The world of B2B marketing has dramatically changed in recent years, and there is a need for business professionals to adapt to the new normal and sail in the current boat.
Even though there are multiple B2B search engine marketing (SEM) strategies, there are some essential hacks you need to learn and master. Let’s check them out!
Top 10 B2B Search Engine Marketing Strategies
1. Actively collect ratings and reviews
Most people nowadays make their purchase decisions based on ratings and reviews they see online.
If you truly want to make your business stand out, then you need to have an abundance of positive reviews for your business. You can collect them on your website, social media pages, Google My Business Page, and any other dedicated review site.
The secret to obtaining positive ratings and reviews is simply providing an outstanding product/service, backed by exceptional customer service. If you have both areas in check, then people will have nothing but nice things to say about you.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Your target audience should be able to access your website through the search engines with minimal effort. Given the level of competition out there, the only way to achieve this is by investing in SEO.
Even though SEO is a considerable area that needs a lot of time and resources, It just cannot be ignored. You need to work on both on-site and off-site SEO. Invest in the right keywords that will draw many people to your website.
3. Reverse Image Search
This link-building strategy gives you the best mechanism to get links that propagates the general growth of your business brand across the search engine.
All you need is to go to Google image search and enter your site’s URL or search string. You will be able to get all the images published on your business site that Google has indexed.
You can click every image to check more details about it. If you realize that people are using your images without your consent, you can to contact them with proof that shows that the images originally belong to your business site. This means that they will need to place an attribution link, which will help you earn some SEO points through backlinks.
4. Pay-Per-Click advertising
Pay-Per-Click advertising, also known as PPC, is one of the most effective models of advertisement that you can use to grown brand. It yields faster results than most other strategies (like SEO).
This method uses paid ads to promote your business across your target market audience to ensure that your brand gets the exposure it deserves.
There are many PPC platforms available at your disposal, but in this case, since we’re focusing on B2B SEM strategies, you should invest in Google Ads and Bing Ads. You can create ads for all the keywords that are related to your business so that people get to see your website as the top result whenever they perform a search.
5. Reverse guest posting
Even though this sounds like a new trick, it’s simply the opposite of guest posting. Guest posting involves hiring a proficient writer to take responsibility for generating content for your site.
Reverse Guest posting is simply getting other people to publish content for your brand for free. It may sound a little crazy, but many marketers will do anything to obtain a backlink to their website, including writing a guest.
To attract writers to your site, you just need to have a “guest post guidelines” or a “write for us” page on your website. That will show visitors that you’re currently accepting guest posts.
6. Create infographics
When conducting a search engine marketing campaign, infographics play a huge role in elevating your efforts to the top.
They help increase the time visitors spend on your website, which then indicates to Google that your page has valuable content. As a result, you get better rankings in the SERPs.
Even though creating infographics such as graphs, and charts (Survey chart, Sankey, or simple Pie charts) can be relatively expensive, you can choose to take over the responsibility and do it yourself to cut the costs.
7. Always be available online
When running your digital marketing campaign, you need to remember that it’s not just about creating good content and posting it on your website.
You need to build a solid reputation by maintaining a healthy customer relationship. Ensure that your site is user-friendly and does not spam content. User-friendly sites often get rewarded by search engines with better rankings. In addition to that, you should be available online throughout the day and at night.
To help with that, you can invest in a chatbot to streamline your customer services. Chatbots are software that can be installed on websites and even social media pages to help answer user queries automatically.
Always monitor all your customer activities through your analytics tool to identify the areas you need to improve. For instance, if a certain page has a very high bounce rate, then you may need to review its content.
8. Review your buyer persona
A buyer persona is simply a fictional depiction of a business’ most ideal customer. Having one will help you establish precisely who you need to be targeting, and how to do so.
Buyer personas are so important because they provide a solid foundation for all your marketing efforts.
For instance, if you uncover that your buyer persona is an HR manager living in the UK, then you’ll know what tone to speak in that resonates with them. You’ll be able to create page titles and meta descriptions that get a much better CTR on the search engines.
9. Evaluate your business from the buyer’s perspective
When conducting a B2B SEM campaign, you should not only focus on securing high rankings on the search engines.
Try and evaluate your business site from the buyer’s perspective to get a clear picture of how they feel whenever they visit your website. This will give you a glimpse of the areas that need modification and adjustments.
Remember that search engines do not purchase any of the products and services you offer. So don’t focus too much on optimizing for the search engines, but rather for the potential buyers.
10. Analytics and reporting
Whenever you want to measure the results of your strategies more effectively, you need to analyze the right data metrics.
To get the right metrics to utilize in your data operations, you need to ensure that you have the right tools at your disposal to make the work easier. Google Analytics is an essential tool to detect and analyze traffic on your business site.
The analytics and reporting feature is mainly used to help you understand what is working and what is not working. In return, this gives you the freedom to choose between what suits your strategies and versa.
