Role of SEO in B2B marketing
Digital marketing refers to the coalition of activities that help an organization effectively market its content or attract consumers to its products or services. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing takes place on online media such as the internet, social media, websites, etc.
Digital marketing can be divided into social media marketing, SEO, SEM, email marketing, etc. It takes place between: –
- Businesses to consumers, or B2C marketing
- Businesses to businesses or B2B marketing
- Customer to customers or C2C marketing
Now, SEO is quite an important part of digital marketing, as it is used in all other types of digital marketing to organically drive consumers towards your organization’s products or services. However, B2B marketers have always been a little unclear about the role of SEO in B2B Marketing, which is why the same has been explained below.
How is SEO Utilized in B2B Marketing?
1. Determining the Target Audience/Target Group
As a B2B marketer, before doing anything else, you must know who your target audience or target group are. Performing target audience or group research is one of the first steps concerning SEO for B2B Marketing as it helps plan content creation and other strategies.
For example, if you were a major software company, you would not want to create content for people looking for classical pianos or vice versa.
How to Perform Target Audience or Target Group Research?
- Competitor research or researching or looking up companies that are competing with you because of the same domain/ product etc. as you can determine which other customer groups to target.
- Target audience segmentation, that is, assigning your audience or target group to certain batches which allow you to create personalized strategies for each of them.
2. Keyword Research
Once you have determined your target audience, it is important to carry out keyword research or research on certain words which your desired audience or group always searches for when looking for relevant queries, based on which Google ranks the relevant websites which have those keywords.
One example is “Apple iPhone 13”, “iPhone 13”, “latest Apple iPhone”, “buy Apple iPhone 13” etc. if your consumers or customers were looking to purchase or know about the Apple iPhone 13.
As the ranking and therefore visibility of your website(s) depends on this step, it is yet another step in B2B Marketing and SEO.
How to Perform Keyword Research?
- Looking for keywords with a lower search volume, or keywords that a small percentage of people search for, as they can be used for high ranking with the help of tools like Keyword surfer, etc.
- Looking for keywords related to the one or ones you are targeting, using tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, etc. that will help you learn which keywords are working
- Use certain terms or modifiers to drive traffic better, such as using the name of your competitors (an alternative to Microsoft Teams, etc.), or others like project management tools, systems, etc., business, etc. if you are targeting businesses and so on.
3. Planning and Executing Content Creation Strategies
Once you have determined the keywords which you can use, it is important to determine the type of content that works for your organization concerning the product being marketed.
Planning your content is one of the crucial aspects of Using SEO in B2B Marketing as it helps in strategizing as well. The following steps are useful concerning content planning: –
- Determining your goals
- Creating customer profiles
- Analysing their behaviour with the help of Google analytics, and creating heat maps
- Creating a brand identity by determining the company’s USP and tailoring messages, and communications accordingly
- Performing content audits
- Holding content brainstorming ideas and fine-tuning sessions
- Executing and measuring the Return on Investment
4. Backlink Building
Backlink building refers to organically having links to your content present in the content on other sites which are known authorities on the subject, over some time, with your content having links to those websites as well.
This practice improves your credibility with your consumers as they realize that you can be trusted owing to the presence of the same.
Over time, the authority of your website is established, which leads other new and up-and-coming websites to request you to backlink their content, making backlink building an important part of SEO for B2B Marketing.
5. Technical, On Page & Off Page SEO
Technical SEO refers to SEO that deals in all the backend aspects of your website, or the portions of your websites that are often searched through or trawled by Google’s bots or spiders. It refers to aspects like XML sitemap, page load speed, FCP, LCP, etc.
On Page SEO refers to SEO factors such as the keywords used in the heading, the meta title, the meta description, readability, etc. that help users stay longer on your site and make it easier for Google bots to trawl through it.
Off-page SEO refers to SEO factors such as guest posts, image submissions, pdf submissions, third-party blogs, Quora, etc.
Wrapping it up
Thus, the above methods are ways by which interested B2B marketers can know about the Role of SEO in B2B Marketing which will help them in effectively marketing their products and services to their desired consumers.
