(Additional writing from Jordan McKinley and Michelle Abbey)
B2B SEO: Unlocking the Potential of Online Success
“I don’t think SEO matters in this industry.”
It’s not the best thing to hear the first time you meet with a client, but it’s not uncommon. In B2B, there’s still debate over whether optimizing storefronts for search engines is the right choice. Should you leap into the future, or stay planted in the past?
To be clear, eCommerce SEO is the right option – all B2B stores should be optimized for search. But the reasons why, and the strategies that actually drive revenue, might surprise you. Twenty years ago, we were arguing about whether or not B2B businesses should have a website at all, and the businesses that answered incorrectly missed out on years of growth. Optimizing for SEO in 2024 is just as critical to staying alive and reaching new customers.
“The line between B2B and B2C experiences is quickly getting thinner. While B2B should offer tailored experiences to their customers like unique pricing, pay on account and complex shipping rules, the same rules for ‘finding’ a particular product online apply. Showing up on the front page for a unique SKU or product description can land you a client for life and cement your search results position in a niche or very competitive market.”
–Ben Lorenz, Human Element co-owner and managing director
Why B2B SEO Matters to the Bottom Line
The first thing to understand is that B2B SEO can yield excellent returns. Unlike B2C, where you’re often casting a wide net, B2B audiences are usually more serious and have a higher intent to purchase; making that purchase is someone’s job, after all. This means that chasing niche, low-volume keywords can generate significant revenue.
However, despite its potential, B2B SEO faces resistance, often due to misunderstandings about how discovery works for B2B customer.
How Business Discovery in B2B Really Works
The single biggest misconception I’ve encountered among B2B clients is how customers find and select suppliers. B2B companies that are skeptical of SEO imagine something like this:
- The customer realizes they need a supplier (they just started their business or are unhappy with their current supplier).
- That customer goes to a search engine, takes a look at the results, and calls up suppliers they’ve heard about and the top results.
- After having conversations with a dozen sales representatives, they sit down and pick one based on company values, experience with the rep, and availability of products, plus minimum purchase requirements. The role of the website, if any, is adding confidence that the business is real and showing what products can usually be purchased.
Not every B2B business thinks like this, but it’s especially common among businesses with some amount of customer qualification like chemicals, pharmaceuticals, law enforcement supplies, and other dealers of restricted products. It’s also the norm for businesses that have negotiated pricing and want to keep those details private, historically common with B2B suppliers. Displaying MSRP, availability, and connections to local dealers can ease these concerns.
Playing nice with dealers is another barrier. With the right site experience and a solid dealer strategy this can be worked around, but it takes strategic planning to avoid cannibalizing sales or misleading users. We always ensure that dealers can be discovered on the website in alignment with the brand strategy for enriching the channel sales avenues.
In reality, B2B discovery often starts when a business realizes their current supplier isn’t meeting their needs:
- The customer has an issue with their current supplier, usually tied to a specific product. They could be large minimum order requirements, slow shipping, or other availability issues.
- That customer starts searching for alternative options to solve that specific need. Those searches are usually for exact-match product attributes like name, model, SKU, or specifications.
- They note the price, shipping, process to register (if applicable), and site experience of their options. No preference is typically given to a B2B specialized retailer vs. a generic retailer, all else being equal.
- They choose the best option to solve the problem based on the information they could discover.If they can’t understand price, shipping, and the basics of customer experience, that option is out.
What this describes is a precise, web-first discovery process. This level of specificity is where B2B SEO truly shines, but only if businesses understand this search behavior and optimize their content accordingly.
Where B2B Discovery and Paid Ads Clash
To complicate matters, Google Ads (and other keyword-based targeting systems) choose not to serve ads for keywords deemed low volume. A specific manufacturing component might only be searched for 100 times in a year, but if it sells for $10,000, there will be real competition and obvious revenue opportunity. These keywords can only be optimized by doing solid SEO. 15% of daily Google searches are brand new queries.
Old School vs. New School B2B
A lot of resistance to B2B SEO comes from being stuck in old-school business practices. Traditional B2B relied heavily on physical catalogs— those thick, laminated books sent out once a quarter that customers referenced to place orders over the phone. Sales reps played a crucial role, maintaining ongoing relationships, introducing customers to new products, and providing recommendations.
But times have changed. Today’s B2B buyers, especially those under 40, are much more comfortable with eCommerce in both their personal and professional lives. They prefer to research and order products online rather than picking up the phone to talk to a sales rep, and it’s hard to blame them. Increasingly, there are far fewer “purchasing managers” in B2B; instead, purchasing is a component of another full-time job, without the allotment in one’s day to place and take phone calls from suppliers just to keep up inventory.
Phone calls and 300-page booklets haven’t been the preference of most customers for several generations, and yet, many businesses still cling to that model, believing that it’s “just the way the industry works.”
