B2B SEO Strategy for 2025: Complete Step by Step Guide for B2B Companies

Here are some statistics that demonstrate SEO’s importance within the B2B space:

• A study has shown that SEO generates 34% of qualified leads in the B2B space.
• Among B2B companies, SEO is the most used marketing strategy.
• 19% of B2B marketers note that SEO contributes to achieving their top-of-funnel goals the most.
• 30% of growth-mode B2B companies say SEO considerably contributes to bottom-of-funnel goals.

SEO is a core digital marketing channel that simply can’t be ignored by B2B companies. SEO helps B2B brands connect with prospects at every stage of their buying journey. 

We have years of experience in the B2B SEO space and know exactly what it takes to craft a winning strategy for your brand. When it comes to KPIs, we focus on what matters – getting more demo requests and sales inquiries from the right people.

What is B2B SEO?

B2B SEO is the process of optimising a B2B website to increase organic traffic, improve rankings in the search engine results pages and boost conversions. It’s one of the most effective ways of attracting qualified leads to your site.

How does B2B SEO differ from B2C SEO?

The main difference is the target audience. B2C SEO is aimed at individual consumers interested in a brand’s products or services. B2B SEO helps attract individuals who make purchasing decisions at other businesses. So, it targets C-Suite executives such as CEOs, CFOs and CMOs.

Although the basics of B2C and B2B SEO are the same, the approaches are tailored to appeal to two different audiences.

Some marketers may choose to build an in-house SEO team to develop their strategy. However, hiring a consultant to do it for you is generally more cost-effective and helps you achieve better results.

13 Steps for an effective SEO B2B strategy in 2025

Creating, executing and maintaining a B2B SEO strategy is very time-consuming and resource-intensive. However, it simply can’t be ignored, as 23% of B2B marketers note organic search as the most successful channel for driving revenue.

To save time and money, it’s best to find someone who knows what they’re doing and can work with your in-house team to execute it for you.

To show you how it works, we will lay out the 13 steps of how we as SEO consultants would take to implement an effective strategy for your B2B website.

1. Consider your budget and resource allocation

Before you hire anyone to execute your strategy, you need to consider your budget and how you will allocate your resources. Failing to do so can lead to several negative outcomes:

• Overspending on specific SEO services that don’t align with your marketing goals.
• The partial implementation of SEO strategies if your budget runs out.
• Difficulty in measuring ROI as you cannot accurately attribute results to your SEO strategy.

To avoid this, you need to fully evaluate your total marketing budget and determine the amount you can allocate to SEO to achieve your objectives. On average, B2B companies allocate 15% of their marketing budget to SEO.

However, this can vary depending on your niche and exactly what you hope to achieve with your strategy.

2. Understand the buyer’s journey

As a marketer, you know it’s important to target users at different stages of the buyer’s journey. If this isn’t done in B2B SEO, it results in a misaligned content strategy that fails to move leads further along the journey, which ultimately means your business loses sales.

This is partly due to the fact that B2B buyers spend 27% of their time in the buyer’s journey researching products/services online. So, failing to optimise for the buyer’s journey can seriously impact revenue.

At Growthack, we create intent-based customer journey maps that outline how users interact with content at each stage.

This enables us to identify the relevant keywords and content types that are most effective at moving leads to the next stage and getting them to convert.

Typically, this is the content strategy we’d apply to target users at each stage:

Awareness

Content at this stage should focus on raising awareness of your brand and its products/services. So, we’d target users with content like informative blog posts, infographics and e-books.

Consideration

At this stage, we’re looking to nurture leads and provide further information to users already interested in your brand. To do this, we use content like product demo videos, white papers and product comparison guides.

Decision

Users in the decision stage are almost ready to convert, but we need to address any lingering concerns and convince them to choose your brand. The best content types for this stage include case studies, buyer guides and interactive ROI calculators.

This strategy allows us to address users’ specific needs at every stage of their decision-making process. This helps foster stronger relationships with your brand and, ultimately, increases conversions.

