In this third article of the series about B2B SEO we'll be talking about link building. We expect the reader to have a basic knowledge on link building. We won't name the standard B2C link building techniques and focus us on the differences between B2B and B2C link building. What are those differences? We first mention some differences so we can explain them later on:

• There are less linkerati in a B2B market
• A B2B website needs lees links

There are less websites capable of linking to you. A B2B market is much smaller than a B2C market. Compare the travel market with the market of industrial pumping systems. The number of blogs in the travel sector is hundreds of times higher than in the sector of industrial pumps. This means it's much more important to keep being friends with your linkerati. Keep in contact, comment on their blogs and give away a nice scoop.

On the other hand: you need less links in a B2B market than in a B2C market. This is because of the simple reason that your competitors don't have a lot of links as well. Of course this doesn't work in the situation of polysemy: if one of your B2B keywords is an important keyword in a B2C market as well, it won't be easy to rank for it.
However, specific terms like 'peristaltic pumps' are not that competitive. And for those terms, your competitors are having problems finding links just like you.

Enlarge your linkerati group

AS we just said, one of the biggest problem in B2B link building is the small size of the linkerati group. Therefore, it's important to keep in touch with that small group. It is even better to enlarge your potential linkerati. Your niche might be very small but there are always enough related topics whose linkerati might be willing and able to link to you too.

B2B Link Building tip #1

Every B2B company has suppliers. Take for example the case of our industrial pump client. There must be another company building the machines which are used to build the pumps. Make an arrangement with your supplier and let him write a case on their site about how they build your machines. Make it interesting for their visitors, but don't forget the backlink. In this way, you can transform your offline network to be your linkerati.

B2B Link Building tip #2

For some niches, there is not much interesting to say. In such a case, you might want to enlarge your linkerati by blogging about other company related issues. Start a blog about running a B2B company. Corporate blogging isn't as easy as it sounds, but of course it's an option. Doing link building for such a blog shouldn't be a big problem.

Linkbait in a B2B market: knowledge

In the more B2B markets, knowledge is your USP. It's not strange that most B2B companies are somewhat afraid of sharing their expertise. But there is another side of this coin: if you are afraid of sharing your knowledge, other people will be looking for it. A website showing off your expertise and knowledge will attract many visitors. If your niche market isn't that big, people will soon recognize you as an authority in your area. And good content always attracts some links. This is the main advantage of B2B link building: you do have the capacity to write good content. Content is still king, even for link building.

B2B Link Building Tip #3

Start a blog in your niche. Don't only tell about your successes but also share linkworthy content. Make usable checklists, compare products or solutions with each other, tell about new developments in the market. Let users comment and react on their reactions. Write in a personal way to build friendships, to increase the chance of those people linking to you.

B2B Link Building tip #4

Another way to share knowledge is setting up a wiki. Put a wiki on your site and let everyone participate. Start with a lot of enthusiasm and keep networking with the people who write on your wiki as well. After a while you'll be an authority within your market. Everyone writing about your niche has to mention you.

Linkbait for a larger crowd

Even if your product is so boring, there are always opportunities to do something with. Industrial Search Enige Marking quotes Danny Sullivan:

Find a way to make your topic relate to nerds or a large society that frequently expresses their opinion online. (…) With most link bait you are not trying to gain topical expert links… more likely citations from people with a mild interest in the topic (and how you related it to their nerdy interests).

B2B Link Building tip #5

Create a link bait action for your market, that has a strong focus on a different but related market with more linkerati. Place this link bait on social media sites, use press releases (if your link bait has some news value) and promote your link bait in different ways.

Which kind of link bait you have to use depends from case to case. Let's give a few examples:

• Let BMW write a piece of content about their open source Telematics system. Let them say something about what innovations have occurred. Sent press releases to blogs of open source fanatics.
• Let our industrial pump provider make a movie in which all things are placed in the cutter: car tires, potatoes, bottles of shampoo etc. Let 'Will it blend?' on YouTube inspire you. Put the movie on your site and spread it through social media.

Expert knowledge and link building

You don't have large numbers of competitors as a B2B company. However, you do sell a complex product. Therefore, it's quite easy to make yourself an expert within your market. This gives plenty of room for doing link building.

