Business-to-business search engine optimization, or B2B SEO, is an online marketing strategy with two closely connected goals. The basic objective is to improve your rankings in the search engine results and boost your SEO to make it easier for businesses that are interested in your products or services to find your website.
B2B SEO is important, and there are statistics to back it up. According to Gitnux, 70% of brands generate more sales with SEO than PPC, although the return on investment varies depending on different factors.
Optimizing your website and providing top-quality content are crucial for your SEO. But to reach the right audience, getting insights from the sales team is vital. By working closely with them and getting their input, you will see results quickly. Here’s more information on how to improve your B2B SEO strategy by collaborating with sales.
Understanding Your Sales Team’s Insights
If you are a B2B company, your clients are other companies. In such an environment, it can be tricky to find and retain customers, which is the task of the sales team. Essentially, this group (or individual) is looking for new opportunities to sell your products or services, aiming to boost profit.
Besides looking for new customers, the sales team works hard to keep existing ones. Some statistics indicate that improving customer retention by only 5% can boost profits by up to 95%.
There are many ways for the sales team to establish and maintain close relationships with customers. They may focus on pinpointing the product’s best points and what your B2B solutions can do for clients, follow and try to keep up with current market trends, and achieve set goals. It’s not always easy, but using sales intelligence can help to close more deals and achieve objectives.
Increased traffic to your website, which comes from an improved SEO strategy, can also help the sales department to boost profit. But to tailor the product pages, blog articles, and other website content to fit potential customers best, you need to listen to what this department has to say. Their insights and close collaboration can be crucial to send a strong message to potential clients that visit the website.
Steps to Improve Your B2B Company’s SEO Strategy
Is it time to start working on your company’s SEO strategy? Here are the steps for every B2B to follow to boost its position in search engine ranking while ensuring the focus remains on potential customers!
Step 1: Research and Understand Your Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a detailed overview of the specifics of the customers/business you plan to serve, including their needs, demographics, objectives, and other details. The main purpose of creating a buyer persona is simple – it should help you reach your goals by enabling you to offer the target business exactly what they need.
It will take some time and effort to create a buyer persona. Research might show you that you have different groups of buyer personas based on the products offered or other parameters, so segmentation might be necessary. You can follow market trends, read the latest research, check out rivals’ websites and blog posts, create online surveys, or use social media to obtain information.
For example, let’s say that you created an SEO platform. Your buyer persona could be any digital marketing agency that would use your tools when working with their clients. That’s a broad spectrum of agencies, but if your tools are only available in English, you could narrow it down to English-speaking clients.
Any detail can be important in creating a buyer persona. Working closely with the sales department and listening to sales team insights can assist in optimizing that persona. It’s also vital that you are able to adjust the buyer persona profile on the go. Things might change with new market trends, so putting in continuous effort is important.
Once you have a buyer persona ready, try understanding your ideal customer. Dive into what their potential needs are and how to meet them and offer attractive content that will lure them to your website.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Keywords
How does a potential client come across your B2B website? The odds are that they are searching the internet for particular keywords. Optimizing your website for the right keywords, or paying for a CPC campaign, means that you can be at the top of the search engine results for the desired phrases.
Analyzing the keywords your competitors use to drive traffic to their websites is imperative. You can use a dedicated tool for competitor search to overview any rival’s website in minutes. It will provide useful information about the top search phrases, along with the keyword difficulty rating. That can help you understand how difficult it is to rank for the desired keyword.
Once you have the results, you want to closely analyze them and draw smart conclusions for your B2B SEO strategy. You can divide the keywords into groups by topic or search intent. Remember to check search volume and estimated CPC costs.
You don’t have to choose the most expensive options – this depends on your budget. Even ranking for keywords with a lower search volume can be extremely effective, especially if you are on a tight budget. The important thing is to see the content type your rivals offer for those phrases. Consider if that content type is the best approach to meeting users’ needs and determine what path you will take.
Step 3: Create Content That Addresses Your Buyer Persona’s Needs
Before you start creating content, consult your sales team for insights. It’s best to organize a meeting and ask them to provide a detailed report on what details they think should be presented on the website. The sales team can help determine the best ways to meet the buyer persona’s needs, whether by highlighting the strongest selling points for a particular product or tailoring a service to specific requirements.
The primary SEO goal is for the website to offer top-quality content. Product pages should be a top priority, offering detailed and transparent information on what you offer. By working with content experts and the sales team, you’ll be able to present the solution you created better and make it more attractive for the reader visiting that page.;
You shouldn’t forget the importance of other content on your website, which could include:
- How-to tutorials. You can create detailed guides on how to use your services or products. To make these tutorials more accessible, consider incorporating text to speech narration. This can provide an additional layer of engagement for your audience, making your content even more inclusive. Use images in tutorials and even make YouTube videos, as some prefer that type of content.
- Blog posts. Detailed posts about things related to your industry help establish credibility and show you are knowledgeable about the industry and what clients need.
- Customer care. You need to secure simple and efficient ways for customers to reach you if they have questions or want to discuss your project. You can talk to your sales team about recommending the best ways to contact them and design a strategy to respond promptly.
- Content Creation
Content creation stands as the backbone of a compelling online presence. It goes beyond mere information sharing; it’s about connecting with your audience on a profound level. The ability to produce valuable, relevant content is pivotal in satisfying the needs and expectations of your audience. Content creation is an immersive journey into the realm of influential content that goes beyond delivering information, ensuring meaningful engagement with your target audience.
Step 4: Track Your Results
Now that you’ve published the content, the only thing remaining is to be patient and wait for the results. Remember the importance of tracking the performance to see the progress. Professional platforms can offer comparisons to previous days, weeks, or months. With the help of tools like Google Analytics, you can easily measure whether the traffic has increased and if the boost has reached your expected goals.
Even if you are on the right track and exceeded the set objective, it may still be a good idea to review the strategy to see if you can make any adjustments. If things are going your way, the odds are that those adjustments will only be minor.
But if you are far from your goals, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Did you fail to identify some important aspects of a buyer persona, or did it change from the time you defined it? You could switch the keywords to focus on, as some alternatives might give better results. There may be a bit of trial and error until you find the right formula, but it is well worth the effort.
Conclusion
Sales team insights can be integral in optimizing B2B SEO efforts and achieving goals. They can help reach the right audience by enabling you to create and understand a buyer persona. The sales team can point out the strengths of different products and solutions, ensuring you create optimal content that will be engaging for your users.
And it’s not only when creating and launching an SEO strategy that the sales team should be included. You will have to adjust advertising efforts on the go to get the most out of your advertising campaigns, and input from the sales team can be crucial in making optimal adjustments. That’s why you shouldn’t hesitate to integrate sales experts and begin discussing how to create the best SEO strategy together!
Author Bio – Brayden Campbell
Brayden is an SEO expert with over a decade of experience in the field. In his free time, Brayden enjoys walking his dog and listening to heavy-metal music.
