1. B2B Marketers' Roadmap to SEO Success
STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4
PLANNING CONTENT OUTREACH
& RESEARCH OPTIMIZATION & PROMOTION MEASUREMENT
Business goals On-page optimization PR
Traffic & leads
Search personas Content creation Link building
Pipeline & ROI
Keyword research Site accessibility Social media
TRACKING
Keyword Competitive Page Inbound Shares Estimated
ranking ranking optimization score links & likes click value

2. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Step 1 – Planning and research
Your trip to SEO success starts with some key planning and research activities. Take
the time upfront to understand your business goals and needs of your target audiences.
Those factors directly feed into your keyword research.
Business goals – which product or service offerings are priorities for your business?
What lead split are you aiming for by product line? What types of leads are you trying to
capture and how do they match with the different parts of your sales cycle? –i.e. early
stage leads from content downloads, webinar registrants for mid-funnel leads, free-trial
leads for people in the evaluation phase of their buyer’s journey. How many visits and
leads do you expect from your SEO and other inbound marketing campaigns?
Search personas – how many different types of buyers are you trying to reach through
your SEO efforts? What is their role in the buying process? What pain points do they
have? What type of information do they consume? Where do they go to find informa-
HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP tion? And most importantly—what keyword terms do they use to search on? We
Optify provides some great tools to aid recommend developing search personas to answer these questions. Here are some great
your planning and research efforts. resources to help you get started:
Use Optify to gather competitive »»5 Steps To Building a Search Persona
intelligence, get keyword suggestions »»Building a search persona (Webinar)
and determine what current content is
driving traffic and leads. Answering the questions above will enable you to create a strategic SEO and content
plan that will guide the rest of your journey.
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3. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Keyword research
Your keywords are a foundational element of your SEO and inbound marketing efforts—
it’s essential that you choose them wisely. This means taking a strategic approach to
your keyword research, an approach that differs from building a paid search list.
Get this critical step right and you’ll maximize both traffic and leads from your inbound
campaigns. You’ll be looking for keyword phrases that are highly relevant to your
business, have good search volume, are not too competitive and directly support your
“
conversion goals. Your list should also contain a mix of terms across the keyword
Optify’s Inbound Marketing spectrum—see the illustration below for more details.
solution helped us drive more
If all of this sounds like a tall order, read 5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword
qualified leads and close List. This how-to guide will walk you through the steps you need to take to develop a
more deals from SEO.” great keyword list.
Jon Kohl, VP of Marketing, ADSI
SEO keyword diversity for B2B marketers
HEAD TERMS - 1-2 WORD PHRASES
HIGH
“CRM”
“CRM software”
CHUNKY MIDDLE OR “TORSO TERMS” -
COMPETITION
SHORT WORD PHRASES
“CRM Saas software”
“best CRM software”
LONG TAIL - MORE DESCRIPTIVE WORD PHRASES
“review of CRM Saas software vendors”
“whitepapers on CRM best practices”
LOW
HIGH SEARCH FREQUENCY LOW
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4. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Step 2 – Content optimization
You have a plan. You have a strategic keyword list. You’re now ready for step 2 of your
journey. Great content is the foundation of SEO success—content that attracts and
engages your audience, meets their needs and leads them through the sales cycle. But
great content alone isn’t enough. It needs to be optimized so that search engines have
the best chance of finding it.
Creating great content
B2B Content Marketing Usage (by Tactic) In step 1 you determined what content elements you need to meet your business goals
and how they align with your target personas. Your content can and should take many
Articles 79%
different forms—this will help you cover all parts of the sales cycle and maximize reach.
Social Media (other than blogs) 74%
In fact a recent benchmark study found that B2B marketers deployed an average of eight
Blogs 65%
eNewsletters 63%
content tactics to achieve their goals*.
Case Studies 58% Your Web site and Blog are the foundation of your content platform, with both playing
In-Person Events 56% key roles in attracting and engaging your audience. Other content elements such as
Videos 52%
white papers, videos, presentations and webinars are important for your site, and also
White Papers 51%
lend themselves well to distribution on third party sites. If these pieces are optimized
46%
Webinars/Webcasts
well they can help both improve your SEO rank and drive more traffic.
Microsites 31%
Print Magazines 31% As you go about creating content, don’t overuse keywords. Remember that you’re writing
Traditional Media 30% for humans not bots or spiders. Always strive to write great content that your target
Research Reports 25% audiences will find useful. This not only makes good business sense, but may also
Branded Content Tools 22% support your ranking goals given Google’s recent announcement of their “over-optimiza-
Print Newsletters 20% tion” algorithm.
eBooks 16%
Podcasts 16% Check out the resources below to get some ideas and tips on producing great content:
Mobile Content 15%
»»Content that works for B2B marketers
Digital Magazines 14%
»»Ten tips for creating great content
Virtual Conferences 10%
»»The basics of blogging as a tool for B2B marketing
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
* Information and chart from “B2B content marketing, 2012 Benchmarks, budgets and trends”
by The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.
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5. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
On-page optimization
You’ve created great Web pages, Blog posts and other content elements. Now it’s time
to optimize that content to make it easier for search engines to find. Optimize around
just one or two keywords to maximize your chances of success. For your core Web site
content or pillar pages use the strategic keyword phrases that are closer to the head of
the SEO distribution curve. Blog posts and other content items are a great place to use
terms that are more ‘long tail’ in nature. See the diagram called “SEO keyword diversity
for B2B marketers” for more information on this point.