B2B Link Building tip #6

Suppose that our industrial pump manufacturer is looking for high quality links. There must be a few high quality websites about technical stuff which are looking for interesting case studies. Make yourself the authority within your market and place such a case study on a big, high authority website.

Concluding remarks

B2B link building requires different goals than B2C link building. It's less important to get high PageRank backlinks, because your competition doesn't have them as well. The quality of B2B backlink isn't measured in PageRank but in relevancy. B2B link building is easier and more difficult than B2C link building. Easier because you have good content; more difficult because your linkerati group is relative small.

B2B SEO: Link Building is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In the first part of this series about B2B SEO, we spoke about an online strategy for B2B websites. We named some differences between B2B and B2C websites. We also determined the kind of content a B2B website needs. This article dives deeper into the content part of a B2B website. This topic also shows us a few differences between SEO for B2B and B2C. To show you, let's start by showing you how we normally do a keyword review for the B2C market:

1. We brainstorm about important keywords
2. We use log files and analytics to find more of them
3. We deepen the list by finding some synonyms
4. We sort all the keywords on decreasing traffic by using tools like the Google Traffic Estimator

This doesn't apply for a B2B website. Let's take Verder.com as an example. They are producing industrials pumping systems. Which problems occur if we try to take the steps mentioned above for this company?

1. Brainstorming about important keywords can be quite difficult if we don't know how customers describe their problems.
2. The determination of synonyms is quite nasty – Please tell me a synonym of a peristaltic pump…
3. The Traffic Estimator will not help us either, because there isn't enough traffic on pump-related terms.

How do users search?

Not everyone needing a pump installation, will know or use the term peristaltic pump. Most of your clients will look on terms which describe their problem: pumping milk, sludge suction, etc. Other describe the solution they have in mind: fuel pipe, milk pump, etc. As you understand, this list can be lengthened quite easily. The more complex your product, the more people will search for their problem, their question or their challenge. They won't use the name you or the industry gave your products. This is a large difference between B2C and B2B copywriting. In a B2C world, people know what they are looking for. Therefore, I totally agree with Galen DeYoung on Search Engine Land:

The key to B2B SEO is a complete understanding of the prospects, their issues, and their likely actions as they search for solutions. Good optimization considers all potential starting point of the B2B searcher.

Picking keywords for a B2B campaign needs another approach. We are looking for a way in which search quantity isn't leading, just because the search quantity of many B2B keywords is pretty low. Tool won't help you, so you need your own creativity to attract as much related traffic as is possible. It's a important question if all the needed creativity should be delivered by the SEO. There is an interesting source which we didn't mention yet: your client and the clients of your client.

Interview clients and prospects

Existing customers do know that he solutions they were looking for is called a peristaltic pump – but perhaps they didn't knew while they were searching for it. They'd probably remember the problem they had and how they named it. Ask a couple of customers these important questions:

1. How would you describe your problem?
2. How would you describe the solution you have/had in mind?
3. Please name 10 words that describe your problem well?

Document all this information and combine this with the log files of your internal search function. Both the words and descriptions used by your clients as the log files contain words your client uses to find your products and services. Please understand this information and try to find some patterns in it: which branches do your clients come from, what kind of problems do they have, and which words do they use? Order your sales persons to ask the same questions to prospects. There is a big chance people will say things which aren't correct. Keep in mind that these 'dumb' people are the ones raising your sales. It could be that a person is looking for a 'sludge sieve', while your products is being called a cutter. Remember: the client is king.

Using tools in a B2B environment

The contacts with your clients deliver a lot of good keywords. The next question however is to determine which keywords are important and which aren't. Often, it's not possible to question a lot of clients. The challenge is to extract keyword information for all your clients based on a questionnaire on just a small subset. It would have been easy to use traffic estimator tools to prioritize the keywords, but unfortunately, there is not much information on the more specific B2B terms.

polysemy and traffic estimations

Another problem with B2B content is polysemy, which means words having different meanings. As I already stated in the first article, there are large numbers of traffic on 'pumps'. A problem is that most of this traffic is about consumers looking for a pump in their pond. Besides, some of our 18+ readers do know another meaning as well… Because the B2C market is much larger than the B2B market, we can't use traffic estimations on words with multiple meanings. The same holds true for the term 'sealing'. This word is used for packaging flyers and brochures, but it has also something to do with the dentist. polysemy also occurs in the B2C market, but on a smaller scale.

