Take, for example, the potential to attract up to 300 new customers per month from 1,800 leads generated by 470,000 website visits — all by using the right SEO strategies. You can also lead results like this with a B2B SEO agency that understands the ins and outs of SEO. 

If that’s you, choosing the right SEO agency can help your B2B company:

• Benefit from a full SEO team, each with different skill sets
• Hit KPIs like CAC and CAC:LTV ratio instead of just vanity metrics
• Save time and money and put it into other strategic growth areas
• Increase or decrease investment based on your budget and needs
• Spot long-term and short-term growth opportunities for the business
• Improve brand awareness and , brand sentiment while tackling dynamic search engine algorithms and improving search engine rankings

With the truth on the table, it’s time to turn potential clients into paying customers and increase revenue with B2B SEO. Let’s go! 

What does it take to generate revenue from B2B SEO?

A holistic B2B SEO strategy is key to beating the competition and reaching revenue goals—the keyword here being holistic. You can’t ignore your ideal customer persona or technical SEO issues and solely rely on keyword research and content creation and expect to win. You need a mix of specialist knowledge across different areas to meet increasing ARR goals with B2B SEO efforts. Let’s take a look at the lot: 

• Keyword research involves finding valuable search queries your target audience uses while researching or buying products and services on search engines. 
• Content creation and consistent optimization is the process of crafting and periodically refining content using those keywords and trend updates for ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Technical SEO optimization improves your website’s behind-the-scenes elements, such as Javascript, XML sitemaps, redirects, structured data, Hreflang, and canonical tags. It makes your web pages load faster and helps search engines crawl, index, and render them correctly. This one is one that so many businesses overlook. 
• Internal link optimization tactics like reducing click-depth and minimizing link bloat can improve organic traffic by up to 200%. 
• Collaboration with marketers and developers ensures a cohesive strategy across the board, and that you’re all working towards a better-performing site. 
• SEO performance monitoring and analysis can be a full-time job, especially when you want to find what’s working and what needs improvement amidst fluctuating search engine rankings. 
• Industry-specific expertise isn’t optional when it comes to creating content inline with what Google ranks: E-E-A-T.
• Knowledge of search engine algorithm updates is also crucial for not derailing your website with Google’s ever-changing algorithm updates and protecting search engine rankings. 
• Growth analysis and strategy initiatives like discovering low-hanging fruits, quick wins, and aiming for the right big bets are crucial for improving SEO ROI.
• Off-page SEO efforts often work alongside PR. This helps your website and key pages win quality backlinks, which in turn can help them rank higher and generate more business. It can also help to shape brand perception and generate demand using third party websites.

On top of everything, SEO success also demands you to know the ins and outs of your customer journey, competitor research, ROI modeling, growth experiments, and optimizing conversion rates. Taking a growth marketing approach to SEO allows you to figure out how to drive actual business revenue through your organic efforts by strategising, hypothesizing, measuring, analyzing, and iterating. 

Building an in-house team of experts in all these areas is challenging to say the least—especially in today’s economic winter. Budget restrictions, long hiring lead times,  training, and onboarding — they all add to your struggle of even entering the complex world of SEO, yet alone thriving in it at pace. Hiring freelancers can be tough, too, especially if you end up with ones who lack experience, resources, and industry knowledge. 

That’s precisely why you need a B2B SEO agency with specialized expertise. Think we’re stopping there? Oh no, keep reading, friend. 

7 Reasons to consider partnering with a B2B SEO agency

Now that you know what revenue-generating ideas you can try, let’s see what it means to team up with a B2B SEO agency. Keep reading to see what B2B SEO agencies can offer in terms of expertise, insights, and more.

1. Agencies provide specialized expertise and communication across the board

High-quality content and consistent publishing won’t bring you ROI without a solid SEO strategy. At the same time, a decent strategy on its own isn’t going anywhere fast. You need the full package. 

B2B SEO agencies have got you covered from all angles. Agency experts have insider knowledge and expertise to help you with different areas, such as link building, growth strategy, technical optimization, and content production. It’s a good idea to figure out the internal resources you’re lacking and knowledge gaps that need filling, and then align those with an agency that has them—some specialize in strategy, others in content creation, while others have got it all. And most agencies have niche markets that they serve. 

Skale, for example, is a great agency choice for those in the B2B SaaS industry. The experts at Skale bring a mix of SEO skills to the table: like content, growth, on-page, off-page, and technical search engine optimization—which it’s near impossible for one in-house SEO to possess. Plus, our team stays up-to-date with new tech, Google updates, and more. 

With Skale, you’ll essentially have five+ skill sets that you can tap into around the clock. The best of which are able to condense years worth of data points into a simple sentence and accurately communicate wins, losses, and actionable next steps for your business. 

2. Agency teams save your marketing team time and resources

You may not have time to implement something strategic like SEO, and that’s okay. Yet, you know you can’t ignore it, especially when 8.5 billion buyers use search engines like Google to search for their solutions.

Hiring a B2B SEO company makes implementing a responsive SEO strategy easier, smoother, and rapid – something that can take much longer with limited in-house team members. It can take huge amounts of time and costs to train and onboard in-house SEO specialists in a way that adds value to the business—which you likely won’t see an ROI from for five+ months.

Eric Doty, Content Lead at Dock, agrees, “If I were making the case to leadership for hiring an SEO agency, the biggest case in my favor would be the internal time savings. Most marketing teams have the capabilities to do SEO in-house (e.g. write content, optimize the website, do backlink outreach), but it’s normally not the best use of company time—especially for more strategy-focused employees.”

Agencies stick to tight deadlines, enabling you to engage audiences with consistent content delivery and optimizations. Eric continues, “If I needed to write content for 50+ landing pages for our website, that would pull my attention away from more strategic projects for months.”

Hiring a top B2B marketing agency gives you instant access to experts who know what’ll help your business, because they’ve done it before. They have dedicated teams to help you spot quick wins, implement long-term tactics, and provide ongoing support to your in-house team to fill in any knowledge gaps—minus the hefty training.

3. B2B SEO agencies are cost-effective and provide better ROI

Despite its reputation as an expensive channel, SEO delivers the highest content marketing ROI. Don’t take our word for it; look at the numbers yourself:

• 88% of marketers already investing in SEO allocated the same or more budget in 2023.
• Organic search accounts for 53% of trackable web traffic, while paid ads contribute only 27%. 
• Bottom-of-funnel keywords have a conversion rate of up to 8.43%, which is significantly higher than the average conversion rate of 3.75% from Google Ads.
• SEO is a compounding channel that offers more sustainable ROI then PPC – unlike paid ads, SEO can generate exponential returns when done correctly

Do these all convince you to say ‘yes’ to SEO, but you’re not sure about the cost? Read on.

Maintaining an in-house team requires paying for software, salaries, and other HR-related expenses: benefits, and sick leave, it doesn’t come cheap. According to Glassdoor, the average salary of a US-based SEO specialist goes up to $69,648 per year, with additional cash compensation of up to $6,140. Plus, subscribing to keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush can hit you with a $500 monthly bill. It soon begins to add up.

Hiring a B2B SEO service provider means you don’t have to consider all these costs. Ultimately, you’ll spend less than what you’re spending on PPC and social ads but see greater SEO ROI and faster—two things any investor will love hearing. After you make an initial investment, an agency can help you drive more sales, decrease customer acquisition costs, and boost your CAC:LTV ratio.

4. Agencies can provide insights from other brands

Possibly one of the biggest benefits to hiring an SEO company is getting first-hand insights from pros who work with different brands and know what it takes to tackle specific situations. These experts monitor industry news, forums, and competitors to learn the latest in the business, and are most likely well-practiced in your industry. 

At Skale, we’ve worked with over 70 SaaS brands, each with unique challenges. This experience enables us to employ tried and tested recommendations and tactics, leverage industry insights, and so much more. We’ve got business cases in hand for every idea we generate—and these business cases can often help quell those off-the-bat ideas your manager thought up in the shower this morning, or secure buy-in for ambitious projects.

The data-driven insights we get from working with different companies help us implement holistic search engine optimization strategies that actually work. Check out these case studies if you need more proof in your pudding.

5. B2B SEO agencies offer flexibility in budget and planning

Going for cheap SEO can really hurt your business. Subscribe for a commodity like $99/month plan for SEO services, and you’ll soon realize your mistake. Plus, if Google penalizes you for using black hat techniques, your website could be completely wiped out. 

If you’re tight on budget for hiring an SEO agency, you must know that most agencies are happy to work with a flexible budget. 

For example, when new opportunities show up, you can invest more to generate more revenue. Whereas, if budgets need to be pulled back, you can also reduce or pause online marketing spending during an economic downturn and restart when you’re ready. With an SEO Agency, you’re met with that much more flexibility that’s near impossible with trying to build an in-house team. 

6. SEO agencies can offer both long-term and short-term growth

Any company investing in online marketing will experience both peaks and plateaus. SEO is a discipline that delivers short-term and long-term wins with the right expertise and consistency. Teams tend to take a foot off the gas when a strategy doesn’t work, whereas an agency keeps things in motion.

Hiring an agency means you invest in pursuing an SEO strategy that gets you results. For example, an SEO agency can help you stay updated on industry changes, analyze SEO metrics, and keep your website in great shape.

Working with an SEO company means compounding SEO efforts at every step in the customer journey until you see growth. They also make it easier to pivot within a strategy and create a flexible strategy responsive to business conditions, changing KPIs, and fluctuating markets.

7. B2B SEO agencies can boost brand awareness and visibility on SERPs

Did you know 46% of buyers begin with product searches on Google? You can’t turn a blind eye to these potential buyers. 

Working with a professional agency helps you realize these brand awareness opportunities, target high-value keywords, and beat niche competitors. Check out this case study to see how Skale helped Moonpay 256x its non-branded organic traffic and generate 7,000+ non-brand organic clicks per month. 

The best part of working with us is that we go beyond SEO to help you create a coordinated content strategy that supplements traditional and outbound marketing strategies with SEO content writing, on-page SEO, technical SEO, and link building. As a result, you improve your business’s online presence with better search engine rankings, online visibility, and brand sentiment. Sure, someone may not be a perfect-fit customer for you right now, but when their time comes, your brand will be top of the list.  

What’s it like working with a B2B SEO agency?

Any business-to-business SEO company helps you with effective marketing strategies and establishes a solid process to keep you in the loop and all that work flowing. At Skale, we believe in making SEO your #1 revenue-driving channel with:

• A dedicated Slack channel for async communication
• Consultancy from seasoned digital marketing professionals
• Regular meetings and updates on SEO strategy and performance
• SEO campaign performance analysis with respect to business objectives
• Consistent deliverables like new content briefs, technical audits, optimizations, and more
• Focus on SQLs, demos, and sign-ups instead of just vanity metrics like search rankings and traffic 
• Long-term strategy & 3-month sprint roadmaps with data-based KPI modeling for business growth 
• A team of full-funnel SEO specialists, including technical specialist, growth strategist, and content specialist

Like what you see? Here’s what our clients have to say. 

“In three months, we could double signups and triple visitors from non-branded SEO. We also increased the visit-to-signup conversion rates by up to 195% on some website sections. We scored high for competitive keywords such as “meeting minutes,” which has a global search volume of 46k, and we achieved position number four worldwide in less than 3 months. As a result, Slite validated SEO as a key channel for their unicorn growth path and is now investing heavily in it.“ — Arianna Lupi, previous SEO specialist @ Skale

Take Rezi, for instance. They were struggling with limited SEO resources, no guidance, and a low number of backlinks. Skale’s SEO experts helped them with a thorough technical audit, optimizing on-page content, and user journey CTAs. The website got twice as many signups from non-branded search and revenue went up by 176% in four months.

How to choose the right B2B SEO agency for your business

Now that you know the perks of hiring a B2B SEO agency, let’s talk about what to consider when choosing one for your business. 

• Budget: How much money can you spend on SEO and for how long? Businesses typically start seeing results in 2-6 months, depending on their SEO strategy. Make sure you’ve got the budget to commit to this timeframe. 
• Specialization: Are you choosing the agency that suits your niche the best? Take Skale, for example. We’re a great option for B2B SaaS companies but not for e-commerce—yet! 
• Experience: Has the SEO agency worked with other players in your industry? Otherwise, it may take them a while to grasp the basics and create content that resonates.  
• Online presence and recommendations: Do marketers recommend this agency? Does it have a solid online presence? Skale, for example, has testimonials from companies like Flodesk, Holded, Slite, and more. 
• Basic deliverables: What deliverables do you need from the agency? While nothing is set in stone, you should ask for assistance with keyword research, technical SEO audits, content briefs, implementation, and reporting. 

While you can save money with the DIY route, outsourcing SEO is often more efficient. Hiring a B2B SEO agency enables you to use expert knowledge to get faster results at a much lower investment risk. Whether you want to get more leads,  increase brand awareness, drive more traffic to your site, or increase sales, agencies can build you the ultimate strategy to get there. 

Ready to partner with Skale and boost MRR from SEO? Schedule a call today to chat with the team.

B2B customer acquisition strategies essentially focus on increasing brand awareness and using lead generation tactics to attract, educate, and convert new customers–as well as retain existing ones.

By using different marketing channels and tools like inbound marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, and more, SaaS businesses can ensure they’re efficiently reaching potential customers and educating throughout the whole sales funnel. 

However, it’s important to understand that marketing is not customer acquisition–more on this later! 

Whether you’re a small startup or a 500+ employee enterprise, an effective B2B customer acquisition strategy will keep your business going and growing. 

Here are the 15 B2B customer acquisition strategies that really work and can drive growth in your business. We’ll also give you real-life B2B results using eight of these strategies as these are the most successful ones in the B2B space.

Let’s get right into it.

15 B2B customer acquisition strategies that really work

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is today’s most in-demand marketing hotspot. It’s no longer about finding the fanciest commercial center with the biggest footfall. No. Now, it’s all about the ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs)

You’ll find that all SEO statistics point to the importance of SEO for marketing and visibility. Let’s focus on one, a pretty juicy one:

• 95% of search engine traffic goes to the first SERP

This means that if you’re not on the first SERP, your potential customers won’t find you–and since Google only shows 10 results on that first SERP or even less if they show paid ads for that query, you’ll be battling to get in there. 

Learn from 6 SEO success stories from B2B brands

These B2B SaaS brands seriously scaled their ARR with a mix of tactics- we spotlight the key takeaways here

Get insights

How can SEO help you rank higher in the SERPs and thus help you acquire more customers?

By applying SEO best practices to three key areas of SEO that will let Google and other search engines identify your content as worth showing. These elements are:

• Technical SEO: site speed, structured data, canonicalization, XML sitemaps, and more
• On-page SEO: content, title and meta tag optimization, internal linking, image optimization, and more
• Off-page SEO: link-building, social signals, online reputation signals, and more

The best thing about SEO is that it helps leads find you organically. You’re not pushing ads, people are already searching for what your SaaS is offering, they just didn’t know about your SaaS.

How powerful can SEO really be? Let’s take a look at a real-life example:

Piktochart: 995% increase in organic clicks

Source

Piktochart is an online platform that allows users without intensive knowledge to create beautiful designs.

The challenge: By being in the same space as Unicorn Canva, Piktochart wanted to increase their SERPs ranking and in turn their product signups.

The solution: They came to Skale and we looked at some key elements like:

• Quality
• Quantity
• SEO keywords and terms
• Internal & external links
• Technical aspects

We then worked with Piktochart to build a link building strategy and improve some technical on page and off page SEO matters.

The results: Piktochart beat Canva for the high traffic keyword ‘presentation maker’ and achieved 995% increase in organic clicks and 860% increase in signups in just three months.

Piktochart also managed to rank above billion-dollar SaaS Canva. And what’s even more impressive is that it managed to do so with fewer referring domains–quality beating quantity once again: 

Source

2. Email marketing

B2B SaaS marketers are always asking for prospects’ emails. Why? Because email marketing is a highly effective way to communicate with customers, to promote content, products, sales, and events.

Unlike other methods like search, content marketing, or social media, email marketing gets you directly into your consumer’s inbox–and this can make an impact. After all, email marketing has an impressive ROI of $36 for every $1 invested.

Thankfully, there are various email marketing tools to help you segment, send behavior-triggered emails, draft better subject lines, and more.

Yaro Starak: $40,000 in sales without annoying subscribers

Yaro Starak is a serial entrepreneur, podcaster, blogger, and angel investor. Yaro sends a regular newsletter showcasing products, courses, and other offers.

The challenge: Yaro wanted to promote that Eben Pagan opened his GURU MasterClass program without annoying their audience with too many unwanted emails.

The solution: Yaro used AWeber, an email marketing and automation tool, that allowed him to only send emails to those users that showed interest by doing specific actions, such as:

• Whether a person had opened the previous email Yaro sent them
• Whether a person had NOT opened the previous email
• Whether a person had clicked the link to watch the video

The results: Thanks to the automation tool the campaign generated $40,000 in sales.

3. Referral marketing

Sometimes the best way to promote your product and get new customers is through your existing customers. By adding a referral program you encourage your customers to incentivize others to use it too by providing special offers, discounts, or rewards.

Referral marketing benefits include:

• It generates 3-5x higher conversion rates than any other marketing channel
• Referred customers are 18% more loyal than customers acquired elsewhere
• Referred customers are 4x more likely to refer more customers

Let’s see what referral marketing could do for you:

G Suite: managed to go from zero to 5 million paying customers

Source

G Suite by Google is a set of cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools.

The challenge:

G Suite was brand new in 2006 and needed to onboard new customers quickly.

The solution:

Google incentivized signups by paying program participants cash for every new user they brought. Additionally, referral links and coupons were given to program participants.

• Referral links and coupon codes were provided to program participants
• A participant receives $15 for every qualified new user that signs up through their link

The results:

By the end of 2018, 5 million paying businesses were using G Suite; today it’s one of the most widely-used software products.

4. Social media marketing

Social media might not seem like the first place you would look for customer acquisition of B2B prospects. However, it can truly pay off if you know what you’re doing.

