Best Digital Tools to Enhance Your B2B SEO Strategy in 2023

Why Should Your Marketing Strategy Contain B2B SEO Tools?

When looking to improve your B2B SEO strategy, it’s essential to consider the benefits of digital tools. They can automate various processes, giving you more time to focus on core business goals and actions. They also provide accurate data, even in real-time, and visualize it to make it easier for you to process.

Furthermore, you can leave an analysis going and come back to detailed results with actionable recommendations on how to improve the B2B marketing strategy you’ve adopted.

Here, we’ve prepared a guide to explore why B2B SEO is so important, what SEO tools you can use to automate the process and measure its success, and what steps to include in your strategy.

The Importance of SEO for B2B Marketing

Search engine optimization for B2B marketing isn’t something people think about a lot. SEO is the same for any purpose, right?

Wrong. SEO for B2Bmarketplaces is more important than you think, and following specialized recommendations can help you achieve your goals much faster.

B2B SEO has several different approaches, including:

• Low-volume and high CPC (cost per click) keyword targeting instead of high-volume and low CPC for B2C SEO.
• Data-rich, tactical content focused on drawing the attention of decision-makers as opposed to fun, entertaining articles for a broader target audience.
• Very little or no SMM (social media marketing), compared to high exposure on social media for B2C SEO.

So, the keyword choice, content creation, presentation, and promotion should be more meticulous.

How to Measure and Automate Your B2B SEO Strategy

A successful B2B SEO strategy involves close attention to detail, automation, and continuous monitoring to find out what technique or buyer persona works the best for your business. SEO tools can help you with this. Here are some different types of tools you should have in your arsenal, plus some examples!

User Experience Tool

To get insight into the experience of your visitors, as well as their motivations and behaviors, you need a user experience tool. For this, you can use a tool like HotJar. It will analyze where users spend the most time so you know where to place CTAs and adjust the UX of your website to meet their overall expectations.

Keyword Research Tool

Keyword research is one of the most important pillars of B2B SEO marketing. You need to find the most suitable queries your target audience uses to look for opportunities. Besides, you have to research competition and determine their target key terms. You can use SEO tools such as Google Keyword Planner to research keywords, choose suitable ones, and create whole campaigns with them.

Sales Funnel Software

You have to be very careful when it comes to sales funnel procedures. A B2B marketing strategy involves a more complex funnel than the B2C model. It may be tough to control all the actions you have to take to help people move from the awareness stage of the funnel to the consideration stage and further.

Tools such as HubSpot Lead Management or ClickFunnels will help you manage leads and create and optimize landing pages, emails, checkout, and other pivotal assets, moving users deeper into the funnel.

Website Analytics Tool

B2B SEO marketing starts with analyzing website performance, and one of the key metrics for this is keyword rankings. You can use the SE Ranking Keyword Position Tracker or SEO rank tracker to see what queries your site ranks for, its traffic forecast, and identify SEO issues like keyword cannibalization. You can also use Google Analytics to get detailed traffic insights and track the user behavior on your website.

Content Planning Software

A smart content plan should be a part of your B2B marketing strategy because it will help visitors become leads and lead convert into partners. The articles have to be scalable, informational and come in a logical sequence. So, content planning is a must. You can do it with Trello, for example. The tool allows for creating multiple boards to label your content. You can create lists and put cards with article assignments to control the process. Trello pricing caters to different organizational needs, providing flexible plans to accommodate teams of all sizes.

Reputation Management Tool

Your reputation is one of the deciding factors for someone as to whether they want to collaborate with your business. You can manage your reputation online by addressing reviews, content, etc., that may jeopardize your efforts.

The must-have SEO tool for this purpose is Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), which controls the audience’s perception of your company. You can track social media and news mentions with Mention.com. The tool allows you to track the audience’s opinions about you, your competitor, or industry-related terms. With insights, you can create better content and do damage control.

Have at least one of each type of tool to measure your progress and automate your B2B marketing strategy to the max.

How to Set Up a Successful B2B Marketing Strategy

Now that you have the tools you need to help you, it’s time to build a successful B2B SEO strategy. Here are some actionable recommendations you can incorporate into your methods immediately.

#1: Create Buyer Personas

Building buyer personas will show you who you’re going to sell to and provide insight into how to influence them. 3-5 personas are the golden rule, but the exact number depends on the industry. 

A smart B2B marketing strategy will have to message each persona, guiding them smoothly through the sales funnel. You can test the messages and target audiences to find the perfect ones.

#2: Build a Sales Funnel

To build a B2B SEO strategy, you first should create a sales funnel. As the goals for your clients are more impactful than regular consumers looking for a pair of jeans, you should perform in-depth target audience research.

You have to appear in SERPs at each stage, from awareness to decision, to prove that you’re the top choice and worth attention. By being there for your target customers with the answers to their questions and proper offers, you’ll gain better traffic that’s more likely to turn into sales.

#3: Map Out a Keyword Strategy Based on the Funnel Stages

A successful B2B marketing strategy has keywords for all sales funnel stages. There are informational keywords that will help users to get acquainted with your brand and selling keywords that will show your landing pages with exclusive offers.

If you have a website, you must check to see what keywords you already rank for and research the ones with a high CPC and low search volume, as you target a very narrow group of people. Search through competitors, industry-specific blogs, and databases of your digital tools, and cluster keywords according to buyer personas and funnel stages.

#4: Create and Optimize Your Website

Website optimization consists of 3 stages:

• On-page – your content plan, smart usage of keywords, media, internal linking, etc.
• Off-page – high-quality backlinks to your pages, reputation management, business listings, etc.
• Technical – speed and performance, navigation, responsive design, etc.

Every B2B marketing strategy starts with a powerful website. You need informative and visually appealing product pages, easy navigation, and a blog showcasing your expertise that involves case studies, statistics, and more.

#5: Build a Scalable Content Plan

B2B SEO automation revolves a lot around your content. While landing page content is important, it resides at the bottom of the funnel. To get people there, you must first impress them with your knowledge and experience.

Build content clusters in your blog that will answer your target audience’s questions. Create pillar long-form content and pack it with links to additional content that details the terminology and your experience. Use a timeline template to make content planning easier for everyone involved

Incorporate:

• Regular posts
• Guides
• How-tos
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Studies
• Statistics
• Case studies, etc.

#6: Promote Your Brand Content to Earn Backlinks and Authority

Content marketing is important for building authority through links. Social sharing isn’t as crucial for B2B as linking by relevant, high-authority resources. For that, you have to put some effort into reaching out to the owners of those sources and pitching your content to them.

Here’s what you can do:

• Offer to replace a broken link with similar content from your business
• Reach out to journalists to refer to your statistics and studies
• Arrange backlinks as recommendations to read your content, etc.

Summary

In this brief guide, you had a chance to find out why you should use tools for your B2B marketing strategy and how to build a successful one. 

Key takeaways:

• The importance of SEO for B2B is in the specialization of this optimization niche for B2B goals, such as keywords with high CPCs, content made for decision-makers, low-volume keywords, and more.
• You can automate your strategy using digital tools for user experience analysis, keyword research, sales funnel creation, content planning, website analytics, and reputation management.
• To build an effective B2B marketing strategy, you should create buyer personas, build a smart sales funnel, create a content plan that considers the funnel stages, choose suitable keywords, and promote your business.