3. Perform keyword research

Keyword research is one of the foundations of any effective B2B SEO strategy. Without it, it’s easy to overlook niche, long-tail keywords with high conversion potential.

It can also mean wasting resources targeting irrelevant keywords that don’t align with the search intent of your target audience.

If this happens, you will miss out on valuable traffic when decision-makers search for terms related to your niche. This can significantly impact sales and revenue as 66% of B2B buyers use search results as their primary source for product discovery.

Our content SEO services include a thorough keyword research phase that involves:

• Identifying seed keywords related to your specific industry. This involves using keyword research tools and gathering insights from customers and your sales teams.
• Identifying more specific, long-tail keywords (3+ words) to target more qualified traffic. Plus, targeting long-tail keywords has been shown to increase click-through rate (CTR) by 3% to 6%.
• Grouping these keywords based on search intent (informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial) so that content can be tailored to different stages of the buyer’s journey.
• Targeting keywords based on factors like search volume, level of competition and relevance to your niche. This ensures a balanced approach that includes both broad, high-volume keywords and more specific niche terms.

Keyword research allows us to identify the specific terms and phrases decision-makers in your industry use when searching for solutions.

This helps us understand their pain points and preferences and gives us insights into market demand. We can then use this information to inform content creation.

Creating content for relevant keywords establishes your brand as an authoritative voice within your industry. It also attracts organic traffic, improves rankings in Google and other search engines and boosts conversions.

4. Conduct competitor keyword and content gap analysis

The next stage of an effective strategy involves conducting a competitor keyword and content gap analysis. This means analysing competing sites within your niche for:

• Keywords they’re targeting that you’re not.
• Topics they’ve covered in their content that you’ve missed.

Without this analysis, valuable opportunities to address important topics and target high-performing keywords can be missed. This can result in lost potential traffic, leads and sales.

This analysis is also essential for developing a complete understanding of the B2B market. It provides vital insights into user pain points, industry trends and effective content strategies.

Here’s what the process of a competitor keyword and content gap analysis entails:

1. We use SEO tools to pinpoint your brand’s indirect and direct competitors for the keywords we identified earlier.
2. Then, we use the tools to find keywords your competitors are ranking for but which your site isn’t targeting.
3. We assess the quality and type of content your competitors have created to address these topics and analyse the formats they use (videos, blogs, infographics, etc.).
4. We extract insights from this data to refine your keyword strategy, create content to fill any gaps and enhance your overall SEO strategy to improve your search engine rankings.

By identifying the topics and keywords your competitors have missed, we ensure your brand has a competitive advantage and can capitalise on opportunities to fill these gaps. We know this is important to B2B marketers, as 71% of marketers noted strategic keyword usage as their number one strategy for SEO.

5. Optimise your site based on keyword clusters

Keyword clustering is a good tactic for demonstrating a site’s authority to Google and other search engines. Failing to optimise a site based on keyword clusters leads to poor topical authority, which can limit potential traffic and visibility on search engine results pages.

The issue is that keyword clustering requires a deep understanding of user intent and how different keywords relate to each other. This understanding is vital as most SEO professionals say search intent is the most important factor they consider when creating a strategy.

If you don’t have much SEO experience, it’s easy to misclassify keywords and miss opportunities to build topical relevance by interlinking related topics on your site.

At Growthack, our team takes all the necessary steps to ensure your B2B site is optimised for keyword clusters. This involves:

1. Clustering keywords based on common topics or themes. All of the clusters have primary keywords (the main topic) and related subtopics that support the main topic.
2. Creating pillar pages for each primary keyword. These pages cover the topic in great detail.
3. Creating supporting (cluster/spoke) pages that target and cover topics related to the primary keyword.
4. Internally linking the pillar and cluster pages.
5. Optimising each page for its respective keyword cluster. This means inserting keywords into on-page elements like titles, meta descriptions and the main body content.

One of the biggest benefits of this approach is that it results in comprehensive content that addresses multiple search intents, which allows your site’s pages to rank for a wider range of queries.

It also improves user experience as visitors find it easier to locate relevant content on your site.

