At RainKing, our sales intelligence software has allowed us to develop an expertise in marketing for B2B sales, and I would like to share a few of the lessons that we have learned through the years.
The topic for today is the first in a series on how to do search engine optimization (SEO) for B2B sales. We have had exceptional success in growing our organic search volumes and leads via organic search. In March of 2017, we increased organic search traffic by 195% on a year over year basis, which has resulted in a similar increase in organic search leads. In addition, organic search was the source for more than half of our inbound deals. This growth was the result of a focused SEO strategy and effective tactical implementation.
The good news about B2B search engine optimization is that the tools and tactics are almost exactly the same as they are for all other SEO. What changes is the prioritization of tactics and strategies. When you are in a business that is lower volume and higher touch, the key is to take the time to develop your search engine optimization strategies before focusing on tactics.
Step One: Understand three SEO strategies: "Golden apples", "Bread and butter" and "Wheat and chaff"
Too often SEO articles take you straight to SEO tactics. Tactics are important, but before addressing tactics, it is important that you have a well thought out SEO strategy. That strategy is built upon a clear understanding of your business goals and a targeted return on investment (ROI). Effective SEO is always based on customer success and business needs. In that light, there are three core SEO strategies that should be considered:
Golden Apples SEO
'Golden Apples' are the leads that are valuable from the second you pick them. There aren't many Golden Apples around, but you want them all because they convert directly into sales. Golden Apples require you to dominate a few really important keywords and develop a tight conversion workflow. For RainKing, a Golden Apple term would be "sales intelligence". We want to dominate searches for sales intelligence not because of the volume of searches, but because these searches convert to sales.
In considering the Golden Apple SEO strategy, it is important to consider how difficult it will be to rank highly for your Golden Apple key terms. If it is too difficult to rank for those terms, you will need to find ways to rank for related longer tail searches. For instance, if the search term "sales intelligence" is too difficult, we may want to try to rank for "sales intelligence platform". Because the Golden Apple strategy is driven by website authority, the prioritization of tactics required to rank well will be significantly different than the other two strategies.
Bread and Butter SEO
The Bread and Butter SEO strategy is focused on producing content that is directly aligned to your product and helps your customers achieve success. This content isn't flashy and it is unlikely to be linked to by hundreds of websites, but it may be your most valuable content. Because it is so basic, this type of content is often overlooked in many SEO articles.
In our case, two great examples of this sort of content would be, "What is sales intelligence?" or "How much does RainKing cost?"
Odds are you are sitting on a treasure trove of content like this, written either by the sales team or your client services team in order to do their jobs effectively. This content is so valuable because it is answers the questions your prospects and clients have as they make purchase decisions or use your product. This content is directly helping your clients be successful. Your sales team will love you for these leads, because these prospects will be better informed and already have a position within the sales funnel.
Wheat and Chaff SEO
Wheat and Chaff (W&C) requires you to bring in a lot of traffic and sort it out before passing it along to sales. In order for W&C to work, you need to develop a deep library of content that may not always be directly related to your business. A great example of this at RainKing is the term "org charts." We have driven huge organic search growth around terms related to company org charts, but we did so knowing that many people searching for org charts have no interest in sales intelligence software. People could be searching for a company's org chart because they want to find a job or make a complaint, but we win by getting in front of those users who are searching for a company's org chart in order to make sales. Knowing this, we have developed interfaces and workflows to separate the 'Wheat' from the 'Chaff' so that our sales team is only seeing potentially valuable leads.
Factors to consider in prioritizing your B2B SEO strategies
In the next blog post, I will share some tips on how to do effective keyword research to build these strategies, but for now it is worth looking at your organization and building a general understanding of how to prioritize your strategies.
These strategies are not mutually exclusive. In fact, your best SEO efforts will incorporate all three strategies on your a website, but you still must prioritize your efforts. Here are some factors to consider in establishing priority:
Keyword ROI – When you consider all expenses related to a certain keyword, what return can you expect from visitors to your website from those keyword searches? When performing this calculation, consider not just your expense in content development and SEO, but also the time of your sales team and workflow development.
Keyword Difficulty – When assessing keyword difficulty, ask, "Do we have a chance to rank in the top 5 for a keyword in the short to immediate term without expending an extraordinary amount of effort?" For example, the term "Inbound Marketing" may be a great keyword for RainKing, but it is going to take quite a bit of effort to rank in the top 5 for "Inbound Marketing" so perhaps our first priorities are better focused elsewhere.
Current Keyword Rankings – If your website currently ranks on the first page for a certain key term, it can be good opportunity for SEO because you know that the search engines are associating your website with that term already and you have content that has value with regard to that term. It may be worth expending your SEO efforts moving from position 7 to position 3 for that key term rather than building rank for a brand new term.
Brand Importance – Your brand is ultimately defined by making your customers successful. These different SEO strategies play different roles in creating your brand. The Golden Apples strategy conveys your brand's authority, while the Bread and Butter strategy helps support your customers in achieving their goals. Brand is so important that it should be one of the primary variables considered when defining your strategy.
Content Availability – In prioritizing your SEO strategies, account for what content you have available already. It is a great opportunity if your organization has produced a lot of Bread and Butter content that essentially just needs to be published on your website. Alternatively, if you have a dynamic web application that simply needs to be optimized for search, you may have an easy road to a Wheat and Chaff strategy.
Technical Expertise – Sometimes implementing one of these SEO strategies requires development work to be truly effective. Is that technical expertise accessible to you?
What strategies did RainKing pursue?
Using the criteria above for prioritization, RainKing achieved its growth by implementing all three strategies, but first we implemented a Wheat and Chaff strategy, then Golden Apples, and finally Bread and Butter.
Our prioritization is somewhat unique and was predicated on the fact that because RainKing is a SaaS sales intelligence platform, we have an unmatched dataset of accurate company and person profile data and a terrific development team that is able to build excellent web applications. These factors allowed us to build and optimize a dynamic web application that served as the foundation for our Wheat and Chaff strategy. We then pursued a strategy of improving our ranking for our high-value key words and finally publishing our support materials as Bread and Butter content. As noted, we have been able to achieve great organic search growth with these strategies and positioned ourselves for future growth as well.
Source: Rainkingonline
