When it comes to SEO, the devil is in the details.

The nuances between some verticals can be slight, while the differences between SERPs for slight variations of the same keyword can be sweeping.

Because of this, it's important to be aware of how SEO can be best leveraged to take advantage of these nuances — and focus on what works for the target audience.

In this post I'm going to specifically explore how we approach optimizing content and doing SEO for B2B companies (and I'm going to throw in some bonus information around user experience and driving conversions — lucky you).

Differences Between B2B vs. B2C

The differences between these two top-level audiences are staggering. In the interest of keeping things actionable, here are the main considerations you need to pay attention to when designing and building your SEO campaigns:

Education

B2B buyers are likely to be more educated on the nuances of the products or services they're seeking to invest their tightly managed budgets into. They're going to be deeply invested in the specifics of the purchase, they will have requirements sheets for features, want to see your deep knowledge of their product or sales cycle, and will need to be shown social proof in the forms of clients and testimonials.

Price

For a consumer product you may expect to spend anywhere from $50 to $500, depending significantly on whether or not it was an impulse buy versus a calculated decision. For a commercial product, instead you're likely to be considering spending in the range closer to $5,000 to $50,000 or more.

With 10–100x the average price tag, you can expect ~10–100x the average length of the buying cycle.

Buying Process

The buying process for B2B services (especially software at an enterprise level) usually runs through an expanded version of the consumer purchase funnel. Where a consumer's consideration phase often includes reading reviews, asking friends, and price shopping — a B2B buyer at a $50,000+ price point with a 3–6 month sales cycle has an entirely different journey.

This becomes critically important when designing a B2B SEO campaign, because you need to make sure you have pages and associated content to support each stage of the business buyer's purchasing journey.

Decision Makers

With consumer products you're often selling direct to the decision maker, but that's rarely the case when selling to a business. Instead you need to consider all of the departments that may be weighing in on the purchase decision, and more so — the varying motivations of those people depending on their organizational roles and responsibilities.

This again means building out the specific content needed to effectively pitch and sell into each of the functional roles that may be weighing in on writing you a check.

B2B Search Behavior

Now let's expand on how search behavior for B2B purchases is specifically different. Since we work with a lot of B2B software companies, I'm going to draw on my specific experience in what I've found to be true most of the time when we're setting up B2B software websites and SEO campaigns for success.

The most common roles that need to be considered from a B2B SEO perspective are:

Sales / Marketing

These folks are going to be most concerned with lead-flow — how is the website helping us generate new leads, qualify those leads, and helping to build our sales pipeline. These teams will be focused on top of the funnel and middle of the funnel keywords, looking to understand how you are helping to drive new prospects into their CRM.

Finance / Accounting

These departments are going to focus on how much your solution costs, what your payment terms are, and process alignment. They want to know you're legit, and how your solution and its features stack up against your competitors. These folks are likely to be looking at your client lists, case studies, and running comparison searches against your closest competitors.

What's important here is making sure the comparison content exists, and if you want to be smart about it — put it somewhere other than your own website, i.e. get an influencer to write the post or use a 3rd party content platform.

I.T.

More times than not, this is actually where you'll run into a brick wall more so than accounting. Search behavior among IT departments tends to focus on the technical details of your solution:

This is where having a detailed and comprehensive FAQ section comes into play — and making sure it ranks for informational and technical queries.

Management

These folks are going to be most concerned with top-level impacts to the organization:

Management folks are unlikely to be doing much of the Googling. Instead they will likely be asking their direct reports in Sales, Marketing, and IT specific questions — this is where you need to make sure it's easy for each of those departments to find answers so the information can be quickly and easily provided upward.

The B2B Sales Process

The next detail that is important to wrap your head around is HOW B2B companies sell, and what their internal sales process looks like, so you can design your campaigns to support it.

Most of the B2B software companies we work with operate with a sales process that moves from MQL (marketing qualified lead) to SQL (sales qualified lead).

Where MQL means the visitor has come into the site and converted on an initial event to qualify them as a lead — usually a report download or a demo request. Then to move into SQL, they usually need to complete a more specific qualification conversion like completing a company questionnaire, a solution requirement form, or attending a live demo.

If you overlay how this maps to keyword modifiers, search engine optimization can be used to create rankings that generate and then nurture leads at each stage of the funnel. The more you pair your SEO efforts with engagement strategies and leverage marketing automation and email nurturing, the better your net results will be.

Designing Your B2B SEO Campaign

Now it's time to design your growth engine — and not surprisingly, here is where most agencies fall short of delivering real value.

Let's say you've done all of your keyword research, and built out a nice SEO content map to support the various stages of your sales process. Simply having that content map isn't enough — you need to then map the content against your buyer's purchase journey to:

  1. Build out your keyword strategy
  2. Identify where there are still holes that SEO-focused content won't fill

Kicking ass with B2B SEO isn't enough on its own to crank up your lead volume. There will be components of your target buyer's journey where you will need to have pages and content to move them through your funnel, and SEO won't play any role at all.

An example of this: industry-specific use cases or case studies, where there's no real search volume to speak of — but you need to create a bridge from informational to initial conversion to push visitors through your funnel. In this case your conversion funnel blends with SEO to create a more complete picture.

Design Patterns for B2B SEO

Another common wall I see B2B websites hitting is how to implement on-site SEO without sending their site's user experience straight to hell. If they focus 100% on the UX, it's highly unlikely they'll be using patterns that still support getting all of the necessary content and internal links into the pages.

Instead, there are design patterns that bridge the gap between SEO and UX. These include elements like:

These range from just supporting prescribed on-site SEO to also leveraging best practice conversion-focused design for key pages like feature detail pages, demo request pages, and content upgrade templates.

Building Links for B2B SEO

Link building continues to be of epic importance for pushing up your organic rankings. The thing about building links for B2B sites is most of the more scalable strategies can still work — you just need to adjust your approach and positioning.

Here are the link building strategies we're using for B2B websites:

Resource Link Building

Good old fashioned content creation and promotion. The nuance here is to be relevant for B2B — these pieces tend to have to be process focused, or solve a specific issue of too much information or misinformation, where the resource is the comprehensive destination for organized data on the subject.

Broken Link Building

Broken links have become the diamonds in the rough. These are best utilized if you scrape for them monthly and be ready to jump on one if and when the opportunity presents itself.

Partner Link Building

The easiest of all — hit up your strategic or professional partners and make sure they're linking to you. This is a good opportunity to shoot for optimized anchor text links, especially if you can negotiate a linked mention in a relevant blog post.

Expert Round-Ups

While yes these have been done to death, there are still SO many professional verticals where they barely exist. The more boring, obscure, or hyper the niche is — the better likelihood you have that ego-bait is still alive and will work with flying colors.

Scholarship Link Building

Google still understands that universities are some of the most trusted websites on the web — so if done well, and at scale, this still moves the needle. A few nuances to success:

Sponsorship Link Building

Become a sponsor for events or causes. These tend to work best when local — think a local fair, soccer team, fundraiser, raffle, etc. Everyone and everything has a website these days.

How SEO Drives B2B Leads

So how does all this SEO stuff translate into leads? It comes down to using the right tool for the job. In the case of all the nuances in B2B sales, it usually means leaning on one of the following vehicles throughout the various stages of the conversion funnel:

The art form is then scoring the above conversion points based on their internal value to the company's sales process, and then layering in marketing automation in terms of lead nurturing via email sequences and re-marketing to drive the desired outcome.