Complete B2B SEO Strategy For 2024

No one wants to spend their company dollars on the wrong audience. That’s why every intelligent SEO strategy starts with the buyer and the age-old question, ‘who is your B2B customer?’

Having a customer avatar allows you to make the right keyword choices and to focus your efforts on digital channels you know will make an impact.

There are many things to consider when creating an SEO strategy for your business. One of the most important is choosing what keywords to focus on. You can’t afford to pay for every search term that brings potential clients to your website.

Getting into the mind of your customer is key (see what we did there?) to developing your list of keywords. You need to know what they’re looking for and what key terms they use to find your product or service on Google or Bing.

But not all keywords are worth trying to rank for. For example, if you try to rank for ‘SaaS HR software’, you’ll be competing with millions of other pages, and it’s unlikely that you’ll ever outrank the top-ranking pages already there.

Part of your strategy is developing a list of keywords that not only match your target customer’s search queries, but that also have a chance of ranking on Google. Therefore, your ‘Saas HR Software’ might become ‘SaaS HR Software for universities,’ so to speak.

At Geeky Tech, we spend a lot of time on this phase of your strategy. Our keyword experts use years of experience and professional tools to narrow down the most profitable list of keywords that will get you ranked and get you noticed by the right people. Learn more about keyword research.

Let’s talk about pulleys and levers. While technical SEO may not be something a customer looks out for (and therefore, why would it make a difference to your Google rank?), it might just be the reason your pages aren’t showing up on search results.

When developing your B2B SEO strategy, consider hiring a techical SEO agency to take a look at your website’s settings, themes, and content management system.

Something as small as an outdated WordPress theme could be affecting your rankings. For example, our on-page SEO Geeks go through a thorough site-wide inspection to check for things like:

• Mobile friendliness
• Multi-browser compatibility
• UX/accessibility
• Duplicate content
• Existing redirects and redirect chains
• Sitewide schema
• HTML language attributes
• Valid SSL certificate
• XML sitemap
• Open Graph settings
• Keyword density
• Google services and Bing
• Webmaster setup
• Self-referencing canonical tags

Why else should you be paying attention to your technical SEO? Because technical problems can hurt the user experience, which—because Google takes a user-first approach—will hurt your rankings.

You’re likely well aware of the term ‘user experience’ or UX. But if you’re still thinking of it as separate from Google’s ranking algorithms, or even technical SEO, it’s time to revisit the tight-knit ecosystem of search engines.

Let’s say your content is fortified by a robust list of keywords developed by the most intelligent SEO minds in the business. On top of that, your product works so well that your customers are lining up to leave reviews on Amazon.

But, whenever a potential customer lands on your homepage after waiting 30 seconds for it to load, they are assaulted by an array of clashing neon colours; led to a navigation menu that makes less sense than the final season of Lost; and bamboozled by a series of buttons that lead them to broken links and broken dreams.

Assuming that anyone would wait that long for a page to load (and statistically speaking, most of us won’t), how long before that potential customer cuts their losses and abandons your site? And if enough people start bouncing out before they’ve even scrolled, how long do you think it’ll take Google’s algorithms to pick up on the fact that you have a site that immediately revolts people?

This rather colourful example demonstrates that a) technical SEO and user experience cannot be separated, and in fact, one improves the other; and b) marketers should never get so hung up on pleasing Google that they lose sight of what’s really important: pleasing the customer, baby.

We’re sure by now you’ve heard the term ‘content is king’, which is sage advice that shouldn’t be ignored. Your potential clients are consuming high-quality content like never before to help them decide who they want to do business with.

Your B2B customer is discerning, intelligent, and knows who your competitors are. Generating high-quality content that the customer deems valuable not only boosts your rankings, but also improves your credibility.

Unlike your B2C customer’s journey which moves at relatively lightning speed, it’s very unlikely that your B2B customer will look at one piece of content and convert. The buyer’s journey is a long one, which is why you should focus on top-of-funnel content that raises awareness, informs, and educates your customers.

Your content strategy should include engaging and thought-provoking content in the following formats:

• White papers
• Pillar content
• E-books
• Printable guides
• Blog posts
• Case studies
• Infographics

The more content you create, the more your customers will pin, repost, mention, and link to your site, which sends the right signals to Google’s ranking algorithms (more on that in the next section).

Even though conversion rates for B2B sales are typically much lower than B2C, it doesn’t mean that producing content is a waste of time or that you shouldn’t utilise your long-tail keywords in your copy.

If you have your customer avatar, then you’ll know where and how your target audience consumes their content, which will help you develop a strategy to create content that ranks.

By now, you know what you need to do to increase your rankings and drive organic traffic to your site:

1. Understand who your B2B customers are
2. Develop a list of keywords that match your customer queries and that will also allow you to rank with those search terms
3. Ensure your website looks good and performs well for both search engines and customers
4. Regularly publish keyword-rich content that shows you are a thought leader and expert in your field

But there’s a final step of SEO that should be part of your B2B strategy to gain more traffic to your site: establishing online authority.

We also call this off-page SEO because this step is all about generating backlinks from other high-authority sites. Google gives priority ranking to websites that can ‘prove’ that they actually are who they say they are.

Google’s algorithms are looking for proof of this in the form of social trust, which, in the world of the internet, looks like backlinks, site mentions, customer reviews, social media follows, and basically, just as many referral links as possible. And not from shady, spammy websites, but real domains that other people trust.

Without completing this final stage of your SEO strategy, you won’t be sending Google the right signals, which means you won’t be rewarded with rankings.