earch Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a no-brainer when it comes to B2B marketing. If a prospect is searching for your products or services, you'll want your website to rank on the first page for them. You can either pay to achieve this using AdWords in the short-term, or invest in the long-term goal of eventually ranking on the first page without having to pay for ads. Because people are inherently suspicious, they tend to click on organic results rather than adverts, so it's well worth making the long-term investment into organic SEO.
Search engines are databases: when you search for something, the search engine scans all relevant results to find the most suitable to show you. Therefore, the text descriptions behind webpages and images on your website must be relevant to the queries that your target audience searches for. They also need to rank higher in authority than other websites, including your competitors.
There are a staggering 1.94 billion websites globally (at the time of writing), which goes to show how competitive SEO has become. That being said, there are still many websites that don't optimise for search engines – especially in the B2B space. It's still possible to appear on the first page organically with a great strategy and a few months of financial commitment.
In this article, we will look at the ingredients required to optimise your website for search engines.
Focus Keywords
You'll only want to rank for keywords that are relevant to the products or services your business sells, and for the keywords or queries that your target audience is searching for. You'll also want to focus your strategy first on the low hanging fruit – that is, the keywords that are already performing well. Concentrating on these keywords will mean you see results faster. You can discover which keywords you're currently ranking for, what your competitors are ranking for, and the easiest to acquire traffic through in the short-term by using free tools such as The Hoth and other like them.
Metadescriptions & Alt Text
Metadescriptions tell search engines what your page content is about. If your page doesn't have a description, search engines won't return your website as a search result. Page descriptions must be as relevant to the page content as possible, and should always include your focus keywords. Because search engines can't read images, any photographs or graphics you include on your web page should include alt text. Alt text should describe what your image contains, and should make use of keywords to improve the relevancy and score of your website.
Links & Length
It's in the best interest of search engines for their algorithms to return the best and most relevant results for every search query. So that search engines can generate relevant results, they must make some assumptions about the content of web pages. One of these assumptions is that the more text there is on a page, the more likely it will answer the query of the searcher. Search engines also assume that the more links to relevant and trusted websites a page contains, the better researched and relevant the page's content must be. Because of this, you'll want to make sure each page contains at least a few hundred words and includes inbound links to your website pages and outbound links to trusted websites.
Domain Authority & Guest Posting
Search engines consider some websites to have more authority and trustworthiness than others, and search engines will rank these higher. If a link to your website appears on a website with high authority, search engines will rank your site higher. If a trusted site trusts you, search engines will trust you too. Guest posting on high domain authority sites is a great way to improve your domain authority quickly.
These are the key ingredients for an search engine optimised website and while it might seem straight-forward, it does take time and investment considering the sheer volume of competition there is online. If you find yourself asking yourself "what's the point, then?" just remember that your competitors are only one click away.
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