A Beginner's SEO Guide for Business-to-Business Companies

According to one definition. A market is the sum total of all the buyers and sellers in the area or region under consideration. The Search Engine is a market. Where all buyers are searchers, and sellers are websites. Your goal is to own and maintain the most amount of positions in Google. There are 2 commodities we should consider before ranking for a google search or keyword:

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1) The number of persons that search for it (Volume)

2) How high is the profit potential from it (Intent)

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The higher the volume & commercial intent, the harder it is to rank. But the more lucrative that keyword is. Usually, the most difficult keywords have a high CPC (in Google Ads).

Sometimes we find keywords with a high volume of searches and low difficulty. Or relatively high commercial intent and low difficulty. We call these opportunities low-hanging fruits. Because we can rank for them without putting any additional effort (apart from writing).

And it is our job to find them. Finding these quick wins are the key to building a fruitful incoming stream of traffic for your SaaS.

One crucial step to bringing revenue with SEO is to have a well-oiled contract process. It should run and capture the most amount of opportunities in the Search Engine. It includes knowing your customer journey. Systematizing your writing and content choosing. Ranking & writing for new opportunities. You can think of traffic generation as the number of successful experiments.

You write and target keywords based on what you think is the best criteria. Once you start ranking for a keyword with volume, then you get traffic. But doing so requires your ability to assess ranking difficulty. For example, if you'd like to rank for the keyword: ‘AI bot for mobile apps'. It has medium difficulty (we’ll go more in-depth about difficulty assessment later on). So you conclude it is a good shot to take because it is not so hard to rank for it. You create an article and a landing page for an AI bot for mobile apps. But here is the little trick, that criteria may vary. There is no way to create an artificial definition of intent or difficulty assertiveness. What is important is to analyze how topically relevant you are. If you talk about shoes, you won't have many chances to rank for toilet paper for kids.

To define relevance you need to understand what is the focus of your content strategy. The second point is to benchmark difficulty according to your own domain authority. You should try to rank for keywords that are in your same league. Suppose your domain authority is 25 (you can check this on Semrush or Ahrefs). Then you should not try to rank for 50 Difficulty Score Keywords, but rather those around 25-30. You should play at the same level as the difficulty you want to own.

Another step to increase traffic, is to correctly structure your content. Content hubs are a useful tool to achieve this. What are content hubs? And how do you create them?

A content hub is linking many articles from one page, a pillar page to subtopics (specific page). So in more practical terms, it could be an explanatory guide (like this one) that explains the topic at a broader level. For example Drift, the sales conversation software does this well. Their content strategy goes all about Sales & Marketing. Their potential customers want to read all about those 2 topics. To structure their content they created a pillar page (one big page) called: "The Ultimate Guide to Conversation Sales & Selling". That page links to other subtopics like "Conversational Marketing", "Account Based Selling Guide", and many others. The results of this are two:

• Better user experience thanks to organized navigation and a clear reading path.

• Better rankings because you increase the authority of your subpages.

• Improved internal linking which is a major factor to gain rankings.

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So far we've talked about the strategic process of increasing by 5x-10x your organic traffic by. But the fact is that there are other questions left to answer about this process:

• How to build your website authority? How to create an automated system of outreach & collaboration.

• How to analyze keyword difficulty to find the best opportunities? (note: this is the keystone of successful SEO)

• How important is content quality? 

• What about technical stuff? What should I fix first?

Domain authority

The more backlinks you have, the higher you can rank. Having a good profile of backlinks backing up your main domain it is still, in 2022, the most performing ranking factor.

The two main foundations for building backlinks are Relationships & Authority. You can build backlinks by getting more authoritative websites to link to you. In fact, Google’s algorithm already works as a simulated workflow of the social framework. Look at this chart on how PageRank (Google’s Algorithm) works:

Another interesting study states that pages in the first position exponentially increase their backlinks due to their increased credibility . The winning approach is to build a collaborative mindset. Your brand should talk with their community. It should be able to relate to their main figures within your software category. Among the many strategies to increase DA, we recommend:

Guest Post Outreach

A guest post is an article written and posted on someone’s blog. It is a basic exchange where you provide them with content for free, and they post a link to your website. You make a compelling offer. Same as you, they too want to increase their traffic. You should offer something that is aligned to their content strategy. By having this system running in the background. You will be able to systematically increase authority. The issue is, this is a crowded space. Asking for links to authoritative domains is tough, it is very common to receive guest post proposals. They don’t want to link to you. The expected conversion rate for this should be 1 backlink response from 55 emails sent.

Relationship-Based Link Building

According to CXL, the #1 reason people link to your content is connections. Thus a lot of connections build links, and a lot of them increase traffic. But we have to consider the costs. You have to make this repeatable in order to create a massive change in your domain authority.

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At BravoAlt we’ve combined both of these methods.

Keyword difficulty analysis & volume prediction

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CTRL+F+KEYWORD

When analyzing a keyword, it is useful to click CTRL+F. You can check how many times that keyword is repeated on the SERP.

PDF in the SERP

PDFs are a format not supported by Google, but they can still be indexed. So if a PDF is ranking for the keyword you 'd like to rank for then that could mean it is not competitive.

Indexed forums

LinkedIn Posts, Medium Blogs, Stackoverflow Issues & Quora questions are great ways to find out if you are in front of a traffic opportunity. Forums massively index questions and relevant posts, but Google does not value them as your own website. You have only one purpose. You serve for only 1 (one) topic. And that is your advantage.

Content quality vs content quantity

The key basis to build an amazing content strategy is to just push content. Because you don't know what is going to be your big piece of content that is going to get you many visitors. You have to test. Google has a quality standard in its guidelines called E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). The average time a good long-form article takes to write is 4 hours. Content quality is a ranking factor, but going too deep into crafting one piece of content is not ideal. The solution should be an equilibrium between these two.

Technical SEO to unblock traffic

Having 404s, incorrect sitemap, and low page speed are factors for not having multiple keywords ranked. Here’s a quick win for software companies:

• Indexation. If your page is not on Google, then it's impossible to receive traffic. Articles and pages you created could not be indexed due to never requesting. Thus you created some pages with the purpose of getting traffic, but will never be able to get 1 click from them.

• Meta tags. Changing your article’s headlines. To change meta tags, you need to request indexation.

• Google Pagespeed Insights: Use this tool to analyze your page score speed. Take into account that the mobile score will be lower than the desktop one.

Going to the On-Page route here are some improvements you can apply:

• Duplicated Content. Google wants to show its users valuable information. If you duplicate content or words across your pages, then you will lose ranking potential.

• Missing Keyword Research. From product pages to blog articles, you need to include keywords in your headlines. You should have a clear targeted keyword if you want to be sure that you're going to bring traffic with content.