Get your message heard by B2B tech influencers and decision makers. By Dennie Theodore, Communications Trailblazer and HCI Board Member
Rethink SEO: Drive B2B Tech Buyers to Your Website
by Carrine Greason, B2B Technology Writer and SEO Specialist
B2B tech companies need leads. In recent interviews, several of our clients noted that the only thing their marketing efforts are judged by is “how many leads we get.”
The challenge, of course, is that your company might even have hired an SEO agency in the past, got more traffic to your website, but still didn’t get good leads. Instead, visitors spent 2 seconds on your site and bounced away.
How can you ensure that website traffic is consistent with your marketing goals? People who have needs that you can address, see your company’s value, and become a lead? The secret is found in search engine optimization (SEO) that drives relevant traffic to your website. The trick: finding SEO experts that understand your technology, your brand messaging, and your buyers. All three at once? Is that even possible? Here’s how.
B2B tech vs. consumer SEO: what’s the difference?
You have a technical product that you’d like to see rocket to the top of search results—called the search engine results page (SERP). Successful SEO depends on choosing the right set of keywords to focus on, building a base of thought-leadership content, and regularly publishing fresh content that is both useful to your techy readers and advances your SEO keyword strategy.
Unlike consumer SEO, B2B tech SEO requires a special type of digital marketing expertise. If you hire an agency, you need one that comes up to speed quickly on your technology and B2B buyers.
To sum it up: It’s an ongoing effort to stay at the top of search results, and an SEO agency partner with a strong engineering and technology background can understand your products and help you get to the top and stay there.
Why does Google rank other pages higher than mine?
Google analyzes how visitors behave on your site to determine the rank of your site’s pages in search results. Do the visitors Google sends to your site spend time? Do they scroll and scroll and scroll? Do they visit multiple pages? Do they watch videos? Or do they quickly bounce away, a clear sign they didn’t get what they were looking for?
Search engines want to offer visitors valuable content, so searchers continue to use their service. To fine-tune search results, Google uses 200 signals and changes its ranking algorithm many times a year. Clearly, to get on top, you can’t just game the system. Google has a world full of content to choose from. The only path to long-term success: develop a website with content desired by your potential buyers.
Search engines are more likely to send people to a website that has proven popular in the past—a metric called site authority. When you have more of it, Google ranks your pages higher in search results than if you don’t. How do you earn greater site authority? Through a depth of content related to the buyer’s search term, excellent website performance, and external validation from other websites who link to your content.
To sum it up: More pages, more original content, more backlinks, fast loading pages, more time on site by visitors, and time. As you repair your SEO strategy by focusing on what Google and visitors care about, your site climbs in search authority. It takes an ongoing investment since your competitors are also fine-tuning their sites. Strive to incrementally increase your search authority over time.
How to drive relevant web traffic and leads
It’s somewhat easy for an SEO agency to drive lots of traffic to your website, but if you’re in B2B tech, you may find that the traffic they generate may not be relevant. For instance, we took over a campaign for a company seeking embedded software and enterprise software buyers. But the SEO agency focused on a high-volume, consumer desktop product that generated a lot of traffic that didn’t fit with the company’s product roadmap. The digital marketing experts didn’t understand the technology well enough and only aimed for more traffic, not the right traffic.
Not all website traffic is valuable. Some words and acronyms have multiple meanings, span multiple industries, or are consumer-focused. A semiconductor company might sell MCUs for smart watches, but it can’t extract value from visitors looking for wristwatches. And an operating system company selling an embedded OS for railway systems doesn’t benefit from visits by model train hobbyists.
The good news is that B2B tech users are search savvy. They use more specific phrases and questions. Long-tailed keywords—combinations of words—help drive relevant traffic and generate leads.
To sum it up: To choose the right keywords for a B2B tech company, an SEO agency needs to understand the nuances of the business, the tech, the competition, and the industry.
What types of content do I need for SEO?
For every keyword phrase you want to rank on page 1, your company needs “the one best page” in a field of related pages on your website. Your buyers have pain points and buy B2B tech products to get what they need done faster and easier. To pull those buyers into your site, it’s good to use in-depth SEO pillar pages that answer many related questions and provide access to other content via a variety of learning modes (i.e., text, images, diagrams, and videos). In this way, your visitors spend more time on site, which Google uses as a positive indicator. Once they are there, engineers find helpful FAQs, guides, user manuals, how-to videos, and podcasts.
Alongside pillar pages, a stream of SEO-focused blog posts target specific searches and keep your site fresh. In addition to wholly new content, updating older pages with new content makes them more valuable than the day they were published—an efficient tactic to grow your content.
Make sure your content is easy to find. Crosslinks from one page to another on your site, an easy-reading font size, and explanatory text links all improve navigation. And, for site authority, use SEO-focused page titles, subheads, and file names—even the words in your domain name.
To sum it up: Create a valuable website for your audiences and they will come—if you do it with SEO in mind.
Does AI change SEO?
Searchers that receive an AI overview that answers their question are less likely to click. Artificial intelligence changes SEO while making the basics of search authority and depth of content as important as ever. Rather than sending a visitor to your site, the AI assistant may answer the question by aggregating information from multiple sites, usually providing a link to each but without attribution. You want a link to your site included in the list.
Be careful of using AI tools to create content for your website, however. Go ahead and do it to draft social media posts. Or to identify a list of trending topics to cover in a blog post. You can even ask AI to write a shorter piece from a longer whitepaper you’ve written in-house. But don’t ask AI to write a blog post from scratch, because mediocre one-size-fits-all AI-generated content detracts from your value proposition and brand reputation.
To sum it up: Your website content needs to be original, trustworthy, and valuable to promote your product differentiators.
Ready to rethink SEO?
You need leads. And your website continues to be your most valuable asset to generate more leads. But to create a successful, high-ranking website, you need high-quality SEO that reflects your product differentiators and taps into your buyers. We are ready to come alongside you, gain a solid understanding of your business, and apply the kind of B2B tech marketing expertise you need to attract more potential buyers via search.
Let's connect.
HCI has marketing professionals in North America and Europe.
HCI has marketing professionals in North America and Europe.
