SEO Strategies for B2B Companies to Succeed

Driving traffic to your website is a huge step in SEO. But it’s only the first one. 

For businesses in the B2B space, the real challenge is turning that traffic into meaningful, long-term relationships. This calls for an approach that factors in the 66% of B2B buyers who begin their product research on the internet.

A graph showing the top channels B2B buyers use for product discovery.
Source

This makes SEO a huge part of your strategy, but to get the real results, your B2B SEO needs to align with your company’s specific buying journey. 

What Is B2B SEO and What Makes It Different?

While B2C brands often focus on quick sales, impulse buys, and mass appeal, B2B companies go through a slower, more deliberate buying process. 

They’re often dealing with high-stakes decisions that affect entire departments or organizations. These decisions come with higher price tags and more risk, which means more stakeholders are involved at every step.

While B2C marketing certainly requires building buyer personas, the goals are different. For example, B2C personas might focus on lifestyle and preferences, while B2B personas need to go deeper into role-specific pain points, decision-making authority, and the business's needs.

Speaking of decision-making authority: In B2B, you’re not just aiming at one type of buyer. You’ll often deal with a buying committee involving C-suite executives, procurement managers, and department heads – each with different priorities. 

Is B2B SEO More Competitive than B2C?

Short answer: Yes. 

Unlike B2C SEO, where you're often competing for higher-volume keywords, B2B SEO competition revolves around niche, high-value keywords. These keywords might get less traffic, but the visitors they attract are often worth a lot more because of higher conversion potential.

For example, while a B2C consumer might search for “graphic design tools” to discover a solution like Canva, a B2B buyer is more likely to search for “best design collaboration software for teams”. 

That’s a much more specific, business-focused query in which they might bump into tools like Artwork Flow via landing pages or keyword-optimized content. That shows they’ve worked hard to build their authority through noteworthy content, which potential buyers are looking for.

A search result highlighting Artwork Flow, a design collaboration tool for creative teams.

Now, the more specific and buyer-driven the search gets, the lower the volume. But unlike in traditional B2C keyword research, lower volume can be a great sign in B2B. These keywords, if specific enough, attract more qualified leads that are typically further along in the buying cycle. 

Plus, converting a smaller pool of highly targeted prospects can be more profitable than attracting a larger, yet less relevant audience. 

Understanding Your Sales Funnel In B2B SEO

Would you say you understand your buyer’s journey from start to finish?

Failing to fully understand the specific steps (or touchpoints) both your prospects and buyers go through can lead to misaligned SEO strategies and wasted resources. If you don't know your audience's journey, you risk targeting the wrong keywords, which can attract traffic that doesn't convert, ultimately hurting your bottom line.

What’s one of the best solutions? Talking to your sales team! 

Your sales team has a wealth of information that can be eye-opening for your SEO strategy. They know:

  • Why customers buy your product
  • Why prospects give up midway through the process
  • How long it takes for a deal to close
  • Which objections the prospects (and the buying committees) bring up

Of course, you’ll want to triangulate your data whenever possible. Keep up with customer feedback to better understand the customer lifetime value (CLV) and pinpoint common reasons for both success and failure.

This data informs how you structure your SEO, the content you create, and how you map out each stage of the buyer journey. 

For example: if you find out prospects often hesitate because of uncertainty about implementation costs, you can create content like cost-benefit analyses to address these concerns upfront.

After Collecting Insights, Here’s Why Funnel Optimization Is Crucial for B2B SEO

A B2B deal can involve weeks or months of research, multiple decision-makers, and several touchpoints. So avoid throwing keywords anywhere in your content and hoping they stick.

Funnel optimization means creating content that guides prospects from one stage to the next with as little friction as possible. A digital conversion funnel outlines each step a visitor takes on your website towards a conversion.

While your strategy should indeed engage, nurture, and convert leads, it's important to remember that the buying journey, especially for B2B, is not always as simple as the three-pronged awareness-consideration-decision funnel that most general guides show. 

For example, you’ll find variations of steps and nomenclature for a reason.

A comparison of B2B and B2C sales funnels, illustrating the longer B2B decision-making process.
Source

Adding extra steps like intent, evaluation, or loyalty reflects the intricate process companies go through when deciding on a high-value purchase. Each stage has its purpose, whether it’s evaluating competitors (evaluation), ensuring post-purchase satisfaction (loyalty), or determining preferences based on detailed comparisons (preference).

