Is SEO too competitive now so it’s impossible to generate high-quality B2B leads? That can’t be further from the truth. While it’s indeed true that SEO is now more wet than ever, there are still many ways we can maximize our SEO to generate the best results. In fact, due to the saturated digital market and SERP, SEO is now more important than ever: you either get noticed through SEO or you’re not. For any B2B Marketing business, SEO is one of the most important methods in generating high-quality leads, build a loyal community, and ultimately, generate revenue. With more than 70% of B2B buyers admitting that they do start a B2B purchase with a Google search, B2B SEO shouldn’t be a luxury, but a necessity.
How to Implement B2B SEO
Although we can make SEO very complex and technical, SEO is actually pretty simple and only consists of three core elements:
- Creating great content
- Promoting your content and outreach to other websites
- Building high-quality links to the content
- Below, we will discuss them one by one
- Content Creation
Content Creation
Creating content for SEO should be based on proper keyword research. However, it’s important to understand how keywords work in SEO today, which has evolved over the past decade or so. Google and the other search engines are now very smart and can effectively understand the context of the content, so it’s no longer necessary to stuff a single piece of content with the target keyword, and it’s no longer produce different pieces of content to target similar keywords (a common practice in the past).
Basic Steps To Creating Seo Content
Instead, we can create separate content pieces that are targeting related and adjacent keywords while covering one big topic. For example, if our main topic is “digital marketing”, we can create one content targeting “SEO”, another targeting “social media marketing”, another one targeting “content marketing”, and so on. Google now can properly recognize that your site is a credible resource for this topic. So, how can we implement a proper SEO content creation in 2020? In general, there are three basic steps:
Keyword research
Above we have discussed how the importance of keywords has shifted since the 2010s, but it doesn’t mean that keywords are no longer important. In general, we should build a list of keywords that are:
- Relevant for your target audience with a high enough monthly search volume.
- Relevant and valuable for your business or product/service.
- Depending on your budget and timeline, the competition for the target keyword should be manageable enough
Expanding keywords into topics
After you’ve got a list of your target keywords, you should figure out what kinds of topics are fit for each keyword. The most important thing to consider here is to understand the intent behind the search for the keyword. There are various tools like BuzzSumo that can help you in this aspect, but we can also do it manually via a simple Google search. Check the results on the first one or two pages of Google’s SERP and check their types of content. If there are a lot of content pieces on the first page, then it’s pretty obvious the search intent is mainly informational.
Develop your content
How should we develop our content for SEO? The most basic approach is again, to do a quick Google search and review the first page or two of the SERP. Check the top-ranking content for this keyword, and our job is to build content that is: little better than these top-ranking pages: bigger (more words), more in-depth, more data/information, and so on take a different approach and be unique. If you can cover the topic from a unique angle, you can rank higher. Obviously there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to SEO content creation, and creating content that ranks is tough. However, if your content is good and/or unique, you will always rank sooner than later. Focus on creating valuable, engaging content that caters to your target audience, and not to focus on solely pleasing the search engine algorithm.
2. Content Promotion
SEO by itself is a content promotion method, but the dilemma is that we should promote our content to get traffic and backlinks before we can get the SEO results. We should promote our content via various different channels to generate enough traffic (and get more links) to the content, and here are some common ideas:
Guest posting: still a very effective strategy as long as you do it right, and as long as you target the right, authoritative sites in your niche.
Social media: pretty obvious. Social media is where our target audience is, and we can use various ways to promote content on social media.
Email marketing: A Great Way To Promote content to existing Leads/Prospects and nurture them in the process
Influencer marketing
in this age of influencers, getting our content retweeted or mentioned by a relevant influencer in our industry can mean a lot. There are obviously more ways we can use to promote our content, but again, it will always go back to your content quality. If your content is valuable and engaging, it’s going to be much easier to promote it and the more fruitful it will be. On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality, spammy content.
3. Link Building
We all know how backlinks remain one of, if not the most important ranking factor in SEO. So, link building should be a core part of any B2B SEO strategy. On the other hand, it’s very important to note that today, the quality of our backlinks is more important than quantity. It’s better to get 3 to 5 high-quality backlinks from good sites a month rather than 50 low-quality links each month. However, obviously getting these high-quality backlinks can be easier said than done. So, what should we do besides promoting our content, as we have discussed above? The key here is to figure out the ‘hook’ or ‘asset’ of each content, and basically giving people a reason to link your content. The content itself, if it’s interesting or entertaining. For example if it’s an interesting real-life story. Unique and relevant data/information like a research report, statistics, etc.
Actionable Tips And Tutorials
And so on. If you have the right ‘hook’ in your content, then getting these backlinks is only a matter of outreaching to the relevant websites. As you can see, the core of effective B2B SEO is and should be a high-quality, relevant content that is valuable for your target audience. The More Relevant And Valuable Your Content is, the higher the quality of leads that are going to visit your site. So, there’s no shortcut to SEO than developing high-quality, relevant, and informative content that is targeted to your most ideal audience.