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How to Perform an Effective B2B Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide
September 5, 2024
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The art and science of B2B SEO stand as the bedrock of a robust B2B performance marketing, and you, as a B2B marketer, play a vital role in shaping this strategy.
61% of marketers reported that improving SEO and growing their organic presence were their top inbound marketing priorities. (Source)
Hence, we decided to put together this B2B SEO guide, especially for all you B2B marketers looking to stay right on top.
This comprehensive B2B SEO guide equips you with practical insights to help you make the most of your B2B SEO campaigns. Here’s all that we’ll cover in this guide:
This guide is not just a collection of best practices; it's a forward-looking manifesto, paving the way for the future of B2B SEO.
Having a decent share in the SERPs plays a significant role in getting you the desired visibility for your B2B business. It's what gets your potential customers to learn about your products and services.
Let’s face it: B2B companies have significantly long sales cycles. With many decision-makers scrutinizing your products and services, it takes a lot to get a buy-in from each decision-maker in an organization.
To get prospective customers to buy from your business, you must build credibility.
Getting rankings for prominent niche search terms helps you display thought leadership that guarantees recurring conversions for your business.
B2B SEO is a core digital marketing strategy that helps draw the right people to your website. The approach helps you grow your business organically and reduce your dependence on paid ad campaigns.
A successful B2B SEO strategy helps you build relationships with your prospects by offering valuable content that fulfils some of their most pressing informational needs.
The strategy lets you get your ideal prospective customers into your marketing funnel and turn them into paying customers.
The difference between B2B and B2C SEO lies primarily in the target audience and the marketing strategies employed to reach them.
B2B keywords have a low search volume compared to B2C keywords. However, B2B searches are more motivated by specific business needs.
B2C keywords, on the other hand, typically have a higher search-volume but may be related to broader and more generic topics.
B2B audiences are decision-makers within other businesses. Their keyword research is often formal as their intent is to find solutions to specific business challenges.
B2C audiences are individual consumers and may look for entertaining content when searching the web. Their keyword searches are often more conversational and casual.
B2B sales cycles are usually longer, involving multiple touchpoints. Therefore, B2B SEO must focus on nurturing leads throughout the buying process.
B2C sales cycles are often shorter, emphasizing immediate conversions. That's why a B2C SEO strategy aims to drive quick sales.
In this section, let’s look at some of the key aspects of B2B SEO and how to use them to your advantage.
Write captivating meta titles and descriptions for each landing page and content piece. These concise snippets appear in search results and influence click-through rates.
Organize your content with clear headings (H1, H2, etc.) and subheadings. Use relevant keywords naturally within the content.
Create descriptive, user-friendly URLs that include your target keywords.
Add relevant internal links within your content. These help users navigate your site and distribute link equity across pages. By directing users to the relevant web pages, you can allow them to consume content with ease. Moreover, internal linking makes site navigation easy enhances user experience.
Off-page SEO is like the wind beneath your website's wings. It's not just about what's on your site; it's about how you build its authority and showcase it to the world.
Here are some off-page SEO strategies that can make a big difference to your B2B website.
Authoritative backlinks from reputable sources enhance your site’s authority and credibility. Here are some tips for executing a high-quality link-building campaign for your business.
White-hat link building practices have a tremendous potential to get you lasting results in terms of improved website rankings and brand reputation.
Online Directory Listings
Ensure consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information across popular niche directories.
Customer Reviews
Good reviews on platforms like Google My Business and industry-specific sites boost your reputation. Encourage satisfied clients to leave reviews.
To consistently rank on search engines, your website must be technically sound. It must be free from any SEO-related issues.
You can use an SEO auditing tool to check your website for any such errors and resolve them as soon as possible.
Here are some fixes that most websites need:
A slow-loading website causes poor user experience and drives users away. It leads to low average time on site and increases your site’s bounce rate.
Hence, it’s ideal to fix your site’s load speed and ensure it loads quickly across devices and browsers. Here are some actionable tips to improve your B2B website’s load speed:
Don’t forget that many of your target prospects visit your website on mobile devices.
Hence, you must ensure that your users can easily navigate the website across different devices, such as tablets, smartphones, and laptops.
Start With a Mobile-First Approach: Design for mobile devices first, then adapt for desktop.
Use a Responsive Theme: Choose a mobile-responsive template that adapts to varying screen sizes.
Remember that addressing error pages contributes to a smoother browsing experience for visitors and helps search engines index your site correctly.
Regularly audit for broken links and redirect dead URLs to maintain a clean site structure.
Search-friendly and authoritative content marketing is the life and soul of B2B SEO. It starts a series of positive and fruitful interactions between your business and potential customers.
Well-researched, informative content marketing establishes niche authority. It builds trust with potential clients.
Since your goal is to get organic search rankings, you must know that long-form content is more likely to rank than short-form content. Hence, it's ideal to focus on long form content creation optimized for the relevant search terms.
Also, quality content marketing attracts natural backlinks from reputable niche sites. These links improve your site’s credibility and its search engine rankings.
In-depth and audience-centric content marketing is an asset for your business as it continues attracting relevant people to your website.
How do you publish high-quality?
Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines help you write and publish quality content that resonates with users and search engines.
It's ideal to focus on creating content that demonstrates your personal experience with a topic. This authenticity helps validate your topical authority in your niche.
As an author, you must possess relevant expertise, qualifications, and credentials to provide reliable information.
Consider your overall reputation within your industry, especially among experts and influencers.
Users should trust your content. Factors include the creator’s reputation, content accuracy, and website reliability.
Here are some other key elements of high-quality content marketing that should be antegral ptoyour B2B SEO strategy.