A social media marketing strategy that works will help you build your brand’s voice, engage users with the more ‘human’ side of your business, and position your brand at the top of the consumer’s mind.

Seeing how 22.7% of internet users use social media for business-related networking and research, you might want to try it out and keep it in your customer acquisition playbook.

Cloudera: managed to get over 200K organic link clicks from social platforms

Source

Cloudera is a cloud database management system that helps businesses obtain the data insights they need.

The challenge:

Cloudera wanted to get better engagement rates and organic clicks from social media.

The solution:

They used SproutSocial to get the most out of their social media marketing efforts. Specifically, they used three features that SproutSocial offers:

• Optimal Send Times: automatically publishes content when social users are most active for engagement opportunities
• Advanced Listening: helps identify the percentage of positive, neutral, and negative messages associated with the brand
• Analytics and reporting tools: helps see with real data what’s working and what needs to improve

The results:

Across LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, Cloudera achieved a:

• 164.4% increase in total social followers
• 78.4% increase in total social engagements
• 78.6% increase in total social impressions

This social engagement helped them get 201,400 total organic link clicks from social platforms.

5. Influencer marketing

Although influencers are noticeable in B2C businesses, they’re also important for B2B—they just work a little differently. In B2B marketing, unlike B2C marketing, you’ll care much more about the quality (of your influencer’s audience) rather than the quantity (the size of it). 

Let me explain.

For B2C, macro influencers that reach more than 100,000 people can be a goldmine–think about the power of Kim Kardashian for clothes sales, for example. However, when it comes to B2B, you want to reach your niche effectively. To do this you’ll be working more closely with micro (10.000-100,000) and nano influencers (<10,000). This is because the more relevant the impressions that you get, the higher the chances of actually converting leads.

Whilst for a B2C product you can have an influencer post a picture using or consuming your product, when you do B2B influencer marketing they’ll do different types of content.

When asked what types of content are mostly being used by current B2B influencers, respondents said:

• Webinars (81%)
• Social media (74%)
• Blog posts (71%)
• Recorded video (67%)
• Interviews (62%)
• Podcasts (52%)
• Live video (48%)
• Case studies (38%)

As an example, we can see above how ChartMogul’s CEO, Nick Franklin, uses his social media account on Twitter to not only network with potential customers and the industry but also to share ChartMogul’s content and spread brand awareness. People relate to people. 

Influencer marketing will let you work with thought leaders in your industry that your prospects trust.

Sage: generated 200 million organic impressions from its influencer marketing campaign: #sageinspire.

Source

Sage is a global accountancy software company.

The challenge:

They wanted to increase their social media reach and engagement through industry influencers.

The solution:

Sage’s Global Influencer program involved over 120 small businesses and accountancy influencers in six countries in five languages.

The results:

Over 9 months the program generated over 200 million organic impressions for the brand.

6. Account-based marketing

Account-based marketing can be a true game changer for B2B companies because it allows them to perfectly target those high-quality and high-value leads.

When marketing and sales teams work together to create personalized buying experiences for specific leads they increase the chances of getting conversions.

Account-based marketing can:

• Bring a 208% growth on your marketing revenue
• Generate an increase of 171% of annual contract value
• Improve deal closing rate by up to 67%

SAP: AB M’s initiative generates $27 million in new pipeline opportunities.

SAP is an enterprise software provider that offers solutions from CRM to planning to financial and supply chain management.

The challenge:

SAP wanted to cross-sell other solutions to its existing customers. The problem was that its current marketing activities were not personalized and its messaging did not reflect which products were favored by existing customers.

The solution:

SAP decided to take the following steps as part of their ABM program:

• Acquired internal buy-in for the proposed ABM program
• Tested first with only five companies
• Did deep research on each target account and insights were used as a guide

The results:Within two years after the start of the ABM program, SAP was able to target 55 high-value target accounts, achieve new pipeline opportunities worth $27 million, and make $57 million in total revenue.

7. Content marketing

Content marketing focuses on creating and sharing relevant content that targets customers will value and look for. 

To make the best out of your content marketing, you should follow the content marketing cycle:

• Create buyer personas with the help of your marketing and sales team
• Create content for different channels, personas, media, and stages of the marketing cycle
• Plan content marketing campaigns
• Continuously audit your content and make changes where it needs

Bungalow: went from zero to 500K+ unique page views in just 10 months

Bungalow provides long-term room and home rental services across the US. 

The challenge:

Bungalow wanted to attract potential customers that would be visiting the areas where they offer their services. 

The solution:

Thanks to DSLX, a SaaS content agency, Bungalow started publishing ‘best neighborhood’ guides for all of their most important cities/markets.

The results:

In less than 10 months Bungalow managed to go from zero to over 500,000 unique page views thanks to their city guides. Additionally, they now rank first for various local keywords like ‘best neighborhoods New York,’ best neighborhoods Los Angeles,’ and ‘best neighborhoods Chicago.’

8. Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a more holistic approach than content marketing and takes into account all content that drives an ICP from awareness to customers. For example, a pop-up modal window that targets a user that has been on the website multiple times is a small tactic within the greater inbound strategy that brought them to the website in the first place. 

Businesses that apply inbound marketing tactics can get up to 126% more leads than those that don’t.

Perkbox: increased MQLs by 102% in only 10 months

Perkbox supports employee well-being, employee recognition, company culture, and more–all to help with recruiting and retaining the best possible talent for your team.

The challenge:

Perkbox wanted to turn their non-branded organic traffic, which was low intent, with a low conversion rate into MQLs and opportunities. In order to scale cost-effectively, Perkbox needed to rank for higher intent keywords that indicate their ICP needs their solution imminently.

The solution:

Working with us we did a full SEO and content audit and realized there were some important changes that could give us the outcomes Perkbox was looking for. As part of the strategy we included:

• Detailed keyword research and content planning
• Optimizing existing content
• Creating new landing pages and blog articles
• A technical SEO analysis
• High-quality B2B link-building

We focused on creating content that could convert visitors into leads and customers–landing pages, blog articles, etc. 

The results:

In just 10 months, Perkbox managed to:

• Increase by 49.2% for non-brand organic clicks
• Increase non-brand organic MQLs by 102%
• Increased opportunities by 40%
• Reached a cost per opp of just £110

9. Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is about using search engines to increase the visibility of your SaaS.

B2B Search marketing is the combination of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing techniques to help your business gain visibility online, rank higher on search result pages and increase traffic through search engines.

Pay-per-click advertisements like Google Ads are easy to identify simply by looking at the little tag that says ‘Ad’ on the SERPs.

Seeing how the close rate of SEO B2B marketing is almost 8x higher than that of traditional marketing and 61% of marketers say they rely on PPC ads to distribute content and generate more leads, you know SEM is a key player in the B2B space.

Build visibility & grow MRR with Skale’s SEO experts

We turn leads into conversions with powerful content and data-driven strategies for revenue growth

Learn more

10. LinkedIn marketing

96% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing. You can see why LinkedIn marketing is the right place to increase business awareness and connect with potential leads—right? 

LinkedIn marketing is about making the most of what the platform offers to network, generate leads, improve brand awareness, foster partnerships, distribute content, and increase your website traffic.

Here are five best practices to seize your LinkedIn presence:

• It’s a social platform, so don’t forget about hashtags
• Know when to use a LinkedIn Profile vs. a LinkedIn Page
• Share posts of various lengths
• Share external blog posts or content on your profile or page
• Keep your publishing schedule consistent

By following these practices you’ll get the results you want from your LinkedIn campaign.

11. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing it’s related to referral marketing in the sense that through already-established connections you get new customers or leads. However, affiliate marketing involves paying a commission to an affiliate each time someone makes a purchase through a unique affiliate link.

For the time being, affiliate marketing is not as highly seized as it has the potential in B2B:

• Only 18.6% of affiliate marketers work in the B2B space
• Only 12% of affiliate marketers sell B2B products and only 6% sell B2B services

There are three best practices that can help you make the most out of affiliate marketing for your B2B business:

• Focus on choosing the right affiliates: of course, you don’t have to pay if your affiliate doesn’t bring new leads, but if you’re after real leads and revenue, you need to make sure your affiliate is the right one to bring new product-qualified leads.
• Invest enough resources and time: create an affiliate landing page, keep constant communication with your affiliates, and recruitment never really stops. If you want your affiliate program to work, you need to put in the work.
• Educate affiliates about the B2B sales cycle: the B2B sales cycle tends to be longer and requires more decision-makers, which is why you need to remind your affiliates of this so they don’t get discouraged by the time it takes.

12. Outreach marketing

Another way to acquire new B2B customers is by reaching out directly to one of the decision-makers in the company you’re trying to land. Maybe a CEO, maybe a director with high authority, or a manager that’s in charge of purchases.

By reaching out directly to these decision-makers you’ll be speeding up the process–however, you must be careful not to spam. You want to truly study and understand your potential customers before you reach out to them.

For outreach marketing the most important thing you’ll need to do is study your potential customers and understand who you need to contact and which way is best: call, email, LinkedIn messaging, etc. Additionally, you also need to know how to best convey your message, both in the subject line or call opener, and in the body or during the rest of the call.

13. Multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing is exactly what it says on the tin, marketing done across multiple channels. It’s about being where your audience is: everywhere. 

Today, people don’t only consume content and ads through their desktop computers, nope. They use their smartphone, smartwatch, tablets, and even smart glasses to see and engage with new content. Soon, they’ll likely be adding the Metaverse to this mix as well.

Companies that use multichannel marketing will be interacting with users directly and indirectly through different channels like:

• Online catalogs
• Websites
• Push notifications
• Text messages
• Podcasts
• Emails
• Paid search
• Social media 
• TV
• Radio
• Direct mail

You can see how this list of channels mixes traditional outbound marketing with digital and inbound marketing. Covering all possibilities is what’s all about to obtain the desired outcome: engaging with all potential customers. 

The challenge is getting your branding and messaging unified across all of these platforms, so that no matter where your audience finds you—keep in mind it’s likely to be in more than one place—they get the same, continued brand experience every time.

14. Video marketing

Video marketing is using videos to show your brand and products in a way that will turn viewers into potential customers. A great example of video marketing is Dropbox’s video explaining what its product can do for its clients.

Videos can be exactly what your customer acquisition strategy is missing because videos allow you to:

• Showcase your brand’s voice and culture
• Create highly shareable campaigns
• Thoroughly explain your product
• Create an emotional bond with the viewers
• Show the human side of the brand

Additionally, videos are a great way to showcase reviews. Seeing a written review of your product or services doesn’t quite have the emotionally charged message that a video showing a person truly happy and satisfied with your product would do. 

After all, 93% of emotional communication is done non-verbally, you’ll give your testimonials a better chance on video!  

When creating video content for your brand and product remember to use storytelling elements to really engage users from the first few seconds, ensure the video has various playback quality options for an optimal load and viewing experience, and that it’s got subtitles–psst. you can easily add subtitles to videos with Happy Scribe.

Lastly, videos can really help your inbound marketing campaigns by letting leads educate themselves on your product and answer as many questions as they might have with visual tutorials—they cut out the need for manual webinars. The webinar is dead!—for some. This helps potential customers feel better about the decision they’re going to make.

15. Customer retention

B2B SaaS brands typically offer their services on a subscription model, so customers spend only a small percentage of their customer lifetime value upfront. This makes customer retention crucial for the growth and success of your business—especially if you’re billing monthly over annually.

Since acquiring a new customer can cost up to 5x more than retaining an existing one, it’s better to focus on those customers you already have. Additionally, studies have shown that an increase of 5% in customer retention rates can increase overall revenue by 25-95%.

Although it might not seem obvious, the more happy customers you have and keep, the more new customers will come to you. This rapidly spreading product-led growth model relies on a product growth flywheel that feeds itself. When you look after your customers, you look after your product, and mediocre customers quickly become happy, engaged users that bring in cohorts more. 

How can you improve customer retention? By following these best practices:

• Implement net promoter score surveys: they help you know what your customers think of your product and understand the ‘why’ behind their thinking
• Segment your feedback: depending on which pricing your different customers are paying, they’ll have different things to say about your product–segment them to know what to take from each and how you can deliver tailored product experiences to different customer segments. 
• Act quickly: don’t just take feedback and let it pile up, you need to respond and act quickly on it. From there, let your customers know you’ve listened and put in the work.
• Constantly measure product usage: notice when product adoption rates increase, or drop, highlight friction points, and combat churn
• If customers churn, understand why: don’t let customers churn without understanding exactly what made them churn, this will help you avoid it in the future
• Show that you care: at the end of the day customers want a product that works, but they also want to work with a company that listens. Showcase you’re listening, and offer customer support methods that match every type of customer: from frontline support reps to functional, self-serve knowledge bases.

Now that we’ve seen these 15 customer acquisition strategies and real-life examples, we can dig a little deeper into how are marketing and customer acquisition different:

The acquisition framework: how are marketing and customer acquisition different?

Marketing will create recognition and attract potential customers. Customer acquisition is when the marketing campaign is actually fruitful and drives revenue.

Marketing is the method, customer acquisition is the result.

How exactly do we get the results in a customer acquisition strategy? By understanding the customer acquisition framework.

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The customer acquisition framework’s goal is to create a systematic approach to attaining new customers. By understanding how the content strategy, the customer lifecycle, and the sales funnel of your business interact with each other you’ll be able to create a strategy that brings results.

In the image above we can see how the content you create will have an impact on the different stages of the customer lifecycle. In turn, this impact lets you better understand the outcomes in the sales funnel and the role of your marketing and sales teams, as well as your customer success team.

You might be more used to the five stages of the marketing funnel, which are:

• Awareness: an unexpected internet user lands on your page, finds your social media content, or simply gets invited to one of your webinars
• Interest: after coming in contact with your brand there’s a pique in interest and the user starts engaging more with your content
• Consideration: the prospect starts to consider your product or service as a solution to their problem
• Conversion: they make the decision to pay for your product
• Loyalty: they renew their subscription with you
• Advocacy: after being a customer and seeing their results with your product they become advocates of your brand

Combining the marketing funnel with the customer acquisition framework will give you everything you need to create a truly powerful customer acquisition strategy.

Knowing that customer acquisition needs to see real conversion results is why you’ll want to leave customer acquisition in expert hands.

Work with Skale to enhance customer acquisition & drive revenue

Skale provides 30+ B2B brands with actionable strategies that directly impact CLTV- you can be one of them

Learn more

Make SEO part of your customer acquisition strategy

Organic search generates 53.3% of all website traffic–this means more than half the people that land on your website are there thanks to SEO. As we’ve seen, SEO depends on many variables that deal with:

• Technical
• On-page
• Off-page

We at Skale are an experienced B2B SEO agency that can help you hit your customer acquisition goals. Let’s chat and see what we can build together.

B2B Customer Acquisition FAQ

SEO is the process of optimizing your B2B website for users and search engines to make it easier to rank above your competitors, and hopefully in the highest positions on Google’s SERP  (Search Engine Results Page). This makes changes in SEO and SEO algorithms to be the most important area in content marketing for 62% of B2B marketers.

SEO is not so straightforward, from keyword optimization to building quality backlinks, there are a lot of moving parts. If your B2B business is new to SEO, you may feel overwhelmed handling these seemingly never-ending (some tedious) SEO processes alongside other core business strategies. 

This is where B2B SEO automation comes in.

B2B marketers are increasingly streamlining their workflow by implementing solid marketing automation technologies to meet and grow demand. In fact, 90% of agency owners say that automation is successful in driving revenue for their companies. 

SEO automation offers multiple advantages, particularly to B2B businesses that rely on a smooth marketing process to retain customers and avoid marketing stagnation. Selling a B2B product involves multiple stages, indecisive decision-makers, and a high risk of customer churn. Automation tools take the pressure off by relieving B2B teams of tedious, time-consuming SEO processes, ensuring quality at every stage of the marketing process, and allowing employees to concentrate on more complex tasks. 

This article will explore the ten best SEO tools to automate your B2B SEO campaigns. Let’s kick things off by understanding what SEO automation is. 

What is SEO automation?

SEO automation is the process of using tools and software to automate your simple but repetitive SEO activities. It aims to reduce the need to manually perform menial tasks, which can be automated and completed much faster.

While SEO aims to improve your site’s organic traffic it’s not just limited to ranking for top-performing keywords. Nope.

Business to Business, or B2B SEO, requires a unique SEO strategy that targets niche consumers. It involves digital marketing tactics that include optimizing your website’s content and technical layout to rank highly on Google. 

These tactics include optimizing different SEO elements—including content SEO, technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. 

Handling all these elements simultaneously and optimizing them to rank higher is the real challenge marketers face—making them turn to SEO and B2B marketing automation tools.  

While it’s not possible to automate the whole process or an entire SEO workflow—you can automate repetitive manual SEO processes to improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns. 

What parts of B2B SEO marketing can be automated?

When we asked the leading B2B experts about what aspects of SEO can be automated and what’s something that definitely can’t be automated, and why, here’s the response we got. 

“I would say that the aspects of SEO that can be automated are those that don’t require creativity or a personal touch. In other words, you can use tools to do the work for you. With the tools that are available and the knowledge that people have about SEO, you can automate the process to a certain extent.

 There are certain things that can’t be automated, such as what your website looks like and how people use it. It’s hard to know what people will find valuable or not.” 

– Jamie Irwin, Director & Founder @ Straight Up Search.

It’s important to understand that SEO automation doesn’t replace every hands-on SEO activity and detailed analysis—but rather streamlines your SEO processes so you can focus on the creative side of your digital marketing campaigns. 

