5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List

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5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List

2© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved. www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

Before you dive into keywords, read this first!To maximize your return from SEO, B2B marketers must approach all aspects of their SEO program strategically,

including keyword research. In the B2C world the main goal is often to drive e-commerce transactions from an

individual search visitor. The B2B world is a lot more complex, with multiple buyer roles and a multi-stage sales

cycle. That’s what makes it fun though right?

So before diving into keyword research, we suggest that you create a framework for your keyword strategy.

1. Define your business goals --what’s your product or service fo-

cus or priorities? What type of visitors are you trying to attract?

How are you going to capture these visitors? What are the best

offers for you to convert your SEO visitors to leads? How many

visits and leads do you expect from your SEO efforts?

2. Develop a detailed picture of your audience—how many

different types of buyers are you trying to reach through your

SEO efforts? Once you’ve answered this question we recom-

mend developing search personas for each of your targets. At

the end of this exercise you should know the following for each

persona:

• Their role(s) in the purchase process

• Their pain points and drivers

• Where they search for information

• The keywords they use to search

• The type of content they like to consume

Taking the time upfront to do these crucial steps will guide not just your keyword research, but also your content

development and lead nurturing plan. Okay, with those items in hand let’s get started building our keyword list.

The holy grail of keywords

To pass muster and end up on your

list, keywords must be:

• Highly relevant to your

business

• Have good search volume

• Not impossibly competitive

• Able to convert someone

to a lead

5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List

3© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved. www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

Finding your ‘seed’ keywordsTaking the first step to building a keyword list can be a little daunting. The good news is that you’re not starting

with a blank piece of paper. There are some great places to look for ‘seed’ keywords– those terms that will get you

started on the right track. Here are some suggestions:

» You sales and marketing materials – how do you describe your product and services? How do you explain

to your family and friends what your company / products do?

» Your business goals—remember those? Be sure that your seed keywords reflect the key products that

you’re marketing.

» Your search persona documents—yes, that’s one of the reasons you need to do that piece first!

» Your Web site and Blog—run a report of the organic keywords that are current driving visits and leads.

» Your competitor’s sites—plug your competitor’s URL into a tool like Optify to get a real insight into their

keyword strategy. Even without SEO software you can get a good idea of what keywords your competitors are

targeting. Take a look at their page titles, headlines and content.

» Your team – brainstorm keywords with anyone in the company that understands your audience.

» Your customers – make sure you verify the keyword assumptions you came up with during your search

persona development with real live customers. Got ones that you a great relationship with? Take them out

to lunch, run your list by them and see what else they come up with.

Here’s a report from Optify that shows visits, leads and conversion rate by organic keyword.

STEP ONE

STEP TWO

STEP THREE

STEP FOUR

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5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List

4© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved. www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

Plug your ‘seed’ keywords into an SEO keyword suggestion toolWith your seed keyword list in hand it’s time to get some hard facts on your keyword contenders. To make your

final list you’re looking for keywords that are:

» Highly relevant to your business

» Have good search volume

» Not impossibly competitive

» Able to convert someone to a lead and opportunity

Plug your seed keywords into Optify’s keyword suggestion tool. This serves two main purposes—to suggest terms

and iterations that you haven’t come up with yet, and to give you data on search volume and the degree of compe-

tition. At this point, it is OK to have a big list of keywords, we’ll narrow down and focus later.

Once your keyword suggestion tool has done its magic, export the data into a spreadsheet and move to step three,

where we’ll sort by relevance and ability to convert.

Here’s Optify’s keyword suggestion tool in action. Data can be exported into a spreadsheet for further analysis.

STEP ONE

STEP TWO

STEP THREE

STEP FOUR

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5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List

5© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved. www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

Let the culling begin—first cut on relevancy & convertibility Chances are that you’re now looking at a spreadsheet with hundreds of possible terms. Given that you’re aiming

to find 1 or 2 keywords per Web page, Blog post or asset to optimize on, you need to do some culling. A good

strategy for first round cutting is to rank your keywords by relevancy. Just glancing through the list you’ll imme-

diately be able to delete some odd irrelevant terms that slipped through the net. Then you can add a ‘relevancy’

column to your spreadsheet and rank remaining terms—a simple 1,2,3 ranking system usually does the trick.

It’s tempting for some of us B2B marketers to cling on to keywords that are tangential at best to your products’

core competency--especially if those terms have decent search volume, and low competition. As you’re going

through this exercise keep asking yourself “is that term really core to what my product offers?” or “what’s the

likelihood of someone becoming a lead from that term?” That will help keep you honest.

Keyword diversity

» You’ve probably seen a graph like this that shows the typical relationship between search volume and

degree of competition. Your strategic keyword list should contain terms from different points along the

curve. For your core or pillar Web site pages choose terms more towards the head of the curve. Blog

posts are a great way to use terms that are more ‘long tail’ in nature. With this strategy you may end

up with 7-10 keyword phrases around a head term that you can apply in your different types of main

site content.

SEO keyword diversity for B2B marketers

CO

MP

ETI

TIO

N

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

STEP ONE

STEP TWO

STEP THREE

STEP FOUR

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5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List

6© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved. www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

You’re honing in on your targets—sort by volume and competitionWith irrelevant terms off the list, you can now rank by relative volume and degree of competitiveness. Chances

are that terms with high volume are also being targeted by your competitors. That’s not necessarily a bad thing,

depending on how good a job your competition is doing. The golden keywords that you’re looking for are the ones

with decent volume and that you have a realistic chance of getting on page one of the search engine results page

(SERP). Start honing in on those.

If you’re thinking about going head to head with a competitor on certain terms you’ll need to know what you’re up

against. Use Optify’s Competitive Intelligence features to get detailed insight on each of your main competitors.

Understanding the number of inbound links and domains, and how well their pages are optimized for your tar-

geted terms, will help you make an informed final decision on your targeted keyword list.

Optify provides detailed insight on competitive pages. Choose the keyword you’re thinking of targeting, and find out how well their page is optimized on that term. We’ll also show you how many links they have to that page and how many times the page has been shared and liked in social networks.

STEP ONE

STEP TWO

STEP THREE

STEP FOUR 4

5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List

7© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved. www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

Get benchmarks and start trackingCongratulations you have a shiny new target keyword list—one that’s built on a solid business strategy and a de-tailed understanding of your audience. Now what? Before you start in on any of the fun stuff of creating content, optimizing it and reaching out to the world at large for inbound links—you need to benchmark where you and your competition are today. Having that baseline data will enable you to show the improvements that the next phase of your SEO journey will yield.

Let the fun of optimization begin!

Capture benchmark data on how you and the competition are ranking for your targeted keywords, and track the results of your SEO efforts.

STEP FIVE 5

© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved. www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

About OptifyOptify delivers an integrated top-of-the-funnel solution for mar-

keters responsible for fueling their company’s growth. Optify

helps professional B2B marketers reach more buyers and gen-

erate 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.

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