SEO is a crucial part of B2B marketing. 49% of B2B marketers are using SEO as part of their marketing strategy, according to Sagefrog’s 2023 Marketing Mix report.
Even in the current saturated market, Search Engine Optimisation can significantly increase your website visibility, attract potential customers, and drive business growth. 61% of B2B marketers confirm this — SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than any other marketing initiative.
Not sure where to start with SEO?
Get a comprehensive understanding of SEO fundamentals in this beginner’s guide. From on-page and off-page SEO best practices to top-notch tools and essential KPIs, you’ll find everything you need.
Before diving deep into the details, let’s start from the very beginning.
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It involves a wide range of optimisation strategies to improve website visibility in search engines.
SEO’s primary goal is to boost web page rankings for target keywords, ensuring that the pages appear in front of potential customers when they prompt a relevant search query.
In broad terms, SEO can be categorised into three primary groups: on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Each of these plays a vital role in SEO. Here is a breakdown:
Considering the fact that Google has over 200 ranking factors, you should understand that SEO is a long-term game. It takes time to see impactful results.
However, understanding how search engines work at their core will help you create a website that’s aligned with SEO best practices. This, in turn, accelerates the ranking process.
In a nutshell, search engines follow a three-step process to discover, categorise, and rank content (a.k.a. documents or web pages).
Crawling: Search engines employ crawlers, also known as bots or spiders, to crawl the website and collect information. During the process, they navigate links, read the content and HTML resources, and identify new or updated pages.
Indexing: After crawling, bots store the collected information in a large database known as an index. During indexing, Google analyses the web page content and its attributes, such as titles, alt texts, videos, images, and more. In other words, Google tries to understand what the page is about.
Ranking: When the user types a search query, search engine algorithms choose the most relevant and useful content from hundreds of billions of web pages within the Search Index. The ranking algorithms have numerous factors, and Google doesn’t publicly disclose the complete list.
As you see, these three phases are critically important and interdependent. Without first being crawled and indexed, the web page won’t be ranked by Google at all.
Listen to Liam Bartholomew, VP of Marketing at Cognism and Gaetano DiNardi, Growth Advisor, discuss Cognism’s SEO strategy 👇
Keyword research is the process of identifying the most relevant keywords that potential customers use in their search queries. It’s the backbone of the SEO strategy. If users aren’t searching for what you’re writing about, you won’t get any organic traffic.
In fact, Ahrefs’ research shows that almost 91% of web pages don’t get any organic traffic from Google.
The same source suggests that the average top-ranking page also appears within the top 10 search results for around 1,000 other relevant keywords.
Keyword research tools are invaluable in identifying the right keywords and optimising pages around them. To get started, compile a list of relevant topics and create content pillars. Next, use the tools to analyse relevant keywords for each content cluster.
Free and paid keyword research tools are available. Some popular free options include Uber Suggest and Google Keyword Planner. These are good starting points, but free tools have huge limitations.
If you want to dig deep and gain more insights, paid tools are what you need. Ahrefs and Semrush are the biggest players used by millions of marketers.
You can use them to analyse keywords, find their search volume and difficulty level, get competitor data, create reports, and more.
Keywords can be categorised into different groups based on their intent, length, and search volume. Here are the most common types:
Short-tail: Short-tail keywords, or head keywords, contain one to three words and are considered generic. They also have a high search volume, thus intense competition.
An example could be the keyword “digital marketing” or just “marketing.”
Long-tail: Long-tail keywords are more specific search queries. They contain longer words and phrases, usually more than three or four words. These keywords have a low search volume but tend to have a higher search intent.
For example, “digital marketing strategies” and “seo best practices for small businesses” are long-tail keywords with specific intent.
Competitor: These are the keywords your competitors use and rank for. To analyse your competitor’s keywords, you should use keyword research tools.
Branded: These keywords contain the company’s name, brand, or product. For example, “Cognism.”
You should use branded keywords to establish your brand and increase your traffic potential.
Money (Transactional): Money or transactional keywords have the highest buying intent. This means users are ready to take immediate action if the product page is well-optimised.
For example, “book hotel room.” It’s a clear indication that the user wants to book a hotel.
📚 Learn how Cognism updated its SEO strategy targeting more money keywords and saw a record-high number of conversions from blog pages — 16% higher in Q1 versus Q4 last year.
As mentioned above, on-page SEO is about optimising the elements of the website so search engines find and understand it better.
Here are some tips and best practices for crafting on-page SEO.
High-quality content is aligned with user intent and is one of Google’s most important ranking factors. Having quality content means that you prioritise users and address their needs.
In return, you receive a lower bounce rate as good quality content receives high engagement, and users don’t want to leave the website after a few seconds. Learn the criteria for high-quality pages by Google.
Furthermore, well-researched content makes you an industry expert in front of your potential clients and builds trust. This leads to higher conversion rates.
Optimising page titles, headings, and meta descriptions is essential for effective on-page SEO. Why?
Because Google first assesses these elements of a page.
Read on for some tips and best practices to follow in your on-page SEO.
What should you do?
What you shouldn’t do:
Good title ✅ |
Poor title ❌ |
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B2B Lead Generation Tactics |
What should you do?
What you shouldn’t do?
Good description ✅ |
Poor description ❌ |
Need help finding quality leads for your B2B business? We’ve rounded up the 9 best B2B lead generation tactics. |
B2B lead generation is the process of attracting other businesses to purchase your product or service. |
Optimising images and alt texts greatly impacts a website’s overall performance, user experience, and even load times.