It’s not about one being more “correct” than the other. These variations represent how different businesses may approach the funnel, based on their industry, sales process, or even customer preferences.

What Does the Funnel Look Like for Your Business? And How Can You Figure It Out?

Ideally, you should identify key stages where potential clients interact with your business (e.g., downloading a case study, or after attending a webinar). 

This often involves working closely with sales and customer support, who have direct insight into buyer behavior, common questions, objections, and reasons for both purchases and lost opportunities. 

In addition, you should review historical data, customer feedback, and the buyer’s decision-making process. Surveys, interviews with current customers, and analytics tools can help clarify the touchpoints and stages of engagement specific to their audience.

That’s how you can better guide prospects through the funnel and increase your chances of conversion.

Focusing on the Right B2B SEO Keywords

Doing keyword research is one thing. Understanding which keywords will drive real business outcomes and applying them strategically to your content is another. 

For the most part, the focus should be on keywords that match where your prospects are in the funnel

For example:

  • Comparison keywords like “HubSpot vs Salesforce” or “Best CRM for small businesses.” These types of keywords target buyers deep in the decision-making process.
  • Solution-oriented keywords that address specific pain points, like “enterprise CRM solutions” or “how to improve supply chain efficiency.”
  • Industry-specific long-tail keywords: Don’t be afraid of low-volume keywords! These reflect your customers’ unique challenges. If you’re selling manufacturing software, targeting niche keywords like “ERP software for aerospace” can attract highly qualified leads.

Use Funnel and Keyword Data to Optimize Service and Product Landing Pages

Your service and product pages serve as the primary touchpoints for many potential customers. These pages need to do more than just describe what you offer. They should educate, inform, and convince visitors that your solution addresses their specific challenges. 

Use Pillar Pages and Topic Clusters

An illustrative example of a pillar page and topic clusters for the keyword “content marketing”.
Source

Don’t forget to harness topic clusters. This strategy organizes your content around a central “pillar” page that covers a broad subject and links out to more specific, related “cluster” pages. You could create a pillar page around “CRM software for enterprises” and link it to cluster pages like “How to use a CRM in manufacturing.”

That way, search engines can better understand the relationship between your content pieces

Not only can you rank higher for many relevant keywords, but you can establish your business as an authority on a given subject.

To see if these pillar pages are performing well, use SiteGuru’s Content Report

This tool shows the organic performance of pages, highlighting top keywords, indexation status, impressions, clicks, and page views. 

You can also see which keywords drive the most organic traffic and identify the top 5 keywords your page ranks for. This data is actionable, helping you adjust your SEO strategy, prioritize cluster content updates, and make informed decisions on how to tweak underperforming pages for better rankings and engagement.

To find it, go to Insights > Content in your dashboard.  SiteGuru’s content report highlighting metrics for two key pages.

SEO-Friendly B2B Content: What Works?

Around 78% of B2B buyers say they value content from trustworthy sources. And rightly so, because there’s no way around it: when decisions involve hefty investments, your content needs to be credible. 

So, when you're putting together long-form content (still a staple in B2B marketing), make sure you're linking to trustworthy, authoritative sites. Not only that, but showcase your expertise with author bios, certifications, experience, and credentials when possible.  

If you’d like to try something other than long-form articles, here are different content types that currently work well for B2B:

  • Hyper-personalized content. This type of content takes individual buyers’ journeys into account. For example, personalized email campaigns that suggest a solution based on previous interactions. It makes each step feel more personal. And when buyers feel understood and valued, they’re more likely to trust your brand and take action.
  • Video content: More B2B companies are investing in video for demos, product explanations, and testimonials. There’s no need to show your face if you don’t want to, as long as you offer valuable content for your specific audience. However, some human connection is great to have.
  • Polls, quizzes, and assessments are becoming popular this year. They not only keep visitors entertained but also give insights into what your audience wants. Plus, they can help increase the time spent on your site, which is always a win.

Bonus: Create a Scalable Content Strategy

A scalable content strategy means producing a steady stream of high-quality content that addresses prospects’ needs at each stage of the funnel.

It doesn't have to be difficult, especially if you’ve created evergreen content you can update regularly.

The goal should be to improve depth and personalization rather than churn out generic pieces. This approach frees up your team to focus on adding valuable insights versus starting from scratch. 