Polysemy doesn't only disturb your keyword analysis, it's also irritating within the SERP's. If a large number of garden shops is trying to rank for 'pond pump', you won't attract a lot of B2B buyers on that term looking for 'pump'. Advertising on AdWords (where this article is not about) on 'pump' is also quite terrible if you only deliver industrial pumping systems. A solution for this problem might be the usage of B2B verticals, but not every B2B buyer uses those search engines. Another solution is aiming for the long tail. A disadvantage of using the long tail is that there might quite a high conversion on the long neck, because people don't know exactly where they are looking for. You don't want to forget the long neck.

Special content

It's pretty normal for B2B content that it isn't always placed in a normal text format. B2B content is often placed in tables or PDF content and you probably would want so. There are quite a few articles available about optimizing PDFs (take this article of Francis Marketing as an example). However, the questions remains if you want to choose for a suboptimal solution. The best way to deal with PDF content is not to optimize this PDFs, but to make a HTML version of the content. Of course, you could still link to the PDF page with a nofollow.

Optimizing tables isn't that difficult, but you have to know the problem of using a table. Tables do contain small numbers of words but they have a high keyword density. Therefore, it's a good idea to write some content above or below the table. In that way, search engines are more capable of determining the topic of the page.

Technicians vs. Marketers: Who will be writing the content?

Another challenge doing B2B copywriting is the question who'll be writing the content. For technical installations, three situations can occur:

1. The technician will be writing – Knows everything on technical stuff, but nothing about SEO copywriting
2. The marketer will be writing – Knows half of the technical stuff, and half of SEO copywriting
3. The SEO will be writing – Knows nothing about the technical stuff, but everything on SEO copywriting

Of course we exaggerate a bit, but the problem is clear. There is not an ideal person to do the writing. The best solution depends from case to case, but it seems a bit of teamwork is necessary. Let's propose a simple solution:

1. The technician writes down the most important content of the page
2. The marketer adds some KPIs he wants to communicate in the text
3. The SEO determines the headings, based on the keywords
4. The marketer writes the text and consults the technician if necessary

This won't be the ideal solution in each situation. It's much more important to face the facts, then to follow some kind of a correct procedure.

Conclusion

Content SEO for a business to business website can be a real pain in the ass. The most important challenge is finding the best keywords. Talk with your clients and prospects and listen to their word usage. This communication can be physically but you can also use log files of your internal search engine. Tools are less useful in a B2B campaign. Creativity, logic and the investigation of your clients are very important.

The third and final article in this series of articles about B2B SEO is B2B SEO: Link Building.

B2B Content SEO is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Business to business marketing is a strange thing. In some ways, it cannot be compared to business to consumer marketing:

• The market is much smaller
• The products and services are more complex
• Sales take much longer

This is part 1 of a series of 3 about B2B SEO. I suppose that the reader has a basic knowledge on SEO and wants to broaden that knowledge to B2B SEO as well. The most important goal for this article is comparing B2B SEO to B2C SEO. A little bit of background in marketing is also quite handy.

Buying process

This first article talks about the strategy of a B2B website. What are the targets and conversion moment and what do you want to communicate? First of all, we must understand that the lead time of a purchase in a B2B market is much longer than in a B2C environment. Even the most expensive B2C products like holidays only take a few weeks between gathering information about the product and ordering the holiday. The graph below (source: Enquiro Research) shows how long the lead time for a B2B purchase is:

As the graphs shows, it might take weeks or even months for someone decides to buy the product. In the same research of Enquiro Research, 85% of the respondents claim that they use online media somewhere in the buying process. This shows the importance of having a good B2B website for your products and services. Search engines do play an important role in the buying process:

The long lead time of a B2B purchase obviously doesn’t apply for things like office supplies. However, it does apply for something like a complex technical installation. This has a lot to do with the money and people involved. The technician has to take a look at the performance of the machine, the economic man is interested In the cost of buying and maintaining the machine and if you aren’t lucky, the managing director also has an opinion about the whole thing.

