SEOYour B2B SEO Guide: Step-by-Step Strategies, Comparison Tables, and More
Your B2B SEO Guide: Step-by-Step Strategies, Comparison Tables, and More
Is it time for your business to create a business-to-business (B2B) search engine optimization (SEO) strategy? In this guide, we’ll explore the essentials of creating that tailored, ultimate B2B SEO strategy. We look at how to attract high-quality leads, build authority with your clients, and drive sustainable growth. Right now!
If you are new to the concept or looking to refine your approach, you’ll find solutions, inspiration, and more in this guide. If building the ultimate B2B SEO strategy is challenging with your current team or expert access, then we are here to help. Partner with WebFX to help with the world load, get insights and access to tools, and high-quality B2B SEO services!
B2B SEO is the process of optimizing a website to improve its visibility on search engines like Google, specifically for businesses that sell products or services to other businesses. Unlike business-to-consumer SEO, B2B SEO focuses on attracting and engaging decision-makers, such as managers, executives, and procurement teams, who are often part of longer and more complex buying cycles.
The goal of SEO for B2B companies is to generate traffic to a website, to increase its search engine results (SERPs), but also to increase it’s qualified lead generation. Leads are what are ultimately going to increase sales.
A B2B SEO strategy will do this by targeting specific industries, niches, and professionals that fall within its target audience. This requires a tailored approach that accounts for longer sales cycles, smaller search volumes, and high-value keywords. While these are common B2B SEO challenges, each one has a solution or workaround.
While the core principles of SEO, including keyword research, content research, and technical optimization, are both the same for B2B and B2C, there are some other key differences.
Let’s look at what is B2B SEO and how it is different to B2C SEO!
B2B SEO
B2C SEO
Audience Targeting
B2B SEO targets professionals who are more likely to make rational, data-driven decisions. This target audience also often consults with other stakeholders before committing.
B2C SEO focuses on a broader audience of individuals. They often look for quick solutions and do impulse or emotional purchases.
Keyword Strategy
B2B relies on niche, low-volume, and intent-driven keywords.
B2C targets broad, high-volume keywords.
Content Focus
B2B SEO content strategies include thought-leadership articles, case studies, whitepapers and in-depth guides that address specific pain points for businesses.
B2C content focuses on product features, reviews, and promotions.
Buying Cycle
The B2B buying cycle will include multiple touchpoints. There is usually a longer consideration tim period and leads need to be nurtured throughout every stage.
The B2C purchase process is quicker and is more transactional.
Social Media
Because of the professionalism of B2B target audience, social media is reserved for only a few professional/industry-specific platforms
B2C often uses popular social media channels and can be highly creative and fun with the content.
Goals
It focuses on lead quality, return on investment (ROI), and trust with your audience.
Looks more at traffic volume, sales, and engagement with followers and audiences.
Link Building Strategy
Encourages link-building with industry-specific, professional sites.
Creates link-building partnerships with popular blogs and social media influencers.
In theory, SEO for B2B and B2C share the same foundational goal. However, as the above table shows, the SEO strategies have completely different focus areas due to the audiences they target.
One of the most significant differences between B2B and B2C SEO is their respective sales funnels. While the funnels can be structurally similar, audiences move through them differently.
For B2C companies, leads typically move from the top of the funnel to the bottom. With B2B companies, though, leads move around different stages of the funnel until they convert.
This movement to different stages is caused by B2B companies having multiple decision-makers. It takes more time and research for companies to determine if you’re the right fit for them.
To develop an effective B2B SEO strategy, use these differences to your advantage. Create content and marketing messages that resonate with your target audience and align all your SEO efforts with your users’ specific intent. If you can maximize what makes your business unique, you’ll find it will give you impactful, meaningful results.