Leverage Your Data and Information for Backlinks

Since backlinks are Google’s trust signals, they’re a strong focus area for most B2B SEO strategists. However, acquiring backlinks doesn’t mean you’ll have to reach out to hundreds of sites every day.

Instead of the skyscraper technique, an old staple where you would’ve asked other websites to link to your content (fresher than the old content they’re linking to), focus on your assets:

  • Customers
  • Knowledge
  • Data

For example, Patchstack, a cybersecurity company, analyzes its WordPress vulnerability data every year to publish a whitepaper aggregating the insights. This is an instant hit for getting coverage on other websites that are looking for stats like these, as well as media outlets covering the industry.

A page showing Patchstack’s yearly whitepaper analysis which has proven to be an excellent material for acquiring backlinks.
Source

On the other hand, you could just as easily (and perhaps even more so) leverage your team members’ expertise or your customers’ thoughts to create not just case studies, but opinionated, thought leadership content like Pulsely does for the DEI space:

A page showing Pulsely’s thought leadership content built on top of SME insights.
Source

Once you have a unique angle or data others don’t have access to, you can produce content that will naturally get editorial links. Or, at the very least, it’ll be much easier to ask writers, website owners, and publications to feature it. 

After all, you’ve added new knowledge to the discussion!

Tracking Content Performance in B2B, and What to Pay Attention To

Keyword rankings are crucial to adjusting content strategy. 

SiteGuru’s keyword report gives you valuable insights into how your keywords are faring by providing detailed data on rankings, clicks, impressions, and average positions. This information helps you identify the keywords driving traffic and the ones in need of more attention.

Go to Insights > keywords, and here’s what you’ll find:

SiteGuru’s keywords report featuring an overview of a website’s keywords.

Make sure you also keep track of the following metrics for your B2B SEO:

  • Content engagement: Check how long visitors stay on your pages and whether they’re interacting with your content. 
  • Conversion rates: Look at whether people are taking action on your product pages, case studies, or anywhere else. 
  • Re-engagement metrics. In B2B, repeat visits and how well your content educates potential buyers can be just as important as a conversion. 

Using standard tools like GA4 and Google Search Console gives you a solid overview of your performance. A tool like Mixpanel is a more advanced analytics option that allows for detailed tracking of user interactions. 

For more detailed insights, SiteGuru offers the SEO data you need to fine-tune your B2B SEO strategy – especially because it integrates with both GA4 and GSC.

There’s No Talking About B2B SEO Without Talking About These Folks

Asana

The headline for Asana’s project management solution, which reads “Manage projects efficiently, even when priorities shift.”
Source

Asana excels at targeting solution-based keywords that directly address pain points and offer solutions simultaneously. 

Their content marketing strategy is focused on practical, actionable guides, such as “how to improve team collaboration” or “best project management tools.” 

They make great use of product landing pages that are optimized for SEO and clearly target both broad and specific search intents.

A collection of Asana’s primary benefits for cross-functional teams.
Source

Salesforce

Salesforce has long mastered targeting industry-specific keywords and long-tail search queries relevant to their target markets. 

A search result featuring Salesforce as the leading CRM for financial services.

Their blog and resource section are optimized for both broad and niche keywords, delivering a mix of top-of-funnel content (e.g., articles on “what is CRM”) and bottom-of-funnel content (e.g., comparison pages between Salesforce and competitors).

Their Company Management Software by Industry page is nothing short of amazing. 

An impressive overview of the many industries the Salesforce CRM serves.
Source

Each of the above industry-specific pages has ultra-detailed information about their software for a particular industry. This means the content is highly relevant to users within those sectors, making it more likely to rank well for specific, niche keywords related to that industry.

For example, Salesforce’s page for financial services varies between terms like “financial institutions” and “financial services organizations,” so the content is directly aligned with different queries.

KPIs achieved by financial services with the help of Salesforce.Source

SEO Success Starts with Alignment

We could go on and on about SEO strategies for B2B. But the truth is: your SEO strategy needs to be in sync with your product, sales, and marketing teams. 

Without a well-defined ideal customer profile (ICP) and a clear understanding of your sales funnel, even the best SEO efforts will fall flat. You’ll see the best results when your team works together to attract high-quality traffic, answer more questions, nurture better leads, and get a much higher win rate.