B2B SEO agency - More customers and sales through search engine optimization for business customers

Most company owners are aware of the high customer expectations in the B2B environment. They know that decisions in companies are rarely made by individuals, but usually by decision-making bodies with several people in charge. In addition, business customers in the B2B sector have little or no emotion at the forefront of their purchasing decisions - unlike B2C customers. Business customers are mainly persuaded to buy by rationality and arguments.

Although this peculiarity of B2B marketing is well known, we at Timo Specht repeatedly see companies whose marketing lacks hard-hitting arguments and hard facts. Search engine optimization is particularly affected by this deficit:

• The texts on the website may be technically flawless, but not sufficiently optimized for SEO. Among other things, this is reflected in inadequate coverage of the relevant keywords. The design of the texts and their readability also often leave a lot to be desired.

• When formulating their web copy, B2B companies do not always put themselves in the shoes of their customers, which means that the added value of their own products and services is pushed into the background or not adequately communicated. This leads to poorly formulated web copy in terms of sales psychology.

• The lack of sales-psychological optimization is reflected, for example, in the fact that the focus is not on the benefits for customers, but mainly on the qualities of the company itself. Unfortunately, this results in texts with information that is irrelevant for the B2B target group.

Why is it that companies do not take the high customer requirements of B2B SEO into account, or do so only inadequately?

In many cases, the lack of consideration of B2B customers' expectations is linked to a lack of digitalization in companies. Optimization is required here. Even companies that already have a website and conduct online marketing have the potential for optimization at any time. SEO and content marketing are the linchpins of holistic marketing optimization.

SEO is used to boost the ranking of a company's own website as a digital business card in search engines, while content marketing helps to ensure that a large number of customers find their way to the company's website of their own accord. Providing information instead of loud and cost-intensive advertising: That's the motto of content marketing!

Search engine optimization and content marketing work together to lay the foundation for B2B customers to find high-quality content on the company's website. Ultimately, SEO and content marketing contribute to what many B2B companies lack on their websites:

• Integration of all relevant keywords and creation of a clear website structure

• Providing high-quality content on the website that appropriately showcases the company's products and services and helps to facilitate marketing

• Development and implementation of a holistic B2B SEO strategy that brings more traffic to the website, increases the authority of the website and raises the general awareness of the company by expanding the website, generating backlinks and other individually required measures (e.g. local SEO)

Thanks to high-quality SEO and flawless content marketing, a large proportion of the B2B target group reaches the website by itself, as it gradually climbs to the top of the search engine rankings thanks to B2B SEO. This is entirely in line with inbound marketing, which is increasingly replacing outbound marketing as a marketing method in times of digitalization:

Although you will still take outbound measures in the form of advertising and sales, with B2B SEO you will find that more and more customers come across your website and your company on their own via organic search. B2B marketing has never been more cost-effective and easier!

The high demands of customers result in significant differences in keywords and content for B2B SEO marketing compared to B2C SEO. These differences are presented below. We illustrate how taking these differences into account leads to the development of a customized SEO strategy in the B2B sector. However, the principle of B2B SEO remains the same as with conventional SEO: high-quality content with keywords, technical optimization and backlinks.

Low search volume and high specificity of B2B keywords

Keywords in the B2B environment differ from B2C keywords in that they have a lower search volume. This difference is mainly due to the fact that customers of B2B companies have a more technical background than B2C customers and usually have a concrete idea of what they want to search for.

To demonstrate the differences in keywords, here are three examples each for keywords in the B2C and B2B sectors.

B2C keywords:

• Solar modules

• Vinyl flooring

• PC monitor

B2B keywords:

• Solar modules monocrystalline cells

• Click vinyl

• Monitor 27 inch OLED

Keywords in B2B SEO marketing are therefore more specific than B2C keywords. The usually high specificity of keywords in the B2B sector does not necessarily mean that only long-tail keywords are used in B2B SEO. As the example of click vinyl shows, a specific B2B keyword (in this case one that refers to the click installation process for vinyl flooring) can also be short.

