SEO is a core component of online marketing for most businesses. If you want clients or customers to be able to find your business in search engines and for the right search terms, you need to employ an SEO strategy.
If you are running a B2B business, your SEO strategy is going to be different from a B2C company. One of the key points to consider in this regard is the way you select your keywords. While there are many components of an SEO strategy, none of it will work if you have the wrong keywords. You won’t get seen in the right search results and your organic SEO CTR will be low.
Since keywords are so critical for B2B SEO, it should be one of the first things you consider when developing a strategy. In this post, we are going to walk you through some of the steps for finding the right SEO keywords for B2B marketing.
Find Your Seed Keywords
If you are new to SEO marketing, the first thing you will need to do is build a list of seed keywords. Seed keywords are the most obvious keywords you would associate with your business. They tend to be short, punchy and direct to the point. They also tend to be high-volume and very competitive for rankings.
The point of the seed keywords is to use them as “seeds” from which other keywords can grow. You take these basic keywords and expand them to find ones that may be less competitive, but still high in value. Using an SEO marketing agency as an example, good SEO keyword examples would include things like “SEO” and “Search Engine Marketing”.
See How You Rank
At this point, you should check to see how you rank for some of the most important keywords. Marketers have a variety of tools that can be great for checking search rankings and other metrics. Google Search Console can be a great place to start when checking your rankings.
Check to see how you rank for the basic keywords. See which terms are generating the most traffic for your site. Look at the types of content that are already delivering good results and which content could use improvement.
Research Your Competitors
You can learn a lot by researching your own site, but there is also value in looking at what the competition is doing. You don’t want to copy what your competitors are doing, but taking a look at a similar business can tell you a lot about what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong.
Analyze the search presence of your competition. Where do they rank well? Are they missing any opportunities you could exploit? What types of content are they using? Which keywords are driving the most traffic to their sites? All of this information could be useful when developing your SEO marketing strategy.
Check the Metrics
At this point in your SEO research, you should have a decent list of keywords. Now it is time to check the metrics on some of these keywords to see what you have. Remember, some of the keyword research tools might provide you with a list of hundreds or even thousands of keywords. You need to narrow the list down by eliminating anything that is low value. Remove anything that has no traffic or anything that has your company’s name in it.
The most obvious metric to check is search volume. Solid monthly search volume is a good indicator that it is a keyword worth targeting. Beyond that, you might want to check difficulty. High search volume is good, but if it has a lot of competition, it might not be worth targeting. By carefully considering these metrics, you can have a significant impact on how long it takes to rank in Google.
Build a Keyword List
This is where you build the list of keywords you will use for your SEO strategy. There is a good chance you still have a list with dozens if not hundreds of keywords. You could try to rank for all of them right away, but it is better to pick about a dozen to start. Once you start having success with those, you can then move on to expanding the list.
When you are selecting keywords for your SEO strategy, you want to weigh factors like monthly search traffic against difficulty. Look for the keywords with the highest traffic and lowest difficulty. If the traffic is low, it won’t really matter if you get to the top of the search results because no one is going to see it. High search traffic is great, but if the difficulty is too high, either you will be buried in the search results or you will have to spend a lot of time and money working to move yourself to the top of the rankings.
This is just the beginning of building a keyword list for a B2B SEO strategy. It takes time and effort to move your pages up in the rankings for the keywords. Once you have reached the top of the rankings, it requires continued efforts to stay there. That is why so many businesses hire SEO marketing professionals. The professionals know how to develop strategies that can improve rankings faster and they can dedicate themselves to the continued efforts that will keep their clients on top of the results page.
