SEO for B2B companies. How Principles of SEO for B2B differ from traditional approach.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) principle has hardly ever been the main solution for B2B companies. Such businesses usually use straight sales streams and contacts as the maim operating tools. But recently we notice 2 main tendencies that might have changed the rules of the game and gave SEO whole new significance for the B2B market. First of all, customers have always preferred to make informed decisions and therefore conduct a serious online search as a part of their strategy. The second tendency has shaped itself only several months ago but now looks quite promising and most probably will form the face of B2B marketing of the future. It is of course the need to move all the activity online to have an opportunity to continue operating under the pressure of COVID-19 restrictions. So what the B2B market faces now is the need to adopt SEO principles to be able to move to the future.
Finding the balance
So what SEO has to offer for the B2B market. Online presence has become an important feature sometime before but nowadays it has become crucial for survival. Of course, it is all about the content. And there are two main paths to follow.
SEO specialists usually distinguish between so-called mechanic and automated tactics. They are based on producing huge amounts of articles the main purpose of which is to contain desired links and to generate leads. Those article are usually quite thin and have no informative value. That is why they are hardly relevant to the B2B market, where the search is performed to make informed decisions.
Therefore B2B SEO has to fulfill 2 main purposes. First of all, it has to generate organic traffic. It is not as much about the number of clicks, but mostly – the number of potential customers driven to a particular landing page. The second purpose of SEO for B2B projects is to support the existing sales channels. This goal may only be reached with highly informative and engaging content that actually provides solutions. So generally SEO for B@B is not as much about the numbers and traffic. It mostly concentrates on generating useful information that helps customers that have already arrived at a given page to make a positive decision. It is important to understand the main peculiarity of the B2B market – is concentrated on specific business customers. Unqualified clicks and traffic are not only useless for this model but may even harm it.
SEO mostly focuses on generating large amounts of backlinks. In the case of SEO for B2B, it is much more important to generate valuable content that might lead to only one link but this exact link is as valuable for the whole project. As a result, as backlinks always remain a part of SEO, its main purpose is not generating artificial numbers but thought leads that result in decisions.
