Using SEO to Connect with B2B Decision Makers

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

In B2B industries, the decision makers are the ones that pull the trigger on all purchasing decisions; that makes them your target audience. You need to develop a B2B SEO campaign that allows you to connect with those decision makers via multiple platforms, numerous touch points and at every stage of the buying cycle to get their attention and earn their business. The competition to win the hearts, minds and dollars of those B2B decision makers is fierce, so a drop in the bucket isn’t going to get you anywhere. If you really want to earn their business, you have to take your B2B SEO campaign up a notch.

Start with your content marketing
How can you take your content marketing to the next level? Hopefully you’ve already got a B2B business blog up and running and have posts going live at least two days a week. To kick it up a notch get a post going live every day. This gives you more opportunities to target your top keywords, produces more content for the search spiders to read and gives your target audience a reason to interact with your brand every day. If you don’t think you’ll be able to keep the stream of fresh content going, consider bringing in guest authors. Guest blog posts can offer new information and opinions for your readers, your blog can benefit from the guest bloggers’ authority and you don’t have to worry about writing as much content every week.

If you haven’t already, make sure you are investing time in content promotion as well! A blog post that no one reads, even though it still has B2B SEO benefit, isn’t doing much to get the decision maker’s attention. Submit each blog post to your social profiles and social bookmarking sites, incorporate them into your company newsletter and add social share buttons so your readers can do some of the heavy lifting for you!

Stop focusing on rank
While ranking well is incredibly important, and many would argue the end goal of an SEO campaign, that isn’t the only thing you should be concentrating on. B2B decision makers are smart and they aren’t going to do business with your brand simply because your site ranks first in the search engines. While ranking first may earn you the lion’s share of clicks from the SERP, don’t be surprised if your conversion rate isn’t measuring up. The B2B sales cycle is often so long that a decision maker is going to spend a lot of time and effort researching the best available options before making a decision that ultimately has little to do with where that company ranks in the search engines. Focusing on where you rank often causes B2B marketers to take a pigeon-hole approach with their SEO and ultimately make bad SEO decisions

Leverage offline activities too
Everything B2B marketers do, both online and off, can be leveraged for SEO. That industry tradeshow you are going to next month, why not write a press release and promotional blog post that tells people what booth you’ll be at and what kind of demonstration you’ll be putting on. Send out live updates from the tradeshow itself on Facebook and Twitter and invite attendees to come connect with your company. Record any presentations your company gives and turn them into fodder for your video marketing campaign. Invite people who come to your booth to sign up for your company newsletter right then and there. The more opportunities you create to connect with B2B decision makers the better chance you have of reaching them at least once.