Make sure you create content that aligns with user search intent. User search intent is a vital B2B SEO trend that refers to the underlying purpose or motivation behind a user’s online search query. It represents what the user hopes to achieve by typing specific search terms in the Google search bar.
Types of search intent include: informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial.
It's ideal to align your keyword strategy and content topics to fulfil all these types of search intent. The idea behind quality content is to avoid stuffing it with keywords but to make it as audience-centric as possible.
B2B content should be helpful and guide readers toward understanding and solving their problems. Ensure your content provides actionable steps or solutions.
Simplify complex B2B topics for better content consumption. To make your B2B content easy-to-understand and digest, you should avoid using jargon to technical terms in your content. In fact, it's your duty to explain all such terms to your readers.
In this section, let's understand how to implement a successful SEO strategy for your B2B business.
Your target market controls the direction your B2B SEO strategy will take. For instance, if you're targeting customers in a specific state, you must deploy local SEO strategies and optimize landing pages for local search terms.
Similarly, if you're targeting a specific country, you need to find and optimize your web pages for all such relevant keywords. And finally, if you're targeting international markets, you need to tweak your strategy accordingly.
The process of creating a winning B2B SEO strategy is to start learning about your target audience. In this process, your goal is to uncover the key personality traits of your ideal buyers.
Start documenting your ideal customer personas by incorporating the following details:
Keyword research is the foundation of a B2B SEO strategy. It helps you know about the keywords that you must target for your business to business search engine optimization campaigns. It helps you reach people who are relevant to your business.
So, what are some of the things to consider when doing keyword research for B2B SEO? Let's take a look at some proven strategies:
Effective keyword targeting forms the basis of a winning B2B SEO strategy.
One of the things you can't do in B2B SEO is to create a strategy without knowing what your competitors are doing.
It helps you analyze what's working best for your top B2B competitors.
Hence, it's a vital process that gives you a clear idea of your SEO goals and how you will achieve them. Here are some things you must consider when doing a B2B competitive analysis:
Find your competitors' top-performing content pages to learn about the type of blog posts, guides, or cluster pages you should publish on your website. By analyzing their best content pieces, you will get a fair understanding of the work you need to do to outdo such pieces.
Making a list of core SEO metrics helps you measure results against your business goals.
Every B2B marketer wants her website's main pages and content pieces to rank on the first page of the search results.
It's what guarantees a high level of traffic for a B2B website. Hence, tracking keyword rankings regularly is an essential part of analyzing and improving your B2B SEO efforts.
The right way to do this is to check your Google Search Console to learn if search queries are getting rankings for your website. You can also use a B2B SEO tool like Semrush to conduct an in-depth analysis of how your site is faring in the search engine results.
B2B SEO is essentially an organic way to grow a business. How do you measure if your SEO content strategy is working? Head over to your Google Analytics dashboard to check whether your organic traffic consistently grows with your SEO efforts.
A continuous improvement in traffic is a good sign for your business.
Average session duration represents the average time visitors spend on your site.
This metric represents the quality of experience your site offers its users. It shows the success or failure of your technical and on-page SEO optimization efforts.
CTR is a metric that measures the portion of searchers who click on a search result after seeing it. Precisely it’s calculated as the ratio of impressions to the total number of clicks.
A higher CTR is favourable because it shows that more people visit your site after seeing it in the search engine results.
If you're experiencing a low or reduced CTR on some of your web pages or content pages, consider re-doing their meta titles and meta descriptions.
Tracking your site's backlinks is as vital as working hard on your link-building campaigns. The quality and quantity of backlinks that you acquire per month or per quarter show whether your link-building strategy is working to get you the desired outcomes.
One of the big reasons why you're running B2B SEO campaigns is leads. That's why the number of leads that get added to your sales funnel is a metric you must alway track.
For tracking leads, you can measure the goal conversions on the website's relevant landing pages.
Lead generation is your ultimate goal, and you must keep a close eye on this all-important metric.
First and foremost, a winning B2B SEO and content marketing approach is about putting quality over quantity.
Don't forget that SEO is a long-term game, and if you work on building demonstrated brand thought leadership by investing in quality content and links, you'll get consistent results.
Secondly, it's important to focus only on the relevant keywords and campaigns.
For instance, if you're a small business with scanty resources, don't go targeting keywords related to broad topics and with a very high search volume.
In such a scenario, you should run your SEO campaigns around easy-to-get, long-tail, low-volume keywords and start generating high-intent traffic and leads.
Finally, you must ensure that your web pages are technically sound at all times—it's a must for you to win in your B2B search engine optimization game.
At TripleDart, we believe in making every dollar of your marketing investment count. Plus, we have experience creating and executing high-ROI SEO strategies for B2B businesses like yours.
Take a look at our case studies to learn how we've built robust sales pipelines for our B2B clients with the help of tailored B2B search engine optimization.
And if you think we'll be a good fit as a B2B SEO agency for your business, then book a free consultation with one of our experts.
SEO is indeed significant for B2B businesses as it helps to enhance your business's online visibility and drives targeted web traffic.
It's a strategic approach that focuses on keywords that decision-makers within companies search for to find answers to some of their most burning questions.
An effective B2B SEO strategy can increase a company's credibility and establish it as a thought leader in its industry, contributing to a consistent flow of customers.
Creating a winning B2B SEO strategy in 2024 involves understanding the unique needs of business decision-makers and reaching out to them with tailored SEO campaigns.
The key elements of a B2B SEO strategy include audience persona development, keyword research, content strategy, backlink strategy, a thorough competitive analysis, and outcome analysis.
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