5 Strategic SEO insights every B2B business should know

If your business relies on people finding them online, search engine optimisation, more commonly known as SEO, can be critical to the health of your business. SEO can help increase organic traffic and rankings, boost your credibility, give you a competitive advantage, and also support your content marketing. In our last blog, we discussed why content marketing is essential for business success. But in order to optimise your online presence, you need to understand what to look out for. In this blog, we’ll share our insights about how you can approach optimisation to best serve your business. 

Focus on user intent

WHAT IS THE USER LOOKING FOR WHEN THEY SEARCH FOR SOMETHING IN GOOGLE?

The user intent, or search intent, is the intention an internet user has when entering a search term into a search engine. As search engines have become more intelligent and responsive to search queries, people have become more precise with their searches. What is their goal? What specific answer or resource do they intend to find? The answers to these questions are incredibly important if you want to ensure you rank highly on search engines and give your would-be customers what they want.

It is Google’s aim to give people using their search engine the results that best satisfy their user intent. If users quickly return to Google and click on a different result, it would suggest the content is not delivering on their user intent. This won’t help your conversions and will have an adverse effect on your rankings for those search terms. It’s important to remember that people can make different types of searches.

SEARCH INTENT CAN BE: 

1. Informational - if users want information
2. Commercial - if users want to further investigate or compare products, brands or services
3. Navigational - if users are trying to navigate to a specific website
4. Transactional - if users want to make a purchase

This is why you should make user intent the driving force behind your content and keyword strategy. Start by conducting keyword research. This will help you improve your keyword targeting to mirror search intent. The first step of SEO is always establishing what it is your customers are searching for. This will guide everything else you do.

Create high-quality content 

Your SEO is intrinsically linked to your content strategy. If you want to rank for searches, you need content to rank with. This means coming up with a plan for content you should create, as well as seeing if you can optimise the content you already have.

Look to your buyer profiles and think carefully about what your potential customers might be searching for and what their needs, pain points and queries could be. Then plan to provide content that delivers across the sales funnel. Are they looking for a top-level solution to their pain point, or further in the process of research and looking for the answer to more specific queries? Ensuring your content responds to a breadth of relevant queries along the sales funnel maximises your chances of customers finding you through organic search.

We previously wrote a blog with tips for how to tailor your content for each stage of the marketing funnel. 

As we discussed above, you want your content to be the best answer to the user’s query. That means using the most appropriate keywords and also knowing your customer. Build a persona of your customers, and anticipate their queries and concerns and what they would like to know. Then make sure your content is high quality. Google knows better than to reward low-quality content stuffed with keywords.  Their algorithms look out for signs that content is produced solely trying to rank without offering real value to users, and will penalise this content in search rankings. 

TIPS FOR CREATING SEO-FRIENDLY CONTENT:

• Use topic clusters
• Add internal and external links
• Write content that's digestible and easy to read 
• Use clear CTAs 

OPTIMISE VIDEO CONTENT

When people think about content, they often focus on writing and forget that content also includes video. SEO is all about expanding the ways that people can discover you online. Properly leveraging your video content, and ensuring you have good SEO on YouTube is an important way you can improve your overall visibility.

Google owns YouTube and often displays videos in relevant search results. Such is the dominance of YouTube as a video platform that if people search for video results, they will find that the results are overwhelmingly, in nearly every case, hosted on YouTube. When Google shows a video thumbnail next to a search result, users are much more likely to click that listing. No one knows exactly how much Google weights video content, but adding video content to existing web pages typically results in a dramatic increase in organic traffic.

What is very clear is that hosting videos on YouTube, optimising your YouTube SEO, and then embedding video on your company website, drives more traffic to your website, as well as indirectly driving up search results of linked webpages on your company website.

Earn high-quality links 

Link building is an extremely important part of SEO. Google does not rank websites in search results, it ranks individual web pages. Those web pages have more authority on Google if other well-regarded web pages link to them. The more links, and the more quality links the better. 

There are two types of links: internal links, and backlinks. You can build internal links by simply making appropriate links between the different web pages on your website. This also ensures your website is navigable, and that relevant content doesn’t get lost. For instance, it is always a good idea to link blogs and videos on the same topic. By doing this, you are also making it easier for users to find relevant information on your website.

Backlinks, also known as ‘inbound’ or ‘external’ links, simply mean links to your web pages that come from outside your website. Backlinks are especially valuable because they represent a "vote of confidence" from one site to another. For instance, if the website of a respected newspaper or educational institution links to your webpage, both online users and the Google algorithm itself will recognise that as a sign that your webpage (and therefore you) are credible.

WAYS YOU CAN BUILD UP BACKLINKS:

• Ask your partners or distributors to link to your website
• Pursue digital PR, by getting your articles or quotes published on another website, with a link back to your own
• Guest blog on other websites (with a link back to your own)
• Leverage influencers to review or promote your product or service
• Create quality content or research that other people will want to share (and give you credit for)

Migrate to G4 analytics 

How do you know if the steps you are taking to optimise your search results are doing anything? Your SEO efforts should all be underpinned by measurement and reporting. Google Analytics needs to become your new best friend. With that in mind, it’s important to note that Google is revamping its analytics offering. Google Analytics 4 is already available and will soon become Google’s default analytics tool.

If you haven’t yet migrated to this latest version of Google Analytics, you should. There are useful new functionalities you should take advantage of. In particular, you can generate useful reports to assist you in your SEO.

NEW METRICS YOU CAN TRACK IN GA4: 

• Engagement rate
• User engagement
• Engaged sessions
• Average engagement 
• Average engagement time per session

These insights can tell you a great deal about the performance of your website and how users are engaging with it. By using Google Analytics 4 to its full advantage, you can keep track of any changes or improvements you succeed in making.

Code Milk is a B2B digital marketing agency that helps businesses achieve digital success. If you would like more advice about improving your online visibility, we can help, speak to on of the team.