6. Put a solid website information architecture in place

As you know, B2B websites often have complex product and service offerings, making it difficult to organise the site into a logical and intuitive structure.

If the site isn’t structured logically, it’s difficult for users to navigate and prevents search engine bots from crawling and indexing it effectively. As only 0.04% of online content has been indexed by Google, your site must be as easy to crawl as possible.

We know how important structure is for B2B sites, so we take the following steps to ensure crawlers and users can navigate your site with ease:

• We organise your site’s content into categories and subcategories to establish a clear hierarchy. For example, “Features > Integrations > Workflow Builder.” This creates a logical flow to guide users from broader categories to more specific ones.
• We outline the site’s structure using a visual sitemap. This serves as a roadmap for search engines crawling the site.
• We use internal links to create a web of related content that’s easy for users and search engine bots to navigate.

When your site has a logical architecture, it greatly improves user experience and engagement, leading to reduced bounce rates.

It also ensures that all site pages are discoverable, making it more likely that they will rank for their target keywords.

Plus, a logical structure supports internal linking strategies which distribute authority throughout the site and can improve overall visibility in search engine results.

7. Conduct a full technical SEO audit

Technical SEO audits should be a key part of any overall strategy. Neglecting to carry out audits can lead to technical issues that negatively impact user experience, reduce organic traffic and result in missed ranking opportunities.

As you can probably guess, performing these audits requires a high level of technical knowledge and they can be very time-consuming. In fact, SEO professionals estimate they spend 15% of their time on technical SEO. 

We provide advanced technical SEO services that include comprehensive audits of your site. Here are the steps we take during your audit:

• We use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl the site and extract data on metadata, URLs and other technical elements.
• We analyse the site’s architecture to ensure a logical hierarchy and easy navigation. We also check for duplicate content, broken links and proper use of redirects.
• We examine the XML sitemap and robots.txt file to make sure search engines can access all of your pages.
• Using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, we assess the load times of the pages on the site. For slow-loading pages, we identify the causes, which usually include excessive scripts and large image file sizes.
• We ensure the site is mobile-friendly by testing it on different devices and screen sizes.
• We use our findings to compile a report, which we then use to create actionable insights to improve the site’s performance.

Conducting a technical SEO audit allows us to uncover any hidden issues harming user experience and preventing your site from ranking highly.

It also helps us ensure the site functions smoothly in guiding users between relevant pages. This is important for moving users along the sales funnel toward conversion.

8. Improve user experience (UX) across the website

As mentioned above, it’s important to reduce loading times to improve user experience on your site. Although there are many other ways to improve user experience, addressing site speed is one of the most effective methods.

Users quickly become frustrated when pages take a while to load. In turn, this leads to increased bounce rates, reduced dwell time and fewer conversions. In fact, mobile pages with a loading speed one second faster than other identical pages have 20% more conversions.

Perhaps most importantly, it also negatively impacts conversion rates. In fact, a delay of just a few seconds makes users less likely to complete a desired action.

At Growthack, we perform user experience audits to identify the areas of your site that need improvement. This includes analysing your site’s Core Web Vitals, which indicate site speed and overall user experience.

Usually, we uncover issues with site speed that need to be addressed. To do this, we use fixes like:

• Compressing images with large file sizes.
• Minifying JavaScript, CSS and HTML.
• Utilising browser caching to store copies of web pages.
• Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Aside from enhancing user engagement, improving site speed can also improve your site’s rankings. This is because site speed is a core Google ranking factor.

9. Optimise your product and service pages

The product and service pages on B2B sites must be fully optimised. If they’re not, they won’t rank well in search results and potential customers might overlook them when searching for relevant solutions.

The content on these pages must be persuasive so that it engages users and guides them through the marketing funnel. Plus, if these pages don’t contain clear calls to action (CTAs), users are less likely to convert. This is emphasised by the fact that clear CTAs can increase conversion rates by 161%.

As part of your strategy, we focus on creating valuable and engaging content that highlights the benefits of your products/services. To ensure the pages are optimised, we:

• Incorporate keywords into titles, meta descriptions, headers and throughout the body text.
• Format the text using bullet points and white space to enhance readability.
• Include visuals to make the content appealing and easily digestible.

