So you think SEO is the answer to all your B2B organisation's marketing problems?
You're probably being sold down the river.
Lots of SEO experts, bloggers, and industry professionals paint SEO as a solution to all your lead generation problems.
They're not completely incorrect, either -- ranking highly in organic search results is an excellent method of driving highly targeted traffic to your website, but there's a few harsh truths you need to be aware of when you go into that SEO pitch.
1) There's No Such Thing as Instant Rankings
Shady SEO companies will often promise fast results. They might say they can rank you for a specific keyword next month, or even as quickly as next week.
To put it simply, instant results are impossible. Improving organic search rankings is a longterm effort. You have to keep on creating new content, and do it for months before you'll see much in terms of organic search traffic.
Take a look at our example in the image below, demonstrating our organic search traffic over ~10 months. Throughout that period we made a constant effort to create and promote 3 blog posts per week. Each month search traffic increases, but it takes a while to get to a point where the value of the leads your investment in content (the new SEO) delivers exceeds your content spend.
2) Rankings Cannot Be Guaranteed
Do a Google Search for SEO.
If the results you see are anything like mine, you'll notice a number of companies guaranteeing rankings. "First page from just £49", "No placement, no fee SEO", etc.
These companies are all deceiving you.
Just take a step back and think about it -- how can any company guarantee rankings in search results they do not control.
Whilst SEO professionals can implement strategies designed to improve your rankings, based on their experience, they cannot directly manipulate the results themselves. Google could come out tomorrow and completely change the way they rank search results, for example.
No SEO firm has inside information they can use to guarantee these results, either. Google's algorithms are highly complex, considering hundreds of different factors when ranking a page. There's not one person at Google that fully understands every aspect of such a complex algorithm.
3) Individual Keywords Aren't The Answer
Some SEO firms will give you a list of keywords, and tell you they can rank you for them. This isn't the answer, and actually quite misses the point. Take a look at the diagram below:
Given that longer, more descriptive phrases convert much higher to sales than short, highly competitive phrases, why would any sane person give the short phrases their entire focus? Long tail, more descriptive phrases make up 70% of all Google searches:
This means that effective SEO is far more about creating lots of content which will rank for all the thousands of long tail combinations people are using to search for solutions online, rather than ranking for individual short keyword combinations which may look impressive, but won't bring nearly the same business benefit.
The other benefit of targeting the long tail rather than individual short tail keywords is that you de-risk your SEO strategy. If you rank for thousands of long tail search phrases, and one of them moves from #1 to #10, it has a neligable impact on the traffic driven to your website. Conversely, if most your traffic comes from ranking #1 for 1 short tail keyword that gets thousands of searches each month, and that moves from #1 to #10, you'll lose most of your search traffic.
4) Most B2B Visits Won't Immediately Buy
B2B purchases are usually highly considered. Most of the time someone isn't going to search for "CRM software", land on your website, read a few pages, pick-up the phone and buy a CRM solution for their 1,000 person sales team from you.
Therefore, if an SEO company tells you they can quickly increase your sales by ranking you for competitive phrases, they're not being completely honest, and don't understand the nature of B2B. You need to have lots of content on your website focused on converting visitors into leads -- whether they're in the research, consideration, or decision making stage of the buying process to get the most from your search engine traffic.
That means:
- Having an option to subscribe to your blog.
- Creating educational eGuides and whitepapers which help your prospects to solve challenges, and putting them behind forms so you can contact them.
- Creating product brochures, case studies or other pieces of branded content that help your prospects to consider your specific solution.
- Having decision stage offers like free assessments, consultations, site visits or demos available to engage prospects when they're at the decision making stage of the buying process.
It's not enough to get more traffic to your website. You have to have an inbound marketing machine ready to convert the people arriving at your website into leads, and subsequently into leads ready for your sales team to work.
You can read more about the work involved in building an inbound marketing machine for your company in our post: How to Get Started With B2B Inbound Marketing.
5) Outdated Tactics Can Hurt You
Last but not least, unscrupulous SEO companies won't tell you that the techniques they're using could hurt your website's organic search results, rather than help you.
In the last few years, Google has invested significant development time into penalising websites which use spammy search engine optimisation techniques, like:
- Unnaturally stuffing keywords into website pages
- Building spam links with blog comments, networks of unrelated sites and poor guest posts
- Creating lots of duplicate content
- Creating poor quality content just to rank in search results
- Stealing content from other websites and "spinning" it, to make it unique
- Using invisible text containing keywords
One of the biggest updates they made was the Penguin algorithm update, which you can read more about here. It penalised websites for using spammy linkbuilding practices, and stopped millions of websites optimised by unscrupulous SEO's from showing in search results.
If you're talking to an SEO company, ask them what techniques they will use to rank your website. If it sounds like any of the above, run a mile -- things won't end well, even if in the short term you see gains. Modern B2B SEO isn't a black art. It's a process of optimising the pages on your website, then creating exceptional content over time which will rank for the key phrases your prospects are using during the buying process.