6 key benefits of B2B SEO
SEO for B2B offers unique advantages for businesses that want to attract other businesses as clients. Here are those 6 key B2B SEO advantages:
Drives high-quality traffic: With niche keywords and search queries highly focused on your target audience, the traffic generated on your site will be more qualified and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Generates qualified leads: With newly optimized landing pages, solutions for pain points, and a focus on buyer personas, a complete B2B SEO strategy can boost your business sales.
Improves brand authority: Your content strategy will include well-researched, informative content tailored to your industry, increasing your credibility.
Offers long-term ROI: B2B SEO is a long-term strategy and investment. With optimized content and website, your site will continue to attract leads and generate results over time.
Helps you outrank competitors: With continuous B2B SEO, you’ll gain an edge in competitive markets.
Scales with your business: As your business grows, your B2B SEO will scale with you. It builds on your content to reach a larger audience and get those additional industry professionals.
B2B SEO strategies in 12 steps
Let’s dive straight into our 12-step SEO for B2B companies guide! By implementing a multi-faceted approach to your SEO, you’ll increase your visibility and discover how to create a winning B2B SEO strategy in 2025.
Here’s a breakdown of creating the ultimate B2B SEO strategy
Complete a full SEO audit of your website. An audit will show you where your challenges are and what areas you should improve or focus on. It can also identify technical issues on your website that can hinder it’s performance, such as:
Broken links
Slow page load times
Duplicated content
Poor mobile responsiveness
An audit can also help you uncover opportunities, such as optimizing meta tags and enhancing internal linking. Once you understand and outline all the current obstacles, you can create an actionable plan to correct them, giving you a foundation for your B2B SEO strategy.
2. Complete a competitor analysis
A look at your competitors can help you understand how your business currently stands within the market. Check multiple different types of competitors, such as ones that compete against your services or products. Then there are ones that compete with you against your keywords and those that target the same audience as you.
Once you have a report of the gaps in their strategies, you can discover opportunities to outperform them. For example, if your competitors rank well for specific keywords but lack in-depth content for them, you can create more comprehensive resources and get that competitive edge.
3. Create buyer personas
The first thing you should do when you begin a B2B SEO strategy is to figure out who you’re targeting. For B2B companies, you’re trying to sell to businesses. Ultimately, however, those businesses are still made up of individual people. That means you need to pinpoint the decision makers at those companies, and you must keep that in mind for your B2B SEO strategy.
So, start by determining which types of businesses you’re targeting. Then, determine who at those companies is involved in the decision-making process. Depending on what you’re selling, these decision makers can be anyone from the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to a sales manager to a secretary.
To help with this process, you can create buyer personas — hypothetical people with characteristics common to those you want to reach. An example buyer persona could be “Alice, an accounting manager between 30 and 50 years old with 10–20 years of experience.”
Often, different stakeholders are in play, and each one needs different information about your services or product. For example, a procurement manager would be more interested in pricing and ROI, while the IT director would want to know about your features and technical specifications.
Creating different content for your different audiences and personalized tone and style, will ensure your content resonates with every decision-maker involved.
4. Research your keywords
Another difference between B2C and B2B SEO is the keywords you target. For B2B businesses, the keyword selection process is more thorough. Since B2B businesses have multiple decision-makers, you must target various keywords to appeal to these different people.
Expert insights from
Clayton TroutInternet Marketer
In order to be found on Google and other search engines, you need to know what people are searching for to find the products/services you offer. There are several trusted tools out there that can help you create a keyword strategy so you can begin to effectively optimize your website for these keywords. It is important to do this routinely as search habits and new keywords are being searched for on a daily basis.
Additionally, B2B businesses tend to target low-volume keywords. While these keywords may have less traffic, they tend to have more qualified traffic.
The KD category in the image is keyword difficulty. Keyword difficulty estimates how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword on a 100-point scale. The SV shows search volume. This is the estimation of the average monthly number of searches for a keyword over the latest known 12 months of data.
Start with the type of services or products you want to offer for your business. For example, let’s look at the product “CRM software” using the WebFX free keyword suggestion tool.
