B2B SEO Refresher: Pointers for 2022

There’s a clear line of distinction between marketing to consumers (B2C) versus marketing to other companies (B2B). As a B2B marketer, you need to be aware of the specific blog content, SERP keywords or social media posts that business representatives search for—and avoid falling into the trap of using content that resonates with general consumers, and not company CEOs.

On average, it requires more time and effort to convert a business than a consumer. According to a recent ebook from Chili Piper, 55 percent of businesses surveyed take at least five days to respond to a B2B lead campaign or don’t even respond at all. This is why it’s vital to prioritize an SEO strategy with business-specific criteria to minimize that response drop-off. Curious where to start? Here are a few tips to help you get started:

Create Valuable, In-Depth Content

Data from the Content Marketing Institute suggests that over half of digital marketers plan to spend more money and resources on B2B content marketing in 2022 than in 2021. The most successful B2B marketers will tailor their content to increase brand awareness (80 percent), establish trust and credibility (75 percent), and inform or educate the target audience (70 percent). If you’re just starting to build your B2B content library, use the following five guiding principles to ensure that everything you create is already SEO-optimized:

1. Write in a concise, professional tone that establishes you as a subject matter authority;
2. Offer data-backed insights and sources to ensure your content is accurate and credible;
3. Provide something new, unique, relevant or industry-specific that will generate interest;
4. Include your own research or case studies that haven’t been published anywhere else;
5. Aim for at least 1,000 words in length—do more than scratch the surface.

Make Sure the Content Is Sharable

A good piece of content only does its job when it’s visible to your target audience. In other words, every piece of content you create must be in a sharable format and available to publish on social media networks or other digital spaces. “The average social media user has a microscopic attention span,” noted Sprout Social, and converting your blog posts into infographics or longform Twitter threads is, “definitely more interesting than links and likewise encourage engagement.”

Try to find creative ways to transform content into digestible snippets. For instance:

• Condense an extensive blog post or listicle into a much shorter piece of visual content, such as an infographic or an interactive chart;
• Post a quick audio clip of a podcast episode or teaser footage of a video webinar, rather than publishing an external link to the content;
• Embed a Twitter thread or LinkedIn message into a post to make the information visual and conversational, not just a paragraph of text.
   

Sprout Social also recommends that you focus on a select few SEO-friendly social media platforms, rather than spreading yourself thin across too many networks. This will maximize both your efforts and ROI potential.

Use Specific, Long-Tail Keywords

In most cases, businesses owners will search for answers on Google with highly-specific keywords, instead of the more generic terms that consumers may use. This is where long-tail keywords come in—although they have a lower search volume, highly specialized keyword phrases can attract the smaller, niche audiences you want to connect with. Based on a breakdown from Yoast, here’s what you need to keep in mind when it comes to keywords:

• A long-tail keyword phrase contains about 3–5 words and includes a head term (the main word to anchor the whole phrase;
• If the long-tail keyword phrase you choose is “B2B SEO digital marketing services,” the head term will be “digital marketing;”
• If you use the long-tail keyword phrase to link to external blog posts or webpages, link to content that’s most relevant to the head term category;
• Use your mission statement to define the long-tail keywords that will be most applicable to your content and searchable by the target audience.

Optimize Website Landing Pages

In order to optimize a landing page for B2B SEO, reduce the bounce rate and improve overall conversions, the content must be informative and easy to read. How do you make that happen? The design of your content must also be visually appealing, mobile responsive and user-friendly. You should also plan to structure the content for a quick, cursory read—you want the information to be easily scannable. Use short paragraphs and bullet points to condense the text, and write in an active voice to secure the reader’s attention.

At the end of your content, include a noticeable CTA in a prominent area of the landing page, and make sure it’s both specific and personalized. This tells the reader exactly what action to take and why it will benefit them. For instance, “Join our robust community of thought leaders like you,” has more incentive and appeal than “sign up.” Be sure to eliminate anything that will distract from the CTA on your landing page, like external links and navigation bars that send visitors elsewhere.

Start Crafting Your B2B SEO Strategy in 2022

B2B SEO tactics are often highly technical and require the professional assistance of online marketing specialists—no one expects you to know it all. If you want to create and launch a B2B SEO strategy in 2022, reach out to the team at 10x Digital. Our skilled SEO experts will walk you through each step in the process to build a campaign that converts business leads into clients.