Here are the key things you can automate using B2B SEO tools: 

• Position tracking: The primary purpose of SEO is to rank highly on Google Search or any other search engine. With hundreds and thousands of pages, tracking each page’s ranking gets challenging. You can leverage automation tools, like SE Ranking—to track your page’s ranking and how it gets better or worse with time. 
• Site monitoring: Unsecure websites and websites with broken links can appear on the top search results pages, but the lack of an SSL certification and broken links are signals that the website is not well optimized and can affect user experience, SEO, and rankings. This is why it’s important to regularly monitor your website to avoid these discrepancies. Using SEO automation tools, you can monitor your site’s uptime, page loading speed, broken links, and more. 
• Competitor monitoring: Competitor analysis is an essential part of an effective SEO strategy. You can automate competitor monitoring to analyze how your competitors perform on the Google landscape and create strategies to outrank them. 
• Backlink analysis: Backlinks are essential to boost your brand’s credibility and authority, and backlink analysis helps you analyze who’s linking to your website. SEO automation makes this process easier—allowing you to prevent spammy and shady websites from linking to your website. 
• SEO reporting: Automated SEO reports compile all your SEO key performance indicators (KPIs), sent out on a regular basis. With automated SEO reporting, all you need to do is establish the metrics you’d like to include in your report, add the recipient, and the tool or application will do the rest. 

Rajesh Namase, Co-Founder and Professional Tech Blogger at TechRT, sums it up really well. 

“SEO is an ever-changing and complex field, making it difficult to know what can be automated and what can’t. There are a few key things to watch out for when automating SEO tasks.

First, you need to make sure that the automation tool you’re using is up-to-date and compatible with the latest changes in Google’s algorithm. If it isn’t, you could end up doing more harm than good.

Second, you need to be careful about which tasks you automate. Automating too many things can lead to a drop in traffic and rankings. So, it’s important to only automate the most time-consuming and tedious tasks.

Finally, there are some things that just can’t be automated, like creating original content or building backlinks. These things require a human touch and can’t be done by a machine.”

Let’s now dive in and see the 8 B2B SEO automation tools you should definitely consider to make the most out of your time and SEO efforts. 

Not convinced? You can find more B2B SEO statistics to help put SEO on your radar.

10 B2B SEO automation tools

While having an all-in-one tool that handles all your SEO efforts might seem convenient, it isn’t possible. That’s why you need to be strategic with the marketing automation software you use and the SEO processes you automate. 

These eight best SEO automation tools will make your B2B SEO and marketing strategy a breeze and make your business reach new heights – literally.

1. Use Screaming Frog to automate website audit and crawl

Pricing:

• Free: limited to 500 URLs per crawl
• Paid: $209 per year: unlimited URLs

Key features:

• Find broken links
• Generate XML sitemaps
• Audit redirect URLs
• Analyze page title and metadata 
• Discover duplicate content 
• Site architecture visualization 
• Review directives and robots 
• Extract data with XPath

How it works: 

Screaming Frog is a great SEO automation tool that helps you automate your website’s crawling. It’s a technical SEO spider that crawls your website—allowing you to analyze the issues that affect your site’s performance and, consequently, search engine ranking. 

The tool allows you to schedule website audits at set intervals or automate the entire audit via the command line. What’s best is that you can also auto-export the crawl data to any location on your computer. 

The web crawling tool crawls your website to identify the Search Engine Optimization issues, such as broken links, redirects and loops, duplicate content, and more. 

If you want to automate site monitoring to understand technical SEO, Screaming Frog is a good option. It’ll analyze your site structure and uncover technical issues that could be holding it back in SERPs.

2. Automate your copywriting process using Copysmith’s AI-powered software

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Pricing:

• Starter: $19 per month
• Professional: $59 per month
• Start Up: $299 per month

Key features:

• AI image generation 
• Product descriptions  
• Content generation & enhancement
• Campaign building 
• Blog templates 
• Essential integrations 

How it works: 

With the recent arrival of AI-driven chatbots like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing, automated copywriting is fast growing in popularity. With Copysmith, you can create, launch and optimize your content and campaigns in a scalable and results-oriented way. 

With Copysmith, you can summarize long-form content into concise sentences— and vice versa— to increase readability, rewrite existing content and refine your copy prior to publishing to encourage improved performance. 

The potential benefits are numerous. If website engagement, search rankings or conversion rates are falling, content optimization is the first place you should be looking.  You can delegate tedious tasks like drafting sales emails to Copysmith, freeing up precious employee time and ensuring consistent high-quality work.  

3. Use Ahrefs to automate site backlink analysis 

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Pricing:

• Lite: $99/mo
• Standard: $199/mo
• Advanced: $399/mo
• Enterprise: $999/mo

Key features:

• Site audit Site explorer for competitor analysis
• Content explorer to analyze top-performing content 
• Keywords explorer to identify keywords customers search for
• Rank tracker to track your site’s ranking progress 

Backlinks are one of Google’s top ranking factors that help your website rank higher and earn organic traffic. 

Google considers credible backlinks votes of trust, and Ahrefs is a beneficial SEO automation tool to monitor the quality and quantity of your website’s backlinks.

It helps you monitor insightful SEO metrics, such as the number of backlinks, the number of referring domains, and Domain Rating (DR). 

Using Ahrefs, you can set alerts and notifications for:

• New and lost backlinks to your website
• Brand mentions of your website or business
• New keywords 

These automated alerts make it a breeze to keep track of your website’s performance. Ahrefs also lets you monitor your competitor’s backlink profile—allowing you to leverage opportunities to find potential sites you can earn backlinks by maximizing your SEO efforts. 

Alongside SEMrush and Moz, Ahrefs is at the forefront of the SEO analysis field, providing insights into the estimated organic traffic to each referring domain and linking page.

4. Use SEMrush to automate keyword research and competitor analysis

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Pricing: 

• Pro: $99.95 per month
• Business: $191.62 per month
• Guru: $374.95 per month

Key features:

• Competitor research and analysis 
• Keyword analysis
• Domain analysis
• Backlink analysis
• SERP tracking
• Technical SEO audits
• Analyze PPC strategy 

SEMrush is a comprehensive SEO automation tool. 

While SEMrush helps automate multiple parts of your SEO campaigns—finding relevant keywords per your specific industry tops the list. 

Simply enter the keyword you wish to analyze in the Keyword Overview feature of the tool, and you’ll get key metrics like keyword difficulty, search intent, high-performing keyword variations of your seed keywords, global volume, related keywords, and more. 

Using the Organic Research feature, you can also analyze your competitor’s web pages and the keywords theyrank for. All you must do is enter your competitor domain or page you want to analyze, and you’ll get a list of all the top organic keywords the page ranks for—including metrics like the number of keywords present on the page, traffic, estimated traffic cost, and non-branded traffic. 

The tool also gives an analysis of SERP features with key details like:

• The keywords that help the page obtain a featured snippet
• See how many backlinks each webpage on the SERP has–and what those sites are
• A list of FAQs that shows up for specific query 

Thus, SEMrush is an excellent B2B marketing automation tool for finding relevant B2B keywords your competitor ranks for, making it easier to find areas of improvement for your website’s performance and SERP ranking. 

5. Use Google Search Console to monitor organic search presence and visibility 

Source 

Pricing:

• Free 

Key features:

• Keywords ranking metrics
• Detect sitemap issues and fix them correctly 
• Details about how your website appears on SERPs
• Identify broken links
• Identify pages losing organic traffic
• Fix indexing issues and request re-indexing of updated or new content
• Provides knowledge of your site’s responsiveness, AMP, and mobile-friendliness
• Alerts when Google encounters spam, indexing, or other issues with your website

Google provides great analytics and SEO automation tools, including Google Analytics, and one of them is Google Search Console. 

This tool allows you to track, maintain, monitor, and troubleshoot your website’s organic presence on the SERPs. It shows your website’s ranking for various keywords—displaying which keywords bring the maximum traffic to each page and your site as a whole.

Google also automatically notifies you if something goes wrong with your website with issues like broken links, inconsistent information, or missing tags. Keeping track of all these key SEO aspects isn’t always possible with numerous pages. This makes Google Search Console a great tool to rescue with its automated feature. 

Promptly fixing these issues helps your website rank higher on Google.

6. Use SentiOne to automate social media campaigns

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Pricing:

• Team Plan: $300 per month
• Enterprise Plan: Book a demo

Key features:

• Social listening 
• Online data analytics
• Automated reports 
• Comprehensive bot analytics 
• Bot integrations
• Sentiment analysis

An important aspect of optimizing your website for SEO that most B2B businesses overlook is optimizing your social media campaigns. While SentiOne isn’t necessarily an SEO tool, it uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to deliver key data insights that can help you optimize your website for SEO.  

Higher website traffic is essential for your site to rank higher, and one way to boost traffic is through social media platforms. 

Over 96% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content and drive organic traffic to their websites. Sharing authoritative and relevant content on professional platforms, like LinkedIn, is a great opportunity to grow your brand’s online visibility. 

SentiOne offers a feature called Social Listening that helps you monitor what your target audience says about your brand and the way they interact with it on different online channels and social media platforms. 

Here’s how the social listening tool can help:

• It “listens” to your audience’s perception of your brand on social channels. It helps you keep up with your audience’s requirements to ensure high customer satisfaction. 
• Provides audience’s views about your brand from 5+ million sources, including social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube and other channels like Tumblr, blogs, news portals, or Amazon
• It sends automated alerts and notifications when someone mentions your brand so you can see what they post and talk about your brand. You can connect with these content marketers or bloggers interested in your brand and ask to include a link to your brand. This way you can grow your site’s backlink portfolio. 

If you want to automate social media monitoring to boost backlinks and grow organic traffic, SentiOne is a beneficial marketing automation software to try for your B2B business. 7. Use SISTRIX to create the perfect content that ranks 

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Pricing:

• Start: $102.58 per month
• Plus: $206.19 per month
• Professional: $361.62 per month
• Premium: $620.65 per month

Key features:

• Improve organic visibility
• Competitor analysis
• Resolve on-page issues
• Create content to impress visitors

Sistrix SEO automation tool provides multiple packages to monitor and improve your SEO campaigns—and one of them helps you find ideas to create content that attracts more visitors. 

Content is an integral part of SEO. 57% of SEO experts consider content creation and content marketing as the number one way to drive the best search marketing results. Sistrix’s content assistant helps you optimize your existing content to find gaps you can fill to make the content rank better. 

Once you paste your content into Sistrix’s content optimizer—it displays a content report with data like:

• Text summary: words, sentences, characters, readability score
• Plagiarism checker
• Relevant keywords and keyword density in your content 
• Questions you can add to your content 
• Brand analysis across platforms like Amazon and Instagram

You can also add team members or editors to review the content or export the optimized content to an external location per your specific requirements. 

Apart from content optimization, Sistrix also makes it easier to monitor your website’s visibility index, traffic estimation, URL structures, directories, keyword ranking, and more to improve search engine visibility. 

8. Use Oracle Eloqua to nurture leads and effortlessly create marketing campaigns

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Pricing:

• Basic: $2000 per month 
• Standard: $4000 per month

Key features:

• Email marketing 
• Online marketing 
• Lead management 
• Campaign management 
• Reporting & analytics 

A top-of-the-list B2B marketing solution, Oracle Eloqua Marketing automation offers everything from advanced lead scoring to campaign design to integrated sales tools. Its advanced technology allows you to create and deploy campaigns that match customer interests, span multiple channels (email, web search, video, and mobile), and can be created quickly, using simple drag-and-drop commands. 

A stand-out feature of Oracle Eloqua is its use of artificial intelligence, which the tools uses to calculate customer fatigue, personalize content and tailor product recommendations. The software’s architecture also features an open framework designed to be flexible and grow with your company. With the ability to easily collect data from varied sources and leverage unlimited API calls, your business can stay agile.

9. Use SERPWoo for detailed competitor insights 

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Pricing:

• Bronze: $49.95 per month
• Silver: $99.95 per month
• Gold: $199.95 per month
• Platinum: $299.95 per month

Key features:

• SERP analysis
• Keyword finder and research 
• Brand monitoring with mentions
• Daily accurate rank tracking 
• On-page SEO analysis
• Schedule reports 

While Google Search Console helps you monitor the keywords your site rank for, SERPWoo is an SEO automation tool that allows you to monitor other pages or websites ranking for your target keywords or search term. 

It’s an Online Reputation Tracking (ORM) and keyword rank-tracking tool that lets you perform a comprehensive SERP analysis for the top 20 websites ranking for your B2B SEO keyword. 

This allows you to monitor your competitors to find better ranking opportunities. 

In addition, SERPWoo’s Reports tool allows you to schedule SEO reports and automate the reporting process to mail the report to four separate email addresses. 

This critical report gives you insight into key metrics like domain strength and page authority, and social shares and brand mentions to analyze ranking and build a more effective SEO strategy.

All these SERPWoo features provide excellent opportunities for B2B businesses to increase organic traffic and grow SEO performance. 

10. Use Hawke AI for automated PPC data insights and performance analytics 

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Pricing:

• 14-day free trial
• Comes in three plans: Entrepreneur, Advertiser, and Agency
• Plans start at $89/mo 

Key features:

• Customized performance alerts 
• Single-view reporting
• Budget monitoring and auditing
• Anomaly detection 

Hawke AI is a reporting software that uses AI and ML algorithms to provide a comprehensive picture of your marketing campaigns and real-time insights to improve your SEO strategy. 

Its unique feature that helps monitor your ad budget makes it stand out from other tools. Many B2B marketers find it difficult to monitor the performance of their ads and Paid Per Click (PPC) budget—especially with multiple ongoing marketing campaigns. 

Hawke AI alerts you about negative trends, high media spending, or inefficient campaign performance by monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 24/7 using Machine Learning. 

With this knowledge of potential performance issues in advance—you can make relevant changes and close gaps to improve your campaign’s SEO performance. 

Hawke AI is an excellent PPC automation software to reduce the manual work required to monitor ad budgets across multiple platforms, like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

B2B SEO marketing automation strategies

When we asked Straight Up Search‘s Director and Founder, Jamie Irwin, about what you need to watch out for when it comes to SEO automation, here’s what she said:

“What you need to watch out for is that the automation process might not be the best you can do. That is, the tools might not be the best option for your situation, or the automation process might be too complicated or difficult to implement properly. 

It would be a good idea to be able to monitor your optimization process, so you know what’s going on, and you can take appropriate action. You also need to be aware that you might not be able to automate everything. You might have to have a personal touch in your SEO process, so it’s not all automated.”

This is why having a robust B2B SEO marketing automation strategy that works is important. The end goal is, of course, driving demand. If your B2B SEO automation tools aren’t delivering these results, you may need to rethink it. 

Here are three key B2B automation strategies to implement. 

Implement lead scoring to quantify the lead’s value 

Lead scoring refers to the process of assigning a numerical or point-based score to quantify the value of a customer or lead. This score is determined using your KPIs like content downloaded, opened emails, pages visited, newsletter responses, etc. 

Quantifying these leads makes it easier to focus your attention and prioritize outreach to nurture leads with the potential to convert them further down your business’s sales funnel. 

HubSpot provides a great B2B marketing automation called Predictive Lead Scoring to automate lead qualification. It uses ML algorithms to find nurturing leads to optimize your outreach strategy and boost lead generation. 

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Depending on your B2B marketing automation campaign, you can customize the software’s scoring criteria and add data from page views, and CTA clicks to form submissions and email interactions to nurture leads. 

Automate email marketing to facilitate outreach

77% of B2B organizations use email marketing newsletters for their content marketing strategy, and 64% of B2B companies use email automation techniques. 

Email marketing is amongst the topmost channels for revenue and lead generation for B2B businesses. However, marketers face numerous challenges with email marketing like:

• Following up in a timely manner
• Improving email personalization
• Increasing customer acquisition and retention 
• Enhancing email deliverability 
• Improving brand awareness 

MailChimp is a great example of a B2B email automation software through which you can automate trigger emails based on the customer journey, automate cart abandonment emails, deliver personalized emails, and more. 

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You can also analyze how your emails perform compared to the top-performing campaigns in your B2B industry with MailChimp’s data-driven suggestions and insights. 

While email marketing doesn’t directly impact your business’s B2B SEO, you can use it to boost traffic. 

Leverage chatbots and conversational messaging for the best customer experience

The B2B industry has seen a significant increase in chatbot integration, which are essential assets for lead generation. 

55% of businesses using chatbots generate much more high quality leads, and around 58% of B2B businesses use chatbots. 

Here’s how you can use chatbots to automate B2B SEO: 

• To answer customer’s or lead’s questions
• To direct them to self-help or helpful website resources, like guides and blogs
• To assist leads with filling out forms

Instead of waiting for actual human—leads, get instant information and immediately get their queries resolved with the help of chatbots, as they’re available round-the-clock. This 24/7 service and faster response time facilitate and speed up customers’ buying decisions. 

You can create your own customized chatbot and chatbot funnel using MobileMonkey—an omnichannel messaging platform. 

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Using its sales outreach automation, you can automatically follow up with leads, target hard-to-reach customers, and book sales qualified meetings to quickly drive prospects down your sales funnel. 

A user-friendly website experience and SEO go hand-in-hand—when it comes to achieving higher search engine ranking. Integrating chatbots into your B2B marketing campaign will help: 

• Boost customer engagement: MyTradingHub saw a 59% decrease in churn, meaning customers were more engaged
• Improve customer satisfaction: Charter Communications helped decrease the time it took customers to reset passwords by 50% by using chatbots
• Grow organic traffic: Good Spa Guide saw an increase of 29% in website traffic in six weeks by using chatbots
• Increase search engine ranking: by providing an overall better user experience websites can improve their search engine traffic, however, it’s important to mention that chatbots are not a Google ranking factor

We can see how using chatbots helps create a positive impact on your business’s customer experience. 

A B2B SEO automation alternative: Hire an SEO agency

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution or an all-in-one tool that can help boost your B2B SEO efforts, grow your website’s traffic, and drive demand. However, there is no shortage of automation tools to revolutionize SEO operations and ultimately boost revenue. 

Each tool has its own specialty and features to boost your site’s performance. Managing all these different tools simultaneously while ensuring a successful B2B marketing automation campaign can be tedious. Not to mention the additional expenses of handling and setting up these multiple SEO and marketing automation tools—which can get expensive for your business. 

The solution: hiring an expert SEO agency.

