Businesses are constantly looking for ways to attract more visitors to their websites through organic search, where they can convert and become sales leads. While more web traffic is generally a good thing, more of the right traffic is better for B2B websites to generate leads.
The beauty of organic traffic is you’re getting attention from web users who are willingly looking for your content. They’ve submitted keywords in search queries that bring up matching content in search engine results pages (SERPs), and leveraging the right SEO tactics can get your website listed among those results. Knowing what your audience is searching for and interested in is invaluable.
B2B companies can drive quality traffic and potential leads to their websites, both organically and through paid search campaigns, using a combination of technical SEO and content strategies. We’ve outlined five of them here:
1. Start by Creating Target Personas
I know what you’re thinking. What do personas have to do with organic traffic? The answer is everything. Personas should be the foundation of your marketing strategy. If you don’t know who your target audience is, how can you market to them?
Part of B2B companies understanding their audience is knowing what types of things they’re searching for online. What questions are they asking? What products and services will help their businesses grow? What content are they looking for?
Luckily, there are a few ways B2B companies can find answers to these questions.
Participate in a Persona Workshop
The first way B2B companies can identify their target audience is to participate in a persona workshop, which helps determine demographics of your primary target audience, what their goals are, what frustrates them, and what matters the most to them. It’s highly recommended to elicit the help of a professional marketing agency that not only has personification expertise but also brings a fresh, outside perspective.
2. Perform Robust Keyword Research
Once you know the type of information your audience is searching for, you can then start to determine relevant categories/topics and conduct research to figure out the exact keywords you want to target. Keywords directly related to your products, services, and industry are obviously relevant to your audience, but figuring out long tail keywords may be more valuable to your business and SEO strategy.
Long-tail keywords–or keywords that are lengthier and more specific–can be a better match for customers who are closer to making a purchase, or those who know exactly what information they’re seeking online. Long tail keywords generally have a lower search volume than more standard keywords–but less volume often means higher quality.
3. Publish Quality Content
Identifying who your users are, and the types of keywords they’re searching for, allows you to begin creating content that caters directly to them. Users interact more with content they find informative, educational, and engaging.
Keyword-rich content elevates your overall SERP rankings and better positions you to be discovered by your target audience. Publishing content like blog posts, whitepapers, infographics, landing pages, and more helps drive traffic to your website, which potentially generates more leads.
When it comes to content, high quality is far superior to large quantities. Put another way: Optimized content will outperform an abundance of poor content. For content to be optimized and better positioned for successful conversion and SEO, it needs to:
- Include internal links to other pages on site
- Be keyword rich
- Utilize a proper heading structure (H1s followed by H2s, H2s followed by H3s, etc.)
- Have an eye-catching title
- Contain well-placed CTAs
- Be approximately 1,000 words or more
4. Internal and External Link Building
B2B companies start creating and publishing valuable pieces of content, a solid link-building strategy ensures that more people will find it through organic search. As the most important factor in ranking for competitive keywords, quality links are crucial for making sure your target audience can find your content.
External Link Building
Despite what many believe, links from your website to another don’t impact search rankings. What matters most in link building is picking up backlinks, which happen when other websites link to your website from their own.
While link building might sound simple enough, it can be quite challenging. The most important things to focus on are creating relevant content that provides value to the user, and identifying which websites would want to link back to this content.
Just like with content creation, backlinking is all about quality over quantity. Determining who your ideal backlinks are is a critical step in a link building strategy. Generally, quality links will come from industry-related publications, popular bloggers, media outlets, and so on. The higher your content quality, the more these publications will feel compelled to link back to it.
Internal Link Building
Link building should also take place internally. Internal link building is one of the easiest ways to improve your website’s technical SEO, both architecturally and also from a user experience standpoint, because it strategically offers visitors new paths to navigate your website’s content.
5. Optimize Landing Pages
For B2B businesses, the importance of a good landing page is invaluable. Landing pages are essentially the gateway to a sales lead, so making sure they’re best optimized to convert is key. Below, we’ve compiled some tips on how to properly optimize a landing page.
Write Eye-Catching Headlines
Headlines are the first thing a prospective client will see. The headline needs to not only grab the reader’s attention, but it should also be clear as to what the value proposition of what you’re selling is.
Focus Your Copy on Benefits
The body copy on a landing page is your opportunity to promote the benefits of what you’re selling. It’s important that you don’t waste valuable space on the page with copy that doesn’t provide the user with value on your products or services.
A-B Test Your Headlines, Copy, CTAs, and Buttons
The best way to determine what’s working on your landing page and what’s not is to conduct A/B tests, which consists of altering a variable on a page and testing the altered version against the original. Remember not to change multiple variables because you won’t know which changes lead to the differences in analytics. Variables to consider changing are headlines, body copy, button copy, and images.
Keep Your Forms Brief
Once a user clicks your call-to-action (CTA) button from your landing page, the last thing you want to do is overwhelm them with a lengthy form to fill out. Make sure that the information you’re requesting from the user is brief and necessary. If a contact us form is too long, the user may get frustrated and exit the page entirely.
Remember: B2B Lead Generation Takes Time
B2B companies should understand that lead generation won’t change overnight; it’s a process. By following all of the above steps, B2B companies are better positioning themselves to drive more organic traffic to their website, which can ultimately turn into sales leads.
It’s important to note that all of the steps listed above must be addressed in your organic search strategy, because they all depend on each other. There are several more ways to increase lead generation for B2B companies.