The resources below contain information about all aspects of on-page optimization.
You’ll learn how to approach key meta tags including title, description and image alt tags.
You’ll also get some great tips on optimizing PDFs and videos.
»»SEO 101: What is a Pillar Page?
»»SEO Best Practices: 10 Tactics to Rank Higher
»»The Changing Face of SERPs: The Durable Elements of SEO
»»7 Tips for Optimizing Video For Search
HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP »»There’s SEO gold in your PDFs—make sure you optimize them
Use Optify to see how well your pages
are optimized and find out exactly what
you need to do to improve your page Site accessibility
score to increase rank and traffic. Site accessibility refers to things your Web team can do at the site level to make your
Web and Blog content as accessible as possible for search engines.
Check out these resources to learn more about crawling and indexing, site maps, the
effects of page load speed and URL structure.
»»Six tips for improving your website’s accessibility
»»How Many Homes Does Google Think You Have?
»»Five Ways to Optimize for Google’s Sitelinks Update
»»Seven Steps for Stellar SEO During a Site Redesign
»»6 Tips for Improving Your Page Load Speed to Rank Higher
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6. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Step 3 – Outreach and promotion
On page and site level optimization will only get you so far with your SEO efforts. To
really boost your SEO rank and to maximize traffic you need to dedicate time and resourc-
es on your outreach efforts.
Link Building
The number and quality of inbound links to your site are key factors for search engine
algorithms. Having great content that can be found will garner you some inbound links as
people write about your content and link back to your site. But to really grow the number
of high-quality inbound links you need to take a proactive and systematic approach to
your link-building efforts.
Discover how to get more quality inbound links while avoiding shady tactics by reading
the inbound marketing guide for link building
PR
HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP Your PR efforts are a key part of your outreach program, and go way beyond targeting
Optify has some great features to help traditional media outlets. Explore the resources below to learn how to maximize the
you with your outreach and promotion results of your PR efforts from both your core media contacts and from the Blogosphere.
efforts including a link suggestion tool
»»Top Ten Tips for Optimizing Your Press Release for SEO
to help you garner new inbound links
»»7 Tips for Optimizing Your New Press Page for Press and Search
and Twitter for Business—a great way
»»31 Tips for Getting Your Stories Found in Google News
to syndicate your content.
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7. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Social media
Social media has revolutionized the way information is found, consumed and shared.
Promoting your content via social networks has a direct traffic benefit, but increasing
evidence suggests that social influence (how much your content is shared and ‘liked’) also
impacts your SEO rank.
Get insight on how to get the most traffic and SEO benefit from your social media and
Blogging efforts from the resources below:
»»How Social Has Turned Search On Its Head
»»5 Tactics to Help Your SEO through Social Media
»»How Social Media Has Revolutionized Search Marketing (Webinar)
Step 4 – Measurement
To determine whether your SEO and other inbound marketing efforts are really success-
ful you need to measure not just traffic and leads, but pipeline and ROI. This level of
closed-loop reporting requires tight integration between your inbound marketing and CRM
platforms. With this type of solution in place you can report on the number of leads,
opportunities and sales along with the associated costs and conversion rates.
HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP
Tracking
Use Optify to track and report on the
metrics that matter most for your There are dozens of metrics that relate to SEO and inbound marketing, all of which tell part of
the story. It’s important to determine upfront which metrics are important to your business,
inbound marketing efforts. From
so you can establish benchmarks and track progress.
keyword ranking to closed-loop ROI
reporting, Optify’s powerful tracking Metrics such as keyword rank, number of inbound links and overall page score tell you what
and analytics engine gives you the areas need attention and where to prioritize your efforts. They indicate the progress you’re
information you need to make informed making towards your ultimate goal of generating more traffic, leads and opportunities. To see
marketing decisions. Optify integrates which SEO metrics we recommend you keep track of read the Top 10 SEO metrics that B2B
with Salesforce.com to give you a marketers need to understand to generate more leads.
closed-loop view of your inbound
marketing efforts
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8. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
About Optify
Optify delivers an integrated top-of-the-funnel solution for marketers responsible for
NEXT STEPS fueling their company’s growth. Optify helps professional B2B marketers reach more
buyers and generate more demand for their products or services month-after-month.
The Optify Inbound Marketing Software Suite brings together the enterprise-class SEO,
• Request a demo social marketing, website analytics and tools that B2B marketers need to increase
awareness of their business, influence buyers across social networks, and engage with
• Sign up for a free trial prospects at the earliest point of their buyer’s journey.
THE OPTIFY INBOUND MARKETING SUITE
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
INBOUND DEMAND EMAIL NURTURING SALES ENABLEMENT
• Build Your SEO Campaign
Create a flow of high quality Nurture your house list with Help sales reach prospects and
in 15 Minutes (PDF) leads into your marketing email campaigns and get engage with them early in the
funnel with enterprise-class detailed intelligence about what sales process with visitor
• International SEO (PDF) SEO and social marketing. every lead does after they intelligence and prospect alerts.
receive your emails.
• How the new face of SERPs
has altered the Organic
CTR Curve (PDF) TRACKING & ANALYTICS
Get full insight into what influences your buyers and the path they take to find and evaluate you during their
research process.
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