SEO is an important component of a B2B business’s digital marketing strategy. The right SEO strategy takes your website visibility to a higher position and keeps you ahead of your competitors. Much of organic traffic clicks- a massive 67.6% – come from the first five organic results on the first search engine results page (SERP). Moreover, 75% of searchers never click past the first page of results. With such statistics backing up the importance of SEO, it is evident that digital marketers and website owners should move it towards the top of their priority list.
In a report by Semrush, boosting SEO performance is a high priority for 67 percent of content marketing experts. Another 73 percent indicated that they employed their SEO abilities and tools to improve their content marketing results regularly. While the competition is extremely high, including SEO strategy in digital marketing increases website visibility, user traffic, conversion rate, and ROI.
While beginning your SEO journey itself can be challenging, keeping up with it is no less a task. The only constant in the complex world of SEO is change and it requires a combination of technical know-how, analytics, insights, content marketing capabilities, and link-building capabilities to be effective. SEO strategies themselves need to be optimized for every search engine.
Here are the top three SEO tips for digital marketers:
1. Include user-oriented keywords
You’ve probably heard it a thousand times and it’s true- at the heart of every effective SEO strategy is keyword research! While there’s a sea of keyword research tools available, your perspective while placing those keywords can make all the difference. Understanding how SEO fits into the buyer journey can help in converting those precious leads into sales.
According to a report, a B2B buyer spends 27% of the time in the purchase journey independently researching online. Digital marketers must analyze the buyer journey alongside keyword research. This will help in understanding buyer intent and then employing the right keywords at different stages of the purchase journey. Look at the following example and see how keywords change with each B2B buyer stage.
2. Try to rank for featured snippets
When it comes to search engine results pages, Google’s Featured Snippets is a prized position that many digital marketers strive for. Short snippets of text that display at the top of Google’s search results to quickly answer a searcher’s query are known as Featured Snippets. Definitions, tables, steps, and lists are all examples of Featured Snippets.
Let’s first look at what features snippets look like(Figure 2) if someone searches for “best ice cream brand” :
Earning a featured snippet on Google means securing the highest-ranking position, that is position zero, without advertising. But to achieve that your content needs to be optimized. Here’s an interesting thing about Google’s Featured Snippet, it mostly shows the content that “asks a question”. Thus, researching keywords keeping in mind the question-type search query can be helpful. Also, don’t overlook the “People also ask” box, it can turn out to be a goldmine of opportunities for a certain topic.
3. Keep up with search engine updates
Your SEO strategy will only work if you regularly keep a tab on the algorithm and feature updates of search engines. Believe it or not, Google is reported to change its search algorithm around 500 to 600 times each year. Thus, as a B2B digital marketer, keeping an eye on frequent search engine adjustments and updates is very important, you can’t expect your SEO efforts to reap results if the foundation isn’t right.
Other times, user and consumer behavior also prompt changes. Take this for example, Google reports that 27% of the online global population is using voice search on mobile. With the increase in the use of virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, the use of long-tail keywords in search will likely increase. As a digital marketer, it becomes your responsibility to hop on the trend and use it to maximize the business’s goals.
Let’s look at how using long-tail keywords can be specific and targeted and help in funneling down your audience.
Other practices like keeping an eye on competitors, adding meta descriptions, building backlinks, etc are also needed to ace your SEO strategy. However, it always boils down to the basics. While curating an epic SEO strategy, always set some realistic goals first, perhaps you can aim for certain numbers or percentages of increase in website traffic, leads in quarters. Remember, the end goal is not to just rank on top of SERPs, but to increase business outcomes.
SEO goals should be aligned with business performance based on understanding how SEO contributes to the marketing pipeline. Before beginning to start a new SEO strategy, assess the current one, research and make changes, incorporate techniques best suited to your target audience’s experience, intent and needs and add valuable informational content. If you found the SEO tips useful, have a look at our detailed guide to SEO.
