When building your B2B digital marketing strategy, one of the most important things you can do is ensure your content has B2B-informed SEO team. It’s one thing to attract viewers who might become potential clients or consumers through B2C SEO or B2C companies, but attracting other businesses requires a whole different set of skills that can be difficult for many digital marketing specialists to accomplish. This is where a B2B SEO agency can help.
A B2B agency has experts who are able to fill your web pages and content with keywords that can attract the more challenging targets involved in B2B marketing. A B2B company often comes with full teams that are able to support you and learn how your business works, and its B2B SEO services can help you build a B2B SEO strategy that’s unique to your company.
If you wish to begin working toward more B2B digital marketing and think that a B2B SEO agency will be able to help you raise your bottom line, these are just a few things you should know to help you find one that works for you.
How Does B2B SEO Work?
If you’re especially inexperienced with B2B SEO, it’s important to know how exactly your business can benefit from this type of digital marketing. SEO essentially involves using specific keywords in your website and online content to help search engines like Google identify them, but instead of choosing words typical consumers tend to search, B2B SEO chooses keywords that are more relevant to businesses looking for specific services.
This can involve just as much – if not more – planning than your average SEO marketing strategy, since you often want to have a more focused set of targets for your business to be marketing toward. As a result, it can potentially be far more difficult to do without an SEO specialist, as they are usually more skilled and experienced in creating and implementing all kinds of digital marketing plans.
What Do B2B SEO Agencies Do?
As simple as it would be to say that B2B SEO agencies help you with improving your business’s B2B SEO, there’s a lot more that these agencies can do for you. Their goal is to improve your ROI by using an external team of experts to boost your company’s visibility online, and that involves accomplishing tasks of various sizes as part of their marketing process.
These are just a few of the things that B2B SEO agencies tend to offer, and parts of their process that you can usually interact and collaborate with them on. There are many things they may wish to do beyond these four categories, but these four tasks are some of the most important things you should expect from a worthwhile and experienced B2B SEO agency.
Competitive Analysis
If you don’t know what your peers and competitors are doing, it’s impossible to improve your digital presence. After all, there’s only so much room at the top of Google search results and, not shockingly, your competition wants to be there too. Even if you aren’t actively fighting with similar businesses due to your geographical position or unique services, SEO involves showing up in searches alongside any business that’s similar to yours and building a digital B2B marketing strategy means knowing how others succeed.
This leads to one of the first things that most B2B SEO agencies will do, which is often known as competitive analysis. This involves looking at the SEO and marketing strategies of companies that are similar to yours, in order to see where they’re succeeding and where they could benefit further. This information is then used by you and the agency to start building a digital marketing plan that’s similar to these other businesses but still unique enough to help your business stand on its own.
Web Design and Development
Once a B2B SEO marketing strategy is in place, your B2B SEO agency should be working to implement it as smoothly and efficiently as possible. This will most likely be taking place on the landing pages of your website, making sure that they have a high density of keywords to attract businesses looking for your services.
At the same time, they also will be working to improve your website’s navigation and readability. B2B marketing usually means including some unique web pages and content to help your company seem like a reliable partner that will improve your ROI, while customers will usually interact with websites differently and visit different pages when assessing your services.
Content Development
Speaking of content, something else that many B2B SEO agencies will do is help you create additional content for your site, particularly when it comes to blog and video content. Google loves lots of content! Blog content can especially help to make companies come across as more experts, and filling your site with resources to help uninformed business owners understand your services better can greatly improve their first impression of you.
This particular search engine optimization service can also result in other types of written and video content to showcase more of how your company works, as well as showing what the workplace is like. B2B marketing is often more results-driven than emotion-driven, but it’s still important to seem like a relatable and reliable company without strictly relying on statistics and numbers; SEO with a B2B influence can help ensure this content is viewed by your target audience.
Traffic & Data Analysis
As your agency’s B2B SEO strategy is being implemented, it won’t often be an instant improvement on your business. These marketing efforts often take quite a bit of time and will not see results the moment your websites are updated, and instead tend to be much more gradual and experimental while figuring out how your business functions, and how to make it appealing to other businesses. Incremental improvements over a long period of time can yield exceptional results!
