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How to Perform an Effective B2B Competitor Analysis
September 5, 2024
An effective B2B SEO strategy goes beyond merely targeting keywords and optimizing your website to capture your B2B audiences attention. You need a comprehensive approach that creates valuable content and earns credible backlinks (among other strategies) to attract and convert your audience into highly-qualified leads and customers. You also need to track the results to iteratively improve your SEO strategy.
This article explores how you can create a successful B2B SEO strategy which boosts your brand’s search engine visibility and gets you highly qualified leads from your website. Let's get started.
A successful B2B SEO strategy targets decision makers across all stages of the sales funnels. Whether it’s to explore your brand’s offerings, compare options, or make purchase decisions, the strategy not only educates them about their pain points but also guides them in selecting the best solution for their businesses.
Although this strategy takes time (typically 3-6 months), this long-term investment - if done right - yields significant profits as results compound over time. By targeting the right keywords across all funnel stages, planning effective content, optimizing websites, and implementing other effective strategies, you can use SEO to boost the visibility of your website and brand. Consequently, this increased visibility positions you as an expert which attracts qualified leads for your business.
Here are a few benefits of a B2B SEO strategy.
The right B2B SEO strategy can boost a brand’s online visibility on the search engine. It puts them in front of their target audience, including decision-makers, actively or passively searching for solutions relating to their business challenges.
For instance, Rentomojo, a furnishings rental company, boosted its traffic from 110k to 240k is an insightful example. Although the brand found it challenging to stand out in a highly competitive market, TripleDart’s effective SEO strategy enabled the brand to create targeted content, boosting its search engine ranking. This ranking not only increases brand awareness but also positions Rentomojo as an authoritative source about real estate topics among its audience.
With a valuable library of content that answers industry-related questions and provides other helpful resources across the funnel, you can position your brand as a reliable expert in the field. This establishes credibility and trust and increases the likelihood of being chosen over your competitors.
Another key benefit is to target specific audiences with precision. Through strategic keyword research, businesses can tailor their content to address the specific needs and pain points for different groups and sub groups within their main target audience group on search engines. This targeted approach using the right keywords ensures that the content resonates with potential clients, and attracts high quality leads who are actively seeking solutions to their business problems.
If you compare SEO with PPC in the long run, SEO wins purely because of the stability and cost effectiveness. PPC is far more expensive than SEO because of how directly dependent it is on your funds to deliver results.
This is because once you create great content to rank on page 1, Google and - generally - all search engines aim to keep you on top because they prefer to serve the most updated content to its searchers.
For instance, Rezolve.ai, another TripleDart’s client, had a content strategy overhaul which contributed to a 99% increase in organic traffic and 136% increase in lead generation. Thanks to the valuable content created by the team, the company can continue to generate a consistent stream of high-quality leads over several months that will drive and sustain their business's growth. This is mirrored in the results we see in almost all of TripleDart’s organic growth clients.
If done right, SEO can be generally thought of as creating high-quality, highly helpful, and precisely relevant content once. Then adding to it and optimizing it at regular intervals. Rankings do get affected due to rising competition, long term market shifts, search algorithm updates, or some other factor affecting the website. To address these, regular optimization campaigns may be needed every 3-6 months.
If and when you use PPC instead, your campaigns would stop fetching you leads the day you stop paying the ad campaigns. This is not to say SEO is better than PPC; both strategies have their time and place and both can be very effective in terms of results if done right - and TripleDart can help with both. But SEO wins the sustainability crown for marketing strategies!
If you need to create an effective B2B SEO strategy, here are some steps to follow.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) research helps you gain a deeper understanding of your ideal buyer, including what they talk about and what they prioritize. This provides insights into how your product can solve the problem. Once you have a clear understanding of your ICP, you can address their pain points and target the right keywords that answer their questions. Thus, it helps you tailor your SEO efforts to target the right type of audience who are most likely to become profitable, highly-qualified clients.
After ICP research and refinement, the next step is a B2B SEO audit that determines what you have, what's working, what isn't working, and why. It examines your content assets, their performance, and highlights the areas that need improvements. It also checks if your website's content aligns with your business goals and audience needs. With a focused content audit, you can identify content gaps, analyze and optimize existing content for maximum growth.
The goal of competitor analysis is not to copy your competitor’s entire SEO strategy. The goal of this activity is to find content trends and themes that exist in your industry’s marketing that you can use for inspiration and to find gaps in their strategy that is the strength of your product. You can then showcase your brand’s expertise and fill those gaps with helpful content.
A detailed competitor analysis informs your strategy of your competitors’ keywords, content ideas, and overall SEO strategies. It's not advisable to exactly copy what your competitors do. Instead, you should check if the analysis aligns with your business’ goals.
Here are a few tips for conducting a competitor analysis:
All these considerations can provide insights you can leverage for a competitive advantage. This approach will help you identify new opportunities that can advance your business’s growth.
B2B SEO campaigns are long -term projects. So, it is essential to set up actionable goals and objectives for your SEO strategy. Ask yourself the following questions to prioritize:
Setting goals keeps you on the right track as you can use them for timely reviews, thus ensuring your SEO strategy aligns with your overall business objectives within the stipulated time.
After a thorough SEO audit of your content and a detailed competitor analysis, now comes the time to finish constructing your full SEO strategy by unifying insights and data from all phases.
