Many B2B marketers face a similar dilemma: Few people look for your products or services by name in search engines like Google. Instead, their searches revolve around the exact challenges that your product or service solves.
So the key to getting traction in SaaS marketing SEO for B2B is figuring out the answers that your audience needs. Sometimes those answers won’t relate directly to your product. Sometimes they will.
In either case, you know what you need to focus on for SEO, but how do you build a successful organic B2B plan? Keep reading to uncover a few B2B digital marketing tips to move your pages up in the ranks.
1. Identify a Core Concept to Own
Before you even begin to create content for your website, ask yourself – What concept do I want my business to be known for? For example, if you are a small business loans provider, you will most likely choose a concept that small business owners will want to hear about such as marketing, finance or operations.
Without identifying this concept, you might start writing about one topic, jump to the next and after six months wonder why you’re not doing so great in organic for a topic #7. So once you identify the main topic that explains what you do and answers the questions your target audience has, you’re ready to move on to the next step – creating and documenting your organic search strategy.
2. Create (and Document) a SaaS Marketing SEO Strategy
Multiple studies have shown that marketers with a documented content strategy outperform those without one. So write your strategy down.
While no two strategies are the same, writing yours will force you to think about the topics that your audience wants to see. As we mentioned in the intro, identifying general topics or concepts that your desired audience is interested in is vital for B2B success in SEO.
The reason being is that identifying topics relevant to your industry and audience is key in content generation. All it takes is a process of repeatable and applicable steps to build a great content and SaaS Marketing SEO strategy.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Take a deep dive into the B2B verticals you serve, and learn what new trends, techniques and innovations are shaking up the industry. For every industry, there are a handful of popular online sources that after only a few lines into reading provide ideas to get you started
- Jot down topics competitors are writing about to give you a big picture view on what interests your target audience
- Use Google Analytics to identify your most popular blog posts. Select the top 10 posts that received highest engaged visits in last 3 months and repurpose this content to connect with your target audience
- Leverage social media analytics to capitalize on your most shared content and create a part 2 or a multi-part series to the most popular posts
3. Invite Guest Contributors
For any B2B SEO strategy to succeed, you must publish high quality and industry relevant topics regularly on your website to bump up your SaaS marketing SEO rankings.
The thing is, content production is a resource-intensive process. Thankfully, guest contributors can help ease the load on you and your team while also delivering great SEO benefits.
Invite industry experts and clients to write an article for your blog that not only serves your audience but also gives the author’s piece more visibility by reaching out to a wider network. Ensure that guest contributors are interested in writing about the topics and concepts that are important to your readers.
On top of that, a guest contributor is likely to promote the content they write for you. That means you’ll likely earn a link from them as well as some love on social media.
4. Establish Good Optimization Habits
Once you’ve established the strategy and know who will be writing the content, what’s next is to optimize. After all, why put the work into creating informative content if you’re not going to do everything you can to make sure it gets as many eyeballs on it as possible?
Every article you write (and page you create) should have informative meta descriptions and URLs. You should also include keywords—to the extent that it makes sense—in the headers of your pages and the alt text of your images. And, don’t forget to compress images using a tool like Tiny JPG.
Stick to Google’s SERP limits when writing the title and meta description for any page. Along with that, every landing page and product page should have a clear description of service offered and an attractive call-to-action button that gets the visitor to convert.
Finally, make sure to optimize the PDFs you create. That means, at the very least, include a meta description of the file and a descriptive title. If you’ve never optimized a PDF, check out this blog post for more tips on how to do it.
5. Promote Your Content in Multiple Channels
Often times, we spend so much time creating great content that we don’t focus as much as we need to on promoting it.
To capitalize on the SEO benefits of creating content, you need people to read it, engage with it, share it and link to it. It will take time for this to start happening consistently, but the only way to make it happen is to promote your content. And remember – Don’t restrict your promotion to blog post only. Go ahead and promote any ebooks, whitepapers, infographics, case studies, webinars, surveys or reports that you have created.
Every audience is different so the channels and messages you choose may vary. The only way to figure out which channel provides the most opportunity is to test. Of course, you can start by following best practices, but you should also be constantly monitoring your channels to find out where you’re getting the most traction. Generally, the more traffic you get, the better your SaaS marketing SEO will be.
6. Keep it Fresh and Test
As mentioned in the fifth tip, figuring out what your audience wants requires testing. Despite this, many marketers continue to do the same thing over and over again because it’s what they know. Even if you’re getting okay results, don’t settle.
Although the second tip gives a breakdown of repeatable steps one can follow to identify topics, it is not meant to be applied across all seasons of the year. It is a guideline one can use to research current topics in the market. This will keep your content fresh and you’ll definitely discover new insights about your audience. And when you know more about your audience, you’re going to create content that performs much better in the search results.
Putting the User First in Your SaaS Marketing SEO Strategy
You’re still selling your product or service, but in today’s marketplace, you have to put the user first. If your offering is valuable and you’re writing to an appropriate audience about relevant topics, your product or service will come up naturally.
So think about how you can answer your prospects’ questions first, then relate it to your product. Don’t be overly promotional and address the unique issues your service can resolve as well as the benefits your product can offer. At no point should your readers think of it as a sales pitch and lose interest in your article.
After all, that’s what search engines are trying to do: give people the answers they want. If you align your SaaS SEO strategy with search engines by serving the user first and yourself second, you’ll have no problem climbing the ranks.
