How to Align Your SEO to the B2B Customer Journey

Understanding your prospective customers and the stages they go through in order to make a purchase should always be part of a B2B SEO strategy. In marketing, these stages are commonly referred to as the customer journey. Since most people begin their journey researching online, it is critical to recognize the importance of aligning your SEO and content marketing efforts to the B2B customer journey. After all, search engines don’t provide customers with a solution, you do by showing up in the search results. The bottom line– you need to optimize your content for SEO to show up in front of prospective customers on their journey in the first place. 

Identify Your Prospective Buyers & Analyze Their Buying Journey

A successful B2B SEO strategy starts with identifying who your audience is and understanding their needs, search patterns, and personas such as demographics, behavior, motivation, and goals. The needs of your buyers and their purchase behavior will vary depending on your products and services. To align your content marketing and SEO efforts to the B2B customer journey, you should first consider what their values are and the types of information they are looking for in order to provide relevant and useful content. Your buyers may be looking for information such as:

• Answers to solve specific problems
• Customer reviews
• Prices of products and services
• The types of customer support offered

Employ Keyword Research and User Intent to Optimize Content

After you have a good grasp of your buyers’ values and general buying journey, you’re ready to learn how they navigate online. Since many B2B buyers launch their research with a general online search, it is important to stay one step ahead and perform keyword and user intent research. That way, you can optimize your marketing content with the keywords they are looking for, in order to show up in their search results. Knowing the intent of their search such as if they want to: know, go, do, or buy can help you identify the correct type of content to offer at each stage of their journey.

Provide Relevant Content at Each Stage of the B2B Customer Journey

Since the B2B customer journey is often longer than the B2C customer journey, it is important to stay in front of them at each step. Identifying the intent of their search query, such as if it is informational or transactional, can provide insight into what type of relevant content you can provide. For example, if a keyword has a strong “how” intent, content that provides useful resources and quick answers would be relevant to provide. It is important to note that you don’t always need to create new content. Optimizing existing content can also be impactful.  

Aligning your SEO strategy with the B2B customer journey can help increase your brand’s visibility to potential customers at each step of their voyage. Having higher brand visibility online can help bring more traffic to your website and ultimately more conversions. Taking the time to monitor your SEO efforts and adjusting or reevaluating your user intent research as needed can ensure you are providing valuable content buyers are looking for. If you need help with your SEO strategy, contact us to learn how we can help you reach your goals.