use the Screaming Frog Spider SEO tool to improve these components.

4. Page redirects. Check your page redirects and fix them.

5. Backlink health. Not all links are good links; therefore, conduct an extensive backlink analysis to identify toxic links that negatively affect your SERPs ranking. You can use the Majestic SEO tool to identify questionable websites that are linking back to your site.

6. Indexing. Ensure that Google is indexing only one version of your site pages.

7. Identify and fix duplicate content issues. Google may see such pages as an attempt at manipulation.

8. Identify thin content pages. These pages offer little to no value to your visitors. You can identify them as pages with a low word count.

9. Orphan Pages. Resolve orphan pages that aren’t linked to from any other page on your site.

10. Do an HTML validation check. Use the World Wide Web Consortium free tool to perform an HTML validation check on your website. It’ll help you ensure that all the HTML code on your website is correct.

11. Crawl your site. Perform a site crawl to better understand issues that you may not have specifically looked for. This will help you identify non-indexed pages, pages that are missing canonical URLs, and the error statuses of your web pages. Netpeak Spider SEO tool is another alternative to the Screaming Frog Spider tool that you can use to perform a site crawl.

12. DNS setting. Check your DNS setting to ensure bots aren’t running into any errors while they crawl your site. The easiest way to do this is by logging into your Google Search Console > Navigating to the “Current Status” section > Looking for a Green checkmark for your DNS. You can also check your DNS settings using Pingdom.

3. Create Specific SEO Campaign Goals

The difference between an ongoing SEO process and an SEO campaign is that you need to set specific and measurable goals for an SEO campaign.

It’s easy to think ranking #1 on Google search results is a worthy goal, but it is just a detail. You need to set specific KPIs that you can track throughout your marketing campaign.

Some good SEO campaign KPIs are:

• Improve the ranking of pages that appear on the second or third page of SERPs.

• Rank for primary local converting keywords in your niche.

• Percentage increase in organic conversions.

• Increase in traffic from specific geographical locations.

• A number of backlinks from authority sites.

After listing down your goals, you need to strategize the exact steps you need to move through to achieve these goals.

4. Perform Keyword Research

Finding competitive keywords is one of the most critical steps for any SEO effort. It doesn’t matter how hard you try; if you’re creating content nobody is actively searching for, you won’t get any traffic from Google.

How to find keyword ideas?

• You need to brainstorm seed keywords. They’re keywords that are primarily related to your niche. While you won’t be targeting these seed keywords, they will help you find competitive keywords for which you can actually rank. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Answer the public, and Keyworddit to find keyword ideas.

• Identify keywords your competitors are ranking for.

• Use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. After building a list of keyword ideas, you can use them to pull a huge list of keywords from their database.

How do you know if a keyword is competitive or not?

Now that you have a ton of keyword ideas, you can use the following SEO keyword metrics to narrow down your target keywords.

Low Competition

Low competition keywords are those that have a low keyword difficulty score. These keywords are easy to rank for and can provide quality organic traffic in a short amount of time.

High Search Volume

Keyword search volume is a metric that indicates the number of times a specific keyword is searched in a particular time frame. The higher the search volume, the more popular the keyword. You have more potential for attracting organic traffic to your page with these keywords.

Customer Fit 

No matter how promising your target keyword looks, you need to ask yourself whether you will actually make money if you rank for this keyword.

The Power of long-tail keywords

Short-tail or head keywords are harder to rank for because those are keywords that most big brands in your niche are competing for.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are phrases with low competition, low cost, high search volume, and high conversion rate. Therefore, targeting long-tail keywords will help you rank faster and higher.

5. On-Page SEO Optimization

On-page SEO is not just about cramming your target keywords throughout your webpage. There’s a lot more to it.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing your website pages to boost its search engine ranking and drive more quality traffic to your website. While off-page SEO depends on external factors, on-page SEO optimization focuses primarily on your web pages’ content and HTML code.

This screenshot from Google’s How Search Works page clearly states the importance of keyword optimization.

Additionally, there are several other critical on-page SEO factors that you need to take note of.

• URL. Keep your URLs short yet descriptive. Use hyphens between words to ensure readability.

• Title & meta description length. Ensure your title is around 55 characters and your meta description is around 155 characters.

