SEO investment in B2B sector is a life vital for business development

Long term investment in your business with SEO

The greatest issue with B2B technology search is targeting the right users for high quality traffic. Often the search terms with the lowest volume produce the best quality leads. These are the long-tail searches as they are often called in the SEO world.

Matching Keyword to Intent

To understand this concept a bit better we’ve used an example below to show you how different types of keywords can be mapped to the different stages of the funnel and therefore have different levels of intent.

The keywords below relate to a niche application lifecycle platform product that specialized in the medical and compliance space. As you can see the top of funnel keywords relate to broad topics such as “medical development” whereas the bottom of funnel keywords relate to much more specific high intent terms such as “ALM platform”.

Another more common example of this could be a marketing automation platform such as bidding on keywords like?“Marketing automation” and “marketing automation software”. The latter keyword?implies a higher level of intent to buy than the first and therefore is more likely to convert, so for PPC campaigns you want to invest more money in these terms.

Investing in SEO in the meantime

Whilst you are laying the groundwork on your PPC campaigns and getting that in place you need to be investing in SEO as soon as possible. This is because of the lag between the work done and then seeing results. Sometimes you’ll only start to see results from an SEO campaign 3-6 months after the investment has been made, so it’s important not to delay on this front.

SEO as a specialism can really be grouped into three main streams of work: Technical, Links and Content. The technical aspects refer to the usability of your website, is it fast? Easy to use? Is it built to webmaster best practice guidelines? The linking part mainly focuses on which other reputable websites are building links to your website? These links are an important indicator of relevance. A link is like a vote of confidence from one website to another, and of course this helps Google determine how useful your website is.

The bit we focus the most for B2B SEO revolves around quality content. Content is the fuel for a successful website and long-term SEO campaign. Technical SEO is a one-off project a lot of the time and links often go hand-in-hand with content as that’s what people link to. So how do you go about it?

Producing content for SEO

The biggest mistake we see a lot B2B technology companies make in their SEO efforts is writing content about what they think is useful rather than what their potential buyers and users think is useful.

Google exists to provide users with the most relevant and reputable answers to their questions. Logic dictates here that if we can figure out what those questions are then we should be trying to answer them as best we can, better than anyone else, and in turn we’ll be rewarded. This is where using search data from?keyword research?& content research tools comes in handy.

Can’t content be both optimized for SEO and be thought leadership?

Yes. That comes down to quality of the content. Quality content will always rise to the top of a search result. If you focus solely on content that ranks but it’s basically clickbait this will not only hurt your companies reputation but it will also eventually may give way in the search results for someone who actually answers the question better.

To summarise that point, SEO is basically answering buyer questions on your website better than anyone else. Once you understand that you’re a servant of Google when it comes to attracting people to your website, the easier it is for you to generate the content that it wants.

Looping back around to look at vendee intend

Just like in the PPC campaigns you need to use an intent based framework for your SEO campaigns. Below is a simplistic diagram showing from left to right the buyer awareness stages and their level of intent to buy from you. What these means is that for SEO you need to produce content that addresses both low intent searches and high intent searches.

Why not just focus on high intent terms?

An obvious question here is why not just focus on search queries with high-intent. The reason for this is two fold. The first reason is that this is the most competitive market in terms of SEO and therefore the most difficult to see results. The second is that the pages you want to rank for these terms are usually short in word count and limited in terms of SEO – they are usually solutions or product pages.??

The key to this is producing content that addresses the buyers problems at the low-intent stage and linking this content to the higher intent terms and pages. These are often referred to as topic clusters. A simple example is shown below referring to a company that sells AI demand forecasting software.

This plays into the role of Google, it will treat websites that are more “useful” with higher overall rankings, so answering questions around your services will have a knock-on effect on the page rankings for those highly competitive terms.?

Simply put, if the search engine sees you are producing lots of useful content around a service it will then rank that service page higher for the really high intent terms.

Combination of PPC & SEO Strategy

We’ve mentioned how you can run PPC and SEO campaigns for B2B technology companies and how the intent based approach works for each, but how do you find the balance and how does PPC affect SEO and visa versa?

PPC vs SEO for high intent keywords

Running the intent based PPC campaign structure we talked about earlier means that you put most of your budget into these high intent keywords further down the funnel. This is because it’s much harder to rank for these terms organically as they are the most competitive. They are also the most expensive when it comes down to cost per click.

You eventually may want to get to a point where you rank #1 for the term organically but then bid on it too. You are then owning potentially 40/50% of the screen view. Without trying to brag too much, below is an example of where we have achieved this. We rank #1 organically in this view and we have a PPC ad just above it, doubling our chances of gaining traffic and our exposure.

Does PPC affect SEO?

No. This is a common question but one that is easy to answer thanks to Google having been asked it a number of times, have a read through Google’s own response to this below, pretty clear I think.

“Ads are how we keep Search free and accessible to everyone. But ads are the only thing we sell.

We don’t charge anyone to appear in our search index. Whether a business, individual or organisation buys ads is not a factor in our search algorithms. We never provide special treatment to advertisers in how our search algorithms rank their websites, and nobody can pay us to do so.

Ads are only displayed if we believe that they’re relevant to the search terms you entered. For most searches, we show no ads at all. When we do show ads, they’re always labelled so that you can tell them apart from search results.”

An interesting take-away from this quote is the bit at the end “for most searches, we show no ads at all”. This goes back to Google trying to provide the most useful results. So when you are thinking about bidding on top of funnel search terms where people are searching for answers, your ad may not even get shown because it’s not relevant enough.

Monitoring SEO & PPC Performance

When it comes to comparing SEO vs PPC campaigns, you’ll need a way of reviewing progress and how to decide when you start to shift or reduce your spend in PPC or SEO.

One useful way of reviewing your organic and paid performance is to use a pre-built report inside of Google Ads called the?Paid & Organic report. This report requires you to have linked your Google Search Console account to your Google Ads account before you can do anything with it.

Once connected together what this report allows you to do is compare directly your Google Ads Performance vs your Google Search performance.?

You can spot where you are ranking organically and where you might be able to scale back PPC – you can also compare your click through rates for both paid and organic on the same keywords.

As you can see from the example screenshot below, you can see when only your ad is showing or where you are ranking organically too.

Summary

In summary if you are working in a B2B technology business trying to acquire high-value deals through inbound channels like SEO and PPC you need to move to an intent-based SEO and PPC strategy.?

This means training the Google Ads algorithms by feeding it more data than it currently has and for SEO it means writing blog articles to answer the questions your buyers are asking online using keyword research.

It sounds simple but it can be tricky to put into practice and usually involves a lot of research around your buyer personas and their problems.?