You will use the following techniques to a lay out a strong foundation for your strategy:
If your B2B SEO business has a decent amount of existing content marketing on its website, chances are you need to improve it. After all, if you have undertaken an SEO strategy exercise before, much of the existing content would often be thin, poorly written, and not optimized. This content can be updated in part or as a whole or repurposed entirely so that it is working for you and not against you. You can optimize your existing content, update CTAs and broken links to ensure you get the most out of your existing content.
New pages in SEO ensure that the search engine indexes your web pages for relevant search queries. You can also use topic clusters to create interrelated content and connect the pages on the website with one another.
Make a list of your keywords and identify its variations, whether long-tail phrases and subtopics. Also, create groups for the keywords using criteria such as semantic relevance, organic difficulty, CPC, and search volumes. This method helps in creating a topic cluster method which results in improved internal linking. It helps search engines to discover these new webpages much faster and makes your website a lot more trustworthy.
Off page SEO involves action taken outside of your website to improve its authority and search engine results. You can improve your site’s off-page SEO through the following ways:
With these strategies, you can improve the domain and topical authority of your website and drive more traffic. Although external backlinks are helpful, forced backlink insertions or backlinks from websites that are completely irrelevant to your niche can actually impact your ranking on the search engine and may result in a spam penalty.
Technical SEO focuses on optimizing “under the hood” functionality of your website. Audit your website to discover technical issues that can affect your site’s traffic. Hire a technical SEO specialist to help you avoid costly SEO mistakes. If done right, the search engines crawlers can navigate your web pages, interpret the meaning of the content on them, and index them effectively. It boosts your website's ranking. It also watches out for other factors such as page loading speed, canonical URLs, and other technical elements.
Without proper technical SEO, your web pages may not get indexed and rank appropriately.
The backtracking process involves regularly reviewing and analyzing the goals and objectives you've set as well as the outcomes of your B2B SEO activities. Start with a specific goal in mind. Do you want to increase traffic or generate qualified leads?
Then, evaluate the additional metrics that can help you in achieving these goals. Watch out for metrics such as search traffic, pages per visit, bounce rate, scroll depth, and more.
During the SEO tracking process, it is also important to stay flexible and adapt to changes. Conduct SEO tests to identify areas that need improvements. Check if your web pages are crawled and indexed. Look out for the page speed.
Regularly reviewing and backtracking your strategy allows you to pivot where necessary, ensuring your efforts remain aligned with your B2B goals and a successful SEO strategy.
Implementing your B2B SEO strategy requires performing various actions to improve your site’s visibility on the search engine. Here are some best practices to follow.
Your buyer personas are imaginary characters that represent the groups/cohorts of people you are trying to reach. It records a deep and specific understanding of your target audience of B2B buyers. Here, you must gather your buyer's accurate data i.e. factors that highlight their pain points & priorities or those affecting their buying decision. These factors include, but are not limited to, their demographics, buying behavior, objectives, and budget.
Building your ideal client profiles like this forces you to focus on your audience's specific needs and create a more targeted marketing strategy.
Engaging, valuable content pieces - by themselves - are not enough to ensure great SEO results. It's also crucial to pay attention to the technicalities such as title tags, meta descriptions, internal links, page speed, featured snippets, and other tech SEO aspects focused on the page. A well-organized and fully optimized site improves your ranking high in organic search.
The goal of using topic clusters is to create a semantic connection between related content for your website. You can develop a content strategy based on owning an entire topic (or subtopic) within your niche consisting of related ideas to boost search footprint for a larger section of your website.
To implement clusters, add topic clusters within your content briefs so your writers have a complete picture before they start writing. The central piece of content - the pillar page - will serve as the hub that links to the related pieces of content, known as the cluster pages. Grouping these pages (the pillar and the cluster pages) helps visitors and search engine bots locate related content faster.
As mentioned earlier, an effective B2B SEO strategy is for long-term results. Improper implementation of these strategies can waste your time and resources. Additionally, your website’s traffic becomes affected, impacting your business’s growth. However, outsourcing to a renowned b2b seo agency like TripleDart can avoid these issues. We specialize in creating and executing an effective B2B strategy that drives traffic, generates qualified leads, and boost revenue growth for your business. Book a call with us today!
A B2B SEO strategy targets business professionals, especially decision makers, across all stages of the sales funnels to enhance search engine visibility and ultimately boost rankings. It enables these professionals to explore your brand’s offerings, compare options, or make purchase decisions. The strategy educates them about their pain points and guides them in selecting the best solution for their businesses.
You need a B2B strategy to reach individuals, especially decision-makers, actively or passively searching for solutions relating to their business challenges. It also allows you to create valuable content which positions your brand as a reliable expert in the field, thus boosting credibility and trust and driving sustainable growth for your business.
When searching for the best agency for seo strategies, it's important to consider factors such as an agency's past industry clients, results they produced for their clients, and comprehensive service offerings. Plus, their work process must align with your specific business needs and goals. TripleDart is an excellent agency that offers this service. Our work process with several SaaS companies drives organic traffic that boost your business growth. Check our case studies to get inspired by our efforts and see the one that fits your business.
Join 70+ successful B2B SaaS companies on the path to achieving T2D3 with our SaaS marketing services.
