Search Engine Optimization

It’s very easy to make small mistakes with your company’s B2B SEO campaign that can have lingering effects on its long term success. Many B2B companies don’t even realize they are making these simple mistakes and can’t understand why their SEO campaign is under-delivering on their expectations. If your B2B SEO campaign seems to be suffering, double check that you aren’t accidentally making these 3 SEO mistakes before deciding to chuck your campaign.

1. Relying too heavily on industry jargon for your main keywords.
This is a common SEO problem in many B2B industries, especially for tech or software companies. You might rely too heavily on industry specific keywords (like “contact reasoning engine”) that don’t mean anything to your target audience. Instead of “contact reasoning engine,” they are searching for “call center analytics.” You have to remember to take user intent into account when conducting B2B SEO keyword research. You might be using industry approved jargon that your top competitors are also targeting, but unless you are taking the time to educate potential clients with your content marketing you can’t assume they know what those keywords mean or are using those them to search.

Obviously you don’t want to forgo all industry keywords, as those are important to building your credibility as an industry expert. However it’s important to incorporate related keywords that the average user might use to find your products/services.

2. Keeping your content on lockdown.
I’ve noticed that a lot of B2B websites keep a large portion of their content behind a login, trying to keep some content accessible only by their customers. While I understand wanting to provide unique and exclusive content for your current customers (as an added incentive), you don’t want to lock all of your content away. Anything that requires a login to be accessed can’t be read and indexed by the search engines; making is useless for your B2B SEO. If you are going to lock a large percentage of your content away, it’s important to balance the content scales by producing similar amounts of content that is crawl-able. A B2B business blog is a great way to consistently produce fresh content that is easily indexed by the search engines and you’re your brand connect with potential customers (they need content too!)

3. Failing to take your sales cycle into account.
You can’t rush your B2B sales cycle any more than you can rush your SEO. Most B2B sales cycles are much longer than the average B2C sales cycle. After all, it only takes 5-10 minutes to decide where you are going for lunch today while it takes 5-10 months to decide to purchase a $50,000 business software solution. Many B2B companies forget to take their sales cycle into account when measuring the success of their SEO campaign. You can’t begin to measure the effectiveness of your SEO until AFTER your normal sales cycle has completed.

In B2B industries, the decision makers are the ones that pull the trigger on all purchasing decisions; that makes them your target audience. You need to develop a B2B SEO campaign that allows you to connect with those decision makers via multiple platforms, numerous touch points and at every stage of the buying cycle to get their attention and earn their business. The competition to win the hearts, minds and dollars of those B2B decision makers is fierce, so a drop in the bucket isn’t going to get you anywhere. If you really want to earn their business, you have to take your B2B SEO campaign up a notch.

Start with your content marketing
How can you take your content marketing to the next level? Hopefully you’ve already got a B2B business blog up and running and have posts going live at least two days a week. To kick it up a notch get a post going live every day. This gives you more opportunities to target your top keywords, produces more content for the search spiders to read and gives your target audience a reason to interact with your brand every day. If you don’t think you’ll be able to keep the stream of fresh content going, consider bringing in guest authors. Guest blog posts can offer new information and opinions for your readers, your blog can benefit from the guest bloggers’ authority and you don’t have to worry about writing as much content every week.

If you haven’t already, make sure you are investing time in content promotion as well! A blog post that no one reads, even though it still has B2B SEO benefit, isn’t doing much to get the decision maker’s attention. Submit each blog post to your social profiles and social bookmarking sites, incorporate them into your company newsletter and add social share buttons so your readers can do some of the heavy lifting for you!

Stop focusing on rank
While ranking well is incredibly important, and many would argue the end goal of an SEO campaign, that isn’t the only thing you should be concentrating on. B2B decision makers are smart and they aren’t going to do business with your brand simply because your site ranks first in the search engines. While ranking first may earn you the lion’s share of clicks from the SERP, don’t be surprised if your conversion rate isn’t measuring up. The B2B sales cycle is often so long that a decision maker is going to spend a lot of time and effort researching the best available options before making a decision that ultimately has little to do with where that company ranks in the search engines. Focusing on where you rank often causes B2B marketers to take a pigeon-hole approach with their SEO and ultimately make bad SEO decisions

Leverage offline activities too
Everything B2B marketers do, both online and off, can be leveraged for SEO. That industry tradeshow you are going to next month, why not write a press release and promotional blog post that tells people what booth you’ll be at and what kind of demonstration you’ll be putting on. Send out live updates from the tradeshow itself on Facebook and Twitter and invite attendees to come connect with your company. Record any presentations your company gives and turn them into fodder for your video marketing campaign. Invite people who come to your booth to sign up for your company newsletter right then and there. The more opportunities you create to connect with B2B decision makers the better chance you have of reaching them at least once.

