Quality search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to helping potential customers find your products or services.
- 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic search.
- 72% of marketers worldwide said relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic, according to a June 2015 report from Ascend2.
- In the same Ascend2 report, 48% of respondents identified keyword/phrase research as a most effective SEO tactic with 34% citing frequent website updates.
An SEO strategy can be divided into two groups — on-page and off-page. Both contain several factors that play an important part in your success. All factors weighted for SEO work together to raise your site’s rankings. No one factor alone can improve rankings.
For example, you can have a great site structure, well-written meta tags, and several backlinks. However, none of these will help if your site has low-quality content. While having positive SEO factors can improve your site’s rankings, negative factors and penalties can have a far worse effect.
On-Page SEO Success
Quality Content
Google is constantly looking for high-quality content. Who wants to read an uninspiring or uninformative article loaded with grammatical and spelling errors? It’s imperative that your pages are well-written and easy to understand. Generating high-quality content should be an important aspect of every SEO strategy. Not only does this help SEO, but it can also lead to higher conversion rates.
Site Architecture
How easy is it for Google search bots to “crawl” and understand your website? Good site structure plays a crucial role in your search ranking as well. A proper site structure makes it easier for search engines to understand what your site is about. It also allows them to easily find and index all of your content. If Google can’t figure out your structure and find all of your pages, it won’t be able to index them for others to find.
Meta Tags
Meta title and description tags entice viewers to click on your page. What good is remarkable page content if no one clicks on the page? We recommend keeping titles between 55-60 characters and descriptions between 150-160 characters. That way, your page title and description won’t get cut short when viewed on different devices.
Off-Page SEO Success
Trust and Authority
Search engines aim to display trusted and reliable sources. While it’s unknown exactly how Google determines the credibility of a site, clicks, links, and shares show that your site is an authoritative source.
Quality Links
Inbound links are important, but you need to be careful. Aim to only get natural, high-quality links from trusted, authoritative websites. Quality links can have a huge impact in boosting your SEO. However, if your inbound links are paid, from low-quality sites, or considered spammy, they can result in penalties that will drastically impact the rankings of your site.
Avoid Violations
SEO violations can negatively impact your website’s ranks. To try and improve rankings, make sure your website avoids being marked as “spam” or flagged for using “black hat” tactics. Google will penalize sites that try to deceive or manipulate ratings. Depending on the severity of the violations, your site could not only drop in rankings, but search engines could also ban it completely.
As Google gets smarter and algorithms continue to update and change, it’s important to stay on top of the best ways to optimize your SEO strategy. For more information on how to best optimize your B2B website, check out our blog, Is Your B2B SEO Strategy Suffering From These 5 Mistakes?
All marketing tactics should be thought of as part of a larger whole, rather than separate pieces. By strategically integrating all marketing tactics, the marketing program becomes more effective and cost efficient. As a B2B agency, we developed B2B 360 Integrated Digital Marketing to meet this improved performance need. To learn more about B2B 360 and how it will benefit your business, download our free eBook: The Better Path to Top-Tier Tech Marketing.
