Many SEO marketing agencies break search engine optimization down into various activities and charge you separately for each. For instance, website optimization and link popularity campaigns are often regarded as two different services and are charged as such. That means you pay twice for the same need - promoting your website.
It’s better to keep things simple and choose an agency that properly implements B2B SEO methodology and provides all-inclusive professional B2B SEO services. There is a process that ensures your site will make it to the top of search result pages, and skipping a step may negatively affect your efforts.
Here is the B2B SEO methodology your marketing agency should follow in order to have the best chances of improving your SEO ranking:
1. Research
The research phase deals with assessing your website, your goals, and your competition in order to plan your strategy and execution.
Discovery Interview
SEO methodology begins with clearly defining the short-term and long-term goals for your website. This information will then be used to plan your SEO campaign and design the strategy that best fits your website.
Keyword Effectiveness Research
The next step is to analyze top keywords that are relevant to your website and select those that are the most cost-effective to your line of business.
It is important that you, together with your agency account manager, determine the terms that your target audience actually searches for as opposed to those terms you might think your business is about.
Choosing appropriate keywords is one of the most important aspects of the optimization process. This is because the right keywords will attract your ideal audience, while others won’t be as effective in attracting the type of audience your business needs, proving your SEO efforts futile.
After this is complete, you will have exact search phrases which will most likely ensure targeted traffic to your website.
Competitive Analysis
Now, the agency should analyze the top 3 websites competing for your primary keywords, and use this information to plan your SEO strategy in order to outdo them over time.
Preliminary Ranking Report
A preliminary ranking report is a baseline report that ranks your site at the beginning of the project, before any actions are performed. This will help both you and the marketing agency measure the ranking progress over time.
2. On-Page Optimization
This phase includes all efforts that are performed within the boundaries of your website.
Optimizing Pages For Keywords
Your marketing agency account manager should provide you with recommendations and guidelines to optimize your web pages for the selected keywords. Follow the rule of one keyword phrase per page to ensure that the content is structured in a user-friendly manner.
The end result will determine how a search engine robot (also known as a “Spider” or “Crawler”) will actually see and rank your website.
Meta Tag Composition
Create or adjust the meta tags for each of the optimized pages. Meta tags provide important metadata about your website to search engines and are typically used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata.
Google XML Sitemap
It is important to generate a Google XML sitemap file for your website to ensure proper crawling and maximum indexing of your pages. An SEO XML sitemap is a file listing each individual page of your website to signal to Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Then, the search engine web crawlers use this file to more intelligently crawl your site.
A professional should create your XML sitemap because your sitemap provides valuable metadata associated with your pages to Google, metadata that you want to ensure is accurately represented and free of mistakes.
Add New Content Pages
Produce quality fresh content for your website, optimized for search engine inclusion. These may be new landing pages, internal pages, blog posts, and more. Adding testimonials to your website is another way to add keyword-rich content to your site (and it’s free!).
Generating optimized content on a regular basis is important to show search engines you have a consistent flow of valuable and relevant content, allowing you to rank higher for more than one keyword.
Website Structural Analysis
Another important factor in B2B SEO methodology includes structure analysis of your website in order to identify potential problems. You must go behind the scenes and examine the design, flow and construction of your site from an optimization perspective.
Professional service providers will give recommendations using B2B SEO best practices that apply to your website objectives.
Website Usability Assessment
Asses the user experience on your website and identify potential problems. Take into account user interface aspects, ease of navigation, copywriting issues, and overall look and feel.
Website Quality Report
A professional B2B SEO marketing agency can check your website for a variety of errors and problems (broken links, missing ALT attributes, etc.) and provide you with a detailed report of everything that needs to be fixed.
3. Off-Page Optimization
This phase includes all efforts that are performed outside the boundaries of your website.
Link Earning
Getting one-way incoming links from relevant websites is the true challenge of any SEO campaign and the golden key to success. External links from authoritative websites show Google that your content is regarded as valuable by other sources as well, allowing you to rank higher.
There are many strategies that can be applied, and some are more common than others. But at the end of the day, you either pay for links (something you totally should avoid according to search engine methodologies) or provide quality content that will motivate other websites to link to back you.
It’s best to have talented bloggers and copywriters providing you with quality content, highly relevant to your website and business. High quality content is, by nature, content that is valuable or interesting and informative, that others will gravitate towards and want to link back to it when sharing with their audiences.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is another strategy used to earn backlinks. Over the years, KeyScouts has established a vast network of online assets that we can utilize to promote websites. These are websites, bloggers and editors that will consider publishing your content exclusively and in return will mention your business (typically in a form of a backlink).
The first step is to research your top competitors in order to learn where they get their links from.These links are highly valuable to build your overall domain authority with Google, especially when they appear in the content and in the right context.
This is an ongoing effort which will enhance the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links you receive from other web resources.
Your goal is to get your website connected within your industry and build your brand awareness, and improve your SEO ranking at the same time. In result you will gain targeted traffic from both related authority sites and the search engines.
Ranking Check
Monitor your ranking with the selected search engines on a bi-weekly basis and provide monthly reports. You will be able to review your ranking history analysis, see how your website stacks against competition and measure the effectiveness of your marketing agency’s efforts.
Ever Changing Landscape
Over the years, at KeyScouts, we have changed our B2B SEO methodology several times to ensure we align with the search engines best practices, and most importantly to avoid any risk to our clients.
But in concept, SEO serves the same purpose as it always did - that is to ensure that your website is optimized for the search intent of your users - and this most likely will never change.
Interested in professionally boosting your B2B SEO efforts? Contact KeyScouts for a free SEO consultation.
