SEO Tips for B2B Businesses without SEO Budget

One of the best ways to SEO optimize a B2B website is to focus on the company's marketing collateral.

As rule, B2B companies do not have a flexible infrastructure that would allow for a full-scale SEO optimization project on the fly, because this type of projects requires close collaboration between multiple teams, demanding a fair amount of project management effort. Given that websites are rarely a priority for B2B companies (with the exception of SAAS and web-based businesses), SEO optimization of a website is often pushed to the end of to-do lists by executive management.

To make matters more complicated, marketing managers often do not have access to the website code and cannot make changes easily. Working with third-party website design firms involves budget decisions. It is difficult to conduct proper SEO optimization of a website in this situation.

At the same time, it is expected that marketing departments generate customer leads on a weekly basis, marketing managers are often assigned quotas, and the company website is perceived as a major lead generation resource.

If your role requires you to generate customer leads while not having adequate management support and/or a budget for it, the most cost-effective SEO strategy in this situation would be to focus on existing marketing collateral.

B2B companies spend a fair amount of resources on the production of web-based customer-facing collateral, such as white papers, case studies, success stories, etc. Optimizing these documents can be done by one person, it can be done quickly and in most cases would not require budgetary spending.

Here is what you can do to boost your search engine ranking without diving into a whole SEO project:

- determine your most desired keywords based on your company's sales scripts
- rename all pdfs by adding these keywords to the end of all titles, separate individual words using underscores (your file names will be long)
- assuming that your pdfs are already posted on the company website, check to see that each document title contains your keywords and is presented as a link
- provide a short abstract underneath each pdf link using important keywords (many companies simply have lists of titles)
- if your design guidelines permit, include document links in bold and italics

Example: Top 10 CRM Software Management Benefits for Small Businesses (pdf)

In addition, review your existing web pages and where possible:

- rename files using most desired keywords
- make sure each page has an H1 tag that contains your keywords
- split your texts in chunks add H2 and H3 subheaders with keywords
- add bulleted lists and sprinkle keywords as often as your style permits, do not overdo it
- add links to other pages on your website that contain similar information
- if possible, include keywords inside the link descriptions and make all links bold and italics
- add more paragraphs using keywords (aim at having at least 500 words per page)
- focus on 2-3 keywords and repeat them 10 times per page, 2-3 times in the first and last paragraphs and at least once in headers and subheaders (H1, H2, H3)
- use the same keywords in your file names, page titles, headers and subheaders, links, and copy (text). This should be done without offending users' sense of style, so be careful.

Going forward, make sure that all web documents are produced with the above SEO guidelines in mind. The more documents (pages) you have, the better it is for your SEO.

Having wealth of resources on your website will also create positive affect on your users' perception of your company. This in turn helps generate qualified customer leads - something your sales people would be sure to appreciate greatly.