Back in the early days of SEO, it was common to crank out dozens of thin articles packed with every possible keyword, all in an attempt to game search engines and drive more traffic to a client’s website.
That was stupid SEO.
Search engines have grown a lot smarter and more protective of their users' good moods. Google now says its ranking systems are designed to reward helpful, reliable, people-first content, and its spam policies still call out keyword stuffing as a practice that can hurt search visibility.
So what's a B2B marketer to do?
The answer is still S.M.A.R.T. SEO:
To choose these keywords, you actually need to know your target market. So that's really the first step. You need to have a clear understanding of:
Once you have a good handle on the answers to those questions, use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, HubSpot, WordStream, Semrush, Ahrefs or SpyFu to explore those words and phrases. The tool matters less than the discipline: compare search volume, ranking difficulty, current page performance and, most importantly, search intent.
For a B2B company, the best SEO targets are not always the phrases with the most searches. A phrase like "industrial equipment maintenance company" may bring fewer visitors than a broad educational term, but the person searching for it is much closer to a buying decision. Choose one primary topic for each page and a small set of related phrases that a real prospect would use when researching the problem, comparing options or looking for help.
Take some time to go over your competition's web pages, keeping a close eye on products or services you know they market successfully online.
You can still look at source code if you want, but don't waste time chasing meta keywords. Modern SEO work is more useful when you identify the gap between what your prospects need and what the current search results actually answer. For website projects, this is also where SEO belongs in the redesign conversation; a website redesign should account for search visibility, content and lead generation before pages get moved, merged or rewritten.
Between your own brainstorming, the input provided by whichever keyword tool you're comfortable using, and research on your competition's website, you should have a long list of potential topics and phrases in hand.
Analyze all of them to narrow down the best choices for each page. You still want enough search demand to matter, but you also want a realistic chance to rank and a clear connection to revenue. A page that ranks for a high-volume phrase but attracts the wrong visitor is not doing its job.
Then, put your thoughts into action.
Be sure to write for your reader/target audience first. But remember, Google's a reader too.
Now that you've optimized your page as best you can, the other half of SEO success will come from earning attention and links from other places. Recycle the idea behind the page by turning it into useful material for:
While you're at it, think about how you can add internal links to other pages on your site to your newly optimized page using plain-language anchor text. If you need help connecting SEO to the rest of your marketing system, Whittington Consulting's SEO services are built around qualified traffic, content strategy, technical cleanup, and lead generation instead of vanity rankings.
As marketers, this should be second nature by now. You need to track the results of your efforts on a regular basis. Doing so provides a ton of great information at your fingertips that can help you fine-tune your search engine optimization efforts over time.
Track SEO results in Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4 and your marketing automation software or CRM. Search Console is best for understanding queries, impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position. GA4 helps you see what organic visitors do after they arrive. HubSpot or another CRM helps connect those visits to contacts, opportunities, and revenue.
The key here is to track your progress over time. Organic search traffic should grow as you steadily improve important pages, publish relevant content, and keep technical issues from getting in the way. Rankings matter, but for a B2B company, the better question is whether search is bringing the right prospects to pages that help them take the next step. When SEO and paid search both matter, use the data to decide the right paid search versus SEO mix instead of treating one channel as the whole strategy.