B2B Marketers' Roadmap to SEO Success

STEP 1 PLANNING & RESEARCH

Business goals

Search personas

Keyword research

TRACKING

STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4

On-page optimization

Content creation

Site accessibility

PR

Link building

Social media

Traf�c & leads

Pipeline & ROI

CONTENT OPTIMIZATION

OUTREACH& PROMOTION MEASUREMENT

Keywordranking

Competitiveranking

Page optimization score

Inboundlinks

Shares& likes

Estimated click value

B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success

Step 1 – Planning and researchYour trip to SEO success starts with some key planning and research activities. Take the time upfront to understand your business goals and needs of your target audiences. Those factors directly feed into your keyword research.

Business goals – which product or service offerings are priorities for your business? What lead split are you aiming for by product line? What types of leads are you trying to capture and how do they match with the different parts of your sales cycle? –i.e. early stage leads from content downloads, webinar registrants for mid-funnel leads, free-trial leads for people in the evaluation phase of their buyer’s journey. How many visits and leads do you expect from your SEO and other inbound marketing campaigns?

Search personas – how many different types of buyers are you trying to reach through your SEO efforts? What is their role in the buying process? What pain points do they have? What type of information do they consume? Where do they go to find informa-tion? And most importantly—what keyword terms do they use to search on? We recommend developing search personas to answer these questions. Here are some great resources to help you get started:

» 5 Steps To Building a Search Persona » Building a search persona (Webinar)

Answering the questions above will enable you to create a strategic SEO and content plan that will guide the rest of your journey.

HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP

Optify provides some great tools to aid your planning and research efforts. Use Optify to gather competitive intelligence, get keyword suggestions and determine what current content is driving traffic and leads.

2

B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success

Keyword research Your keywords are a foundational element of your SEO and inbound marketing efforts—it’s essential that you choose them wisely. This means taking a strategic approach to your keyword research, an approach that differs from building a paid search list.

Get this critical step right and you’ll maximize both traffic and leads from your inbound campaigns. You’ll be looking for keyword phrases that are highly relevant to your business, have good search volume, are not too competitive and directly support your conversion goals. Your list should also contain a mix of terms across the keyword spectrum—see the illustration below for more details.

If all of this sounds like a tall order, read 5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List. This how-to guide will walk you through the steps you need to take to develop a great keyword list.

3

SEO keyword diversity for B2B marketers

CO

MP

ETI

TIO

N

HEAD TERMS - 1-2 WORD PHRASES“CRM”“CRM software”

“CRM Saas software”“best CRM software”

“review of CRM Saas software vendors”“whitepapers on CRM best practices”

CHUNKY MIDDLE OR “TORSO TERMS” - SHORT WORD PHRASES

LONG TAIL - MORE DESCRIPTIVE WORD PHRASES

SEARCH FREQUENCY

HIGH

HIGH

LOW

LOW

Optify’s Inbound Marketing solution helped us drive more qualified leads and close more deals from SEO.” Jon Kohl, VP of Marketing, ADSI

“

B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success

Step 2 – Content optimizationYou have a plan. You have a strategic keyword list. You’re now ready for step 2 of your journey. Great content is the foundation of SEO success—content that attracts and engages your audience, meets their needs and leads them through the sales cycle. But great content alone isn’t enough. It needs to be optimized so that search engines have the best chance of finding it.

Creating great contentIn step 1 you determined what content elements you need to meet your business goals and how they align with your target personas. Your content can and should take many different forms—this will help you cover all parts of the sales cycle and maximize reach. In fact a recent benchmark study found that B2B marketers deployed an average of eight content tactics to achieve their goals*.

Your Web site and Blog are the foundation of your content platform, with both playing key roles in attracting and engaging your audience. Other content elements such as white papers, videos, presentations and webinars are important for your site, and also lend themselves well to distribution on third party sites. If these pieces are optimized well they can help both improve your SEO rank and drive more traffic.

As you go about creating content, don’t overuse keywords. Remember that you’re writing for humans not bots or spiders. Always strive to write great content that your target audiences will find useful. This not only makes good business sense, but may also support your ranking goals given Google’s recent announcement of their “over-optimiza-tion” algorithm.

Check out the resources below to get some ideas and tips on producing great content:

» Content that works for B2B marketers » Ten tips for creating great content » The basics of blogging as a tool for B2B marketing

4

B2B Content Marketing Usage (by Tactic)

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

79%

74%

65%

63%

58%

56%

52%

51%

46%

31%

31%

30%

25%

22%

20%

16%

16%

15%

14%

10%

Articles

Social Media (other than blogs)

Blogs

eNewsletters

Case Studies

In-Person Events

Videos

White Papers

Webinars/Webcasts

Microsites

Print Magazines

Print Newsletters

eBooks

Podcasts

Mobile Content

Digital Magazines

Virtual Conferences

Traditional Media

Research Reports

Branded Content Tools

* Information and chart from “B2B content marketing, 2012 Benchmarks, budgets and trends” by The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP

Use Optify to see how well your pages are optimized and find out exactly what you need to do to improve your page score to increase rank and traffic.