• Publish relevant and readable content. Use multiple headings and subheadings (H1, H2, H3 tags, etc.) to give your readers the ability to skim through your content. This improves user experience, which is a major ranking factor for Google.

• Keyword density. Maintain a healthy keyword density of 1% to 2%.

• Image optimization. Use tools like ImageOptim, TinyPNG, and WP Smush to optimize your images. Don’t forget to add image alt texts, and include your target keywords wherever it fits naturally.

• Link building. Add internal & external links.

Now that you understand the different factors you need to optimize for on-page SEO, let’s look at the things you need to keep in mind w.r.t. on-page SEO content.

6. On-Page SEO Content

How to create content that ranks on Google? This is a million-dollar question that nobody knows the exact answer to.

Why? Because when it comes to SEO, change is the only constant.

Google modifies its algorithm 500 to 600 times every year. In fact, in 2018 alone, Google made 3000 changes to its algorithm!

So, how do you keep on top of all these changes? Honestly, you can’t. The more thoughtful thing to do is observe the blogs that consistently rank on Google and analyze what they have in common.

Lucky for you, we’ve done this tedious job in your stead. You can simply take advantage of our hard work and use this checklist while creating content for your website.

• Keyword placement. 

• Include your target keyword in your URL, title tags, and meta description.

• Place your primary keyword as close to the beginning and within the first 100 words.

• Incorporate your target keywords naturally throughout the page.

• Include related keywords. Don’t just aggressively use your target keywords; use semantically related keywords.

• No big paragraphs. No one likes reading huge blocks of text. Ensure your paragraphs have no more than 3 to 4 sentences. Keep in mind that your paragraphs appear even chunkier when viewed on smartphones.

• Subheadings. Break up your content with subheadings after every 300 words.

And the most important thing you need to remember is that you need to write for both Google and Humans!

7. Link Building

Quality links are one of the top-ranking factors for Google.

But link building is not easy, which is why several businesses either struggle with it or simply skip this step. However, if you’re serious about ranking on Google, you need to have a link-building strategy.

Here are a few strategies you can implement to gain backlinks from authority sites.

• Guest Posting. Find authority websites in your niche that have the potential to send targeted traffic to your site. Create relevant content for their site while naturally linking back to your website. This strategy will not only give you a backlink, but you’ll also earn quality traffic.

• Reverse-engineer existing backlinks. Find authority websites that are already linking back to your site. These websites would be more open to providing more backlinks.

• Feature Influencers. Mention influencers (primarily from your niche) in your blog post. Then reach out to let them know about it. More often than not, they will happily share your content with their audience.

• Competitor’s backlinks. Ethically spy on your competitors and find their sources of backlinks. Approach these websites and pitch your content.

Source: Ahrefs

Here is an excellent example that showcases how you can pitch your content without feeling salesy.

Another way to promote your content is through internal linking.

There are two internal linking strategies that you can implement.

1. After deciding on the topic of your blog, create a list of related pages on your website that you can link to from that particular blog.

2. After you write the blog, find published web pages on your website and add links that point to the new blog post.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t repeat the anchor text you use for linking more than once or twice.

8. Monitor Your Performance

As I’ve mentioned at the beginning of this post, SEO campaigns have tangible KPIs that you need to track to understand whether or not your campaign is successful.

However, it is essential to remember that you can’t expect quick results with SEO. That said, here is a list of metrics that’ll help you evaluate the success of your SEO campaign.

• Google SERPs ranking.

• The number of visits.

• The number of social shares.

• The number of backlinks.

• The number of comments.

• Bounce rate.

Other than these general metrics, you can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track other personal SEO campaign KPIs you’ve set.

You can also use SEO-specific tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to track your SEO campaign performance.

Summary

You should now have a pretty good understanding of building an SEO campaign strategy to get more exposure and traffic from search engines like Google.

We’ve included a checklist in almost every single step of the process to make it easier for you to build a relevant and effective SEO campaign.

A word of caution. Don’t chase after SEO buzzwords or use blackhat SEO tactics to cheat your way to the first page. All they’ll do is hurt your business in the long run.

If you have any further questions, or you would like to find out more about working with an expert B2B SEO agency like Teranga, we’d love to hear from you.

You can schedule a no-strings-attached discovery call with us at a time that suits you.