Marketing Sherpa surveyed 1,530 marketers for its 2012 B2B Benchmark Study to identify what SEO tactics work in online and offline marketing, and content creation came out on top. The word on the street is that many traditional SEO tactics are on the way out, such as link building and the emphasis on keywords. The current focus is on content marketing, the creation of valuable content that can be shared and will attract and engage potential customers that convert.
The Marketing Sherpa chart below shows this year’s most effective marketing tactics. As you can see, content creation is on top. Only last year, the 2011 B2B Benchmark Study showed keywords as the top strategy. Things have been changing rapidly since Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, aimed at cleaning up SERPs with artificial links and poor content emphasizing keywords. The new requirement for link building is relevance, with valuable content at the top of the list.
B2B SEO requires highly specialized tactics that differ from B2C sites. Below are four SEO tactics that wholesalers and manufacturers can consider for increasing conversions.
1.     Optimize Your Conversion Funnel
This involves creating, executing, and then evaluating your product pages in order to increase the number of visitors that take the desired actions (purchase, subscribe, join, etc.). This SEO tactic was deemed most important by over 1,700 B2B marketers responding to the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, as shown in the chart below.
2.     Categorize Manage Your Leads
Lead management is a process used to optimize demand and move prospects down the conversion funnel. The lead management process requires: capturing the lead (download, fill out form, subscribe, etc.); scoring the lead (assignment of points to various leads for proper distribution); lead routing (ensuring the sales team acts on qualified leads); and nurturing (nurturing of leads that may become qualified leads in the future). Because all leads are not created equal, manufacturers and wholesalers must use some kind of lead management process to develop different marketing initiatives that result in the most conversions.
3.     Nurture Non-Qualified Leads
There are always a good percentage of site visitors who are not interested in immediate purchase. Lead nurturing helps to build a relationship between such visitors and the company in an effort to move them down the path to possible conversion. For instance, curiosity seekers, students and researchers may become advocates for sales and help bring more qualified lead opportunities.
4.     Create Valuable Content
While the creation of new content can be one of the most effective B2B marketing tactics, this may require some effort on the part of wholesalers and manufacturers because most of their pages consist of product descriptions that may not be unique, novel or very exciting. That makes it hard for wholesalers and manufacturer to generate content that pleases and attracts prospects. However, you can create great content by establishing industry expertise and developing valuable assets of interest to your audience. For instance, if you sell scarves, create a video demonstrating the many uses of your beautiful scarves (and don’t forget to post the video transcript on your video page).
Conclusion
As search engines strive to better serve user intent, link building and keyword usage have been fading in importance as SEO tactics. The latest focus is on content marketing, the creation of valuable content to attract and engage potential customers. The most important B2B SEO tactics to focus on are: conversion funnel optimization, categorization and management of leads, nurturing of non-qualified leads and valuable content creation.
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Article source: http://www.toptenwholesale.com/news/b2b-seo-tactics-wholesalers-manufacturers-16696.html