You can see already here are some great keywords and even blog topics that you can use, such as ‘10 best crm software’, ‘how crm software works,’ and ‘what crm software is available in the market.’
Some great places to start with finding seed keywords are to check:
Your services and products
Check what keywords your competitors use
Use forums and online communities for what your audience is talking/asking about
Ask your sales team or customer support teams what language the customers are using
Monitor industry trends
Once you understand who you want to reach, it’s time to start getting into the marketing itself. That process starts with optimizing for relevant keywords. But you don’t want to grab whichever keywords sound good and start using them on your pages. You should aim for keywords highly relevant to your business that you think your target audience will use.
An excellent type of keyword to target is long-tail keywords — keywords that are several words long. Since these keywords are longer, they tend to be more specific to particular queries. They also come with less competition since a smaller niche of businesses will target those key terms.
When you integrate your keywords into your content, try to place them strategically. Include them in the body copy, but also be sure to feature them in titles and headings.
5. Develop a B2B content marketing strategies
A critical component of SEO is content creation. B2B content marketing strategies drive people to visit your website and learn more about your business. For people to find that content, you need SEO to help it rank. Since B2B leads take longer to make decisions, you must continually provide helpful content that guides them toward conversion.
Top (Awareness): Customers know the problem you can solve.
Middle (Prospects): They are ready for a solution but need a little convincing that you are the right partner.
Bottom (Conversion): They have decided on a solution and are ready for you to give it to them.
The following table includes the common types of content you can use for B2B content marketing strategies. However, all these details can change depending on your products or services.
Content-Type
Funnel Stage
Target Audience
Benefits
SEO Considerations
Blog Post
Top of the funnel
Broad audience and researchers
Blog posts can educate and build awareness. It also drives organic traffic and establishes authority.
Use target keywords, optimize metatags, and include both internal and external links.
White Papers
Middle of the funnel
Decision makers, analysts
Creates in-depth insights and showcases expertise. White papers can also generate leads through gated content.
Create optimized landing pages for your white papers with clear call-to-actions (CTAs). Use keywords in the titles and descriptions, focusing on lead generation.
Case Studies
Bottom of the funnel
Decision makers and stakeholders
Builds trust and demonstrates proven results. It encourages readers to convert.
Case studies are a great place to use long-tail keywords specific to your industry. Optimize for niche search queries and structure with clear headings.
eBooks
Middle of the funnel
Managers and decision-makers
Offers value and captures leads. It also establishes you as an authority on complex topics.
Optimize your landing pages for conversions, and include keywords in descriptions. Use those gated forms to capture leads!
Webinars
Middle of the funnel
Decision makers and influencers
Webinars can engage with your audience, demonstrate thought leadership, and improve engagement.
You can optimize webinar pages with keywords and add transcripts for SEO. Repurpose webinar content into blogs and videos.
Infographics
Top of the funnel
Broad audience.
Infographics can simplify complex data. It also increases the likelihood of shareability and drives traffic.
Include keywords in the file names, titles, and alt text of the infographics. Start the sharing process by sharing on your channels and using it in other blog posts.
Videos
Across the funnel
Broad audience
Videos increase engagement and can simplify messaging. It also humanizes the brand.
Add video descriptions with target keywords and use the transcripts for SEO.
Landing Pages
Bottom of the funnel.
Ready-to-convert leads
Great for driving conversions. Provide clear CTA’s and offer product and service details on these pages.
Optimize for transactional keywords. Combine with compelling meta descriptions and engaging CTAs.
Email newsletters
Middle of the funnel
Existing leads.
Emails help to nurture leads that may have gone cold. Use them to keep audiences engaged and drive repeat traffic.
Link back to optimized pages on your site and track performance metrics.
Each time you write a piece of content, you should target a specific keyword. So, don’t write a blog post and then try to shoehorn a keyword in afterward — rather, pick the keyword first and then write the blog post specifically to address that query.