An expert SEO agency takes a lot of burden off your shoulders. Here’s why you should consider one for your B2B business: 

• You benefit from a dedicated team of experts from experienced and top-notch SEO companies—who drive better and faster results
• Time-efficient as you don’t have to analyze data or key insights—it’s the expert’s responsibility now
• More affordable than investing in multiple tools
• The agency will keep a close eye on core Google updates and algorithm updates—to tweak your SEO performance according to and strive for better results.

Getting familiar with multiple tools and perfecting them to boost SEO performance can take longer than anticipated, as it’s a long process demanding immaculate attention to detail and general SEO knowledge. Hiring an expert B2B SEO company like Skale can help you jumpstart your SEO campaign with expert knowledge and best SEO practices—right from the get-go. 

Get in touch with Skale to learn more about boosting digital marketing performance, improving backlinks, performing keyword optimization, and on-page optimization—and become the next SaaS King of your industry. 

B2B SEO Automation FAQ

All that happens faster when you get search intent right and rank on Google search results. In other words, when using SEO for lead gen.

SEO for lead generation is the art of drawing in visitors and potential customers who use search engines, like Google, to look for products and services you sell. It’s also the delicate art of learning from your potential customers so you can keep delivering exactly what they need to go from potential to actual paying customers. 

If you’re struggling to get there, this article walks you through eight actionable tips to increase conversion and get the most out of your B2B search marketing.

What is SEO lead generation?

SEO lead generation uses search engine optimization tactics to rank higher on search engine results and attract qualified leads, which are ready to spend money on your products or services. 

The question is: how do SEO and lead generation work together? 

Whenever you turn to Google to buy something, you typically use search queries with relevant words like ‘buy,’ ‘purchase,’ or ‘services’ in the search box. The relevant product pages and other results ranking for those transactional keywords appear.

Investing in SEO helps your web pages appear on SERPs for those queries. After coming across your website for relevant search queries, users start interacting with your brand to weigh their options. 

68% of online experiences begin with a search engine query. If you do SEO right, Google will recommend your website over and over. Once people gain trust in you, you’ll see the real magic–more traffic, sales, revenue, and business growth. 

Additionally, sometimes it can be hard to untangle your SQLs, or Sales Qualified Leads, from your MQLs, or Marketing Qualified Leads, however, SEO can truly help you improve your SQL–and revenue–numbers simply by how they get to your content and how you are presenting it to them. 

SEO works well for lead generation because it helps you appear before your target audience, and get more relevant traffic, and more paying customers.

There are also some important metrics to look at that can really tell you if your marketing and SEO are going in the right direction. Worry not, we’ll cover the most important ones here. 

Let’s first take a closer look at why SEO is so important for lead generation.

Why is SEO important for B2B lead generation?

B2B sales cycles are longer with more people in the decision-making process, so the right SEO strategy is crucial for B2B businesses looking to attract high-intent web traffic that converts into leads. 

As these decision-makers conduct thorough research, your products and services must appear high on search results for different related queries. By increasing your brand visibility, you will be top of mind when B2B decision-makers consider purchasing the product or service you offer. You’ll see more qualified leads, engagement, and conversion as you scale lead generation.

Still, trying to decide whether to invest in B2B SEO? Check out these benefits and see how SEO pays off over time:

• Rank for relevant, business-related target keywords 
• Reach more potential customers by showing up on organic search results
• Improve lead quality by creating content around transactional keywords
• Nurture and convert visitors and potential leads into paying customers
• Reduce relying solely on outbound methods like emails and cold calling
• Increase the number of demos, calls, and booked consultations from potential customers

“There are two main benefits to using SEO for lead generation. First, it’s mostly evergreen—you can make the investment upfront, and continue to reap benefits for years. Second, if you’re smart about your topic selection, it tends to bring you users who are highly qualified, because they went to Google for help solving some particular problem. It’s a highly motivated, active audience—not an audience that you’re grabbing while they happen to, say, check their email to open up Instagram.”

–Lucia Tang, Head of Content @ Keeper

Some B2B shoppers will need the extra push to seal the deal. They may be at the final stage of the sales funnel but are yet to be ready to convert as they have unanswered questions. These customers are going back to Google, and other search engines, to look up your trustworthiness. 

That’s why your SEO marketing strategy should also focus on creating case studies, thought leadership content, or generating customer reviews that position you as a leader in your domain. All with the purpose of guiding your users and readers to your helpful resources so that they can click the ‘Chat with us!’ button in a heartbeat–or even better the ‘Get starter’ one. 

By now you might be wondering, if the goal is to appear on search engine result pages, what’s the difference between SEO and PPC?

We’re glad you asked.

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

The key difference between SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) is that SEO helps your brand gain visibility for informational and commercial queries, whereas PPC involves running paid search ads for converting potential customers. 

What do SEO and PPC do precisely?

Following SEO best practices helps you optimize your website and have better chances of ranking on search engines–organically. These optimizations include:

• On-page SEO, among other things, helps you research keywords that customers use to learn about products similar to yours, strategically place them in your web content, and align it to match users’ search intent.
• Off-page SEO includes getting backlinks from reviews, backlinks from blog posts on other websites, citations, and building local links–all showing search engines that you’re a trusted authority in your business domain
• Technical SEO ensures all technical aspects of a website so that search engine spiders can easily find, crawl, and index your website

PPC is an online advertising technique that helps you serve laser-targeted ads on search engines and social media. You pay a fee every time a visitor clicks on your ad.

Setting up PPC advertisements involves:

• Keyword research for understanding what customers are searching
• Setting bids or the amount you’re willing to pay for each click
• Creating ad sets with texts, headings, and right destination URLs
• Audience targeting for setting who’ll see your ad

Both SEO and PPC have some advantages and disadvantages. 

Let’s look at PPC first.

Efficient PPC ad campaigns with solid landing pages and the right keywords will get you instant results. You can also target different geographics, and demographics, and run A/B tests to understand what’s performing better.

However, PPC can quickly get expensive because everyone wants to target and bid on the same keyword. Additionally, you’ll need to constantly monitor existing ads and refresh them for maximizing revenue. 

SEO strategies may take longer to produce results, but these are long-lasting results that aim to keep growing your online presence.

With SEO you initially spend a lot of time and money creating competitive and educational content that informs buyers and builds website authority. Slowly but surely, potential customers will start seeing you as a credible, trustworthy industry expert. That’s when you start ranking for targeted keywords, drive traffic, get leads, and drive them through the sales funnel–all organically achieved.

“The main benefit of SEO in the case of lead generation is its long-lasting effects. Unlike paid strategies such as PPC advertising, the results of SEO efforts can continue to drive leads for your business even after the initial work has been completed. Obviously, you have to work with SEO, i.e., update content and address algorithm changes, to maintain and improve your rankings, but the initial investment can pay off for a long time.”

–Natalia Brzezinska, Marketing & Outreach Manager @ PhotoAiD 

PPC results disappear almost the moment you stop paying, instead, SEO results last for some time after that, but will start to diminish as time goes on if you don’t keep investing in SEO.

The image above shows how Skale organically ranks for the keyword SaaS SEO agency. The ads you see above it will keep changing depending on who wins the PPC bidding war. However, the organic result will only solidify its position over time.

Here’s a final stat that will prove to you why SEO is a must, and PPC might not be the right investment to do: 58% of people don’t trust the ads they see online. Everyone is Google-ing their questions, but most are looking for the organic results, not the ads section. 

If that has got you thinking, check out these actionable tips on generating leads with SEO.

How to use SEO for lead generation: 8 strategies

Generating SEO leads starts with putting the right strategies to use. Using SEO for lead generation can be incredibly simple: 

• Creating original content
• Targeting high-intent commercial keywords
• Nurturing visitors and solving their pain points 
• Providing the right content for users and visitors in all stages of the sales funnel

How do you get started? This section outlines eight strategies that you can start leveraging today. 

1. Audit your website

A detailed website audit tells you what’s affecting your search rankings and overall performance. In your audit, you’re looking for every single factor that’s helping or stopping, you from achieving visibility in search engines. 

There are several different types of audits:

• Competitive site audit: compares your website with competitors’ to reveal your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities
• SEO link audit: evaluates your backlink profile and shows if your website is getting value from the links currently pointing to your website 
• Conversion optimization audit: analyzes incoming traffic sources and spots opportunities to serve those visitors in the best possible way 

All these may seem a little overwhelming. Luckily, there are plenty of B2B SEO tools today that can help you with website audits. After you run an audit, you’ll be able to diagnose and resolve:

• Technical errors
• SEO issues
• Content problems

Tools are absolutely crucial for website auditing, but you also need a team of experts to help you make the most out of them and succeed. 

Site audit using Ahrefs

A simple website audit using a tool like Ahrefs shows top issues along with keywords you rank for, organic traffic, backlinks, and more. 

You can then dive deep into these issues and affected URLs. Fixing these audit issues will help you improve the overall domain health, domain rating (DR), organic traffic, and more. Also, remember to look at Google Analytics and Google Search Console as well to track different performance metrics and issues. 

2. Spend time researching strategic keywords

Keyword research is key to understanding what queries people use to look for products and services. Analyzing these keywords, their intent, and search volume will enable you to create content that satisfies both users and search engines. 

Researching keywords helps you:

• Fuel traffic growth with the right mix of long-tail and short-tail keywords
• Identify trending topics that your audience wants to learn about
• Acquire customers by creating helpful, relevant content that solves customers’ pain points

How do you go about researching keywords? Start by finding broad topics relevant to your business and customers. Then use a keyword research tool to find relevant phrases that can help you rank on search engines for that topic. 

Coupling the right keywords with the right search intent is the winning combo. Instead of taking keywords at face value, spend some time understanding the search intent of each keyword. Search intent analysis tells you the reason behind an online search.

The four types of search intent are:

• Informational: Users are trying to find short or in-depth answers to specific questions. Example: what are statistics?
• Navigational: They want to go where they want to go and look for the right website URL. Example: Facebook login.
• Transactional: The searcher wants to purchase a product or service. Example: buy MacBook pro.
• Commercial: The user is weighing their options to buy a specific product or service. Example: best content management system.

Once you figure out the search intent behind keywords, you’ll be able to better prioritize content creation and make sure each piece of content matches the user intent behind the main keyword.

Researching keywords using a keyword research tool

Imagine your company is launching a content management system. Here’s how you can go about keyword research for this topic.

First, you can simply plug in the keyword ‘content management system’ to the keyword tool of your choice to understand search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic potential. 

Then you can find related keywords to understand their intent, volume, and difficulty. Don’t forget to check Google autocomplete suggestions. These topics tell you what people are actually looking for.

Once you collate all the keywords, you can prioritize low-hanging fruits–aka high-volume keywords with low difficulty. Create content around multiple short-tail and long-tail keywords to rank faster. Long-tail keywords are phrases with low search volumes but are often used during the point of purchase.

Remember to look at Google Analytics and Google Search Console as well to track different performance metrics and issues.

3. Publish SEO-optimized content on your blog

Every blog you write should focus on one key theme. Optimizing each piece for a single keyword will help you satisfy the search intent and answer every related sub-topic. To get the most of your SEO efforts, make sure you’re publishing regularly. 

The rate at which pages are created and published is known as content velocity–and Google really likes websites that have a constant influx of fresh content. It also helps improve your chances of being found, simply due to quantity. 

Follow these best practices to optimize every blog for easy crawling and gaining visibility on search engines:

• Structure your content right: use H1s, H2s, and so on to help Google crawlers understand the context of your content and to help readers understand what you have covered in the post, just by skimming the headings
• Optimize for featured snippets: if you want a blog to rank for a featured snippet, try to answer the question succinctly–so that users can see that your page will indeed answer their questions–improving CTR
• Create people-first content: this is not an option, especially with Google’s helpful content update. One way to do this is to understand buyer personas and their motivations or challenges while writing a blog. Add visuals, thorough explanations, and scannable sections when you can.
• Add keywords to meta descriptions: because they help readers better understand what your post is about, improving click-through rate. A compelling meta description is short yet compelling enough to entice readers.
• Add alt texts to images: an alt text describes what’s happening in a photo to help both visually impaired visitors and search engines easily understand the context
• Focus on interlinking: linking out to relevant articles or pages on your website helps search engines better understand and rank your page. Plus, interlinking also helps you reduce bounce rate, build website architecture, improve craw efficiency, build link equity, and improve conversion, and time on page. You can also link to external sites to help readers expand their knowledge.
• Avoid keyword stuffing: as you optimize your web pages, remember to add keywords naturally and not oversaturate content with them

Ready to check out what an SEO-optimized blog looks like? 

Example of structuring and optimizing your blog 

If you look at the Skale blog, you’ll see every content piece is optimized around a key theme.

Every blog is structured and optimized for SEO so that visitors can easily find what they came for.

Need a good SEO-optimized blog template? Check out this template from Ahrefs. It clearly shows how to structure your blog with a title, intro, headers, and conclusion for maximum impact. 

4. Increase website speed

Site speed matters more than you can imagine. Most people will abandon your website if a page doesn’t load quickly. In fact, 53% of visitors will leave a page if it doesn’t load in just three seconds. A fast load speed is a competitive advantage as it quickly shows shoppers what they came looking for. A report published by Google shows that improving website speed by just one second can help you increase conversions by up to 27% for mobile users.

Site speed is also an important ranking factor. Google’s Core Web Vital signals consider page experience signals in search ranking algorithms. These signals consider three user-centric metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): calculates loading time by evaluating the render time for the largest visible text or image on your page
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures layout stability by checking if the page layout shifts every time a page loads an element
• First Input Delay (FID): looks at the time gap between when a user first interacts with your site and when the browser responds to that interaction

Source

All these show the importance of improving site speed. Wondering how to improve it? Check out these tips to get started:

• Analyze current website speed: this step is extremely important for getting a full picture of the current site performance
• Optimize scripts and images: use trustworthy plug-ins like WP Fastest Cache or TinyPNG
• Clean up unnecessary links and scripts: consider removing unnecessary scripts that are of no use and delay the loading time. Don’t forget to also fix broken links.
• Make your site mobile-responsive: with more users searching from mobile, you should definitely focus a lot on your mobile website. This is especially important since 2019’s Google announcement of mobile-first indexing.

Let’s look at how to put all these into practice.

Analyze site speed issues with PageSpeed Insights

Use PageSpeed Insights to understand what real users are experiencing while accessing your site. Simply enter your URL and hit analyze to get started. This example shows Core Web Vitals for Amazon.com.

PageSpeed Insights show whether your site passed or failed based on Core Web Vital metrics collected over the last 28 days. 

You’ll also get to see a bunch of recommendations that may help your page load faster.

Click on issues to understand them in detail and find potential solutions.

5. Focus on link building

Link building is an essential part of  SEO. Getting more links from other websites helps search engines find new pages on your site–if you link to those new pages–and rank them higher in search engine results. This happens because Google sees inbound links as a vote of confidence from other sites. 

However, not all links are equal. A link from an authoritative site like Forbes will have more link juice–or how much power and authority a backlink passes to another domain–than a random website published last year.

Wondering if you should invest your time in getting backlinks? Let’s look at the benefits:

• Referral traffic: from authority websites has a higher chance of converting into customers
• Brand building: happens when multiple relevant and well-established sites start linking to you for being the domain expert
• Building long-term relationships: with bloggers, journalists, and influencers pay off in the long run

If you’re wondering how to build links fast, check out this extensive guide on link-building strategies. 

Case study: how natural backlinks improve organic clicks

MoonPay is a leading cryptocurrency payment platform. They were struggling to get non-brand organic clicks to their transactional pages. 

With Skale’s link-building solution, they were able to secure 7K+ links per month to high-intent transactional pages. Check out the full case study to learn how Skale worked with publishing partners to acquire high-quality backlinks for MoonPay. 

6. Have a local SEO strategy

If you’re a small business trying to get more local customers, you should definitely zero in on a local SEO lead generation strategy. Businesses with brick-and-mortar stores use local SEO to improve search engine visibility and get more organic traffic. 

Try out these local SEO tips to get more local prospects for your business.

• Use Google My Business: a verified Google My Business page helps local customers find you, get your phone number, or even know the opening hours
• Ensure consistent NAP: i.e. name, address, and phone number across all channels. Make sure the NAP appears as crawlable HTML text on your website. This helps Google in showing your business in location-based search results. 
• Optimize listings in online directories: having the right address in directories and citations is key to showing the right map data on aggregator platforms like Bing, Yelp, and Trip Advisor

Finally, remember to participate in local community events. These events are ideal for building brand awareness and generating leads.

Using Google My Business for local listing

Google is the first place people go when they are looking for places near them. That’s why it’s important to be present on Google My Business. 

Add as many details as you can to make the most out of Google My Business. Remember to also answer FAQs and encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews.

7. Promote customer reviews

Customer reviews are excellent trust signals for future buyers and can also improve SEO rankings. These reviews can be positive or negative. Negative reviews present opportunities for you to understand customer problems, solve them, and share results in public. 

When you focus on reviews to gain brand trust, you’ll automatically increase sales from web traffic. How do you get started?

• Build off-page SEO: by collecting customer reviews on a third-party platform like G2 or TrustPilot
• Engage with referral traffic: coming in from these review sites
• Feature reviews on your website: to send trust signals to potential buyers
• Build content around customer pain points: you solved and convert them into case studies

Time to see a real-life example:

Customer reviews boost conversion

Check out how Ahrefs uses a carousel of customer reviews to appeal to each customer segment they serve. 

They also mention how users rated them on third-party review platforms.

Both the reviews and ratings appear just before the CTA on their homepage. These trust signals persuade buyers who are hesitating to make the purchase.

8. Check the metrics that really matter

Once you’re done following all the previous steps, you’ll want to know if your efforts have been worth it.

Truth is, lead gen is just the beginning. Getting thousands of new leads without being able to guide them down the sales funnel would just be a vanity metric to show but nothing else. That’s why the final step to use SEO for lead gen is to make sure you’re not just using it for lead gen. 

How can you check this? 