Well-optimised product and service pages clearly communicate the value propositions of your product/services. So, users can easily understand how these offerings address their specific pain points, leading to better conversion rates.

This clarity also improves user engagement and builds trust and credibility.

10. Implement local SEO for B2B with multiple locations

If your business operates from several physical locations, you need to optimise for local SEO within those areas. This is because 46% of Google searches have local intent.

If this step isn’t taken, your business is less likely to appear in local search results for queries like “manufacturer near me”, resulting in fewer leads and sales.

Here’s how our local SEO services ensure your business captures B2B customers in the areas where you operate:

• We perform keyword research to find location-specific terms relevant to each of your business locations. For example, “pharmaceutical company in Nottingham”.
• We create landing pages for each location you serve and optimise them with target keywords. These landing pages include content highlighting the products/services provided at the specific location and can be further enhanced with local testimonials.
• We create and optimise a Google Business Profile for each location, maintaining consistency across each profile. So, we check that information like address, phone number and business hours is accurate.
• We build citations for your business by listing the various locations in local directories, review platforms and industry-specific sites. We also ensure that your business’s NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) details are consistent across these platforms.
• We actively solicit customer reviews on Google to enhance your credibility and improve local search rankings.
• We use tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to monitor your performance in local search and make any necessary adjustments.

Our local SEO efforts enhance your visibility in local search results, driving more targeted traffic and leads from the specific areas where you operate.

11. Integrate your strategy with other B2B marketing channels

SEO shouldn’t be an entirely independent channel that is disconnected from your overall marketing strategy. You must integrate with your other marketing channels, such as email, social media and paid search.

If it’s not integrated, this can lead to disjointed messaging across your various channels. This weakens brand identity, reduces trust and harms your site’s credibility. Here’s how you can integrate our SEO strategy with your other channels:

• Repurpose SEO content for social media, email and other channels. This increases the reach of the content and improves user engagement.
• Use the keywords we target with our SEO content to create content about the same topics for your other channels.
• Share SEO content across your social media channels and as part of your marketing campaigns.
• Maintain the same tone of voice, messaging and branding across your channels. This is vital as 32% of marketers report that consistent messaging increases brand revenue by over 20%.

Proper SEO integration leads to cohesive brand messaging, cross-channel amplification and data-driven decision-making. This drives more user engagement with your various channels, increases qualified leads and boosts conversions.

12. Maintain your B2B SEO strategy

Once your B2B SEO strategy is in place, it must be maintained to ensure its ongoing effectiveness. Without proper maintenance, you can quickly fall behind your competitors as they continue to optimise their own strategies.

If your strategy is poorly maintained, it can become stagnant and lead to reduced organic traffic and declining rankings.

We take several steps to ensure the continuous performance of your strategy, such as:

• Regularly creating new content that provides value to your audience. This includes various types of content that target different stages of the buyer’s journey. In particular, we focus on social proof content like case studies as 62% of B2B buyers prefer practical content like case studies to inform their purchasing decisions
• Consistently updating existing content with new keywords and insights to keep it relevant.
• Using tools like Google Analytics to track key performance metrics including bounce rates and conversion rates.
• Frequently performing audits to identify issues like slow page load times, poor conversion rates and broken links.

13. Track your results

Monitoring and analysing the results over the course of the SEO campaign is essential. If the strategy’s performance isn’t properly monitored, it’s difficult to assess which tactics are working and which aren’t.

We tracks the results of your campaign closely and provides you with regular, detailed reports. These reports contain important information like:

• Overall organic traffic performance compared to previous periods.
• Breakdowns of organic traffic by channel (organic, direct, referral, etc.).
• Key performance metrics such as bounce rates, conversion rates and CTR.
• Changes in rankings for target keywords.
• Top performing content and pages.
• Content gaps and opportunities.
• Technical SEO issues that have been identified and resolved.
• Page speed and mobile responsiveness metrics.
• The progress made towards your specific SEO goals and KPIs.
• A comparison of your key performance metrics with your main competitors.
• Actionable insights for further improvements.

