Why You Need a Great B2B SEO Funnel and How To Build One

A business-to-business (B2B) company needs a reliable marketing strategy to stay top of mind with its clients. Once a prospect indicates an interest, you must guide them toward making a purchase. An excellent strategy is to use a B2B search engine optimization (SEO) funnel to keep track of your leads.

Let us explore the following topics:

• Benefits of a B2B SEO funnel.
• Steps to create a B2B SEO funnel.

Along the way, learn how to optimize the different B2B SEO funnel stages like a B2B SEO agency. Let’s go!

Want to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to SEO? Watch this video!

Benefits of a B2B SEO Funnel

Anyone involved in creating marketing strategies has heard of the buyer's funnel. This describes where the person is in buying a product or ordering a service. They start in the unaware stage until a triggering event leads them to the awareness stage of the funnel. With guidance, a prospect moves from awareness to interest, to decision, and then to the action stages.

The SEO funnel functions this way: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional stages. A person starts gathering information until they find the right product or service. The transactional stage is when they finally make a decision. B2B companies should produce high-quality content throughout the SEO funnel to stay on top of their clients' choices.

Let us look at more benefits of using a B2B SEO funnel.

• Increase Organic Traffic: A B2B SEO funnel guides marketers in creating quality, engaging content for every stage of the funnel. Quality content is informative, relevant, and contains good links, guaranteeing a higher ranking on search engine results pages (SERP). Having good rankings also increases visibility and organic traffic.
• Boost Lead Generation: A higher ranking on SERPs improves lead generation. A website at the top of the SERPs will surely attract attention. B2B customers choose companies at the top because they are seen as industry experts. Users visit the website, contact the company, and sign up for email alerts or newsletters, which boosts lead generation.
• Organize SEO Content Strategy: Every business benefits from SEO. With an SEO funnel, marketers are able to organize their content creation. They can also efficiently monitor the progress of their content strategies and quickly adjust.
• Improve Return on Investment (ROI): A well-oiled content strategy eventually helps businesses achieve their marketing goals. Whether it’s to increase leads, conversions, or sales, all of these B2B marketing best practices lead to a positive ROI. Creating an efficient SEO funnel specific to a B2B company is what it takes.

Steps to Create a B2B SEO Funnel

As mentioned earlier, an SEO funnel has four stages: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. To ensure effective strategies for every funnel stage, follow these steps:

   1. Identify Customer Segments

To create an effective SEO funnel, marketers must first determine their customers. Clearly define customer segments, particularly how they look for products or services. These techniques help B2B companies create customer segments:

• Research and identify the customers. Collect information such as gender, age, income, values, interests, and geographic location.
• Divide the audience into groups. Ensure differences between these segments, identify sales percentages, and determine the approximate size of each segment.
• Create customer personas to avoid making content out of assumptions. Consider the customer's background, responsibilities, professional history, and more.
• Ask current customers about their needs and preferences using surveys.
• Correlate products and services to customer segments. Doing so enhances their experience, creates insights, and improves focus.
• Prioritize segments that respond to ads and those that generate higher revenues.

   2. Create a Content Strategy

Businesses can develop their content roadmap once they clearly define their customer segments. Content strategy creation is a marketing priority that makes content creation more efficient. It starts with keyword and topic research for every level of the buyer’s funnel. 

These terms help optimize content and the B2B website. Create a great content strategy with these strategies:

• Set content creation goals. For B2B companies, it may include improving leads, increasing sales, and enhancing brand awareness.
• Analyze current content and content strategy. Identify pages that get higher engagement and identify areas for improvement.
• Check keyword effectiveness. Use a keyword research tool such as Google Keyword Planner to discover search volume, difficulty, and competition.
• Talk to your team and brainstorm content ideas. Ask for suggestions, look for good pictures online, and check your competitor's websites.
• Decide how to measure results. Depending on the content strategy (social media, email, blog, or landing page content), measure effectiveness using relevant metrics. Measure traffic, conversions, engagement, authority, and SEO performance.

   3. Write Content

The next step is creating stellar content for every stage of the funnel. It ensures that you expertly guide and lead every prospect. Writing great content for B2B companies requires excellent skill and knowledge of the industry to which the company belongs. Marketers use these tactics to write engaging content:

• Provide research on the topic. This ensures a deep understanding of the topic through coverage of figures, issues, solutions, and strategies.
• Incorporate subtopics when creating an outline or page content. Searchers are also looking for subtopics related to primary keywords.
• Use correct keywords. The primary keyword should be used once in the headline and once in the body of the article. Add keywords as naturally as possible and avoid keyword stuffing.
• Include internal and external links in the content. Internal linking connects related articles inside the funnel.
• Use quality images, videos, infographics, and other visual content.
• Consider the word count for a topic. Too much content can negatively affect SEO.

   4. Follow B2B SEO Funnel Optimization Tips

Content creation is just one of the steps to creating a formidable SEO funnel strategy. Perform thorough planning and research when creating content for every funnel stage. To do so, marketers follow these best practices:

• Prioritize content according to value, competition, and volume. Remember: high value, low competition, and high search volume. For competitive industries, emphasize informational content at the top of the funnel.
• Promote and amplify content. Use email newsletters, social media platforms, and various retargeting campaigns on Facebook or Google.
• Overhaul old content. Some old content might still be helpful. Update statistics, information, and images. Make sure that the links are working and update contact information.
• Practice content variety. Review the audience's interests to make certain that the content meets their needs and preferences. For example, a podcast can become a written guide, while how-to content can become a video.

Summing Up

B2B companies need an SEO funnel to ensure that their marketing efforts align with their customers, no matter where they are in the buyer's funnel. It is an efficient way to make content strategies work and streamline connecting with prospects. A well-developed SEO funnel guides prospects until they become full-fledged customers.

Find out more about how an SEO funnel can help your B2B company. Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) for the latest in B2B SEO.