Whatever your business, increasing your online visibility is always worthwhile. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is how you do it, but it remains a mystery to many in the B2B space. We hope to change that.
What actually is SEO? It’s a series of techniques to improve the position of your website in online searches. Search engines like Google use algorithms to determine where websites will rank in searches. If you use the right keywords and phrases, your ranking will improve.
The better your SEO, the more people will find you online – which means more leads. It’s relevant to every business, and we want to demystify it.
Next we’ll shed some light on what we do at GetCrisp to help our B2B clients to nail their SEO. If you have direct questions or want to know more about our services, head to our contact page.
Spelling out your products, services and USPs
Your products are keywords in themselves – which is a good place to start with your SEO. Each page that features an individual product will benefit from having text and image and file titles that are relevant to the product. Be careful not to cram keywords on the page, but the more you can catch people’s Google searches, the more people will find you.
Your services might be a little different if they’re unique to you. You’ve got the freedom to brand them however you like, so really this goes back to understanding your clients. Whatever long-tail keywords you choose to market your services, you are trying to offer the solution to your clients’ problems. This could be a problem they didn’t even know they had.
It’s likely that you will have a broad range of competitors that might be selling something similar, but their formula will be different to yours. So, it’s important to make your unique selling point (USP) known. You may offer a better service, a wider choice of products or a more competitive pricing. A key-phrase like “affordable, award-winning telecommunications” says more than just “telecommunications” and sets you apart.
Put your USPs in your meta description (that’s the text describing a web page, which you see in Google results before you click). If the USP contains a few keywords, even better. That said, it needs to be something that your customers want. It’s pointless to say that you are unique unless your USP aligns with what your customers want.
Know your audience
As a tech business you’ll understand that if you know your audience, you will know what products and services will resonate with them. So, if the user journey to your product starts with the question they’ve typed into Google, how are you going to answer that question?
You want your surrounding keywords and metadata to consider how people might use the products that they’re looking for. It’s also good to be mindful of the potential problems that people face using technology. Not everyone is an engineer! Try producing marketing materials like user guides, manuals, explainer videos and helpful blogs. This will allow you to hit multiple keywords in a natural way, while also showing customers that you understand their needs. It will also bring the customer closer to understanding your product.
Write for people, not algorithms
Google ranks pages using its algorithm. Clearly, you’ve got to bear this in mind for SEO purposes. But remember that the algorithm isn’t your audience; people are. A natural, readable style is always a priority.
Whatever you’re writing, it’s wise not to let those highly searched keywords be the sole focus of your content. SEO will gather people to your website, but if it doesn’t make any sense or is just cramming keywords into it, it will just seem like senseless jargon. Google always seeks to bring users to the most trusted and user-valuable sites related to their search term, so be mindful that your content should above all be made of substance.
You wouldn’t read a book that was exclusively made of adverts. People want real content. One good approach is to put longer-form search terms as your sub-headers. Then you can address those sub-headers underneath, without having to cram in unnatural language. That way you attract people who are asking relevant questions, while also offering them content that’s useful to them.
Nailing the off-page and technical bits
Your off-page marketing serves to fill in the gaps and extend your website further. The surrounding social media pages, content marketing, Google reviews and link building all serve to improve your website ranking. And of course, the more familiarisation a viewer has with your brand, the more you’ll acquire their trust.
Behind all of the on-page SEO and content marketing, you have the technical SEO, and that’s where the developers and experts come in. Getting Google to trust your site and boosting your domain authority and website speed and health can be a rigorous process. Getting the right help to do this could make your website accessible even to the biggest companies.
Call to action
In every corner of a webpage, piece of social content or product brochure, the steps to sale need to be easy for the any consumer to find. For B2B companies the call to action has already been spelled out in the content – all that’s needed is a pointer to the right steps to sale.
There’s certainly a happy medium between making a call to action bold and eye-catching on the one hand, and distracting and overly present on the other. Begin with a verb. Keep it short. Don’t over-use slogans. Put them in the corners of a page rather than in the centre. With these points in mind, you should be hitting the right market with your SEO. Follow through with your optimisation by keeping your content relevant and up-to-date, and you should be onto a winner.
If you want more advice on SEO or developing a marketing strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Head to our contact page and get in touchv.