B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success

On-page optimizationYou’ve created great Web pages, Blog posts and other content elements. Now it’s time to optimize that content to make it easier for search engines to find. Optimize around just one or two keywords to maximize your chances of success. For your core Web site content or pillar pages use the strategic keyword phrases that are closer to the head of the SEO distribution curve. Blog posts and other content items are a great place to use terms that are more ‘long tail’ in nature. See the diagram called “SEO keyword diversity for B2B marketers” for more information on this point.

The resources below contain information about all aspects of on-page optimization. You’ll learn how to approach key meta tags including title, description and image alt tags. You’ll also get some great tips on optimizing PDFs and videos.

» SEO 101: What is a Pillar Page? » SEO Best Practices: 10 Tactics to Rank Higher » The Changing Face of SERPs: The Durable Elements of SEO » 7 Tips for Optimizing Video For Search » There’s SEO gold in your PDFs—make sure you optimize them

Site accessibilitySite accessibility refers to things your Web team can do at the site level to make your Web and Blog content as accessible as possible for search engines.

Check out these resources to learn more about crawling and indexing, site maps, the effects of page load speed and URL structure.

» Six tips for improving your website’s accessibility » How Many Homes Does Google Think You Have? » Five Ways to Optimize for Google’s Sitelinks Update » Seven Steps for Stellar SEO During a Site Redesign » 6 Tips for Improving Your Page Load Speed to Rank Higher

5

HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP

Optify has some great features to help you with your outreach and promotion efforts including a link suggestion tool to help you garner new inbound links and Twitter for Business—a great way to syndicate your content.

B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success

Step 3 – Outreach and promotionOn page and site level optimization will only get you so far with your SEO efforts. To really boost your SEO rank and to maximize traffic you need to dedicate time and resourc-es on your outreach efforts.

Link BuildingThe number and quality of inbound links to your site are key factors for search engine algorithms. Having great content that can be found will garner you some inbound links as people write about your content and link back to your site. But to really grow the number of high-quality inbound links you need to take a proactive and systematic approach to your link-building efforts.

Discover how to get more quality inbound links while avoiding shady tactics by reading the inbound marketing guide for link building

PRYour PR efforts are a key part of your outreach program, and go way beyond targeting traditional media outlets. Explore the resources below to learn how to maximize the results of your PR efforts from both your core media contacts and from the Blogosphere.

» Top Ten Tips for Optimizing Your Press Release for SEO » 7 Tips for Optimizing Your New Press Page for Press and Search » 31 Tips for Getting Your Stories Found in Google News

6

HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP

Use Optify to track and report on the metrics that matter most for your inbound marketing efforts. From keyword ranking to closed-loop ROI reporting, Optify’s powerful tracking and analytics engine gives you the information you need to make informed marketing decisions. Optify integrates with Salesforce.com to give you a closed-loop view of your inbound marketing efforts

B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success

Social media Social media has revolutionized the way information is found, consumed and shared. Promoting your content via social networks has a direct traffic benefit, but increasing evidence suggests that social influence (how much your content is shared and ‘liked’) also impacts your SEO rank.

Get insight on how to get the most traffic and SEO benefit from your social media and Blogging efforts from the resources below:

» How Social Has Turned Search On Its Head » 5 Tactics to Help Your SEO through Social Media » How Social Media Has Revolutionized Search Marketing (Webinar)

Step 4 – MeasurementTo determine whether your SEO and other inbound marketing efforts are really success-ful you need to measure not just traffic and leads, but pipeline and ROI. This level of closed-loop reporting requires tight integration between your inbound marketing and CRM platforms. With this type of solution in place you can report on the number of leads, opportunities and sales along with the associated costs and conversion rates.

TrackingThere are dozens of metrics that relate to SEO and inbound marketing, all of which tell part of the story. It’s important to determine upfront which metrics are important to your business, so you can establish benchmarks and track progress.

Metrics such as keyword rank, number of inbound links and overall page score tell you what areas need attention and where to prioritize your efforts. They indicate the progress you’re making towards your ultimate goal of generating more traffic, leads and opportunities. To see which SEO metrics we recommend you keep track of read the Top 10 SEO metrics that B2B marketers need to understand to generate more leads.

7

INBOUND DEMAND

TRACKING & ANALYTICS

SALES ENABLEMENTEMAIL NURTURINGCreate a flow of high quality leads into your marketing funnel with enterprise-class SEO and social marketing.

Get full insight into what influences your buyers and the path they take to find and evaluate you during their research process.

Nurture your house list with email campaigns and get detailed intelligence about what every lead does after they receive your emails.

Help sales reach prospects and engage with them early in the sales process with visitor intelligence and prospect alerts.

THE OPTIFY INBOUND MARKETING SUITE

B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success

About Optify Optify delivers an integrated top-of-the-funnel solution for marketers responsible for fueling their company’s growth. Optify helps professional B2B marketers reach more buyers and generate more demand for their products or services month-after-month.

The Optify Inbound Marketing Software Suite brings together the enterprise-class SEO, social marketing, website analytics and tools that B2B marketers need to increase awareness of their business, influence buyers across social networks, and engage with prospects at the earliest point of their buyer’s journey.

NEXT STEPS

• Request a demo

• Sign up for a free trial

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Build Your SEO Campaign in 15 Minutes (PDF)

• International SEO (PDF)

• How the new face of SERPs has altered the Organic CTR Curve (PDF)

8