We’re already well into 2019, but it’s not too late to make some important changes to your B2B company’s online strategy that will ensure this turns into a banner year.
Though B2B SEO hasn’t changed too dramatically – yet, anyway – there are some growing trends that are on their way to becoming standards in the near future. The sooner you adopt them, the sooner you’ll enjoy an edge over competitors who continue with methods that are quickly becoming outdated.
3 B2B SEO Strategies to Implement in 2019
Fortunately, adopting B2B SEO best practices in 2019 doesn’t require any massive overhaul. You don’t necessarily even need to increase your budget. Just implement the following changes to your current SEO strategy and you should enjoy more traffic in the near future.
1. Utilize SEM Until Your SEO Results Pay Off
If your B2B SEO efforts haven’t paid off yet – or at least not as much as you’d like – the obvious solution may seem to be to either keep the course or even double your efforts. For most companies that decide on the latter, this means producing even more content.
The problem with this approach is that, according to recognized online marketing expert Neil Patel, content marketing can take two years before it starts showing an ROI. That’s assuming you’re doing everything right, too.
So, how much longer do you have before your investment will finally pay off? Are you close? Or is it going to be another year or so before inbound traffic starts trickling in and converting into customers?
It’s not that content marketing isn’t worth the effort. Once your site starts showing up on the first page of Google for popular keywords, you’ll enjoy a largely passive form of lead generation.
It’s just that, while you’re waiting for SEO to pay off, you should make room in your budget for the power of B2B SEM. If the room is tight, pull back on SEO a bit to put some money into paid traffic.
This will give you some initial leads with which to work, which means conversions now while you wait for SEO to bring more.
2. Conduct a Thorough Content Audit
Of course, one reason your B2B SEO efforts may not have paid off yet is that the content on your site is a mess. Don’t worry – you wouldn’t be the first. Many marketers look back on the content they created for their company’s site years ago and realize it either wasn’t a good fit topic-wise or wasn’t SEO optimized.
This is why content audits have become essential. It’s like pruning your website of the content that’s currently holding it back.
The first step is to go through all of your blog posts and put them into three separate categories:
- Complete Success – It generates a lot of traffic and/or engagement
- Moderate Success – It produces some traffic and/or engagement
- Complete Failure – It produces no traffic or engagement
Leave the first category alone.
For the second category, go through each post and look for ways they could be improved. Maybe it’s adding more links or secondary keywords. Whatever the case, let this content stick around another 6-12 months before doing another audit.
Delete everything from the third category. Clearly, it didn’t work. Get rid of it, so Google only sees the content that had at least some level of success. This will help raise your domain authority and, thus, your propensity for ranking.
3. Interlink to Your Product/Service and Landing Pages
While you’re doing that content audit, keep this next piece of advice in mind, too. You’re going to look for every opportunity to add interlinks to your website. Google loves this because it makes your site easier to navigate for users and easier for it to understand what the site is about.
Now, don’t go too crazy. The interlinking should still make sense, but this is an extremely easy tactic to improve your B2B SEO.
Even better, link from any of those category-one and -two pages to service and product pages. This will help those important webpages – the ones that are used to convert – rank higher in Google.
Finally, do the same with landing pages. Those are generally harder to rank, but it’s worth trying considering their potential for conversions.
Turning Your B2B SEO Investment into Returns
For the most part, you can probably keep most of your company’s B2B SEO best practices in place. Only very minor changes are required to help improve your site’s rankings, but those changes could be extremely valuable.
Speaking of which, if you want help taking that new traffic and turning it into new business. We can help. Contact us today and we’ll show you how our platform can improve conversions by more than 50% with no other changes to your site.