By checking the metrics that really matter:

• Trial sign-ups or demo requests: understanding if your SEO and content strategy is actually answering your potential customers’ questions and getting their interest piqued is essential
• Revenue: it’s great to get your name out there and have people come to your website, however, you need to ensure it is bringing you money
• Return on investment (ROI): sometimes it can be hard to really gauge the ROI of your SEO strategy, however, it isn’t impossible. Here’s a complete guide on how to do it + a free tracker.
• Conversion rate: understanding how many visitors are actually converting is one way to know that your website–and overall SEO efforts–are really worth it
• Click-through rate (CTR): there are different CTRs that you can calculate. For example, the CTR for the call-to-action (CTA) button on your landing page, or the CTR for the prices page from your home page, etc. Depending on what you want to find out you can calculate CTR and this will let you know if your SEO efforts are paying off. 
• Customer lifetime value: this metric is extremely important as it gives a more timely look at your SEO efforts. SEO does not only work to attract new visitors, it also helps keep the relationship going with your customers.

Improve the quality of your B2B SEO leads with a B2B SEO agency by your side

Increasing organic traffic is an excellent way to start but definitely not enough to build a revenue pipeline. That’s why you need a top-class content marketing and SEO strategy that drives product adoption, increases conversions, and generates recurring revenue.

You can undoubtedly leverage SEO tools to get there but you’ll also need a team of experts who know what works and doesn’t. A B2B SEO agency often has a deep understanding of the challenges you face and can help you scale customer acquisition. They are SEO-tool experts but also work with multiple clients and marketing budgets—which altogether makes them uniquely qualified for driving growth with SEO.

If you’re looking for an agile agency to gain a competitive advantage faster, book a call today to see how Skale can help you increase SEO lead generation, conversion, and overall revenue.

SEO for Lead Generation FAQ

However, more and more marketers need to understand how their SEO strategy is performing to know where crucial changes need to be made–and properly report to stakeholders. 

SEO is much more than keyword research and organic traffic to your landing pages–but what exactly are B2B SEO benchmarks, and which ones should you be looking at to get the insights that you need? 

Look no further, here we’ll go through a selected list of nine unmissable benchmarks and KPIs you need to track to make the most out of your SEO efforts. 

First up, let’s check what B2B SEO benchmarks are and why they’re so important. 

What are B2B SEO benchmarks?

B2B SEO benchmarks are evaluative milestones that chart your B2B company’s SEO performance, situate efforts in relation to your competitors, and allow you to make adjustments to hit growth goals. 

Keeping an eye on business benchmarks has long been second nature to all business owners, but SEO benchmarks are relatively new, certainly here to stay, and brimming with company growth potential. 

Not all SEO benchmarks are created equal. To get the best results, use B2B-specific KPIs. There may be metrics common to both B2B and B2C performance tracking, namely website traffic and conversion rates, but B2B requires a different focus. 

Vanity metrics with shiny numbers may appeal to company investment stakeholders, but they won’t do much to help company growth.

The metrics we’ve selected will help you gain actionable insights: 

1. Unique Visitors 
2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
3. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
4. SEO ROI
5. Click-through Rate (CTR) 
6. Average Session Duration 
7. Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate 
8. MQL-to-SQL Conversion Rate
9. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
10. Customer Churn Rate

Let’s dive into these benchmarks that need to be on your B2B radar–so you’re on the search engine’s radar.

What makes B2B clients special? 

It’s important to note that these benchmarks are B2B-specific because of the particular demands of their client base. 

First, B2B target customers have a business mindset. They know what they’re looking for and want to find out if your solution will integrate well into their company structure. This means you need to be meeting the more defined, data-driven needs of a business customer base – which isn’t all bad compared to the fickle desires of a consumer. At least you know what you’re working with. 

Secondly, the sales process for B2C customers is much more straightforward, whereas the B2B sales cycle is much longer and more complex. Purchases tend to be more costly and there is usually more than one decision maker which makes target customers spend a longer time making decisions. 

For B2B businesses this means concentrating on retaining customers as much as attracting new ones, or that you focus on brand exposure and product education. B2B companies need to show off their expertise, persuading multiple decision-makers, while B2C SEO strategy is usually focused more on single decision-makers. User intent must be the priority for B2B marketers looking to convert potential leads into paying customers. 

So, now you know why it’s important to leverage a successful B2B-specific SEO strategy. 

Now let’s find out how with our list of the ten most significant SEO benchmarks that actually matter to B2B businesses. 

10 B2B SEO benchmarks to measure your marketing performance

1. Unique Visitors 

Website traffic KPIs are a great place to start. Unique visitors metric measures the number of people who visit your website over a set period of time. Rather than the total number of visits—often a vanity metric, this metric count individual (new) visitors. 

This metric is useful for the notoriously longer B2B buyer cycle, as visitors are more likely to return to your website multiple times if they’re seriously considering investing. 

Unique visitors is one of the most telling website KPIs, helping you more accurately gauge levels of interest and growth rates in new visitor numbers. The numbers will also give you a stronger picture of brand reach and SEO campaign success. 

Many analytics tools, like Google Analytics, will also be able to tell you which visitors are coming through organic search results and which are coming through paid campaigns. This helps to optimize your marketing budget by indicating which campaigns are proving successful (paid or organic) and which could do with some TLC. 

It’s useful benchmarking your number of unique visitors against the average in your industry sector to benchmark yourself against your competitors and work out areas of improvement. You can also benchmark unique visitors against your most successful signup months (considering your consideration backlog time) or against the same month in a previous year if you tend to operate on season sales. 

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) 

CAC is calculated by dividing the total cost of product marketing and sales efforts by the total number of new customers. It’s a crucial KPI to understand the efficiency of your customer acquisition strategy, by indicating how costly — and how profitable — growth is for your business.

CAC is also a useful metric to show potential stakeholders, as it enables them to gauge the scalability of your business. It also demonstrates transparency from your end. In B2B SaaS, the average paid customer acquisition cost is $341, while the average organic CAC stands at $205. 

3. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) 

LTV is the total worth to your business from a single customer contract during the total time they spend as a paying customer. As a metric it’s slightly more complex to calculate, depending on the measurements you have available. 

It also depends on whether your core subscription metric is ARR or MRR. If you’re operating on annual subscriptions (yearly contracts) LTV may take longer to work out if you’re running it for the first time. However, if you’re operating on monthly subscriptions, you’ll have an idea of this quicker. 

One of the main uses of LTV is calculating the LTV to CAC ratio. This ratio (LTV divided by CAC)  informs you of the relationship between the lifetime value of a customer and the cost of acquiring that customer. 

This KPI helps direct your marketing budget either towards customer acquisition or customer retention, saving time and money in product marketing efforts. 

Ideally, you want to be aiming for an LTV to CAC ratio of at least 3:1. 

4. SEO ROI 

SEO ROI (return on investment) is the ultimate measure of the financial success of your SEO performance. 

It’s slightly different from the other KPI benchmarks we’ve explored, offering a more holistic evaluation. SEO ROI informs you of the overall profitability of your SEO strategy by comparing the amount of money invested with the total profit. 

This is (put simply) calculated by the value of organic conversions minus the cost of SEO investments, divided by the total cost of SEO investments. 

As with any business, developing a stellar marketing budget for your B2B company is half the battle. You can have the best B2B marketing plan out there, but that won’t mean anything if you don’t have the funds to implement it. 

Determining SEO ROI is a useful way to keep tabs on your profits, and continually readjust your marketing plan accordingly. You want to be aiming for an average SEO ROI of 5:1, or 500%. 

CTA: Download the SEO ROI Free Tracker here. 

5. Click-through Rate

Pretty much what it says on the tin, click-through rate is simply the number of clicks your digital marketing campaign (whether paid search, email, or social media campaign) has received, divided by the number of total impressions. High CTRs mean more successful (profitable) online campaigns.

When it comes to search engine results pages (SERPs), in addition to indicating the success of paid ads, click-through rate can also measure the effectiveness of organic searches. Organic searches send 53% of all traffic to websites, so they’re a really significant source of visitors—and potential buyers. 

CTR compares the number of impressions with the number of people who actually click on the link. So, if 1000 people see your website on a SERP listing, and 50 clicks through to your site, your CTR would be 5%.

In terms of what to aim for, it really depends on the type of campaign, as it can vary wildly. However, in general, a good SERP click-through rate for B2B businesses is about 2.5%. When starting out, most B2B businesses will have a CTR of around 1%, but this should increase over time. 

CTRs also vary by industry; while travel and real estate tend to have higher click-through rates, financial services, home improvement, and legal services typically have lower rates. 

6. Average Session Duration

Session duration refers to the length of time visitors are spending on your website. By default, it also helps to measure your website’s user engagement levels. Is your content drawing visitors in? Is your website easy to navigate? Are you successfully attracting your target market and retaining them on-site? 

Since a core goal of a B2B website is to present the company as a source of expertise, it’s essential to aim for good session duration figures. The longer a user stays on your website and the more resources they benefit from, the bigger your chance of converting them to a paying customer. 

As with all KPI metrics, average session duration benchmarks vary from sector to sector. For example, Fintech B2B websites have an average session duration of 3:28 minutes, while B2B SaaS is around 4:26 minutes. If you have a blog, whatever the industry, you’ll want to benchmark the read time of each piece: too short or too long could mean your readers (and potential customers) are having a negative experience. Make sure you do your homework so that you’re accurately benchmarking your scores. 

7. Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate 

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a website visitor that becomes a lead when they are successfully reviewed by the marketing team and satisfy specific criteria to qualify as a potential customer. Monitoring this conversion rate is important because the transition from lead to MQL is considered the first important step in the marketing process. 

It’s also significant because not even half of leads generated by B2B marketing teams are qualified to buy their company’s products, meaning that many companies are wasting precious time and resources on pointless lead generation. Tracking the lead-to-MQL conversion rate can therefore help refine marketing efforts and direct sales efforts to leads that match the target customer profile.

To work out your MQL conversion rate, you’ll need to divide MQLs by the total number of leads generated over a certain period of time. If your B2B business is generating, let’s say, 1000 leads every month, and 200 of those are MQLs, your conversion rate would be 20%. 

You’re probably wondering how many MQLs you’re looking to attract. Well, there’s good news and bad news. Bad news first: there’s no simple target metric that will fit all B2B businesses. The good news, however, is that it’s fairly simple to work out. 

Source

8. MQL-to-SQL Conversion Rate

Once you’ve got your MQLs under control, you should be tracking and monitoring these leads as they make their way through the sales funnel and become SQLs, or sales-qualified leads. 

SQLs are those who are showing real buyer intent, verified as potential customers by your sales team. Keeping track of lead development is vital to helping marketing and sales teams foster leads all the way down the sales pipeline to making a purchase. 

To calculate this metric, you’ll need to divide your number of SQLs by your MQLs. If 35 of your 200 MQLs become SQLs, your conversion rate will be 37.5%. 

While dependent on industry and company size as ever, B2B businesses tracking their MQL-to-SQL rate should aim for around 31% for website leads and 24% for customer/employee referrals. 

9. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

MRR is a straightforward, normalized measure of how much revenue your B2B company can expect to receive each month. It’s based on the number of customers you have, and how much you receive from them every month. 

Monitoring this metric will reveal the state of your business revenue—whether it’s generally increasing or decreasing. This is particularly important for SaaS businesses or any companies that rely on subscription-based customers. 

Calculating this metric couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is multiply your average revenue per account by the total number of customers for that specific month. For example, if you have 500 customers paying an average of $20 every month, your MRR would be $10,000. 

This benchmark is vital for all subscription-based B2B companies. Tracking MRR can help you identify the factors which have the most influence on your average revenue, particularly as you can divide your MRR into three categories: 

• New MRR: added MRR from new customers
• Expansion MRR: added MRR from existing customers
• Churn MRR: lost MRR from subscription cancellations
• Upgrade MRR: additional MRR generated by subscribers moving to higher plans
• Downgrade MRR: MRR lost by existing subscribers paying less than the previous month

The insight gained from these can be a game changer for investment pitches, and provides incredibly useful context for marketing campaigns, product reception, and brand recognition. 

As the name would suggest, your monthly recurring revenue will change every month, corresponding to any revenue gained or lost, so your target MRR will be entirely specific to your company and your revenue goals. 

10. Customer Churn Rate 

A B2B company’s churn rate refers to the percentage of subscribers or contractual customers who cancel their subscriptions over a specific period of time—usually over the course of a month or a year. Like MRR, it’s particularly important for B2B SaaS companies that require repeated monthly payments from their customers. 

Churn rate can be used to determine the revenue lost from lost (or ‘churned’) customers, as well as determining the efficacy of customer retention strategies, customer satisfaction, and product growth. 

To calculate customer churn, you simply need to divide the number of churned customers by the total number of customers. For example, if your B2B business has a total of 1000 customers, and you lose 70 in a month, your customer churn rate for that month will be 7%. 

You can use this metric to find out your net logo churn—which takes into account the number of customers gained over a given period—by dividing the total number of churned customers minus the new customers acquired by the total number of customers. Using the same example, let’s say that in addition to losing those 70 customers, you also gained 20. In this case, your net logo churn would be 5%. 

Another option is the revenue churn rate, which indicates the percentage of lost revenue due to canceled subscriptions, downgrades, or other factors. To calculate revenue churn, you simply need to divide the total churned revenue over a specific period of time by the total revenue at the start of that period. Let’s say your total business revenue is $10,000. If your churned revenue over the course of one month is $200, your revenue churn rate for that month would be 2%. 

For subscription-based businesses, churn rate is probably the most significant benchmark metric. While churn rates will vary widely, depending on factors such as industry and company size, an average B2B churn rate should be 5% or under, and logo churn between 3-7% for smaller, younger businesses and 1-2% for larger businesses. 

Give your next B2B SEO campaign a boost

Ultimately, developing a strong SEO strategy is a surefire way to turn those potential customers looking for the solution you can provide into paying customers. 

Taking the time to improve and measure performance is your most effective tactic in ensuring a strong SEO strategy. 

An SEO strategy is never concrete—for best results, you need to be adjusting it in line with your B2B SEO benchmarks. 

These metrics not only help you compare your company against competitors, but also determine the success of your SEO campaigns: which ones are paying off, which ones need to be tweaked, and which can be kicked to the curb. 

Hiring a B2B SEO agency such as Skale can give you expert advice, keep you up to date with SEO trends, and get you started in your journey to becoming a B2B SEO boss. The first step is understanding where your business SEO is at, and what you need to improve on — and now you know how! Right? 

SEO Benchmarks FAQ

There are chances you aren’t focusing on keyword optimization to infuse the right keywords within your content to match your target audience’s search intent. Over 49% of marketers confirm that organic search offers the best ROI—and, in turn, rely on low-cost SEO tactics, including keywords, schema, and more. 

Keyword research is the first step needed for an SEO strategy that has the potential to boost your brand’s ranking on multiple search engines. However, how can you determine the right keywords for your audience’s pain points?

The answer: Keywords Everywhere. 

Keywords Everywhere is an effective keyword research tool that strays away from the other tools and the issues involved—including switching back and forth between the tools and your website. 

It’s accurate, user-friendly, affordable, and time-saving—helping accelerate your B2B SEO strategy. Let’s dive deeper into what this tool has to offer. 

What can Keywords Everywhere do?

Keywords Everywhere is a powerful SEO keyword research extension for Google Chrome and an add-on for Firefox that lets you research keyword ideas faster—directly from the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). 

Many founders and marketers find this feature that makes this tool stand out from others highly beneficial, including Corey Haines, co-founder of SwipeWell. 

Here’s what she said when asked what’s the best feature of the Keywords Everywhere extension. 

“The best thing about it is that since it’s installed and augments SERPs no matter what you’re Googling, it can highlight great keyword opportunities even if you’re not actively doing keyword research. I’ve found so many ideas and random keywords I would never have found simply by naturally Googling things I’m curious about and then finding related keywords via Keywords Everywhere.”

Let’s quickly look at the things you can do with this SEO tool for your keyword research campaign. 

While there are many free keyword research and B2B SEO tools, like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Trends, here’s what gives the Keywords Everywhere extension a cut above the rest:

• It’s a freemium tool—suitable for both beginners and professionals. While the free version is enough if you need it to get a general idea of keyword research, the paid version provides data like the monthly search volume of keywords, competition, trend data, and historical search volume dating as far back as 2004! 
• It draws high-quality and accurate search volume data for your Search Engine Optimization strategy—using multiple sources, including Google, Bing, YouTube, and even DuckDuckGo. 
• It’s easy to use and doesn’t require you to log in or familiarize yourself with its interface. Instead, you can analyze keywords straight from the Google search results page. Long gone are the days of switching between multiple keyword research tools. Just install the extension and perform the keyword research process from the Google search results page (SERP). Easy-peasy.
• It uses the pay-as-you-go pricing model, requiring you to only pay for the credits you use with no time limit. Besides, it costs $10 for every 100,000 searches per year—making it the most affordable and investment-worthy keyword research tool out there.

Keywords Everywhere free-version: 

If you’re new to the keyword research process—the free Keywords Everywhere extension could be a great fit for you.  

Here’s the list of the free-version features it offers: 

• Keyword widgets: provide you with a list of related keywords, long-tail keywords, and People Also Search For (PASF) keywords on the Google search results page
• Trend charts: show a page’s estimated monthly traffic trend and a trend chart on YouTube and Google from 2004 
• Traffic metrics: let you view monthly traffic estimates and the top 500 keywords of any domain or URL
• YouTube metrics: provide SERP metrics, search insights, YouTube tags, and video insights
• On-page analysis: lets you analyze different keywords and keyword density of a given page 
• Competitor gap analysis: makes it easier to find keyword suggestions your competitors rank for, and you don’t
• Moz link metrics: help analyze the Moz domain authority, spam score, Domain Authority (DA) trend, backlinks, and total number of referring domains

Keywords Everywhere paid-version: 

If you’re a marketer looking to enhance your B2B SEO strategy with advanced keyword optimization—this paid version offers everything you need. 

