1. B2B Marketers' Roadmap to SEO Success
STEP 1
PLANNING
& RESEARCH
Business goals
Search personas
Keyword research
TRACKING
STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4
On-page optimization
Content creation
Site accessibility
PR
Link building
Social media
Traffic & leads
Pipeline & ROI
CONTENT
OPTIMIZATION
OUTREACH
& PROMOTION MEASUREMENT
Keyword
ranking
Competitive
ranking
Page
optimization score
Inbound
links
Shares
& likes
Estimated
click value

2. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Step 1 – Planning and research
Your trip to SEO success starts with some key planning and research activities. Take
the time upfront to understand your business goals and needs of your target audiences.
Those factors directly feed into your keyword research.
Business goals – which product or service offerings are priorities for your business?
What lead split are you aiming for by product line? What types of leads are you trying to
capture and how do they match with the different parts of your sales cycle? –i.e. early
stage leads from content downloads, webinar registrants for mid-funnel leads, free-trial
leads for people in the evaluation phase of their buyer’s journey. How many visits and
leads do you expect from your SEO and other inbound marketing campaigns?
Search personas – how many different types of buyers are you trying to reach through
your SEO efforts? What is their role in the buying process? What pain points do they
have? What type of information do they consume? Where do they go to find informa-
tion? And most importantly—what keyword terms do they use to search on? We
recommend developing search personas to answer these questions. Here are some great
resources to help you get started:
»
» 5 Steps To Building a Search Persona
»
» Building a search persona (Webinar)
Answering the questions above will enable you to create a strategic SEO and content
plan that will guide the rest of your journey.
HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP
Optify provides some great tools to aid
your planning and research efforts.
Use Optify to gather competitive
intelligence, get keyword suggestions
and determine what current content is
driving traffic and leads.
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3. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Keyword research
Your keywords are a foundational element of your SEO and inbound marketing efforts—
it’s essential that you choose them wisely. This means taking a strategic approach to
your keyword research, an approach that differs from building a paid search list.
Get this critical step right and you’ll maximize both traffic and leads from your inbound
campaigns. You’ll be looking for keyword phrases that are highly relevant to your
business, have good search volume, are not too competitive and directly support your
conversion goals. Your list should also contain a mix of terms across the keyword
spectrum—see the illustration below for more details.
If all of this sounds like a tall order, read 5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword
List. This how-to guide will walk you through the steps you need to take to develop a
great keyword list.
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SEO keyword diversity for B2B marketers
COMPETITION
HEAD TERMS - 1-2 WORD PHRASES
“CRM”
“CRM software”
“CRM Saas software”
“best CRM software”
“review of CRM Saas software vendors”
“whitepapers on CRM best practices”
CHUNKY MIDDLE OR “TORSO TERMS” -
SHORT WORD PHRASES
LONG TAIL - MORE DESCRIPTIVE WORD PHRASES
SEARCH FREQUENCY
HIGH
HIGH
LOW
LOW
Optify’s Inbound Marketing
solution helped us drive more
qualified leads and close
more deals from SEO.”
Jon Kohl, VP of Marketing, ADSI
“

4. B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Step 2 – Content optimization
You have a plan. You have a strategic keyword list. You’re now ready for step 2 of your
journey. Great content is the foundation of SEO success—content that attracts and
engages your audience, meets their needs and leads them through the sales cycle. But
great content alone isn’t enough. It needs to be optimized so that search engines have
the best chance of finding it.
Creating great content
In step 1 you determined what content elements you need to meet your business goals
and how they align with your target personas. Your content can and should take many
different forms—this will help you cover all parts of the sales cycle and maximize reach.
In fact a recent benchmark study found that B2B marketers deployed an average of eight
content tactics to achieve their goals*.
Your Web site and Blog are the foundation of your content platform, with both playing
key roles in attracting and engaging your audience. Other content elements such as
white papers, videos, presentations and webinars are important for your site, and also
lend themselves well to distribution on third party sites. If these pieces are optimized
well they can help both improve your SEO rank and drive more traffic.
As you go about creating content, don’t overuse keywords. Remember that you’re writing
for humans not bots or spiders. Always strive to write great content that your target
audiences will find useful. This not only makes good business sense, but may also
support your ranking goals given Google’s recent announcement of their “over-optimiza-
tion” algorithm.
Check out the resources below to get some ideas and tips on producing great content:
»
» Content that works for B2B marketers
»
» Ten tips for creating great content
»
» The basics of blogging as a tool for B2B marketing
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B2B Content Marketing Usage(byTactic)
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
79%
74%
65%
63%
58%
56%
52%
51%
46%
31%
31%
30%
25%
22%
20%
16%
16%
15%
14%
10%
Articles
SocialMedia(otherthanblogs)
Blogs
eNewsletters
Case Studies
In-PersonEvents
Videos
WhitePapers
Webinars/Webcasts
Microsites
PrintMagazines
PrintNewsletters
eBooks
Podcasts
MobileContent
DigitalMagazines
VirtualConferences
TraditionalMedia
ResearchReports
BrandedContentTools
* Information and chart from “B2B content marketing, 2012 Benchmarks, budgets and trends”
by The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

5. HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP
Use Optify to see how well your pages
are optimized and find out exactly what
you need to do to improve your page
score to increase rank and traffic.
B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
On-page optimization
You’ve created great Web pages, Blog posts and other content elements. Now it’s time
to optimize that content to make it easier for search engines to find. Optimize around
just one or two keywords to maximize your chances of success. For your core Web site
content or pillar pages use the strategic keyword phrases that are closer to the head of
the SEO distribution curve. Blog posts and other content items are a great place to use
terms that are more ‘long tail’ in nature. See the diagram called “SEO keyword diversity
for B2B marketers” for more information on this point.
The resources below contain information about all aspects of on-page optimization.
You’ll learn how to approach key meta tags including title, description and image alt tags.
You’ll also get some great tips on optimizing PDFs and videos.
»
» SEO 101: What is a Pillar Page?
»
» SEO Best Practices: 10 Tactics to Rank Higher
»
» The Changing Face of SERPs: The Durable Elements of SEO
»
» 7 Tips for Optimizing Video For Search
»
» There’s SEO gold in your PDFs—make sure you optimize them
Site accessibility
Site accessibility refers to things your Web team can do at the site level to make your
Web and Blog content as accessible as possible for search engines.
Check out these resources to learn more about crawling and indexing, site maps, the
effects of page load speed and URL structure.
»
» Six tips for improving your website’s accessibility
»
» How Many Homes Does Google Think You Have?
»
» Five Ways to Optimize for Google’s Sitelinks Update
»
» Seven Steps for Stellar SEO During a Site Redesign
»
» 6 Tips for Improving Your Page Load Speed to Rank Higher
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6. HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP
Optify has some great features to help
you with your outreach and promotion
efforts including a link suggestion tool
to help you garner new inbound links
and Twitter for Business—a great way
to syndicate your content.
B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Step 3 – Outreach and promotion
On page and site level optimization will only get you so far with your SEO efforts. To
really boost your SEO rank and to maximize traffic you need to dedicate time and resourc-
es on your outreach efforts.
Link Building
The number and quality of inbound links to your site are key factors for search engine
algorithms. Having great content that can be found will garner you some inbound links as
people write about your content and link back to your site. But to really grow the number
of high-quality inbound links you need to take a proactive and systematic approach to
your link-building efforts.
Discover how to get more quality inbound links while avoiding shady tactics by reading
the inbound marketing guide for link building
PR
Your PR efforts are a key part of your outreach program, and go way beyond targeting
traditional media outlets. Explore the resources below to learn how to maximize the
results of your PR efforts from both your core media contacts and from the Blogosphere.
»
» Top Ten Tips for Optimizing Your Press Release for SEO
»
» 7 Tips for Optimizing Your New Press Page for Press and Search
»
» 31 Tips for Getting Your Stories Found in Google News
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7. HOW OPTIFY CAN HELP
Use Optify to track and report on the
metrics that matter most for your
inbound marketing efforts. From
keyword ranking to closed-loop ROI
reporting, Optify’s powerful tracking
and analytics engine gives you the
information you need to make informed
marketing decisions. Optify integrates
with Salesforce.com to give you a
closed-loop view of your inbound
marketing efforts
B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
Social media
Social media has revolutionized the way information is found, consumed and shared.
Promoting your content via social networks has a direct traffic benefit, but increasing
evidence suggests that social influence (how much your content is shared and ‘liked’) also
impacts your SEO rank.
Get insight on how to get the most traffic and SEO benefit from your social media and
Blogging efforts from the resources below:
»
» How Social Has Turned Search On Its Head
»
» 5 Tactics to Help Your SEO through Social Media
»
» How Social Media Has Revolutionized Search Marketing (Webinar)
Step 4 – Measurement
To determine whether your SEO and other inbound marketing efforts are really success-
ful you need to measure not just traffic and leads, but pipeline and ROI. This level of
closed-loop reporting requires tight integration between your inbound marketing and CRM
platforms. With this type of solution in place you can report on the number of leads,
opportunities and sales along with the associated costs and conversion rates.
Tracking
There are dozens of metrics that relate to SEO and inbound marketing, all of which tell part of
the story. It’s important to determine upfront which metrics are important to your business,
so you can establish benchmarks and track progress.
Metrics such as keyword rank, number of inbound links and overall page score tell you what
areas need attention and where to prioritize your efforts. They indicate the progress you’re
making towards your ultimate goal of generating more traffic, leads and opportunities. To see
which SEO metrics we recommend you keep track of read the Top 10 SEO metrics that B2B
marketers need to understand to generate more leads.
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8. INBOUND DEMAND
TRACKING & ANALYTICS
SALES ENABLEMENT
EMAIL NURTURING
Create a flow of high quality
leads into your marketing
funnel with enterprise-class
SEO and social marketing.
Get full insight into what influences your buyers and the path they take to find and evaluate you during their
research process.
Nurture your house list with
email campaigns and get
detailed intelligence about what
every lead does after they
receive your emails.
Help sales reach prospects and
engage with them early in the
sales process with visitor
intelligence and prospect alerts.
THE OPTIFY INBOUND MARKETING SUITE
B2B Marketers’ Roadmap to SEO Success
About Optify
Optify delivers an integrated top-of-the-funnel solution for marketers responsible for
fueling their company’s growth. Optify helps professional B2B marketers reach more
buyers and generate more demand for their products or services month-after-month.
The Optify Inbound Marketing Software Suite brings together the enterprise-class SEO,
social marketing, website analytics and tools that B2B marketers need to increase
awareness of their business, influence buyers across social networks, and engage with
prospects at the earliest point of their buyer’s journey.
NEXT STEPS
• Request a demo
• Sign up for a free trial
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
• Build Your SEO Campaign
in 15 Minutes (PDF)
• International SEO (PDF)
• How the new face of SERPs
has altered the Organic
CTR Curve (PDF)
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