What Is B2B SEO and How You Can Benefit From It?

Every business has to establish a solid online presence these days.

Organizations have to build an effective SEO strategy to appear high on Google’s SERPs and be successful online.

People often do a quick Google search to gain more information before making any purchasing decisions.

That’s the primary reason why that’s important so your target audience can find you should they search for your business online.

With the first page receiving the lion’s share of traffic from Google, it’s even more critical to rank higher on Google over your competitors.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the different kinds of professional SEO services and how to employ them for your business.

So What is B2B Search Engine Optimisation?

B2B SEO is Search Engine Optimization strategy focused on maximizing your visibility and boosting the organic search traffic to your company’s website (or specific pages on your website).

SEO specialists employ optimization tactics that help your website or webpage rank higher than your competitors on the search engine result pages (SERPs) for particular search terms.

Most B2B SEO tactics include technical, on-page, and off-page SEO services. However, some SEO providers like freelancers or consultants may have a specific field of focus like link-building or SEO audits.

In this blog, we’ll understand these different optimization techniques and provide a roadmap that’ll help you choose the right SEO agency for your business.

But why do you need SEO service providers in the first place? Can’t you just do it on your own?

For your target audience to find your website for relevant and appropriate search results, search engines like Bing and Google employ several different techniques.

Crawling, Indexing, Link analysis, and evaluating EAT value (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) are just a few techniques that search engines utilize to filter through websites.

Furthermore, these search engines constantly update their algorithm.

Experts believe that Google alone updates its algorithm nearly 500 to 600 times every single year. That’s like once or twice each day!!

While not all these changes may be huge, some of these updates can have a massive impact on how SEO should happen in the future.

You may not even realize that something you’re doing can do more harm to your website than good. Accidentally employing the wrong techniques can get you penalized (or even flagged) by Google — which is the last thing you want.

Furthermore, once your website falls in the eyes of Google, it’s very difficult to get back your reputation.

You understand why you need professional and reliable SEO experts, don’t you?

Let’s now take a look at the different types of SEO service providers.

Types of SEO service providers

1. SEO consultants

SEO consultants are individuals who offer one-on-one consultation services to your company.

They can guide and train your employees or even build a customized SEO strategy for your business. However, they may not have the knowledge or tools to implement these strategies for you.

Working with an SEO consultant is feasible if you already have an in-house team of SEOs and developers and are simply looking for an expert to guide you.

One significant benefit of working with SEO consultants is that you can find an SEO expert who focuses on the aspect of SEO that you’re looking for help with. Maybe you need help with SEO content creation, or perhaps it’s improving your backlink health.

You can pick and choose the right SEO expert for your business.

On the flip side, SEO consultants lack diversification. They usually have their own parameters about the kind of professional SEO services they provide.

Furthermore, since they typically work alone, they don’t have the ability to look at your business or project from different angles and offer varied perspectives.

2. SEO agencies

An SEO agency is a team of knowledgeable and experienced SEO experts who can handle all aspects of an SEO campaign for your business.

The biggest advantage of working with SEO agencies is that they don’t just play a supporting role like an SEO consultant; they can plan, assess, execute, and manage your SEO campaign for you.

From the initial research and SEO audit, building a custom SEO strategy, executing your SEO campaign, project maintenance, and analyzing the data — they take care of everything.

SEO agencies have a massive range of advanced software and tools at their disposal.

They usually have extensive experience working with businesses similar to yours. They understand what works in your industry and precisely what they need to do to improve your website’s SEO positioning.

It’s safe to say that if they’ve established good results for them, they can do the same for your business!

One added benefit of working with SEO agencies is that they have a dedicated team of SEO experts who have their own fields of specialization like SEO content writing and link-building.

Therefore, if you don’t have an in-house SEO team, working with an SEO agency with the experience and resources to manage your SEO campaign is the best choice for your business.

3. Digital marketing agencies

While SEO agencies focus explicitly on providing professional SEO services, digital marketing agencies look at SEO in a broader context of a digital marketing campaign.

They’re usually large firms that try to offer everything — like social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), web design, advertising, paid media, and more.

If you’re looking for everything from one agency, you should look for these firms. However, if you’re looking for agencies with a laser focus on SEO, look for the right SEO agency.