Here are its features: 

• Get accurate monthly search volume for your target keywords
• Get Cost Per Click (CPC), competition, and 12 months of trend data
• Volume data in Google SEO tools, including Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google Trends
• Volume data in search engines, including YouTube, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo
• Volume data in eCommerce websites, including Amazon, Etsy, and eBay
• Volume data in multiple SEO tools, including Soovle and Answer The Public
• Historical volume data in bulk using the Bulk Trends feature
• Historical volume data for Google and YouTube trends chart from 2004
• Keyword importation to view monthly search volume, CPC data, competition level, and trend data

Source 

These features make the lightweight Keywords Everywhere extension perfect for those just getting started.  

To add the Keywords Everywhere tool to your SEO arsenal—here’s a step-by-step guide on setting up and using the SEO tool to win more organic traffic. 

Need a SaaS-specific keyword research guide?

We drive SQLs for SaaS brands every day- and it all starts with these research methods

Read the guide

How to use Keywords Everywhere to seriously scale your B2B SEO

Organic search drives 50% of visitors to B2B businesses—making accurate and action-driven B2B keyword research imperative. Here are eight easy steps to set up the Keywords Everywhere extension and start scaling your B2B SEO results. 

1. Set up the Keywords Everywhere extension 

It’s easy to install the Keywords Everywhere extension for Chrome and Firefox. 

Once you navigate to the product page, click the ‘Add to Chrome’ button to activate the extension on your browser. 

Once you add the extension to your Chrome browser, it’ll take you to this page: 

If you need to use the free version of the extension—your job here is done, and you can start optimizing. 

However, if you need the paid or premium features, you’ll need to get the API key. 

Click on the ‘GET API KEY’ button on the screen and enter your email address. 

Once you enter your email, agree to the terms of service and privacy policy, and hit the ‘EMAIL ME THE API KEY’ button, you’ll get an email with a link to your account API key. 

This key is important as your further purchases will be connected to this account API key. 

Click on the link to access the key. 

Now, open the Keywords Everywhere extension and click on the ‘Settings’ option. 

Enter or paste the API account key in the ‘API Settings’ bar. 

Click on the ‘Validate’ button to set up your API. 

Your API key is set up, and it’s time to purchase credits to access the extension’s premium version. 

Open the Keywords Everywhere extension and click on ‘Purchase additional credits’ at the bottom right. 

You can choose from the different credit packages, ranging from $10 to $1,000. 

It’s best to start small and go for the $10 package, which offers 100,000 credits—where one credit refers to access to Cost Per Click (CPC), search volume, competition, and 12 months of trend data for one keyword. These can approximately last you for over six months. 

The extension automatically adds keywords to your extension after the purchase. Now all you have to do is turn on the paid features by opening the extension and turning the toggle to ‘on.’

Voila! Your Keywords Everywhere keyword research tool is all set up and ready to use. 

Now, let’s begin with extracting keywords directly from the results page. 

2. Extract keyword data directly from the SERPs 

To see the extension in action—just Google your search query. 

Here’s an example of how the search query, ‘What is B2B SEO,’ shows the keyword data to the right of the Search Engine Results Page. 

The first box at the top-most right position of the screen shows a broad perspective of your keyword SEO difficulty metrics. 

SEO difficulty refers to the difficulty of ranking the keyword on the search engine based on factors like content quality, domain authority, and page authority. 

The higher the SEO difficulty number, the more difficult it is to rank for that keyword. 

Other metrics include brand query, on-page difficulty, and off-page difficulty. In addition, the keyword tool analyzes Google’s top-ranking pages to determine the keyword’s off-page and on-page difficulty. 

For instance, if the top-ranking pages follow the best on-page SEO practices, have quality content, and gather quality backlinks from credible websites—the on-page difficulty score for the keyword is expected to be high. 

Generally, highly credible and high domain authority websites easily earn a higher rank for keywords with a high SEO difficulty score. In contrast, it is easier to rank for keywords with low SEO difficulty and drive traffic to your website—especially if your website has less content and fewer backlinks. 

You can learn more about these search traffic metrics and their calculations by checking Keywords Everywhere’s own explanation of SEO difficulty metrics.

Below the SEO difficulty box, you’ll find a trend chart—showing the demand for the search query over the years. 

This trend data is key to determining the keyword’s popularity and relevancy over the past years. By default, the extension shows data from 2004. 

If the trend data graph trends upward with each year, it’s worth considering optimizing that keyword for better B2B SEO results, particularly if its SEO difficulty score is also high. 

While the free version gives a good picture of the keyword’s trend growth—you’ll need to purchase the paid version to access the keyword’s monthly search volume data. 

Now comes the best part—the actual keywords. 

For the query, ‘What is B2B SEO,’ the tool displays a list of ‘Related Keywords,’ ‘People Also Search For Keywords,’ and ‘Long-tail Keywords.’

The Related Keywords box shows relevant keyword ideas and related searches to your search query—which you can use within your content to double down on the organic traffic. 

For instance, here’s how Nadav Harari, Head of SEO for VenturKite uses this feature of the tool to grow their organic clicks. 

“As we grow websites in several niches, we love using Keywords Everywhere to view the organic trend and search volumes directly in the interface.

For example, KeywordEverywhere’s Google trend snippet shows that “gluten-free casserole recipe” peaks on Thanksgiving each year. Together with its other features (Related keywords, People also asked, etc.), the tool helps us plan and write content for our site glutenfreepalate.com.

For our other site savingforcollege.com, we found that the term “529 plan” peaks around Christmas time. Related terms suggest we create location-based pages such as “529 plan NY” or “529 plan California,” and that is exactly what we did, which resulted in additional 100K organic clicks in the past 6 months.” 

The People Also Search For Keywords box comprises keywords other users searched before or after they entered your search query on Google. 

This list is useful for using mostly-searched keywords within your B2B SEO strategy to increase the chances of your website ranking higher for these high-search intent queries. 

Lastly, the Long-tail Keywords box shows longer keywords with three or more words, which are less competitive and excellent for targeting a narrower and niche audience—which could mean higher product-qualified leads for your SaaS. 

Long-tail keywords are specific queries with low SEO difficulty and search volume. Hence, targeting them gives a better chance for your content to rank higher organically.

Long-tail keyword search queries have a 3-6% higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) than generic searches, as users searching them are more in-the-know and likely to make a purchase. 

Here’s what Shivbhadrasinh Gohil, Co-founder & CMO @ Meetanshi had to say about using long-tail keywords with other tools for his brand’s blog post. 

“Keywords everywhere is an excellent tool to add depth to your keyword research technique. The extension overlays three cards on the Google SERP that lists all the related people also search, and long-tail terms for the search term. This data can be pretty useful when you are on a mission to rank your business for high-competitive head terms. Collect the long-tail terms from the extension and paste them into free tools such as Google Keyword Planner to get richer data about the terms, such as estimated monthly search volume, competition, and CPC, to use them for your next blog post or the product page.”

Thus, if incorporated correctly, these low competition keywords are highly lucrative for blog content—driving quality leads and making it easier to secure higher organic ranking faster. 

3. Selecting target keywords from keyword density and competitor analysis

The Keywords Everywhere tool lets you explore more than just the keyword data on the Search Engine Results Page. 

Besides simplifying keyword research, you can analyze the top-performing content pages of your competitors to see what keywords they’re using to win a higher SERP rank. 

To achieve this, load the competitor page you wish to analyze, open the Keywords Everywhere extension, and click on the ‘Analyze Page Content’ option. It’ll take you to the Keyword Density Analysis page—displaying a list of detected keywords. 

In this example, we analyzed Hubspot’s blog on B2B marketing. 

First, the extension displays the page’s meta title, description, and word count—which can be beneficial for seeking inspiration when creating a new content brief. 

When you scroll down, you’ll see a list of keywords present on the page with data like the keyword density and occurrences. 

Here’s what these data mean:

• Found In: Denotes the content element in which the keyword is present, like H2, H3, H4, or page title. For example, the keyword ‘marketing in 2022’ is in the page’s title, H1, and H3.
• Density: Represents the keyword’s prevalence or overall distribution on the page content in percentage
• Occurrences: Shows the total count of a particular keyword within the content
• Monthly Volume (Global): Tracks the average monthly search traffic a keyword gets
• CPC: Cost Per Click measures the average cost advertisers willingly pay for keyword placement
• Competition: Rates the keyword’s competitiveness on a scale of 0 to 1 
• Trending: Signifies the change in the percentage of the keyword’s monthly search volume compared to its average search volume in the last 12 months

This analysis gives an exceptional opportunity to find keyword suggestions, analyze their trends, find keywords your competitors use and don’t use, find keyword gaps, and create higher-performing content. 

You can sort the keywords based on two, three, or four keyword phrases from the filter option at the top. 

If you need to save the keyword list or extract its copy, you can export it to a PDF, CSV, or Excel from the options at the top right to refer to it anytime.  

You don’t need a keyword research tool to see results

Skale generates pipeline for 30+ B2B SaaS brands- check out our top case studies to see how

See case studies

4. Compare your website performance with competitor’s keyword gap analysis 

Here are the Keywords Everywhere extension’s further four most important features you can tap into to target niche customers: 

• Organic Ranking Keywords (URL)
• Organic Ranking Keywords (Domain) 
• Get Top Ranking Pages
• Competitor Gap Analysis

While the ‘Analyze Page Content’ feature gives you a list of all the keywords the competitor’s page contains—and lets you extract as many suggested keywords as possible—the features mentioned above allow you to pinpoint target keywords that drive the most organic traffic to your competitors. 

Organic Ranking Keywords (URL)

By using the ‘Organic Ranking Keywords (URL)’ feature, you can identify the keywords a competitor page ranks for and build your own strategy going off of this knowledge. 

Using this feature on Hubspot’s B2B marketing blog gave us this: 

The blog ranks for the primary keyword, ‘B2B marketing,’ followed by other important keywords, like ‘B2B marketing strategies’ and ‘what is B2B marketing.’

Determining the keywords your competitors use and their rankingis a great way to optimize your content to beat your competitors. 

Organic Ranking Keywords (Domain) 

Another great feature is the ‘Organic Keywords Ranking (Domain),’ which gives a holistic picture of your competitors with their exact keywords. 

For instance, the Hubspot blog domain ranks for keywords like Google Drive, Instagram, and Google Calendar. 

It’s a great way to find keywords your competitors target across their whole domain—an excellent keyword strategy to adopt and beat to help drive traffic to your blogs. 

Get Top Ranking Pages

If you want to analyze the top-ranking pages of your competitors that drive the most traffic, you can use the ‘Get Top Ranking Pages’ tool’s feature. 

This will provide you a brief overview of the pages ranking for the top keywords for the domain and generating the most traffic. You can review these pages to find the target keywords and top-performing blog titles and see if you can create better content to outperform your competition.

Competitor Gap Analysis

Lastly, the ‘Competitor Gap Analysis’ feature allows you to perform keyword gap analysis—identifying keywords a competitor page or domain ranks for but your website doesn’t. 

You can add up to five competitor websites and leverage the great opportunity of discovering common and trending keywords you’re missing out on to optimize your content and make it rank-worthy. 

However, this feature has its own drawback and is still in the beta stage. 

Your website domain needs to be in the tool’s database before you can extract the keyword data. You can’t access the relevant data if the domain isn’t in its database. 

5. Analyze YouTube metrics 

The Keywords Everywhere tool works similarly on YouTube as on other search engines. 

Just put the keyword in the YouTube search bar, and you’ll see data like ‘Search Insights’ and trend data on the right side of your screen. 

The ‘Search Insights’ widget shows the key search metrics, like the keyword’s ranking difficulty, maximum views, average views, and more. 

You can either copy or export this search metrics data with the option at the bottom-left. 

Once you click on the ‘Detailed Breakdown’ option, you’ll see the top-performing videos for the search query with keyword research metrics, like: 

• YouTube views
• Keyword in the title
• Ranking difficulty
• Views per day
• SEO score 

Below the insights, you’ll see the YouTube trend chart for the keyword dating back from 2004. 

It gives the perfect idea of the keyword’s trend over the past decades and whether it’s still relevant today. It will also enable you to predict its trend growth and relvancy for the future. 

Below the trend data is the list of ‘Most Used Tags’ relevant to your search query. 

Once you click on a specific video, you’ll get insights for that specific video, including metrics like:

• Optimization Score
• Engagement Score
• Views Per Day
• Total Channel Views
• Topic Expertise
• Total Subscribers
• Channel Country 

YouTube has become an indispensable platform in B2B marketing to grow brand awareness and present your brand’s Unique Selling Points (USPs) in a way that attracts your target consumers. 

Check these statistics that prove why you need to consider YouTube for B2B SEO:

• YouTube has more than 2 billion active users 
• 68% of these users watched the YouTube platform to make a purchasing decision. 
• 93% of B2B buyers say videos are crucial to building trust in a brand and moving ahead with the purchase. 
• 88% of B2B buyers surveyed have watched videos to learn about the company’s services in the last three months. 

It goes without saying that creating your B2B brand presence on YouTube with quality content and optimizing it with the right keywords using the Keywords Everywhere extension will  bring a wealth of new customers through the door. The question is… 

What type of YouTube video content can you create as a B2B brand?

According to a B2B Video Marketing Report, here are the top video types watched by B2B customers to gather product information and make buying decisions 

• Product reviews 
• Product demos 
• Training/tutorials 
• Webinar
• Educational videos 
• Brand story videos

Using Keywords Everywhere’s YouTube metrics, you can uncover keywords that trend in your industry and use them to better position your brand over competitors with this type of popular content. 

What to do with your keyword ideas 

Now that you’ve gathered a good list of quality keywords, what’s next? 

Here are the actionable strategies to make the most of your keyword research and keep the extensive list of keywords from gathering digital dust. 

Discover more search volume from autocomplete suggestions

You can extract more keyword suggestions without even loading up the SERP. 

This is called The Alphabet Soup Technique — you enter a seed keyword in the search bar and see Google’s autocomplete suggestions relevant to your search query without pressing the enter bar. 

Google prompts queries other users have looked up — providing a more useful and quality search experience. 

Before even landing on the SERP, you can use this technique to determine the top search queries relevant to your seed keyword. 

Filling the content gaps and ideating content creation 

We saw how you could use the Keywords Everywhere tool to explore top-performing and trending keywords that align with your brand message, but your website doesn’t rank for — yet!

Once you’ve identified the keyword gaps in your content, it’s time to take actionable steps to fill those gaps. 

Here’s what you can do: 

• Use moderate to high-relevance keywords with high search volumes to optimize your category and landing pages
• Use relevant short-tail keywords and long-tail keyword suggestions you haven’t addressed yet to solve user queries and drive niche traffic 
• Use keywords with high search potential to ideate blog posts and grow your brand authority

Figuring out the parts of your website that are best suited to address the right keywords is the B2B SEO strategy you need to implement to garner organic traffic. 

Hire a credible SEO agency 

While Keywords Everywhere is an exceptional free tool among other keyword research tools for newbies to save on B2B SEO marketing budgets, it still requires prior SEO knowledge. 

Plus, mastering keyword research for SEO and mapping out a strategy to implement it in a way that targets the right audience takes time and a lot of trial and error — before you can hit the bull’s eye with the #1 ranking position. 

This is where hiring an expert SEO agency can help you — psst. We’re right here! 

You can eliminate all this hassle and experimentation with an SEO agency. 

With Skale, you get an expert’s opinion and a professional eye that provide customized solutions tailored for your keyword research strategy—to garner the best SEO results you’re looking for. 

Waste no time, and get in touch with Skale today to start outranking your competitors—faster with better results. 

You need an agency, not another tool

We’ve done the research- here’s a list of the top B2B SEO agencies in London

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Keywords Everywhere FAQ

Search engine optimization is what will allow your business to go from having a great product to one that has a great product and customers finding out about it.

Being on the first page of Search Engines Result Pages (SERPs) is key for making your business visible. In fact, the top three results of Google get 54.4% of all clicks–exactly where our client case studies end up.

However, it’s easier said than done.

To have a strong SEO strategy you need to focus on three elements:

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

This means there are many moving parts and in order to have a successful SEO strategy you’ll need to know what you’re doing–and the latest trends.

We at Skale have a team of experts that are more than prepared and ready to up our clients’ SEO game in a way that helps them see real return of investment. Let’s look at some of our own SEO case studies. They’ll help you see how we got the results that we got–and how you can do the same!

1. Doubling product signups with a solid SEO strategy for growth

Slite is a Series A collaboration software platform that has raised more than $15.4m. Big names like Notion, Coda, and Slab are its biggest competitors.

The challenge (and what we did to double product signups):

After securing an $11m Series A investment they wanted to make SEO their scalable acquisition channel.

What we did:

• Analyzed and audited current setup and market
• Built a model to show the potential number of monthly signups that could be achieved through SEO
• Created a plan of action focusing on each page by understanding conversion rates by intent and the competitiveness of each topic
• Modified website’s architecture to build a scalable content system, and performed on-page optimization using SEO best practices and techniques
• Built dozens of high-quality SaaS niche backlinks on the pages we focused on
• Set up and ran several high-impact A/B tests through Google Optimize to increase the visit to signup conversion rate

The results we got in just three months:

• Signups doubled
• Visitors from non-branded SEO tripled
• Visit to signup conversion rates increased by up to 195% on some sections of the website
• Achieved position #4 worldwide for high competitive keywords

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How you can achieve the same results

The first thing to do in order to create a solid B2B SEO strategy is to make sure you know what you’re working with. This means you need to do a full site and content audit.

The best way to do a thorough audit is to use B2B SEO tools paired with the right knowledge and understanding of what to look for–ahem, an agency with a team of experts can be exactly what you need! SEO tools will help you better analyze what your keyword strategy and blog pages are doing for you in terms of organic traffic. You’ll also see what your landing page and referring domains are doing for you.

