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Do B2B Companies Need Search Engine Optimization?

By Kristin Gabriel

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Published: 10Sep2008
Word count: 956
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Many B2B sites don't have sufficient content on their websites to respond to desired search terms that folks are using to find them. This is one of the biggest problems facing companies with business to business (B2B) as opposed to Business to Consumer (B2C) solutions.

Ao what does this mean? Consumer driven websites may get more daily searches from prospective customers, but B2B sites get a fair share of potential businesses, strategic partners, and even shareholders who are on the Internet using certain key words to search and find B2B solutions.

Here are just a few of the steps to ensure that B2B client websites are organized into the most logical, user-friendly architecture that responds to organic searches. That means, a search that comes up on the first page of Google, and not the sponsored ads on the top or right hand side of the page. These steps include:

1) Benefits of SEO. Today, with so many companies and individuals swarming the Internet and putting up websites, blogs, and posting to social media sites, the search engines are running out of bandwidth for indexing websites fast and efficiently. What used to take a company just two to three months to be ranked by Google and other search engines for keywords that people are using, may now take eight months or longer. The longer you wait to do the proper SEO for your B2B site, the longer it will take to become ranked. The proof is that we can take a look at your competitors today, and in three or six months, we'll tell you how your SEO compares as they become better and better ranked.

2) The Keyword Analysis. No matter whether you're are a B2C or B2B company, the first step is still a keyword analysis. BUT the differences are that a B2B company should not make keyword judgments, but rather create the gross list that is as inclusive as possible of the potential terms their actual prospects might use - and this would include vertical markets, potential strategic partners, the government in some cases, and even shareholders. As SEO experts, we then focus on generic keywords based on what these potential customers call things. You also need to think about whether or not searches will be about a problem they're experiencing, or the type of company potentially offering solutions? And often times geography may play a role in words people are using.

3) Relative Popularity of B2B Keywords. Once you've created the gross list of potential keywords, we will determine the relative popularity of these search terms to give us some idea of which search terms are used more often than others. The actual raw number of searches for a given search term does not matter.

4) Value of Website Optimization. You can now figure out the search terms by which your site will be optimized. For each B2B solution, there will be one or two relevant search terms that rank highly, three to five more that place as seconds, and many others that also have good potential. You can include terms with lower search volume because in B2B , these may yield less search volume or not as much traffic, but more likely it will yield a more serious potential partner or investor. Website optimization is where most webmasters make their biggest mistakes such as universal tagging, repeating the company name, or NOT using key words in Meta, Alt and Description tagging. This requires a true and experienced SEO consultant. 5) Writing Content for Extra Search Terms. B2B companies often have sparse website content, so they will need to find a home for all of their search terms. As always, each page of content should focus on a specific term. In other words, where else on your site can you create a credible landing page that is going to respond well to organic searches?

5) Internal and External Link Building Strategy. Some of the pages might be directly accessible through your site's primary navigation, other pages may be in the sub-navigation, and others may only be accessible through text links in the body copy of pages. Always keep the landing pages for the most popular search terms closest to the home page. Never go more than three layers deep, or the engines won't look there. Go for the least amount of clicks possible to get to the landing pages with the best key words. Landing pages related to less popular, more obscure terms (also known as longtail keywords)can be deeper on the site.

6) Interlinking Between Related Search Terms. If there are three landing pages for a given product page, a case study page, and a blog posting-make sure that the site visitor can easily get from the landing page to the other website pages.

7) Create Content and External Inbound Links. Articles, blog posts from external blogs, videos posted to YouTube or Google and the hundreds of other video sites, and bookmarks on Social Media websites must be created so there is activity generated TO your website from other places on the Internet. And this does NOT mean recripricol links, but just one way inbound links. This will help get your site ranked faster than anything. AND while we build these links, we can also add other versions of this same content with your keywords to pages of your website, so the search engines have a better chance of finding your B2B company. The bottom line is the faster you accomplish all of the above steps while continuing to build content and links, the better your ranking will be in the search engines. Your goal will be to STAY in the first page of Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

Kristin Gabriel is writer and social media marketing professional with a Los Angeles SEO firm. Her company also handles marketing, public relations, and online advertising. Visit MarComNewMedia.com or call 323.650.2838.

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