Types of B2B SEO strategies

While there are a lot of different professional SEO strategies, here are a few of the most common ones:

1. Local SEO

Local SEO is specifically for businesses that want to gain local traffic. These could be brick-and-mortar stores that want to increase their footfall or companies that specifically want traffic from a specific location.

By optimizing their website for local SEO, these businesses can boost their organic search traffic with potential leads from their nearby regions.

Here are a few guidelines that you can follow to optimize your site for local SEO:

1. Google My Business. Optimize your GMB page and keep it updated. Share relevant posts to keep your account active and revert to any comments you may receive on your posts. It’s also a good practice to encourage people to review your business online. This helps your business rank higher on Google every time someone searches for keywords related to your business or niche. Furthermore, always respond to these reviews and go the extra mile by mentioning the location of the store if you have stores in multiple regions.

2. NAP. Your company’s name, address, and phone number have to be consistent everywhere. Note: Don’t make the mistake of just including your NAP within an image. Google doesn’t have the tech to crawl images for text. You can include them within the header or the footer of your website.

3. Social Media. Just like GMB, staying active on social media also has an impact on your Google rankings. While social media may not be a direct ranking factor, experts have noticed a pattern between a company’s social media success and their SEO positioning.

4. Online citations. You need to ensure that your company’s online citations across map data aggregators like Express Update, Foursquare, Neustar Localeze, Factual, and others remain consistent. Even simple discrepancies like spelling errors can confuse Google while trying to figure out which data it should showcase. In the end, Google may decide not to show data about your business at all, which can be very damaging to your local business.

5. Local SEO Audit. A comprehensive SEO audit can help you understand where your website stands currently and then build a plan to boost your website in the right way. This SEO audit could include a Google My Business audit, on-page SEO audit, Google Search Console audit, website analysis, citation audit, and competitor analysis.

6. Location pages. We’ve mentioned the situation where you have more than one physical store. Another good practice is to create multiple location pages corresponding to each of your store locations. Provide the correct NAP details along with other specifications like unique store descriptions, promotions, store hours, parking/transit information, and testimonials from your customers.

You can leverage tools like Screaming Frog, Moz Local, Whitespark Local Citation Finder, BrightLocal, and Buzzstream to optimize your website for Local SEO.

2. E-commerce SEO

In simple terms, eCommerce SEO helps businesses get their product pages to rank organically on Google.

Let’s suppose you google ‘Mason Jar.’ Google is smart enough to understand that when a user is searching for mason jar, they’re more likely looking to purchase a mason jar than the mechanics behind how mason jars are produced.

This is why Google returns Amazon and Flipkart pages along with local stores that sell Mason Jars.

Optimizing your eCommerce store for SEO allows you to get your product pages ranked on Google and gain free organic search traffic when people search for terms closely related to your industry or niche.

Choosing the right keywords, setting up your web store the right way, and ensuring your store is desktop and mobile-friendly are just a few SEO aspects that an SEO agency can help you with.

3. Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO is simply another subset of SEO. It refers to the search engine optimization of websites to ensure that they operate flawlessly on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.

By the end of 2021, nearly 63% of organic traffic was from mobile devices. This shows the importance of optimizing your website for mobile gadgets, no matter what business or niche you’re in.

4. Voice SEO

Voice search is one of the fastest-growing searches at the moment. According to Perficient, around 55% of people constantly use voice search to look for answers to questions.

Furthermore, over 49% of people who use smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Alexa can’t imagine living their life without them.

But how exactly do you optimize for Voice SEO?

Here’s a simple example:

• Typed search query: Hotels near me

• Voice search query: What are some good hotels near me?

If you want to optimize your website for Voice SEO, you can work with your SEO agency to brainstorm a customized SEO strategy for your business.

Let’s take a look at how professional SEO services can be categorized based on different aspects of SEO:

5. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is basically the different optimizations that focus on the behind-the-scenes elements of your website. These elements include your page speed, mobile optimization, site architecture, and more.

While they may not be the fancy and exciting aspects of SEO, it’s vital to get your website optimized in the best possible way w.r.t. technical SEO to ensure that Google picks up on all the other kinds of optimizations you perform on your website.