Similarly, you should aim to satisfy user search intent. That means asking, “What are they looking for when they visit this piece of content?” You can determine the search intent by looking at what already ranks for your keyword.
Another thing to keep in mind when putting together a B2B content marketing strategy is to make evergreen — that is, write it in such a way that it will still be relevant several years down the road. Avoid unnecessary references to specific years or current trends. That will keep your content ranking for as long as possible.
You want a content strategy that will grow with your company. Start with foundational pieces to get started, then expand to more complex or in-depth articles. Ensure you link between articles.
A few places to find content topics include:
Keyword research
Customer pain points and FAQ
Industry trends and news
Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ section
Forums and Q&A sites
Example of Google’s People Also Ask Section
6. Use visual content
A lot of B2B businesses use complex data or have walls of content on their site. A great way to break it up or give simplified explanations is to create visual content around it for your audience. You can include:
Infographics to simplify complex concepts
Videos and animations to explain products or services
Custom graphics to make your blogs or resources more engaging
Expert insights from
Clayton TroutInternet Marketer
Using different types of visual content in the form of videos, graphics and more gives your potential customer more ways to take in your message. People do not always want or what the time to read through a longer piece of content, so giving them different options can help increase the likelihood of them receiving your message in full.
7. Include local B2B SEO strategies
Over 1.5 billion searches each month contain “near me,” indicating local intent. Local SEO can be essential if you service specific regions or have physical locations. It can also be a great way to separate yourself from other B2B businesses in other regions or continents.
Create a Google Business Profile, which is a platform that allows you to create an online profile for your business. You can upload information like your company’s name, address, and phone number, among other things.
When users perform local searches, there’s a chance that they’ll see your Google Business Profile listed in a local SEO 3-pack. They can visit your website and learn more about your business from this listing.
8. Check your technical B2B SEO
Another step in ‘how to optimize a B2B website for SEO’ is to optimize the technical elements of your website. There are several key ways to improve your site’s technical B2B SEO, and you should aim to implement as many of them as possible. Be sure to optimize each of the following:
Page speeds: Your page load speeds should clock in at three seconds or less so users don’t become impatient and hit the “back” button. To speed them up, you can do tasks like cache your web pages and limit redirects.
Responsive design:Responsive design allows your site to change its layout to fit the screen where it appears, making it more mobile-friendly.
Image optimization: Compress all the image files on your site to prevent them from slowing down your pages, and give them alt tags so they’ll be accessible to screen readers and Google crawlers.
HTTPS: Make sure your site uses HTTPS rather than HTTP, making it more secure. As a result, users will trust you more and be more willing to visit your site — plus Google will rank you higher.
Expert insights from
Clayton TroutInternet Marketer
Making sure your B2B website’s technical SEO foundation is critical to make sure your website can be found on search engines. If there are issues preventing your site from being crawled and indexed, then it won’t matter how great your content is. Ensuring a site’s technical SEO is in good shape should be one of the first steps any site manager should take.
9. Include your off-page B2B SEO
Not all your B2B SEO strategies takes place directly on your site. You can increase your Google visibility using other platforms in a few ways.
To start with, you can earn backlinks. Backlinks are where third-party websites link to your content. If a reputable website links to you, Google takes notice and assumes that you’re also reputable. As a result, it ranks you higher.
For that reason, it’s a good idea to reach out to authoritative sites in your industry to request backlinks. You can do this by scanning those sites for broken or outdated links and then recommending that the sites replace them with fresh links to your content.
You can guest blog on any authoritative publications in your industry. Or encourage your customers to give client testimonials on third-party sites that will link back to you.
10. Use B2B SEO techniques for qualified lead conversions
Struggling to get leads with your B2B SEO strategies? Don’t worry! 54% of marketers say improving lead quality is their biggest challenge. Here are a few of the best B2B SEO techniques for lead generation:
Design compelling landing pages: These should be laser-focused on one goal. For example, you can capture contact information or focus on encouraging a specific action. Use a clean design with a clear CTA.
