B2B SEO is a Different Animal

When you start to perform search engine marketing and optimization for your own business website you really have to figure out whether you are attempting to market a business to a B2B or B2C audience. A consumer audience could very well read their email at midnight and purchase something but not a business audience. Your SEO efforts are going to be quite different depending on which type of person you are trying to attract.

Here are some key elements to look out for B2B SEO:

SEO Demand Generation: For companies that are targeting other businesses in a niche industry, often times they need to target keywords naturally within their content and the rest of the on site optimziation for keywords that have little search volume. This is when there are industry specific terminology that may not have a high search volume yet. But sometimes it makes sense to target a mix of both keywords that people are searching for and keywords that are industry specific that will grow over time. And even sometimes a b2b focused campaign can leverage (and should) other sources of online and offline marketing to help build new keyword search volume (and build a demand) within a specific target marketplace.

Online PR Timing: Whether you are distributing some PR or attacking the social media front your timing is going to be critical. You can’t expect to target a B2B audience creating efforts at 10 o’clock at night can you? You know your audience best so try to anticipate when the best time for something to land in front of them is. You don’t want to be wasting your efforts if nobody is going to see what you are doing. Timing things wrong could lead to absolutely nothing occurring on your website. Remember to keep testing different approaches.

Content Verbiage: It is safe to say that different keywords are going to attract different people. The word “cheap” is going to pull in a different audience than “inexpensive” so it is up to you to figure this out before you begin optimizing your website or putting together an internet marketing campaign. Put a large emphasis on the types of keywords you want to incorporate into your site and your plan. The wrong keywords could pull in the wrong audience which could be disastrous.

Your B2B audience will appreciate a methodical approach to your search engine optimization. Remember that it is an audience that just wants to get the business part done. Many of the decision makers are going to be managers, department directors and some business owners so they just want to see the information, how you are going to solve the problem at hand and what the cost will be to do it. It is a different type of mind set than reaching out to a consumer based audience which is usually driven on emotion and branding to purchase what they want.

source: http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/07/12/b2b-seo/