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6 B2B PR SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid And How To Solve Them

In this article, we will share with you the 12 worst SEO bad things you can do to drive traffic, ranking, and conversions for your website.

Sep 08, 20222.6K Shares264.7K ViewsWritten By: Alastair Martin
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  1. Trading Blindly Without An SEO Game Plan
  2. Use Keywords That Are More Important To You Than Your Customers
  3. Lack Of New Content
  4. Forgetting About Local SEO
  5. Failure To Monitor KPIs And Continual Optimization Of Content Marketing
  6. Missing Keywords From Content And Text Links
  7. Is SEO Effective For B2B?
  8. How Many Keywords Are Good For SEO?
  9. What Is A Good SEO Plan?
  10. How Important Is SEO?

In this article, we will share with you the 12 worst SEObad things you can do to drive traffic, ranking, and conversions for your website.

B2B SEOis a complex game that always comes up with new rules and strategies as search engines update their website regularly. Google itself provides almost a thousand updates every year.

But if you are not an expert SEOexpert, it can be difficult to follow all SEOrules and make as few mistakes as possible. But even SEO experts will make mistakes because they are so strong and solid that yesterday’s thing may not work today.

So, this is my list of the best SEO mistakes to avoid and improve so you can improve your site’s ranking, increase organic traffic, and drive leads to your business.

Here are 6 b2b PR SEO mistakesyou really must avoid:

There are many B2B SEO Mistakes. By far, this is the worst

Trading Blindly Without An SEO Game Plan

When you go on a road trip, you rarely leave the house without a map or, in today's world, a GPS-enabled smartphone app. The same is true for figurative rather than literal journeys; for example, with the aim of optimizing your web contentand rising in search enginerankings.

Do you want to get more conversions? Do you rank higher on the Google home page? Increase your sales? It is very difficult for your businessto achieve these lofty goals if you don't have a strategy for achieving them. Incredibly, 70% of small businesses didn't have an SEO strategyin place in 2020.1

If it sounds too familiar, this is an opportunity to change gears and create a competitive advantage to avoid this common SEO mistake. If you instill a one-time, top-down SEO plan, you'll actually arrive at your intended destination (rather than a random layover hundreds of miles away).

A successful trip usually involves a to-do list. Take inventory by measuring your competitors and their metrics, including:

  • Rankings
  • Content
  • Keyword
  • Performance

Studying other companies' strategies can help you focus better on yours by targeting your adsto overlapping customer bases, keywords, and content types in your (most effective) way. You can also find automated technologies that improve workflows and boost performance or SEO optimization.

Clicking search symbol
Clicking search symbol

Use Keywords That Are More Important To You Than Your Customers

It is quite common for some B2B websites, especially those in the techindustry, to overemphasize nomenclature, specifications, and in some cases, products or categories with clever names as attempts to stand out.

These product and service references are accurate to some, but often not to the buyer. In many B2B SEO programs, one of the most common exercises is to develop an understanding of what customers really think about an industry or a company's products and services.

What a customer might type into a search box on Google, Yahoo, or Bing could very well be different from the language the company uses in its marketing and advertising content.

Here are some tips on how toresearch the keywords customers use to find your products / services:

  • Brainstorming based on customer solutions and needs
  • Identify which concepts are most relevant based on where the customer is in the buying cycle.
  • Conducting interviews or customer surveys
  • Review the current web analytics for referral search traffic.
  • Survey of sales and customer servicestaff to find out the phrases used by customers.
  • Take advantage of social mediatracking tools for tags and phrases
  • Review the competitor's website content

Once you've created a glossary of key terms, you can organize them by site category and add popularity, competition, and relevance metrics to guide their use to optimize existing pages and create future pages.

You can create a standard keyword glossary based on input from tools such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. A social keyword glossary can be created using social media monitoring tools that add keyword groups.

Examining both types of glossaries allows SEOs to find cross phrases for social media optimization and standard SEO.

Lack Of New Content

If you read the online marketing blog on a frequent basis (and we hope you will), you will know what we think of content for B2B marketing companies.

A longer buying cycle for most B2B products and services requires more content to educate customers, help them evaluate their options, consider options, and ultimately make purchasing decisions.

Many B2B SEO efforts focus on optimizing existing content without a content marketingstrategy that defines an editorial calendar for producing new content.

Blogs have been our favorite tool for managing and promoting B2B marketing content to attract customers through searches, links and mentions on social media and networking sites.

Along with the creation of new content there is the problem of the architecture of the site. Managing content and linking keywords with pages helps search engines find pages and deduce their meaning.

New and thematic content paired with a logical site structure that uses appropriate categories, subcategories and links can have a huge impact on the search engine driven customers of a B2B website.

Every new web page or digital resource optimized, published and indexed by a search engine can serve as a potential entry point for potential customers, potential journalists and employees.

Many companies in the business-to-business category publish a large number of documents in PDF format. They can be optimized with keywords and links like any other document. The same goes for white papers, archived newsletters, press releases, past webinars, case studies, and content used to describe online demos.

However, don't create and publish content just to add more "hooks in the water". Pages and media should be targeted and should be included in the keyword glossary and managed with an editorial content guide.