Craft clear and engaging CTAs: Calls to action guide your visitors to the next step in their customer journey. Use strong, clear, and action-oriented CTAs. Make them customer-centric so the client feels compelled to click them.
Give valuable gated content: eBooks, webinars, and insights are all high-value content that you can use. Ensure the content aligns with the visitor’s stage in the buyer’s journey.
Build a seamless experience: User experience (UX) directly impacts conversions. If you have a confusing layout or a slow-loading page, customers can bounce off the page and lose interest. Optimize the site navigation to avoid these challenges and make it easy for visitors to find what they want.
11. Track B2B key performance indicators (KPIs)
Your KPI’s will give you indications of the success of your B2B SEO strategy in the long term. A few KPI’s you can use include:
Organic traffic
Keyword rankings
Lead quality
Conversion rates, especially for SEO-driven traffic, are a key indicator of whether your strategy attracts the right audience.
12. Measure success with analytics
Use analytic tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console to give you valuable insights into your SEO performance. Use them to track the user’s behavior, identify pages that are working or ranking the best, and follow your visitors’ journey.
While checking short-term data can give you real-time insights for subtle changes in a campaign, the long-term insights will give you the best value. You can look at past interactions on your site to predict future analytics.
13. Bonus! Tools to create your B2B SEO strategy
Here are a few SEO tools to help you on your journey! Some are free, others require a subscription, but usually, there is a free trial option.
SEO.com:SEO.com is a great app for tracking your current SEO efforts. It allows you to view keywords, competitor rankings, and loads more!
Google Analytics: You can track your website data and see how your page performs in organic traffic and conversions.
Google Search Console: The Google Search Console will help you with your backend SEO. It can identify all technical SEO errors and even provide solutions to resolve them.
Google PageSpeed Insights: This tool from Google will show you your current load time. It will also provide suggestions on how to improve it.
Common challenges in B2B SEO
B2B SEO has its own set of challenges, mostly due to the nature of business-to-business transactions. There are several complexities involved, but there are solutions for all of them, which we will look at in more detail in the following table.
The Challenges of B2B SEO
The Solutions
Low-volume keywords
Focus on long-tail keywords that demonstrate clear intent, even if this means the search volumes are low. Use keyword research tools to identify phrases that align with your audience’s needs. Create high-value content around them.
Navigate long sales cycles
Develop content tailored to each stage of the funnel. Make sure you use the right user intent and tone for that stakeholder.
Establishing authority in a competitive space
Publish thought leadership content to showcase your expertise.
Balancing SEO with User Intent
SEO optimization sometimes conflicts with creating natural and engaging content for readers. The solution is to use keywords strategically and focus on answering questions and solving problems with the content.
B2B SEO is a long-term strategy, and depending on different factors, it often takes time to see results. However, you should see the initial improvements in rankings and traffic within 3-6 months. An increase in leads and ROI could take longer.
For B2B SEO, Google marketing is critical to the success of your business. If you don’t optimize your site to rank in search engines, people will find your competition before they find you. For businesses to find you and decide to hire you, they need to discover your business first.
A whopping 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine, which means there’s no better place to market than through Google. When someone wants to find a B2B business to partner with, they’re highly likely to conduct a Google search to find the right company.
For that reason, having a successful B2B SEO campaign can be the difference between remaining stagnant and experiencing growth.
All the key elements you need to drive revenue for your B2B business!
Get help with your B2B SEO
If you’re looking for help optimizing your SEO for B2B Google marketing, WebFX would love to give you a hand! We’ve earned over 1,100 testimonials from our clients, proving that we’re the SEO agency small businesses trust to drive top-tier results.
Check our B2B SEO services for more information on how we can assist you in reaching those SEO goals.
If you want to reap the benefits of SEO, don’t wait! To get started with us, just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!