This is why a good B2B SEO agency will try to keep track of as much data as possible, regarding the traffic of your site and where people are accessing it from. This can help you know whether your plan is working effectively towards your intended target, entirely missing, or reaching an audience of businesses you weren’t expecting, and from there the agency can revise their plan with you to better improve your reach.
What Makes a Great B2B SEO Agency?
Now that we’ve gone over what B2B SEO agencies do, it’s important to know what makes a good or bad B2B SEO agency. Even if they have similar structures and methods, there are tons of points where they can vary, ranging anywhere from their background experience to how they work with your company, and different agencies can have all kinds of different skills that might suit you or your business better.
At the same time, there are several reasons that the best B2B SEO agencies are worth working with, as they can improve your company’s bottom line and save you lots of time and funding by avoiding mistakes and poor marketing decisions. If you choose a great B2B SEO agency, you should also be able to see some of these benefits fairly easily.
Education And Experience
It’s also important to know that when working with an internal marketing team or hiring an individual marketing specialist who isn’t associated with an agency, you might not be able to verify their education or experience very well. Some may come from great schools or impressive prior clients, but being outside of a team means they’re left solely to their own experiences to build off of.
Most digital marketing agencies, including B2B SEO agencies, will usually have team members from a wide set of experiences that can help consider far more factors. Given the incredibly specific and challenging nature of B2B SEO marketing, this is extremely valuable for your company’s ROI, and it’ll give you a much greater likelihood of success than other marketing staff options.
Full Marketing Team
Speaking of having a full team, it’s important to mention that most B2B SEO agencies will usually have a more collaborative nature than many other forms of digital marketing. The research regarding your peers and competitors can be difficult to parse without having others to look over it with, and more people will usually mean it’s hard to miss certain vital pieces of information.
This means they’re going to have a much smoother process helping your company, since their collaborative meetings and division of work will result in far more polish than one team member handling several tasks at once. You won’t have to worry nearly as much about your marketing plan performing poorly since there are all sorts of talented specialists keeping an eye on your business’ success.
Data Tracking Tools
One of the best ways you can gauge the effectiveness of a B2B SEO agency is in the tools that it uses, particularly when it comes to data tracking. There are many things you can pick up about SEO behaviours from just looking at a webpage, but you can hardly get a perfect understanding of your business or a competitor’s without the right software and equipment.
B2B SEO agencies tend to be much better stocked in this regard, having full suites of software that can help track your website with accurate data. This means you can go through their findings and confirm their information if you know enough about SEO or B2B marketing easier, but those less familiar will at least be able to verify how the agency came to their conclusions and proposed their marketing plans.
Clear And Frequent Communication
The most important thing you want out of any digital marketing agency is their ability to work with you smoothly, and that involves constant and professional communication. One of the worst things a B2B SEO agency can do is work independently and privately from your business, creating plans that don’t take your concerns or values into account with your marketing.
The right B2B SEO agency will want to take that initiative and ask you for feedback every step of the way, and you should be just as free to ask questions. They are just as much your guides through B2B SEO as they are your partners, and no marketing strategy is going to succeed if you and your agency aren’t on the same page.
Efficient Costs
No matter how great a B2B SEO agency is, you will always have to weigh its strengths with the cost it would be to your business. The cost to work with certain agencies can vary massively based on their experience and size, and while more expensive plans or agencies will usually be better, you always have to weigh that against the benefit your company will see.
Simply put, if you feel you’re spending too much on your B2B SEO marketing, then you’re very likely not working with the right agency. If you’re a small company, you don’t need an agency that normally handles massive international businesses, and larger businesses likely don’t need smaller agencies that aren’t experienced enough to handle their higher needs or demands.
Conclusion
While there are all sorts of traits throughout this piece that you can use to find a great B2B SEO agency, the best one will always be the one that suits your business’ needs best. This can come down to whatever you value the most out of your marketing, including the style, costs, and structure of the agency itself.
If you feel that a B2B SEO agency doesn’t seem to understand your business or its services, then you likely need more personalized support than you already have. If you feel that you can work collaboratively and comfortably with an agency and its team members, and the cost is reasonable for your company’s size and expected growth, then you likely have the right B2B SEO agency for you.