You know what they say when you assume something? It makes a [expletive] of U and ME. The old saying holds true in a lot of situations, including B2B SEO. As marketing professionals, it’s never a good idea to assume you understand your target audience perfectly, assume you know everything your competition is doing or assume you aren’t missing the mark in some way.

Here are 3 B2B SEO assumptions that could potentially ruin you SEO campaign:

Last click = conversion source
A huge part of any B2B SEO campaign is proving ROI; determining what tactics worked well and which ones didn’t. Obviously tactics that seemingly lead to more conversions can be considered more valuable, and therefore deserve more time/budget/attention and so forth. But here is where it gets tricky—the B2B sales cycle is so long term that you can’t just assume that that new customer’s last action/click was the thing that drove them to convert.

For instance, let’s say someone clicked through to your site via a PPC ad. How did they come across that ad? Maybe they did a branded search in Google, specifically looking for your company. But how did they find out about your company? Maybe the read an article you published on an industry blog. Or maybe they came across your booth at an industry tradeshow and signed up for the company newsletter. Any one of those touch points could be credited with being the conversion source. Don’t just assume their last click was the driving force behind their conversion.

Analytics holds all the answers
Ok, so maybe analytics DOES hold all the answers, but only if you interpret the raw data the right way. Analytics are really just numbers and we as B2B marketers interpret them as best as we can. That’s our job; to take numbers and assign some sort of value to them. Sometimes we make the data fit a preconceived notion because that’s what we are expecting to see. Other times we miss valuable insights because we get so far bogged down in the data that we forget to apply it to the business environment our company is operating in. It’s very easy to misread your analytics if you don’t know how to properly interpret it.

B2B content marketing is boring
First off, if you think your industry is boring I have one question for you, why are you in that industry?! Secondly, B2B content is only as boring as B2B content writers make it. Oftentimes we get so comfortable to the ins and out of our given industry, as well as our company, that we forget our customers aren’t privy to the same insider knowledge. Just because it’s old hat for you that doesn’t mean your target audience won’t find it interesting!

Don’t be afraid to interject some humor and personality into your B2B content marketing. You don’t have to stick with static blocks of text either. Branch out into videos, podcasts, infographics, webinars and more! Never settle for boring, no matter how you feel about your industry.

When you start to perform search engine marketing and optimization for your own business website you really have to figure out whether you are attempting to market a business to a B2B or B2C audience. A consumer audience could very well read their email at midnight and purchase something but not a business audience. Your SEO efforts are going to be quite different depending on which type of person you are trying to attract.

Here are some key elements to look out for B2B SEO:

SEO Demand Generation: For companies that are targeting other businesses in a niche industry, often times they need to target keywords naturally within their content and the rest of the on site optimziation for keywords that have little search volume. This is when there are industry specific terminology that may not have a high search volume yet. But sometimes it makes sense to target a mix of both keywords that people are searching for and keywords that are industry specific that will grow over time. And even sometimes a b2b focused campaign can leverage (and should) other sources of online and offline marketing to help build new keyword search volume (and build a demand) within a specific target marketplace.

Online PR Timing: Whether you are distributing some PR or attacking the social media front your timing is going to be critical. You can’t expect to target a B2B audience creating efforts at 10 o’clock at night can you? You know your audience best so try to anticipate when the best time for something to land in front of them is. You don’t want to be wasting your efforts if nobody is going to see what you are doing. Timing things wrong could lead to absolutely nothing occurring on your website. Remember to keep testing different approaches.

Content Verbiage: It is safe to say that different keywords are going to attract different people. The word “cheap” is going to pull in a different audience than “inexpensive” so it is up to you to figure this out before you begin optimizing your website or putting together an internet marketing campaign. Put a large emphasis on the types of keywords you want to incorporate into your site and your plan. The wrong keywords could pull in the wrong audience which could be disastrous.

Your B2B audience will appreciate a methodical approach to your search engine optimization. Remember that it is an audience that just wants to get the business part done. Many of the decision makers are going to be managers, department directors and some business owners so they just want to see the information, how you are going to solve the problem at hand and what the cost will be to do it. It is a different type of mind set than reaching out to a consumer based audience which is usually driven on emotion and branding to purchase what they want.