How Can SEO Make Your B2B Company More Relevant?
July 10, 2018 | Posted In: B2B, Digital Marketing, Social Media
What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an online marketing strategy that increases the rank of a search result within the natural results of a search engine. Let’s break that down. By using SEO tactics, you can make your website appear closer to the top of a search. This is helpful because more people will likely click on your site, raising your web traffic and creating buzz around your business.
What Are Advantages of Using SEO?
A major asset to using SEO is that you can maximize the amount of views you get without having to pay for a top spot. This is advantageous for B2B sellers because 88% of B2B buyers say that online content has a moderate to major effect on who they purchase from (CMO Council).
SEO is a unique method of marketing; rather than having to seek out your audience, they find their way to you. Your website reaches those who are actively searching for what your business offers. In this way, the additional web traffic that SEO provides is a major edge in lead generation. Statistically, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, which is much more impactful than the 1.7% close rate taken from other avenues of advertising (Constant Contact).
How Is SEO Different Today Than It Was a Few Years Ago?
SEO used to solely involve using specific keywords or phrases in a site that were commonly searched for in relation to the business. For example, Square One Creative Group is a B2B marketing firm based out of Covington, GA. If a user types “B2B marketing firm Covington, GA” into Google, the search engine will analyze the results, see that this website includes those keywords, and bring it up as a top result.
This is still around today but is now one of the more standard levels of SEO. The capabilities of search engines in terms of how they rank results are evolving; therefore, so is SEO.
Today, merely including keywords or phrases in your copy does not guarantee that you will be among the top results in a search. These keywords are still incredibly important to your ranking, but there are new factors that you have to think about, such as the type of content that people want to see on your site.
How Does Content Improve SEO?
What is content? Why do you need it? It’s virtually impossible for all marketers to come up with one definition that gets the full meaning across. Understanding what content is means understanding what your audience wants. It is useful, well-organized information that is presented to an audience with the intention of garnering an action or a response. Some common formats of content include text, images, and video.
Google’s algorithm for ranking search results can now evaluate the strength of the content that you post. The exact method through which Google calculates rankings is confidential, but they suggest several ways through which you can maximize your spot in a search. Your content should be informative, valuable, credible, unique, and engaging.
What Are Key Challenges?
It takes a lot of time and energy to produce high-quality content for your business—the last thing you want to do is let it get lost online in the endless pages of search results and be left with no return rates.
When dealing with content creation, it is just as important to ensure that people will find your content as it is to make it. The right kind of content can work wonders for your site’s visibility.
What Are Our Recommendations for Using SEO?
There are several things that you can start doing today to increase your search engine optimization:
- Monitor the web traffic (and other analytics) of your site
- Pinpoint a specific set of keywords and phrases for your target audience
- Post high-quality content often for higher page visibility rates
- Share your articles on social media
Takeaways on SEO
- 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results, so it’s important that you use SEO to be as close to the top as possible.
- Maintaining an active online presence makes your product or service much more competitive when it comes to proposals later on in the B2B buying process.
- In addition to keywords, content is a major opportunity for your website to become more relevant in searches.
- It’s crucial that you start the conversation within your company on how to use SEO to your advantage and increase your lead generation today.
At Square One, we offer SEO services that will enhance your company’s publicity and generate leads for new business.