It’s also important to perform a technical SEO audit to make sure your content and website have all the technical aspects in place: site speed, crawlability, schema markup, etc. Additionally, don’t forget to do a competitive analysis. By doing a competitor analysis, you’ll see what’s working for your rivals, and what content gaps there are that you can seize.

2.  Increase organic traffic by 568% with a 12-month content marketing strategy

Nathan Latka is a serial entrepreneur, podcast host, and best-selling author. He helps SaaS founders and investors by providing insightful data on SaaS companies by region, industry, and more.

The challenge (and what we did to increase organic traffic): 

Nathan Latka wanted to compete against company insights databases such as Owler and Crunchbase., as well as attract a strong SaaS audience to his website. Among other tactics, this meant using SaaS-related keywords, which are extremely competitive.

What we did:

• Audited Nathan’s current set up placing a special focus on its technical SEO efforts
• Built a developer-friendly plan for his engineering team to implement that would focus on increasing organic search growth
• Carried out extensive keyword research to build a 12-month SaaS content marketing plan
• Ran a ‘Top SaaS Companies’ ranking campaign to build SaaS-specific links back to his domain
• Crafted a link-building strategy with a focus on outreach to tech brands

The results we obtained twelve months later:

• Qualified organic clicks increased by 568%
• Dethroned giants like Owler and Crunchbase for high-intent keywords like “Typeform revenue,” “Loom revenue,” and “Semrush revenue”
• Scored page number one position for various competitive keywords such as “ARR,” “ARPU,” “run rate,” “revenue growth,” and “renewal rate”

How you can see the same results

One of the best ways to increase organic traffic, and what we did with Nathan Latka, was focusing on on-page optimization.

Keywords are an important on-page factor. An important element of on-page SEO is keywords. In order to really get the most out of your keywords make sure you’re:

• Including them in your URLs
• Including them in your H1 titles, and H2 and H3 subtitles
• Using tools like Clearscope and Surfer to create high-quality content that includes relevant keywords
• Using them in your meta description

Additionally focus on placing high-quality outbound links and making sure that your user experience, mobile friendliness, and image optimization are on point.

3. Increase signups and organic clicks with a link-building strategy

Piktochart is a pre-seed web-based design app that helps users easily create infographics, presentations, reports, and many other graphic designs.

The challenge (and what we did to increase organic clicks)

Piktochart wanted to increase ranking on Google and product signups. However, since they’re a new player in an area with fierce competition such as unicorn Canva and Venggage, they wanted to focus on off-page SEO–specifically, link-building.

What we did:

• Built a model to understand the potential number of monthly sign-ups and traffic that Piktochart could achieve through SEO based on their existing content
• Approached link-building by intensely focusing on pitching high-quality articles about a single topic (presentations) to authoritative partner websites in the business and design niche
• Link-building efforts were focused on only two key pages during one period
• Various on-page technical improvements were made across their website

The results we saw in just three months:

• Signups increased by 860%
• Visitors from non-branded SEO on two key presentation pages increased 9x
• Managed to rank #2, above the billion-dollar giant Canva, for the highly transactional keyword “presentation maker”–with fewer referring domains than Canva

How you can see the same results

Link-building is a powerful practice, helping you:

• Optimize brand exposure
• Increase referral traffic, website visibility, and trustworthiness
• Connect with more people in your industry

To build a strategy that yields notable results, focus on quality over quantity. It’s about creating helpful content pieces, not about directly selling your product. With various tactics such as increasing linked brand mentions, backlinking using badges, and building brand visibility through your partners and vendors, you’ll start to notice a difference. You can also use media, like B2B podcast interviews, press releases, and roundup articles to support your link-building strategy. It takes time, persistence, and effective networking, but, done right, your efforts will be worth their weight in gold.

4. Re-optimize existing pages to lower cost per opp 

Perkbox products support employee well-being, employee recognition, company culture, and more–all to help with recruiting and retaining the best possible talent for your team.

The challenge (and what we did to re-optimise existing pages)

Due to annual contracts in the industry, but high deal value, it was critical for Perkbox to make sure they were high on the rankings when the target audience was searching for a solution. This meant it needed to rank for high-intent keywords.

What we did:

• In-depth SEO auditing to find out what needed to change to see the most impact in the shortest amount of time
• Thorough keyword research and content planning
• Optimization of existing content and landing pages
• Creation of new landing pages and blog articles
• High-quality link-building strategy

The results we achieved ten months later:

• Non-branded organic clicks increased by 49.2%
• Non-branded organic MQLs increased by 102%
• Opportunities increased by 40%
• Reached a cost per opp of just £110

Alistair Pike, Skale’s Growth Strategy Lead, shares how the SEO strategy played out: 

“We identified pages where MQLs had dropped when compared to their peak performance and established the cause. We refreshed the (dated) content model so that we had a more accurate and inclusive view of where the MQL potential lay. 

We also identified actions for key MQL-driving & high-potential pages: missing CTAs? Need links? On-page optimization opps? All of the above? Once we executed all of these, we saw an increase of 102% on non-branded organic MQLs.“

How you can see the same results

On-page SEO is just as important as off-page and technical SEO.

In this case, and for anyone looking for similar levels of success, on-page optimization is key. One element we focused heavily on was the meta titles and H1s.

For example, their platform page had strong backlinks, but the keywords they were using were not the optimal. By reoptimizing these pages for high-intent keywords, which included (but were not limited to the H1s and meta titles), combined with detailed content briefs, these pages now rank at # 1 on Google UK.

5. Rank first for competitive keywords through content and link-building

Moonpay is an extremely fast-growing cryptocurrency payments platform, launched in 2019. By 2022, they already have an impressive valuation of $3.4bn, after a Series A funding round of $555M.

The challenge (and what we did to win competitive keywords)

The crypto space is one with fierce competition. Moonpay wanted to rank for high-intent B2C keywords like ‘buy Ethereum with credit card’ or ‘buy USDT.’ To be able to do this, giants in the space had to be outranked: Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and others alike.

What we did: We focused on creating a link-building strategy that would get valuable content from relevant topical authority websites in the cryptocurrency niche.

We vetted domains, researched and pitched content collaboration ideas, and then we created and published high-quality content that linked to target Moonpay’s URLs every month.

The results we saw in eight months:

We achieved an increase in non-branded organic clicks to targeted pages of over 7K per month.

How you can see the same results

There are multiple tactics you can implement to see similar results. First, find websites to reach out to, that have relevant topical authority. Gaining a link from these websites will boost your business’s credibility, which you can build on by constantly creating high-quality content. When a website has topical authority, it is more likely to be considered trustworthy. 

Additionally, you should use varied anchor texts for both internal and external links. A phrase match anchor text, for example, will include your target keyword(s) but link to a sentence or phrase related to the article you will link to. 

Anchor text diversity is key: done right, it can have a very positive influence on rankings. Conversely, it’s important to make sure you’re not using the exact same anchor text constantly, as it can cause search engines to view it as a way to manipulate their results.

6. Increase organic product signups through technical SEO

Attest is a series B consumer research platform that has raised more than $95m in investment funding.

The challenge (and what we did to increase organic signups)

Market research, consumer insights, and SaaS are all industries that are highly competitive. With players like Qualtrics and Survey Monkey, the playing field can feel pretty tight, and even more complicated when you’re competing for terms like ‘market research’ against giants like HubSpot.

Attest wanted to drive organic signups–they already had good non-brand organic traffic, but it came from low intent keywords.

What we did:

• Audited the entire website and content and created a detailed keyword research and content planning
• Made sure technical SEO was on point and made adjustment where needed
• Created content that prioritized high intent keywords
• Applied on-page optimization
• Created a link-building strategy for the high intent keywords

The results we got in just over a year:

• High-intent keywords like “market research tools” and “how to measure brand awareness” now rank number one on Google
• Organic product signups have increased 8.5x
• Non-branded organic traffic increased by 1.85x

How you can see the same results

Making sure your website’s technical SEO elements are working will allow your content to have a chance to be crawled, viewed, and ranked by search engines.

Additionally, having the right link-building strategy will help you in a competitive space. However, remember that in order for link-building to work you need to establish a strategy and focus on just a few specific goals.

If you want to rank for 10+ highly competitive terms, you’ll probably fail. Choose the ones that really matter, the ones that have high transactional intent–if your goal is signups–and do a continuous effort in that direction.

Alexandra Hillyard, Skale’s SEO content specialist, says: 

“When you’re focusing on high-intent keywords, the end goal isn’t about dedicating all of your effort to that term alone – it’s about creating a user journey to the high-intent term, which means including low to mid-intent content pieces that lead the user to the end goal. This helps you build out topical authority (because you’re also including the long-tail variations for the targeted keywords), improves your internal linking structure, and creates a holistic SEO strategy.”

Ready to scale your SaaS SEO with Skale?

Each case study we looked at shows that when you implement SEO in a smart and strategic way you can really drive the results you’ve been looking for. 

Let experts from a B2B SEO agency like Skale–hello!–do the heavy lifting for you. There’s no need for you to try and catch up with SEO trends, we’ll do that for you too. You’ve seen the results we can bring to our clients, want to see what we could do for your SaaS Book a call, and let’s find out.

Leave your SEO to the experts

Up your game when you apply for full SEO Management with the Skale team.

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B2B SEO Case Study FAQ

A successful business venture is no longer about simply developing a product and gearing sales towards a target market. SEO is now a major player in SaaS marketing.

Implemented well, SEO can help your SaaS take off by increasing online traffic and optimising your visibility online. If it’s not prioritised, your product will lose out. Whether you’re starting out or consolidating your B2B business, chances are your firm could benefit in multiple ways from working with an SEO agency. 

The typical buying group for a B2B solution involves around 10 decision makers, each one carrying out independent research to inform their own decision, most likely online. In fact, 89% of B2B buyers use the internet for research, 71% of which start with generic searches. This means that your website needs to be attractive, informative, and ideally appear on the first page of Google. Search marketing is an important part of B2B SEO strategy, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Working with an SEO agency will create a holistic approach that identifies and uses all areas for potential. 

Here’s our shortlist of London B2B SEO agencies:

1. Skale
2. DSLX
3. Polaris
4. Yaser
5. Accuracast
6. PN Digital 
7. Neadoo
8. Tiga UK
9. 93X
10. Web Choice
11. GenieCrawl
12. SEO Works
13. Fat Cow Media
14. Thrive
15. Breakline

Now, you just need to choose one. 

1. Skale

Key Services: Complete B2B SEO content management, SaaS SEO growth strategies, keyword research and content modeling, technical SEO audits, link-building, and on-page SEO. 

Location: Remote. 

Website: https://skale.so/b2b-seo-agency/ 

Contact: Book a call with us here. 

At Skale, we pride ourselves on being different from the average B2B SEO agency. To start with, we don’t think rankings and traffic are the be-all and end-all. We prioritise driving business KPIs to increase SQLs; high rankings are just a good indicator of success. 

Our in-house SaaS experience also differentiates us from other agencies: we believe that experience is the best guarantee of success. 

To scale your SaaS SEO channel, you need to work with a SaaS SEO agency that has actually driven growth at SaaS companies. At Skale, we also think that an in-depth monthly report is much more valuable than a one-dimensional links spreadsheet. 

Transparency is key: we’ll work with you to build an SEO model that ticks all your boxes. 

As a remote company, you have the advantage of being able to work with us from anywhere in the world, benefiting from local SEO wherever you are. Our clients include high-profile B2B companies such as HubSpot and Attest. Have a look at our insights blog to find out more about how we work and what kind of results we deliver.

Leave your SEO to the experts

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2. DSLX

Key Services: B2B SaaS content writing and management services. 

Location: London / Barcelona / Remote. 

DSLX is a mission-driven copywriting agency, specialising in the creation of SaaS B2B-specific content. Championing diverse and minority group writers, they collaborate with over 40 talented, trained writers to provide content specifically tailored to your SEO requirements. 

DSLX is young, ambitious and thoroughly up-to-date with evolving SEO strategies. DSLX provides written solutions to SaaS business needs via consultancy, content creation and optimization. DSLX is partnered with Skale; they produce the content under our briefs and guidance.

Whatever stage you’re at in your B2B SEO strategy, DSLX can help, providing the quality and expertise you need to be at the top of your digital marketing game. 

3. Polaris

Key Services: KPI-based strategy, Onsite SEO, Technical SEO, Content Marketing, Digital PR. 

Location: London. 

With over 10 years’ experience in B2B lead generation, Polaris specialises in creating holistic B2B strategies customised to each client. They utilise the B2B-specific marketing requirements, from utilising longer buying cycles to educating over multiple touchpoints through content marketing over time, to bring lead quality and quantity to your business. 

They go the extra mile, offering competitor analysis, proactive account management and weekly market analytics. Polaris could be best-suited to you if your company needs SaaS, Tech or Services SEO. 

4. Yaser UK

Key Services: Focus on organic search improvement, website traffic and hitting targets, specialising in Fintechs, startups and smart CEOs.

Location: London.  

Yaser stands in contrast to many other companies and Fintech SEO agencies in many ways. Firstly, you’ll have one point of contact in the company, which is small and highly experienced. 

Yaser works with big and small B2B companies alike, building a unique, data-driven marketing strategy with each one. Established in 2009, Yaser boasts impressive results, such as one client company’s 100% growth within six months of implementing their SEO strategy. 

Further, Yaser bills you for results, not hours, so it’s good value for money. If you’re looking to learn more about B2B SEO, we’d also recommend having a look at their insights page, which offers industry-specific expertise and advice. 

5. Accuracast

Key Services: SEO, social media marketing, online advertising. 

Location: London.

Offering everything from SEO to multilingual social media marketing, Accuracast utilises AI technologies to maximise the impact they have on your company’s online presence. 

With these tools, they aim to optimise productivity and effectiveness while maintaining a high level of creativity. Accuracast is at the top of their game, providing services to a variety of companies from SMEs up to household names such as PwC and Stella Artois. 

They are not limited to one specific industry, but they do specialise in B2B firms. Their strength is creating data-led search and display to deliver cost-effective campaigns to generate leads and, ultimately, sales. 

6. PN Digital UK 

Key Services: Specialists in targeted growth via website optimization, specialist keyword research and SEO audits.

Location: London.

Over the past 12 months alone, PN Digital has helped their clients generate £250m+ in revenue and over a million Page 1 results. Working towards high search rankings, lasting results and using a bespoke SEO service tailored to each client, PN Digital has enjoyed excellent reviews from hundreds of satisfied clients. 

They offer competitive pricing, in exchange for all the tools and expertise you need to transform your rankings online. 

7. Neadoo 

Key Services: SEO (Local, E-Commerce), Full SEO Audit. 

Location: London.

Neadoo pride themselves on using current technology to its full potential in order to bring you the best results. They are an international firm, offering services in 12 languages across three continents. 

Describing themselves as ‘the outsourced search marketing team of tomorrow’, they deliver results following a simple four-step plan. Each assignment is approached individually, so that a bespoke strategy is created for each. 

Clear communication is a priority: the client will be consulted every step of the way. All work is clearly catalogued, so at the end of each day, the client can see exactly what has been achieved. 

8. Tiga UK 

Key Services: All-inclusive offline and B2B marketing services. 

Location: Kent.

Tiga is a highly-specialised B2B marketing agency. Working on brand identity, digital design and web development, they have mastered the mindset of the B2B buyer, which they outline on their website. 

A top priority of theirs is the cultivation of a strong professional relationship with each of their clients, based on trust and joint ambition. Tiga seeks to combine science and creativity in every bespoke marketing strategy, geared towards maximum exposure and quality lead generation. 

Tiga is based in Kent, but is a short train ride from London if you need some face-to-face communication. 

9. 93X

Key Services: B2B SEO services specifically for technology, SaaS and software companies. 

Location: London.

93X is the B2B digital marketing agency that works exclusively with B2B technology and SaaS companies. They go beyond traffic and ranking, working towards generating qualified leads, driving pipeline and growing revenue. 

Their website also offers a great Insights blog, giving helpful and qualified advice for those starting out in B2B Digital Marketing. If you’re looking for an agency with focused expertise, 93X might be the one for you. 

In fact, the company was founded in response to the frustration felt by B2B tech and SaaS companies towards generic, consumer-focused digital marketing agencies. These simply did not understand the B2B buyer, using the wrong metrics and ineffective strategies and producing little to no SEO ROI. 

93X is a leader in its field, offering further digital marketing capabilities such as UX & Design, WordPress development and Digital Strategy. 

10. Web Choice

Key Services: Specialised in website optimization and organic traffic generation.

Location: London/Somerset

With offices in London and Somerset, Web Choice has worked with over 500 clients across the world since its establishment in 2009. They offer performance-focused online strategies that incorporate SEO, PPC, CRO and content marketing. 

Using keyword research, SEO Audit, Link Building, Competitor Analysis and On-Page SEO, Web Choice will help you develop a holistic strategy for online growth, delivering tangible results. 

11. GenieCrawl

Key Services: Specialised in website optimization and organic traffic generation.

Location: London.

Offering a free SEO audit to potential customers, GenieCrawl delivers expertise to B2B businesses and identifies current shortcomings, as a starting point for a tailored growth strategy. They have been rated as the best SEO company in the UK by Clutch, out of a total of nearly 3900 UK-based SEO agencies. 

Even more impressively, their customer satisfaction levels have reached the stellar average of 96%. Their website offers numerous industry-categorised case studies, boasting household names such as Subway and Papa Johns. GenieCrawl prioritises full transparency and clear results, satisfying all legal requirements on every project. 

12. SEO Works

Key Services: Sustainable SEO providing ethical results and a strong website profile.

Location: London.

SEO Works is an award-winning SEO agency with offices in London, Leeds and Sheffield. Their portfolio of SEO, PPC, paid social and design & development offers B2B companies the resources they need to reach target audiences, wherever they are on the web. 

They also offer a website analysis of 20 hours’ work, totally free of charge. SEO Works is a leader in the UK industry, providing high levels of customer satisfaction. This is demonstrated by an impressive average 4.8/5 user rating. SEO Works provides a trusted pair of hands to put your B2B SEO needs into. 

