Crossing the SEO Chasms: Where B2B Organic Traffic Plateaus
Today, we’re going to be taking a look at 3 common places organic traffic plateaus or drops off for B2B companies.
Websites will see an increase in organic traffic but they’ll reach a point. The edge of a chasm. And to get to the next stage of growth, they need to cross it.
Below, we have the dream situation! One that is hard to achieve.
Your organic traffic increases over time - trending up and to the right - flying across the chasms.
However, quite often, organic traffic plateaus or drops off. You fail to cross the chasm.
And try as you might, you can’t seem to do anything to increase traffic!
Your competitors pass you and you’re left looking at a Google Analytics chart from a year ago… reminiscing over the good old days ??
But, fear not, we’re going to:
So, let’s go…
SEO Chasm #1 - no or low-quality content
Quite often, a website will rank in 1st position for little apart from its brand name, and some other branded keywords e.g. [brand name] + [service]
At this stage, your organic traffic is closely tied to how well-known your brand is.?
So it may grow slowly over time (depending on other marketing activities), but more often than not it plateaus.
We see many early-stage start-ups or companies that haven’t invested much in their website stuck here.
It’s the first chasm and it’s a tough one to get out of. And the main reason why is because you don’t have:
Or, you have this content but…
In short, you haven’t got content on your website that Google wants to rank.
How to cross this chasm?
You need to get keyword-focused content onto your website, to do this:
(1) Carry out keyword research: Guide by SEJ.
(2) Figure out the search intent of each keyword: Guide by Ahrefs.
(3) Create a page for each of your services: Guide by us.
(4) Create content around these services: Guide by Ahrefs.
Do this and you’ll be well on your way to crossing this chasm.
SEO Chasm #2 - a low domain authority
With keyword-optimised content on your website, you’ll start ranking for a range of keywords. At this stage, these will tend to be the lower-difficulty keywords.
A great example of this is long tail keywords. These are keywords that get fewer searches per month, they tend to be more specific keywords, and have a longer query length.
Here’s an example:
Because these long-tail keywords have a lower search volume and they’re more niche, the big players in your industry don’t tend to target them.?
Meaning you’re not competing with massive companies, but only with companies similar to you - making them less difficult to rank for.
So you’ll start to see an increase in organic traffic for some lower-difficulty keywords.
However, organic traffic will soon plateau as you try and target more difficult keywords but your site can’t rank for these.
The main reason being is that you have great content but a low number or no backlinks. Meaning no authority.
And without this, Google doesn’t think you should rank for certain keywords.
How to cross this chasm?
In short, you need to build up your domain’s authority. You can compare your score to the competition using a tool such as Majestic or Ahrefs.
By building links from other websites back to yours. This sends signals to Google that you are an authoritative website and you'll start ranking for higher-difficulty keywords.
We created this guide here that outlines 14 tactics B2B companies can use to build links.
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Do this and you’ll be flying across this chasm and out of your plateau.
SEO Chasm #3 - Protect what you have
You now have high-quality content on your website and a stronger domain authority. You’re ranking in the top 3 positions for lower-difficulty keywords and also harder ones.
Traffic is on the up and you have a great process in place for creating content and building links.
But now your SEO efforts are maturing, you face a new set of headaches. So how can you take this to the next level?
At this stage, a lot of the work is about protecting what you have.
There are many factors that can impact your rankings and organic traffic once you rank first for a keyword. These can be:
The competition:
Once you get the top spot, you can’t sit back and relax. Your competition will be optimising their content and building links, looking to take your top spot.
Just because you rank first now, doesn’t mean you will in the future.
Using a keyword ranking tool, the example below is NightWatch, which will allow you to see historical data for your keywords to see how these change over time.
SERP changes:
Google will make changes to the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and you need to keep an eye on these. For example, they may push more video content for one of the keywords you rank for. Or, they may favour long-form guides.
And not only this, your competition may be running paid ads on a keyword. Which can take away traffic from your organic listing.
Again, you can use a tool like NightWatch to keep an eye on this and react to them.
And then two factors in your own hands are…
Keyword cannibalisation:
A common issue websites make when they are ranking well for a keyword is launching a page that competes with this.
Google will (very, very rarely) rank your website multiple times in the same search result for a keyword. Meaning, that if you have two guides on your website about one topic, Google will have to pick which to rank - and they may pick the wrong one.
And this can cause your pages to compete with each other. Ahrefs has a great guide here on keyword cannibalisation and how to fix this.
Outdated content:
You need to regularly review the content on your website.?
In most industries, tactics, tips, best practices and information is quick to change. And you need to ensure you keep your content up to date. Otherwise, users will go elsewhere and Google will notice this.
As mentioned before, you can’t just launch a piece of content and forget about it. It needs refining and improving over time.
Keep your eyes out for these common issues and you’ll be well on your way to crossing SEO chasm #3.
Summary
So there we go, a whistle-stop tour of 3 SEO chasms. The common places we see organic traffic plateau or drop off for B2B companies.
If you have market-leading content on your website and are seen as an authority, you will rank well for keywords and increase organic traffic. But then you need to keep this organic traffic and build on it.
You can't just sit back and relax.
Search Engine Optimisation is a moving playing field with changing rules as well as multiple competitors. So you need to stay on top of it to keep your hard-earned traffic.
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Pssst... want to learn more?
For those of you that don't know me, I'm Steve and I run a B2B web agency.
Helping B2B tech marketing teams unleash their website’s full potential so they can attract high-value customers.
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Steve