B2B (business-to-business) SEO involves optimising your website to boost visibility in search engines for other businesses.
When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), B2B companies face unique challenges compared to B2C (business-to-consumer) brands. That’s because you’re not selling direct to people, but other businesses that need your products and services.
Understanding these key differences can have a huge impact on your digital marketing results. With the right approach, you’ll unlock your company’s full potential, enhance your online presence, attract more organic traffic and build stronger connections with potential customers.
As an award-winning B2B SEO agency with over 25 years’ experience, our guide to the best SEO practices is the foundation of your winning strategy.
How to create a powerful B2B SEO strategy in 8 easy steps
If your marketing team is missing an effective B2B SEO strategy, you’re falling behind your competitors.
A strong strategy should remain laser-focussed on your target customers, but be flexible enough to adapt when necessary. So, when Google rolls out another algorithm update or a rival site outranks you, your B2B SEO strategy is agile, ready and can quickly adjust.
Companies that adopt B2B SEO best practices not only benefit from increased brand awareness, but they also attract audiences at every stage of the sales funnel. That means more customers, higher sales and bigger profits.
Follow these steps to B2B SEO best practices and watch your results improve.
1. Set your marketing goals
Let’s start with the basics – you’ll need a strong grasp of your branding, products, services and buyer personas. Only then can you begin to develop a dynamic B2B SEO strategy that delivers genuine results.
By setting clearly-defined goals at the outset, you’ll ensure your people are aligned before you launch into SEO.
2. Discover your buyer personas
The basis of any B2B SEO best practice is to gain a deep understanding of your potential customers and clearly identify who you’re targeting.
In this instance, your target customer isn’t a person; it’s a business. Building detailed profiles of your target B2B audience involves:
- What they’re searching for (specific products, services etc)
- What’s behind their search intent
- The type of language or jargon used
- The type of content they typically consume
Gathering this data helps shape your content and optimisation efforts around what your target audience cares most about. That way, your B2B SEO strategy will be more focussed, relevant and effective at reaching the right people.
3. Get to grips with your sales funnel
A B2B sales funnel typically contains more layers compared to B2C. It includes stages like awareness, consideration and decision – each one requiring its own SEO tactics.
For example, people at the top of the funnel are only just realising they’ve got a problem to solve. To reach them, your content should cover a broad range of topics that include industry-wide keywords to educate and draw them in.
As they move down the sales funnel, you can introduce more specific content that answers detailed questions and offers clear solutions your company can provide and deliver.
4. Conduct thorough keyword research
The next step in B2B SEO best practice is to launch into proper keyword research. That doesn’t mean chasing high-volume search terms, but rather finding the keywords that your target audience is using.
There’s a range of SEO tools for B2B companies that enable deep keyword research, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush and Moz Pro. They’re great for discovering relevant keywords and phrases.
We recommend a healthy mix of high and low volume keywords, including long-tail keywords that are usually less competitive and more closely aligned with genuine search intent.
You should also map those keywords to different stages of your sales funnel, so potential customers see your content, no matter where they are in the buyer journey. For top-of-the-funnel keywords, that typically means:
- Broad, information-led keywords
- Blog posts
- White papers
You should also focus on bottom-of-the-funnel keywords that people search for when they’re ready to purchase your products or services. In other words:
- Product-related keywords
- Product and/or service pages
- Case studies and testimonials
Here’s an example:
Our SEO Agency for Law Firms page contains the bottom-of-the-funnel keywords ‘law firm seo services’ (yes, we rank first in the SERPs for that specific term.) Therefore, our site is optimised for legal companies searching for businesses with expertise in SEO law tactics.
5. Optimise your landing pages
Your product or landing pages are among the most important elements of B2B SEO best practice – they’re where potential buyers become bonified leads.
To drive more sales, your landing pages should be fully optimised for both search engines and user experience (UX). So:
- Include your main keywords in the title tag, headers (specifically H1) and content
- Give your meta description some love (this has a big influence on click-through rates)
- Check technical performance so pages are fast and mobile-friendly
- Add a clear, compelling CTW to drive conversions
6. Develop a scalable content strategy
A scalable SEO content strategy keeps your online presence strong and steady. Produce a potent blend of blogs, guides, infographics, videos, podcasts and other formats that boost audience engagement.
Ultimately, your B2B content should tie back to your target keywords and the needs of your buyer personas. This helps to map everything out in a content calendar so you can stay organised and publish consistently to satisfy search engines and customer search intent.
Ultimately, your aim is to deliver genuinely useful, high-quality content that solves problems, establishes your brand as an industry leader and makes you the go-to name for businesses looking for your products or services.
7. Promote your content and build strong backlinks
Doing B2B SEO well involves more than just keywords and great content – it needs to be seen by the right people to earn quality backlinks and gain traction.
Backlinks are golden, boosting your rankings, improving your AI visibility and strengthening your site’s authority. You can also widen your reach by guest posting on respected industry sites, engaging in other marketing campaigns and staying active on social media – all this can make your content go further and help you tap into new audiences.
Similarly, building helpful SEO tools or resources can also attract natural backlinks, giving your SEO an organic lift. For example, the AI Crawler Access Checker we recently built secured a natural follow backlink from none other than Ahrefs!
8. Keep learning and adapting
B2B SEO is an ongoing project. When businesses rest on their laurels, they can quickly lag behind their rivals and lose potential customers.
The best way to stay visible is to put in steady work to hold onto those all-important rankings. That means creating fresh, engaging, optimised content featuring new keywords that keep you relevant and topical.
Take your foot off the pedal, and you’ll soon be outranked by a hungry competitor offering something shiny and new that grabs your audience’s attention.
To maintain SEO strength, ensure your strategy is flexible, your content is optimised, your site is functional, and you deliver a smooth user experience (UX) – all essential elements in the fast-moving world of B2B SEO.
B2B SEO vs B2C SEO: What’s the difference?
SEO technically works the same for B2B and B2C.
Search engines like Google don’t use a separate B2B algorithm, and the core ranking factors are identical. All the usual B2B SEO best practices still apply.
But in reality, B2B SEO plays out very differently.
Instead of targeting broad groups like “new dads” or “healthy diets”, you’re usually trying to reach a small, specific set of decision-makers like marketing directors, CEOs, or business owners shopping for accounting software.
That shift changes everything. B2C brands often chase big, high-volume keywords, while in B2B, it’s completely normal to focus on terms with 50 searches a month… or even fewer.
Your approach to content should also differ for B2B than it does for B2C. Social media outlets like TikTok might be perfect for a B2C brand. However, if you’re selling campus network design services, social media probably won’t help that much. Instead, your content marketing should focus on blogs, whitepapers, and email marketing, which are far more likely to achieve positive results.
Want to know more about B2B SEO best practices?
Are you keen to make B2B SEO best practices part of your marketing strategy? At MRS, our in-house specialists create award-winning SEO campaigns that only come with years of experience working with leading B2B companies.
Discover more about our dynamic B2B SEO services and our high-quality B2B PPC solutions to reach new audiences and drive better conversions.
You can also fill in our simple contact form, and we’ll be in touch within the hour.