A B2B website contains information that eases the decisions that has to be made. There is a need for information about when to use the machine, the cost of the machine (purchase, maintenance and devaluation) and technical specifications. For most B2C markets, this information isn’t that necessary.

Soft conversions and long lasting funnels

Al this desired information has consequences for the targets of your website. Most B2B websites don’t offer ways to order anything online, because the products are too complex. The sales take place in a personal meeting or through a telephone call.

The way towards those sales however does lead through various interesting conversion moments of the website.

The download of a PDF with product specifications is a good sign of someone being interested in the product. Therefore, you would like to know how many of the people visiting your site download such a PDF. You also would like to know who these people are, where they come from etc. If the same downloader reads a text about the cost of the product a few weeks later, we can be quite confident that he’s a serious interest in buying the product. It’s important to measure such ‘soft’ conversions (i.e. conversions that can’t be monetized immediately) as a funnel by means of long term cookies.

KPIs for a B2B website

The soft conversions just mentioned, lead us to the following question: What are the KPIs of our B2B website? A webshop has very simple KPIs: the number of sales, the number of newsletter registrations, etc. The KPIs of a B2B website are much harder to define.
The number of people sending you an email is an important KPI, as well as the number of people calling you by phone. Therefore, you would like to know how many people are calling you using a telephone number that they found on your website. It might be a good idea to mention a different phone number on your site than on other (offline) publications. In this way you can measure how many of your telephone calls are being delivered through the website (of course you don’t know whether they came from paid search, organic search, referrers or some other source).

In most cases, the number of unique visitors on your website isn’t a good KPI. I worked for a company that produces industrial pumping systems. In The Netherlands, they rank in de top 3 for ‘pumps’ which does lead to a lot of traffic. Many of these visitors are consumers looking for a little pump for in their pond. They increase the bounce rate quite a lot. The unique number of visitors in a certain period isn’t a nice KPI, but they might use “number of unique visitors visiting three pages or more” as a KPI.

Expert knowledge at B2B SEO

Another problem of B2B SEO is the required expert knowledge. My overall knowledge increased a lot since I started working at Onetomarket. I now know quite a lot about industrials pumps, HR software, medicines and interim management. However, it’s still difficult for me to do a good keyword research for the industrial pump manufacturer. After a few weeks of practicing, I do know how to spell peristaltic pumps, mag drive pumps and progressive cavity pumps, but my knowledge about those things is still pretty limited.

This happens a lot at B2B clients. It’s important to make your B2B clients self-learning. Explain what they should do and train them. Have a brainstorm with your clients about determining keywords; let them write their texts; use their technical knowhow. Your client has also more experience in selling their products than you have. The client knows (if everything is okay) how their clients are calling their products and services and how they’d describe certain problems. Of course, as an SEO you should some basic knowledge about the products your client is trying to sell.

Different audiences

In the B2C market, the buyer is also the person who is going to use the product. This doesn’t apply for the B2B seller. The purchase department buys a technical installation that the technical department ordered. Therefore, there is not much emotional involvement at the purchase of a product or a service. This means that you want to communicate solutions, rather than the beauty and the esthetic value of the product.

As said before, many people are involved in the purchase of larger B2B products. In the report of Enquiro Research four types of buyers are distinguished;

• The economic buyer
• The technical buyer
• The user buyer
• The coach buyer

You have to offer information for each of them. It isn’t that hard to determine the information they need:

Economic buyer
Information about the price, the maintenance cost and the depreciation of the product.

Technical buyer
Technical information about maintenance, information about the installation of the machine, availability of spare parts, etc.

User buyer
Information about how to handle the product, manuals, a support service etc.

Coach buyer
The coach buyer is a manager with some influence. Tell him that your product is indispensible for the performance within his organization.

The list above has consequences for the information on your website. Your site will need quite a bit of information.

Conclusion

Building a good B2B website is hard work. Your role as an SEO is to train, coach and motivate your client, who will be doing all the hard work. Together you should define the information architecture and KPIs of your website. Please make sure that the visitors are climbing in their phone as soon as possible.

This serie is continued with B2B Content SEO, followed by the concluding B2B SEO: Link Building article.

B2B SEO: Marketing strategy for specific niches is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!