Search performance is highest when you first optimize content for customers and then search engines.

Book of local SEO
Book of local SEO

Forgetting About Local SEO

Google spends a lot of time improving local search results and it is becoming increasingly difficult to get visibility on local packages on search engine results pages. Make sure all your business, showroom and office locations are on the map.

Google My Business is a great place to start. Make sure you create lists for each of your locations as mentioned above.

Make sure all your profiles are 100% complete and that your NAP details (name, address and phone number) match exactly what is listed on your website. Follow this by creating your local dating profile. Subscribe to local directories (Yell, Scoot, 118) and niche directories relevant to your industry.

In addition to creating your local dating profile, you also need to implement schema markupon your website. Schema markup is essentially a piece of code that tells search engines what your data means rather than just what it says.

You can use outline markup to mark content as:

  • Articles
  • Local business
  • Software applications
  • Events(edit)
  • Products
  • Restaurants
  • Book reviews
  • Movie
  • TV episodes and ratings.

Google Data Markup Assistant is a great tool for doing this. Alternatively, your web developer should be able to help implement it for you.

Failure To Monitor KPIs And Continual Optimization Of Content Marketing

Each stage of the buying cycle presents different needs for the shopper who uses research to find information and solutions.

Tracking key data and interactions that aren't necessarily conversion or sales focused can provide useful insights into which content or link sources are helping move the needle in the right direction.

Satisfying users' needs with the right content can be measured in various ways depending on what is being offered.

Some KPIs to look out for include:

  • Keyword traffic
  • Traffic of branded and unbranded keywords
  • Indexed pages, popular entry pages
  • Webmaster Tools Monitoring and error reporting
  • Rankings related to your site over time
  • Inbound links: quantity, quality, longevity
  • Link traffic
  • Dating and social media traffic

Obviously, hitting goal pages and conversions is part of the B2B search marketing feedback loop to drive future optimization as well. For one of the best resources on the web to measure website performance, read Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics Blog.

Through continuous monitoring, keyword performance trends, cyclicality and new opportunities will be revealed. Optimizing certain optimization and linking efforts can improve performance and provide new channels for search traffic.

Puzzle with a missing piece
Puzzle with a missing piece

Content alone doesn't solve SEO challenges, as customers search using keyword phrases. The keyword research performed in the first recommendation should be used to "optimize" the content of the web page and any other file formats (PDF, DOC, PPT) or media (images, video, audio) that can be found in an engine of research. A general guide is to optimize for 1-2 sentences per web page, document or digital resource.

Here are some basic on-page content optimizationtips to guide keyword usage:

  • Title tag
  • headers
  • Paragraph titles
  • Keywords in the body of the text
  • More text on the links
  • Image alt text

Ideally, the content management systemshould be modified to require users to use keywords in these areas when creating new pages. Dynamic keyword insertion tactics can also be used to automate keyword placement in title tagsand image alt text, for example.

We have worked with many B2B websites that have great content, but lack the keywords where customers and search engines need it, especially in links between pages. Adding keywords to the link tells both website visitors and search engines which page topic they are linking to.

When it comes to links, one of the most frequently missed opportunities is promoting keywords in other websites' links to B2B content.

Many marketers complain that they don't know where to find inbound links for B2B pages outside of paid directories, link exchanges, and news / bookmarking / social media sites.

Basic backlink analysison sites with active public relations, advertising, and marketing programs often reveals that the anchor text for inbound links is the company name.

The main strategy we follow, regardless of whether the site is focused on B2Cor B2B customers, is to create, package and promote content that is worth linking to.

However, no one will know how to link to great content unless they promote it. One of the most effective ways to do this is to develop social distribution channels.

Here are some examples:

  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Facebook and LinkedIn status
  • Facebook and LinkedIn groups
  • Social news, networks and media: Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Flickr, YouTube

One of the best ways to acquire keyword rich links from other websites relevant to B2B content is to ask! For example, when public relations staff are coordinating the publication of a contributed article or have secured a position in the media that mentions the company, they may also remember to ask the reporter to link to the company site.

The worst the publisher can say is that no, it is not our policy to link. Press releases are common tactics for building links, as are guest posts on other industry blogs. The other best way to acquire B2B links is to create unique and often fun or engaging content that other users share and link to.

Google text with a question mark sign
Google text with a question mark sign

Is SEO Effective For B2B?

SEO is one of the most important customer acquisition channels for B2B companies. Having strong organic visibility at all stages of the buying cycle is a proven way to accelerate growth.

How Many Keywords Are Good For SEO?

For most small businesses, we recommend starting with around 5 keywords (each with a monthly search volume of 100). For some businesses, it might not seem like a lot, but targeting 5 keywords doesn't mean your website only ranks for 5 keywords and gets traffic from 5 keywords.

What Is A Good SEO Plan?

SEO strategy is a detailed plan for improving a website's search engine rankings in order to gain more organic traffic. This plan should be based on several fundamental pillars, including technical SEO, content strategy, on-page SEO, link building, and user experience.

How Important Is SEO?

The most important SEO activities have to do with: Identifying what users are looking for in relation to your products and services. Create content that makes users happy. Providing the right signals to crawlers and search engine algorithms through various SEO techniques.

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