Here are some of the essential guidelines to get your website technically optimized:

1. SSL. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) establishes a secure encrypted link between the browser and web server. The part that you need to care about is that your website URL should start with ‘https://’ rather than ‘http://.’ You can do a simple google search right now and analyze the top ranking website to understand how highly Google prioritizes SSL.

2. Page site speed. It should come across as no surprise that if your website doesn’t load fast, it won’t rank on Google. When was the last time you waited for more than a few seconds for a site to load? You probably don’t even remember. That’s because people simply leave to browse through the following search result to see if it answers their question swiftly. This also increases your site’s bounce rate, which is another factor Google cares about.

3. Mobile friendly. We’ve already established that mobile responsiveness is a critical ranking factor for Google. Therefore, businesses need to ensure that their website is fully responsive on all devices like mobile phones, tablets, and smartphones.

4. XML sitemaps. In simple terms, you can think of XML sitemaps as a roadmap that shows search engines exactly where each web page is. It showcases information like the date the page was last modified, the frequency of updates, and its level of priority on your website.

5. Duplicate content. Trying to manipulate Google into ranking your website by creating multiple versions of the same page is not an ethical SEO practice. Search engines like Google and Bing don’t understand which page to prioritize. Therefore, fixing duplicate content issues should be high on your priority list.

6. Structured data markup. This technical SEO factor enables search engines to better analyze the content within a web page to be appropriately indexed. Structured data markup allows businesses to include star ratings in the reviews, product prices, and information about the reviewer.

   6. On-page SEO

On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) refers to the practice of optimizing website content for both users and search engines. Out of everything within SEO, you have the most control over on-page SEO factors.

While Google has become much smarter than it used to be, it still scans and showcases web pages that contain the exact keyword as your search phrase at the top.

However, there is a lot more to On-page SEO than just including the keyword in the title.

Here are a few On-page SEO techniques that you should employ while publishing content on your website:

1. Title. We’ve already established that including the keyword with the title is a good SEO practice. However, it’s generally a good idea to try and incorporate your primary keyword as early within the title as you can. Other than keywords, ensure that your title aligns well with the intent of the blog and keep the character count of the title between 50 and 70.

2. URLs. Again, include the focus keyword within the URL. Furthermore, keep your URLs on the shorter side of things because shorter and concise URLs tend to outrank longer URLs.

3. Introductory paragraph. Include your focus keyword within the first 100 words of your blog post.

4. Title tags. The H1s, H2s, and H3s of your blogs should have a good density of your focus keyword.

5. Meta description. Keep your meta descriptions within 155 to 160 characters and, of course, include your focus keyword as close to the start as you can.

6. Synonyms and LSI Keywords. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords are simply terms conceptually related to your focus keyword. It’s a good practice to include synonyms of your focus keyword in your meta description and sprinkle them throughout your blog post. This helps Google analyze the intent of your blog post much better and rank your blog for relevant search terms.

7. Images. Optimize your image alt tags and file names because Google isn’t smart enough to scan the image and understand it.

8. Internal and external links. Linking to blogs you’ve published keeps the user engaged with your content. It creates a sort of a spider web where your target user is caught within while browsing through everything you have to offer to them. This subtly makes it difficult for your users to navigate to a different site. On the flip side, you should link to a handful of authoritative external websites. It tells Google that you have researched well before publishing your blog. Note: Ensure that the anchor text is relevant when adding links.

7. Off-page SEO

The difference between on-page and off-page SEO is that with off-page SEO, you optimize your website for factors that happen outside your website — for example, backlinks or guest blogs. It involves the steps you take to impact your SEO positioning off your site.

Off-page SEO factors basically act as votes of confidence for search engines. The quality of your off-page SEO health has a massive impact on your search engine ranking.

Final Thoughts

We’ve simply brushed upon the different factors you need to focus on to improve your site’s SEO. There’s a lot more to SEO than what’s included within this blog — which is exactly why you need to find an SEO agency.

With thousands of SEO agencies to choose from, you need to do your research well to choose the right fit for your business who can take upon the vast task of optimizing your site for SEO.

If you’d like to work with a boutique SEO agency that’ll build and execute an SEO strategy that’ll work best for your business, feel free to book a no-strings-attached discovery call with Teranga today!