In reality, direct ordering and web portals are the norm in most B2B arenas. Where it is not the norm, being early to make the shift is a competitive advantage.
Resistance to Digital Transformation
Even when clients know they need to change, they struggle with when and how to put it into action. Office staff and sales roles that were built around phone orders may find it challenging to transition to eCommerce, and the result is often compromised, limited websites. These are essentially digital versions of the old product catalog without any of the benefits that the web brings.
Another concern is customer alienation. There are many customers who still expect the type of service that was once standard in the industry. Catering to older generations or younger ones doesn’t need to be mutually exclusive, and flexibility is key to providing a good experience for all customers.
What trips up some B2B businesses is turning these concerns into a “chicken-and-egg” problem: thinking that they can’t move to eCommerce because the customers aren’t familiar with it, but holding back their customers by refusing to enable modern eCommerce on their websites. If you’re one of the first in your industry to enable an eCommerce storefront, it can feel risky. However, making a change that serves users better is always a good one to make, even if you’re first to the party.
Judging B2B Opportunities By B2C Metrics
The default SEO approach from many agencies is to maximize “generic” key terms (i.e., terms without a brand name) and leave branded terms on the table. However, in industries with strong brand recognition and requirements for product compatibility, that brand name is the critical information used by B2B searchers. It’s useful for me as a B2B parts supplier to rank well for individual, branded products, down to the specificity of an individual SKU. These searches may have lower volume, but they attract highly targeted traffic—exactly the people looking to make a purchase.
Manifesting B2B SEO Opportunities
So what does SEO for B2B look like? Here are some go-to strategies:
Providing Excellent Customer Experience – Even With Restrictions
A good place to start is by researching competitors’ sites with an eye on user experience. How easy is it to find products on their site? What options are available to refine options? Can one complete or come very close to making a purchase, even in industries with restrictions like hazardous materials? And how quickly do those site actions turn into outreach from sales?
The goal is to find flows to imitate, opportunities to improve, and understand the context potential customers are bringing to your site. Users should be able to provide all the information they are comfortable sharing before a sales representative gets involved, if at all.
Attributes can get complicated for B2B products, and enabling filters and sorting built around your industry and inventory isn’t just a way to help customers find products fast, but serves to educate users about how those products factor into the problems they’re trying to solve.
Content That Empowers Purchases
“Content is king” cries the SEOs, especially in B2B. The best sites invest heavily in content that builds confidence in their brand and answers critical buying process questions. This includes details like shipping times, lead times, back orders, and fees. They answer industry-specific concerns, such as product compatibility or issues affecting availability and pricing. It doesn’t have to be prose; extensive product attributes in a table is valuable content in the right format for the audience.
Stand in the customer’s shoes: what questions is their boss going to ask when they request to switch suppliers on a product they order on the scale of tens of thousands of dollars annually? What can they tell their coworkers about when items will arrive and whether they’ll be available next month?
Going beyond the product page, content like head-to-head comparisons, compatibility across product families, and educational material that’s valuable for veteran professionals and people new to the industry are go-tos for content development.
Differences in Indexation Strategy
Indexation looks different for B2B based on catalog structure. For B2C, best practices are to disable indexing for most category filters; in theory, the searches those pages might target are best served by a topical content page. For B2B, however, those filters are often tied to specific product lines and feature sets that are a primary search for potential customers. Building content-focused pages around “110V/220V Dual Phase Power” (and similar searches) isn’t sensible for most brands, nor necessary to get visibility in niche industries.
Consolidating Multiple Site Experiences
B2B websites are especially prone to splitting brand experiences into multiple sites (usually subdomains). It’s not exclusive to B2B, but its pervasiveness is impossible to ignore. Sometimes we see separate sites for marketing, sales, customer support, and consumer information, each on different platforms with ample duplication.
When you split experiences across subdomains, the first issue is search engine confusion. Multiple sites produce a messy map for interlinking and navigation, where the relationship between your brand, your products, and your websites is harder to piece together in the search engine indices. Practically speaking, customers looking for a specific product could get served a product information page (without attributes), a product listing page (without compelling copy), or in many cases, a different website selling that product which is bringing together a complete information package.
The offsite implications are that links from other domains (which provide the site authority necessary to rank well on competitive terms) are split across those sites in a way that, typically, is not in alignment with the highest priority for search visibility. For instance, separating dealer information from products means that advantageous links from those brands aren’t providing their full value to generate purchases on the storefront website.
Customer-First B2B Means Taking SEO Seriously
SEO for B2B businesses is about so much more than increasing visibility—it’s about creating a site experience that’s a cut above competitors and speaks to the incoming workforce of digitally savvy customers. Businesses that commit to optimized sites with precise, valuable product information stand to grow their audience and make life easier for their customers. Sticking with old-school methods means losing out on a generation of opportunities, believing that the industry “just doesn’t need SEO.” Investing in B2B SEO today is staking a claim in the future of the industry; don’t be afraid to lead the charge.