13. Fat Cow Media 

Key Services: Range of web design and SEO services across London, the UK and the world. 

Location: London.

With over 20 years’ experience, Fat Cow Media helps both local and international clients to capture the attention of a target audience and convert them into paying customers. While they have built up a strong reputation for corporate web design, they also offer SEO, Marketing and Reputation Management services, designed to give your B2B business the full support it needs. 

Fat Cow knows that behind the well-crafted, visually aesthetic website must be a high-functioning strategy designed to generate leads. They boast an impressive testimonials page so you can see their client satisfaction for yourself, as well as a list of case studies including high-profile clients such as Bubbleology. 

14. Thrive

Key Services: SEO, social media marketing, website design & development, PPC, content writing.

Location: Global.

Based around the world, with offices from London to San Diego, Thrive’s results speak for themselves: clients boast organic traffic increases of 664% and online lead increases of 800%. 

Thrive helps you navigate the strong competitive landscape by offering robust, results-driven marketing solutions. Recommended by trusted SEO-ranking website Clutch, Thrive has also been featured in top publications Forbes and The Huffington Post. 

15. Breakline

Key Services: Integrated SEO-based strategies ultimately designed to increase sales. 

Location: London/Guildford. 

Breakline may not be a B2B-specific SEO company, but it is ranked by Clutch as the top SEO agency in London, so we thought it was worth a feature. Their website displays an impressive array of case studies and client testimonials, as well as a comprehensive breakdown of each of the SEO services they offer. Breakline offers 10 years’ experience in SEO and highly trained experts, geared towards achieving your SEO goals and driving sales. 

How to choose the best B2B SEO agency for your SaaS

When it comes to assembling a digital marketing strategy, choosing the right B2B SEO agency is perhaps the most important step. 

First, consider your impression of their own website. Done well, it should showcase exactly what they’re able to do and put what they preach into practice. 

Second, check reviews and testimonials, and request work samples or case studies where necessary. You have to be meticulous when finding a B2B SEO agency — don’t rush it. Look out for red flags such as no clear SEO roadmap strategy for their own site, low-quality writing on emails/posts/social media, and unrealistic SEO goals in case studies. 

Look through their services and begin to identify the SEO tools that you would like to focus on for your company. Educate yourself about what’s on offer and have a starting point in mind so you can discuss potential strategies.

Prepare a list of questions to ask in order to determine the agency’s legitimacy. Don’t be afraid to ask in-depth questions, such as ‘How can I track the changes made on my website?’, or personal questions like ‘What is your client retention rate?’. You don’t want to waste your time on agencies that are all talk and no results.

It is also advisable to request a SaaS technical SEO audit. Discuss this with your prospective agency, but most high-quality B2B SEO companies should encourage an audit before partnering. 

The chosen agency must: 

1. Fully understand and cater to the specific mindset of B2B buyers. 
2. Be able to offer bespoke SEO strategies that fulfil your requirements, ideally based on a full SEO audit. 
3. Provide good value for money. 
4. Offer services that can adapt to new situations or requirements. 
5. Demonstrate good expertise and knowledge of the industry you’re in. 
6. Boast an engaging website of their own; they should be pulling out all the stops for their own company to showcase their SEO and web design skills. 

Choose the best B2B SEO agency in the business

Book a call with Skale’s SEO experts and level up your MRR.

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London B2B SEO FAQ

You’ve seen the huge success brands have achieved through B2B search engine optimization and you’re ready to recreate it. You know where to start, right?

You got it, with a B2B SEO audit.

A B2B SEO audit is an auditing of all the SEO aspects of your website and content strategy that’ll have an impact on your search visibility and conversion rates. 

Technically put, it’s about understanding how search engines are perceiving your content and give you the insights needed to get a higher seat on their search results rankings and better hit user search intent.

In this article, we’ll show you how to conduct an SEO audit focusing on two key aspects:

• Content SEO
• Technical SEO

We’ll explore what you need to check and how you can improve on your findings.

Let’s get auditing.

Let’s find out what we need to know before we start our audit.

What do you need to start your B2B SEO Audit?

There are a few elements you should consider before starting the auditing process.

Run a competitor analysis

SEO doesn’t work by itself; your efforts will be in a constant battle against your competitors’ efforts and the latest SEO trends. It’s always a good idea to see what the competition is doing, and more importantly, how they’re doing.

However, before analyzing your competitors, their rankings, keywords, and holistic SEO strategy, you need to find out who they actually are. There are direct and indirect competitors, but when fighting for first place on search engine results pages (SERPs) you ideally want to gauge direct competitors.

When performing a B2B SEO competitor analysis of your direct competition you’ll discover:

• What weaknesses your pages and your competitors might have, as well as understanding what you’re doing right so that you can focus your efforts on outranking your competitors
• The keywords you should consider ranking for
• Where you can look for backlinks

Now that you know why you should consider your competitors, these are the general steps you should follow when running a competitor analysis:

• Identify multiple competitors
• Analyze competitors’ target and top-ranking keywords
• Analyze competitors’ backlinking achievements
• Take a look at your competitors’ content marketing initiatives
• Study the user experience they provide
• Pay attention to their social media channels and customer interactions

Set goals and objectives

Another important thing to consider before diving into your B2B SEO audit is the goals and objectives that you have for your digital marketing and for this specific SEO audit, you’re about to do. After all, audits are not one-size-fits-all.

Of course, you might think: “but isn’t it obvious that we all just want more customers and profitability?” Well, the way you get there might be different.

Maybe you want to migrate your website to another domain, or you want to get more organic traffic to your landing pages, or maybe you want to rank higher in a few high-intent relevant keywords–each of these will have a different focus on your SEO audit and overall strategy.

So pinpoint your goals and outline your KPIs and milestones for you to get there. 

Now you understand what your competitors are doing and you have specified what your goals are. It’s now time to see the 11 steps, divided into the categories ‘Content’ and ‘Technical’ SEO, to conduct a thorough B2B SEO audit.

How to conduct a B2B SEO audit: Content SEO

SEO depends on content, as you’ve probably heard, ‘Content is King’–and creating great quality content it’s a core part of SEO best practices. So, the first thing we’ll look at is what you should consider when doing a full auditing of your SEO content:

1. Check on your keywords

Keywords are the matchmaker between what your users are trying to find, and your SaaS. They’re like the Cupid of customers and brands. Anyone doing an SEO audit knows that they’re important, so we need to see how they’re performing.

Of course, we’re not aiming to do full-on keyword research, we simply want to know which keywords are working for us and which ones aren’t.

The best way to find out this information is by using SEO tools and keyword research tools–paired with the knowledge of SEO experts–that’ll give all the insights you need. Some recommendations are:

• Moz’s Keyword Explorer: offers a 30-day free trial and subscriptions start at $99 per month
• Google Search Console: a free tool
• Ahrefs Keyword Explorer: subscription starts at $99 per month or $83 per month when you pay annually–plus, you can get two months free if you pay annually.

SpyFu: basic plan for $33 per month

2. Perform a content audit

Now that you understand the health of your keyword performance, you’ll want to do an audit of your current content.

What exactly does a content audit mean?

It means that you’ll want to check for duplicate content, thin content, or out-of-date content, as well as other important elements like the ones Alexandra Hillyard, SEO content specialist here at Skale points out:

“When we do a content model (a Skalified content audit), we manually review each individual page to get an indication of pages bringing in demos & signups, the current performance of each page, where the biggest wins are, and the opportunities we’re missing out on. We’ll also check whether the content is designed for user and business goals, and what topic clusters we can work with and build out.”

Duplicate content: can harm your performance because it confuses Google and other search engines which can lead to them ranking the ‘wrong page.’ Something you really don’t want. In addition, search engines might rank both URLs lower and give preference to other web pages.

Thin content: is a marketing term that refers to content that offers no real value to users. With so many freelance writers online and so many brands struggling with SEO, many websites end up producing a high quantity of lacking content.

The main problem is that if users come and their search intent is not satisfied by the content, or it simply adds no value, search engines will notice that users leave the site rather quickly and continue searching for a piece of content that satisfies their needs better. This signals search engines that your content isn’t that useful for users, thus harming the ranking of your website.

Out-of-date content: or expired content is content that is no longer useful for visitors and not in line with current tech or trends. 

Understanding the content that you have and how it’s performing will also help you find which gaps you can fill with new content.

Two tools that can help you better understand user intent and thus provide high-quality content are:

• AlsoAsked: with a basic plan starting from $15 per month
• AnswerThePublic: it offers a freemium package with pro features starting from $99 per month 

Additionally, for a tool that can help you do your content audit, we suggest using Screaming Frog. It helps you not only do technical auditing but also content auditing, and to schedule these audits so you’re always on top of what’s going on.

Screaming Frog comes in two versions, a free one, and a paid one that’s $259 per year. 

How to conduct a B2B SEO audit: Technical SEO

Now that you’ve checked how your keywords and content are doing, you’ll want to look at technical SEO. A technical SEO audit will make sure that it will make sure that there are no crawlability and indexation issues (which would prevent the search engines from crawling your site and showing it in the search results).

There are plenty of elements of technical SEO that you can audit, here we’ll go through the nine most important ones.

3. Audit your sitemap

Skale’s own tech SEO analyst, Selda Akin, gives us her definition of a sitemap:

“Search engines always need help to understand the structure of a website. A sitemap is a close friend that helps them to understand which pages are important on a website and makes it easier for search engines to find those pages to be crawled & indexed.” 

To audit your sitemap you can use a number of different useful tools, like:

• Screaming Frog
• OnCrawl
• SE Ranking
• DeepCrawl
• SEO Site Checkup

What these tools will tell you is if there are any issues with your URLs. Maybe they link to duplicate content, or maybe there are errors like orphaned pages–those that do not connect to any other–or other problems. When cleaning up your sitemap the audit will function as a guide to what you need to improve.

4. Don’t forget about on-page elements 

On-page elements include:

• Title tags
• Headings
• Meta descriptions
• Image alt tags
• and more

During the audit, you’ll make sure that you’ve added each one of them where necessary, and that you’ve included appropriate keywords and easy-to-read copy in all of them.

Source

Alt tags on images are normally ignored in SEO, but they’re actually extremely important because they:

• Increase the accessibility of the images for those with eyesight disabilities
• Are a Google ranking factor
• Help Google images perform searches 

They also allow images to become a source of keywords and increase the crawlability of your site for Google image searches.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your alt tags:

• ​​No more than 125 characters
• Make them descriptive 
• Avoid keyword stuffing
• Include text in the image

For example, the tool Screaming Frog helps you find missing alt tags, H1 titles, and other on-page opportunities that are crucial during your SEO auditing.

5. Check your site speed

Since 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load, making sure you understand how long your website takes to load is an important part of the audit.

Site speed is not only important for user experience, it actually is cited as one of Google’s ranking factors–as a Core Web Vital: for example, LCP is a Core Web Vital that measures the seconds from when the page starts loading until the largest element is rendered.

Google PageSpeed Insights is a great tool to measure your page performance on both mobile and desktop.

Elements that could be slowing down your site speed are:

• Unoptimized images–we’ll talk about image optimization in a sec
• JavaScript issues
• Including too much Flash content
• Excessive HTTP requests
• Not using caching techniques
• Long, complicated, and unclean code
• Not using gZIP compression
• Having too many ads on the site

These are just some of the factors that could be slowing your website loading time–which is why it’s crucial to do a thorough website speed audit.

Besides site speed, there are other factors that are part of the Core Web Vitals or those specific factors Google checks to ensure optimal user experience. 

Other important Core Web Vitals to consider:

• Interactivity, also known as first input delay (FID): the time it takes for users to actually interact with your page. For reference, a ‘good’ measurement is defined as 0-100ms, and a ‘bad’ one is anything longer than 300ms. 
• Visual stability, also known as cumulative layout shift (CLS): this refers to how stable the page is while loading up. If during the loading time images, buttons, and text shift too much, the user will need to relearn the location of important elements of your page, thus providing them with a poor user experience. 

6. Consider image optimization

Images are important in for user experience–for example, blogs with images get 94% more total views than those without. No one wants to see a website that’s only text with some blank spaces. In order to actually get going with auditing your images the first thing you’ll need to do is use an SEO tool like Screaming Frog to create an image inventory.

Once you have the inventory organized and prepared for the audit you’ll be able to answer the following questions about your images:

• Are they necessary? Get rid of unnecessary or irrelevant images, for example, using images that are not bringing any value to the reader or explaining a concept should be considered ‘filler’ images and shouldn’t really be used
• Do they have alt tags? Remember to include keywords
• Are they appropriate ratios? Are they responsive for different screen sizes
• Have they been compressed? So they don’t slow down your site–you can use the tool Optimizilla to compress JPEG, GIF and PNG images for free
• Are they high-quality images? No one wants pixelated images
• Do they have a file name that’s relevant and includes keywords?
• Are they in the file type that you want them to be? Some sites work better with JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc.

All of these questions will help you understand the state of your images. Nothing in SEO is left to chance. To achieve the best results possible you need to consider every detail of your website.

7. Ensure mobile friendliness

Check this number: 80%. That’s the number of top-rated websites that are mobile friendly–and also the percentage of people that surf the internet on mobile devices. When auditing, make sure your website elements: pages, texts, images, CTAs and more, adapt to different screen sizes and devices.

Below we can see Maze’s website on desktop and mobile:

Source

To ensure your website is mobile-friendly check that it:

• Has a responsive layout that adapts to different screen sizes
• Has buttons that change size and placement so they fit mobile devices
• Uses HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash
• Uses eligible fonts that are readable on mobile
• Has images that have been optimized and compressed
• Doesn’t have unnecessary pop-ups

And most importantly, make sure you’re constantly testing on various mobile devices to make sure it looks and works as you want it to.

8. Check on links

Check which internal and external links you have on your website and how they’re doing. Ensure there are no broken internal or external links.

Top tip: To check if your links are broken there are plenty of tools out there, for example, the free Google Search Control, or the free or paid versions of Ahrefs and Screaming Frog, or you can use a plugin for your CMS like the Broken Link Checker for WordPress. 

Besides checking the health of your URLs you should also make sure you have a 404 page working. A 404 error is when a redirect has not worked since the page could not be found. However, instead of just having a warning page and seeing your users leave your site, make it useful.

Things to include on your 404 error page:

• Empathic copy to connect with your user
• Explain what the 404 means
• Give links and options to go to–home page, other important and relevant pages, etc.

Lastly, you’ll want to also ensure your 301 redirects are working appropriately. 301 redirects are when an old URL is inserted, the user then gets sent to a working URL. It’s important to make sure they work so you don’t lose a website visitor. It’s also crucial to update internal link redirects to a new URL to avoid a redirect chain. 

Redirects normally lead to a loss in link equity of about 15%. Since redirect chains compound these effects, if there are two redirects in place, the link equity can go down to roughly 72%. So, watch out for those.

9. Review your index status

Indexing is crucial for SEO because, if your site is not indexed, regardless of how many amazing blogs it has, or flashy graphics, or the number of keywords, it won’t be seen by search engines. Period.

Thankfully, technology is here to help. Google Search Console and SEMRush Site Audit tools are two tools to make sure the pages that you’re including in your SEO efforts are being seen by search engines.

The URL Inspection Tool from Google Search Console will let you add a URL to include and will tell you the index status. If a page shows up as not indexed you can request it to be crawled by Google–which means that it will be indexed. A report will be shown to you in case it can not be indexed so you know why that is.

10. Verify your schema markup

Schema markups are a way of presenting rich snippets so that they show the value the linking site can provide to the user.

For example, there are FAQ Schema, which are specific codes that tell search engines that the information you are presenting is in a question-and-answer format. When the content is added correctly, with the right code, including relevant keywords, and the proper length it can be eligible to appear in Google Assitant searches as a rich snippet. 

Below you can see a FAQ Schema and how it’s different from the People Also Ask box. PAA box results don’t have to be appearing on the first page of results, so this is a great way to get additional traffic. While the FAQ Schema helps you boost CTR as long as you are on the first few pages of Google.

In the optimized image below () you can see three examples of schema markups for the same type of service: video platforms. You can see how video giant Youtube has a more complete schema markup.

During your auditing, it’s important to test if your schema markups are working properly. To do this you can use Rich Results Test, it allows you to test and verify that your schema is error-free.

11. Double-check your robots.txt

Robots.txt file for web pages help you manage crawling traffic to specific URLs. This stops the server from becoming overwhelmed by too many requests from Google’s crawler, and also helps avoid crawling both unimportant and similar pages on your site.

To make sure everything is working as intended, check the number of pages you view on Google search results and compare that number to the pages you see listed directly in Google Analytics. If there’s a page on Analytics but not on search results, that would mean there’s an error that you’ll need to address.

Selda Akin, Skale’s tech SEO analyst, tells us how to address this problem:

“If you disallow a URL in your robot.txt file, you tell user agents not to crawl that specific URL. If user agents can’t crawl the pages, they can’t index & show them in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). 

However, blocking a page in the robots.txt file doesn’t always guarantee that user agents will follow your command. They might ignore it and continue crawling & indexing disallowed pages. 

It’s important to remove any links pointing to the pages that you do not want to be listed on Google because Googlebots might follow those links to land your page & index it. That’s why a page might appear on GA but not on Google. 

Additionally, the traffic source on GA is important as well. That page might be from direct or any referral traffic. Therefore, there are different metrics to check why your page is on GA but not on Google. By knowing the reason why it’s not showing, you’ll be able to fix the issue in no time.”

Top tip: use Google’s robots.txt Tester to check how your robots.txt are working.

Leave your next B2B SEO audit to the experts

B2B SEO can significantly impact your marketing outcomes, conversions, and profits. The best way to start on the right track is to do a thorough audit of where you currently stand. Although it isn’t quite rocket science, it’s something that’s best to leave in the hands of experts.

Lucky for you, here at Skale, we are a B2B SEO agency with a team of knowledgeable experts ready to take your case and make it an astounding success story.

Ready to make your B2B SEO audit and strategy part of your success? Book a call and let’s see where we can help you.

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