Which keywords should ultimately be used in B2B SEO depends on each individual B2B company and its target group. In general, the use of specific keywords is a core feature of B2B SEO. If too many general keywords such as "solar modules" and "PC monitor" are used on the B2B website, this would inevitably lead to mainly B2C customers coming across the website. The consequence: the wrong target group.

Marketing managers are therefore obliged to carry out keyword research for search terms that correspond to the B2B company's target group. This does not exclude the use of general keywords, but the priority of the keywords must clearly be on specific terms. This approach opens up great opportunities for B2B companies in search engine optimization: Specific keywords are niche keywords! Competition is low here, so companies can quickly gain visibility with their website for the respective niche keyword.

The high complexity of B2B content requires an adjustment of the quality of the text creation: very accurate, precise and correct formulations, high content density without filler words and irrelevant sentences, maximum coverage of the search intention.

Search intent is a particularly important criterion in B2B content marketing. Search intent is the intention that users have when they enter a keyword into the search engine. There are certain search intentions behind all search queries. In view of the low search volume for B2B keywords, it is particularly important to precisely evaluate the user's search intent before creating the text.

In the B2C sector, companies can much more easily afford to neglect search intent in their keyword research, as the higher search volumes for B2C keywords mean that plenty of users come across the website anyway. The situation is different for B2B companies: Having few potential customers per keyword means having to do everything possible to win these customers over!

In order to achieve the highest possible conversion rates per keyword with a small target group, you need high-quality content that covers the search intent as precisely as possible. In addition, a regular supply of new SEO texts is important: in order to gain rankings, the website must be successively expanded. This is where B2B companies and their search engine optimization show an enormous deficit. According to an article in the online trade magazine marconomy, studies show that there are differences in content production between B2B and B2C. While a third of B2C companies produce new content every day, only 18% of B2B companies publish new content on their own website every day, according to the marconomy article and the Statista study.

From our daily practice in SEO for B2B, we know very well that even the amount of companies that produce content every day, as described in the online trade magazine marconomy for the B2C sector, is too low. So there is no need to even talk about the lack of content production in the B2B sector ...

According to marconomy, B2B providers cite a lack of time as the reason for the infrequent publication of new content and texts on the website. With this aspect in mind, it also makes sense to get support from a B2B SEO agency or a B2B SEO expert. Our SEO team in Munich works with professional content agencies who do nothing else on a daily basis but create up-to-date content on a wide range of B2B topics.

Thanks to our analyses and strategies as well as the B2B content from specialized content agencies, you are guaranteed to receive the highest quality content for your website! This gives you authority in the eyes of your customers and in the search engine rankings, so that you generate more and more traffic and steadily increase your website's rankings.

The content on both the entire website and the individual subpages should be clear and easy to understand. Unlike private buyers, B2B buyers are less impressed by an elaborate animation of the website. In order to communicate the benefits of your own products, services and other B2B offers as efficiently as possible, the content should be easy for users to understand and read. This in no way excludes the use of infographics and videos, but these graphics and videos must definitely be useful and not, as is sometimes the case in B2C SEO, simply integrated to break up the text.

The fact that the keywords in SEO for B2B have a low search volume opens up the possibility of creating many subpages for the individual keywords and structuring the website clearly according to the individual topics. This is known as topic siloing. This involves identifying and organizing all relevant topics for SEO in B2B:

• For which keywords and topics is it worth creating separate pages and constantly optimizing them?

• Which topic is subordinate to another topic? How should the menu structure and sitemap of the website be prepared?

• How can internal links be created between the topics and pages of the website?

(Graphic idea -> Create theme silo with visualization of a website structure)

These and other questions are used for topic siloing in order to develop a clear roadmap based on the findings as to what content should be created and how this content should be implemented on the website. The decisions made here have an impact on all B2B online marketing, which includes the placement of advertisements, social media marketing (e.g. Twitter, Xing, LinkedIn) and various other sub-disciplines of marketing.