The Role of SEO Within a B2B Marketing Strategy – Finding a Balance

Today's post is an excerpt from The MFS Guide to B2B SEO: How to Integrate SEO into a Broader B2B Marketing Strategy.

With your goals set, the question then becomes about balancing your SEO activities with your overall marketing strategy. You want to get the most visitors you can to your site - but you also want to ensure they are the right kind of visitors. The kind of visitors that have legitimate buying interest and are suitably qualified to engage with your sales team.

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Looking at the 4 pillars of SEO we laid out in the previous chapter, the task becomes not merely to increase web visitors but to increase web visitors in a strategic way. Within each of the 4 areas there are general best practices to follow, but rather than simply following every SEO tip along the way, you should maintain a strategy-first mindset as you develop your SEO program.

4 SEO Pillars - Strategic Considerations

1. Technical SEO

There is little to consider here from an overall strategy viewpoint. Simply ensure your site is meeting technical SEO best practices by making whatever adjustments necessary or recommended to you by an SEO expert.

2. On-Page SEO

Again, for the most part, the task here is relatively straightforward. On-page SEO best practices should be followed - albeit not to the letter of the law. One on-page SEO tip would be to add keywords into header tags. You will need to exercise a degree of caution here. Yes, many on-page SEO best practices like image tag optimization, using the correct h tags, etc. should be strictly adhered to. There may be situations however where you will have to balance messaging with SEO.

One example might be an on-page tip to get a target keyword into a header tag - but doing so might not fit in with the page content or the message you are trying to convey on the page. There is a fine balance between on-page optimization and making your content sound like it was written like a robot.

Take a situation where a potential decision maker at one of your target companies comes to your site, do you want him to read a page that gets your company’s value proposition across in the best way possible, or do you want him to read a page that is stuffed with keywords in headers, and is built in such a way that keyword targeting is favored over articulating your value proposition. That situation requires a bit of consideration and you will have to use your judgement to achieve the correct balance here.

3. Off-Page SEO

From a strategy point of view, there is not much to consider here. You need to work with your SEO experts to build up backlinks that come to your site to build up your site authority. Links from questionable sources may have to be disavowed from time to time, but, for the most part, this backlink work will be straightforward and won’t require major strategic considerations or trade-offs.

4. SEO Content

Here is an area that we feel must be considered carefully. There are a number of possible routes to go down with SEO content.

Develop lots of broad awareness content to rank for as many terms as possible targeting buyers at the awareness stage of their journey. The goal would be to convert those visitors into leads via a form or chat feature on the site.
Develop content that targets buyers further along the decision-making process. This content might not generate as many visitors but will bring more qualified visitors to the site. In general these types of keyword searches would be more specific and considered longer tail keywords.
Develop a mix of awareness and decision stage content. Here you would seek to build up two different stages of your sales pipeline via SEO.

Incorporating SEO Into a B2B Marketing Strategy

Once again, the goals you set will come into play here - are you happy to get visitors to your site and figure out how to convert the visitors into leads or would you sacrifice some traffic gains for more targeted visitors? Our advice - given this is the year of our lord two thousand twenty five - would be to go the latter route. We know buyer behavior is changing, we know AI is impacting search results, and we know that AI has made high volume content production - albeit low quality content production - a reality. Another factor is that lead form fills are in terminal decline.

Above are just some example considerations - you will have your own set of circumstances that are unique to your company. In general, think about your SEO project in terms of what specifically you are setting out to achieve, and how you want to get there.

Balance is key. SEO is an important part of your marketing strategy - but it is rapidly evolving. The pace of change in SEO is such that SEO might be radically different even one year from now. Stay strategy-focused, balanced, and agile - opportunities in SEO will arise, but you will need to adopt an approach to SEO that is flexible and allows you to adapt and tweak activities to meet ever-changing conditions.

What works today, might not work tomorrow - but, by implementing an SEO program that works and evolves within the parameters of your greater B2B marketing strategy, you will be best positioned to make your SEO program a success.

This post is an excerpt from the MFS Guide to B2B SEO: How to Integrate SEO into a Broader B2B Marketing Strategy. If you would like to read more you can access the guide in full here. If you have a marketing challenge you are looking for support with, you are welcome to set up a no obligation initial strategy consultation with our team.