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.