Here are a few best practices to help you optimise your images:
Good image name ✅ |
Poor image name ❌ |
userpilot-disengaged-customers-segmentation-how-to-analyse-the-customer-journey-using-behavioral-analytics.png |
image_234.png |
URL structure and internal linking play a vital role in SEO. They help search engines and users understand your site’s structure. They pass authority (aka link juice).
Eugene Zatiychuk, Head of SEO at Belkins Agency, shared some best practices for effectively implementing internal linking:
How to do this all? Eugene suggests the following workflow:
Technical SEO is about optimising the technical aspects of your website. Proper execution helps search engines find, crawl, index, and rank your website for search queries.
Creating a mobile-friendly or responsive website is critical to a good user experience.
Irina Maltseva, Head of Growth at Aura, recently noticed that desktop traffic started regularly dropping while mobile traffic grew. Since the attention span on mobiles is significantly lower than on desktops, you need an ultra-fast loading website.
Thus, Irina suggests:
“Make the mobile version as light as possible and avoid heavy plugins. Remove long intros and focus on essential content. Everything needs to be clear and concise.”
“Additionally, make CTAs more aggressive. The best practice would be placing them at the beginning or in the middle of the website to immediately grab the attention of mobile users.”
Page speed directly impacts user experience. According to a survey conducted by Unbounce, 82% of consumers say that slow page speed impacts their purchasing decisions. So every second counts!
There are some proven techniques that developers use to improve page load times. Here are some actionable strategies:
Adam Krzywda, Founder of SEOptimer, said:
“Google’s mission is to deliver the world’s information to users in an accessible and useful way.”
“Page speed is becoming increasingly important in achieving this mission, especially on the mobile web. We’re now seeing strong correlations between fast page load times and higher search rankings.”
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a language that search engines use to process and comprehend your website content on a deeper level and provide rich results. Rich snippets, rich cards, or knowledge panels can only be displayed with structured data.
Google recognises 32 types of schema markup, including:
While there’s no guarantee that you’ll win featured snippets or rich cards, structured data gives a lot of opportunities to improve visibility.
To create a schema markup for your website, go to Google’s structured data markup helper, generate markup, and add the code to your website.
Learn the basics of off-page SEO to build your online authority more effectively.
A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one page to another website. They’re a crucial component of off-page SEO, as their quantity influences the website’s authority, visibility, credibility, etc.
The greater the number of quality backlinks your website has, the higher its potential to rank in search engines.
If you’re still sceptical about backlinks, here is a case study from Bivvy, a pet insurance company.
After generating high-quality backlinks to their primary web pages and constantly creating blog posts, the company grew its organic traffic by 773.58% and increased its domain authority from 14 to 30. It achieved this in just 3 months.
White-hat link-building uses legitimate methods to gain backlinks and boost the overall website authority. Here are the most actionable tactics to earn backlinks:
🔥 Here are 33 expert-proven advanced link-building tactics to inspire your growth in the SERPs.
Black Hat SEO is the practice of using manipulative techniques to artificially boost website rankings. They can harm your brand and result in a permanent ban from Google.
Here is what you should avoid:
Choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential to evaluate the effectiveness of SEO campaigns.
While different companies implement different KPIs based on their needs, here are the most significant metrics and KPIs in SEO.
SEO is always evolving as search engines regularly update their algorithms. Keeping up with these changes is crucial for long-term successful SEO.
For reliable information, keep an eye on Google Search Status Dashboard, Google Algorithm History, and official announcements.
And the universal way to prep for search engine updates is to learn what the update is about and compare your site against new rules.
To stay informed on SEO trends, follow well-known resources like Search Engine Journal, Moz, Ahrefs and Semrush blogs. Network with peers on Twitter and LinkedIn and learn from industry leaders and influencers, such as Rand Fishkin, Aleyda Solis, Barry Schwartz, Neil Patel, Kevin Indig, and Brian Dean.
You can also attend popular SEO conferences like Brighton SEO, Pubcon, and MozCon.
There are numerous tools in the market, but we’ve curated a list of those we use at Cognism and are popular among our peers. Let’s take a look.
This free tool helps you find keyword ideas, see their search volumes, and understand the competition. It’s a great choice for beginners who don’t have much experience and budget but want to start their keyword research journey.
Semrush is a comprehensive keyword research tool that offers tons of features to step up your SEO game.
From keyword suggestions and competitor analysis to keyword search volume and difficulty, the data is available within seconds. There is a 7-day free trial. The pricing packages start at $129.95/month.
While Ahrefs is more known for its powerful backlink analysis features, it’s also an excellent choice for keyword research.
It provides keyword suggestions, search volume, difficulty scores, and insights on specific keywords.
There is no free trial, and the pricing starts at $99/month.
This powerful desktop application crawls your website and finds the errors hurting your website’s performance. You get a detailed report on broken links, duplicate content, redirects, etc.
The tool has a forever-free plan with limited functionality. To access the advanced features, you’ll have to pay $259 per year per license.
Ahrefs offers the world’s largest backlink database — 35 trillion live backlinks updated with fresh data every 15–30 minutes.
It helps you find low-quality, spammy, or broken backlinks and wrong anchor texts to optimise your backlink profile. It also provides detailed information on competitor backlinks.
Majestic is a backlink checker tool that allows you to evaluate the quality of your backlinks and find out who links to your website.
You can sign up for free, but their cheapest plan costs €46.99.
SEO is an ongoing process. To implement a successful SEO strategy, you’ll need to take an iterative approach. Follow the best practices discussed in the article and conduct SEO experiments.
Don’t forget to define clear goals and have relevant KPIs in place. This will help you monitor your SEO performance and take action accordingly.
Get more B2B marketing/demand generation insights from Cognism - click 👇 to access our Demand Generation Playbook!