Tracking your campaign’s results allows us to make data-driven decisions about how to optimise your strategy effectively to ensure you’re getting the best results possible.

Although we interpret the data for you, it’s still useful to understand what to look for in your performance metrics. Let’s take conversion rate as an example.

The average B2B conversion rate for organic search is 2.6%. This may not seem high, but it’s much better than the conversion rates of other marketing channels. To demonstrate this, here are the average conversion rates for the other B2B marketing channels:

• Email: 2.4%
• Organic social: 1.7%
• Paid search: 1.5%
• Paid social: 0.9%

So, when you receive your performance reports, you should make sure your conversion rates are around 2.6% or that there are strategies in place to reach this figure.

Calculating ROI Of B2B SEO

As a marketer, it’s important you understand the ROI of your various marketing channels so you can make informed decisions about resource allocation and budget.

Fortunately, there’s a relatively simple equation you can use to calculate the ROI of your B2B SEO strategy: SEO ROI = (Revenue from SEO – SEO costs) / SEO costs.

Of course, to use this formula, you first need to calculate your SEO revenue and costs. Working out your SEO costs is easy as it’s the amount you pay to the agency. You will then need to evaluate the sales and revenue generated through the leads you’ve gained from your SEO campaign. You can then apply this information to the formula above to work out the ROI.

Measuring B2B SEO ROI and pipeline impact

So, you’ve used the formula to calculate your SEO ROI. But what does a good ROI for B2B SEO look like? Well, it’s highly dependent on your industry.

To give you an idea, First Page Sage did research on the typical SEO ROI across multiple niches:

Of course, you will have your own goals and KPIs in relation to the ROI you get from your SEO strategy. However, you can use the average ROI within your industry as a benchmark to measure your own success.

It’s also important to track your SEO strategy’s impact on your sales pipeline. There are a number of ways you can do this, including:

• Measuring the velocity with which SEO-generated leads move along the sales pipeline. You can then compare this with the velocity of leads from other channels to assess the impact of SEO on attracting qualified leads.
• Compare the quality of the leads generated through SEO to your other channels. This includes analysing metrics like lead-to-opportunity conversions.
• Calculate the overall revenue your business has gained from SEO-sourced leads that convert into customers. This ties your SEO strategy directly to bottom-line impacts.

By measuring the ROI and pipeline impact of your B2B SEO strategy, you can ensure that the financial rewards are worth the investment.

The future of B2B SEO

The landscape of SEO is constantly evolving and we regularly have to tweak our approach to stay ahead of the curve.

In particular, AI tools are having (and will continue to have) a big impact on B2B SEO.

For example, Google’s SGE has instigated a shift towards generative results that has been adopted by most search engines. This can push organic listings further down the page and negatively impact businesses’ visibility.

To counteract this, our B2B strategies focus on creating concise content that directly answers users’ queries. We also structure content to be eligible for featured snippets, which can appear above organic search results.

What are the most common B2B SEO mistakes?

The most common B2B SEO mistakes we come across include:

• Failing to understand user intent.
• Creating content without a clear strategy.
• Overlooking valuable keywords because they have low search volume.
• Publishing “thin” content.
• Not optimising for local search (when applicable).

How can SEO help B2B companies with long sales cycles?

There are many ways SEO can help B2B companies with long sales cycles, such as:

• Creating content for different stages of the buyer’s journey.
• Driving ongoing visibility and engagement throughout the long sales cycle.
• Creating scalable content strategies that continually provide value and keep your business top-of-mind.

Final thoughts

A solid B2B SEO strategy is vital for staying competitive and driving growth. To achieve this, we target decision-makers, optimises for user intent and continually refine our approach. As a result, we can boost your site’s traffic, leads and conversions.

By partnering with Growthack, you can ensure your strategy is well-executed and future-proof. Ready to take your B2B SEO to the next level for 2025? Contact us today and find out how we can help you achieve long-term, sustainable success.