Ultimate Guide To Finding A B2B SEO Agency

If you’re looking for a B2B SEO agency, you probably know about the benefits of SEO and want to apply that to your target B2B customer demographic.

SEO as a means of marketing is lucrative, but B2B SEO in particular is extremely lucrative. This is because your SEO efforts are targeted at reaching decision makers at companies instead of a general audience.

In this post, I’ll give you a detailed explanation of how B2B SEO works and what criteria you should use to pick a B2B SEO agency for your business.

What is a B2B SEO agency?

A B2B SEO agency is an agency that focuses on helping companies target business customers with SEO. Many companies often spend large advertising budgets to get in front of enterprise customers, so SEO offers a more cost-effective way to market to that audience.

More specifically, a B2B SEO agency helps with content marketing. A good B2B SEO agency will help craft a content strategy for you to target what your key customer demographic is searching for.

For example, a B2B SEO agency can help an IT provider create blog posts that center around helping answer questions that enterprise customers have about IT support.

By creating helpful content that helps your enterprise readers, you can start building leads and converting customers with B2B SEO. The great thing about getting enterprise clients through SEO is that you can maintain your keyword ranking for years. A sample blog post can be the #1, #2 or #3 ranked search result on Google. You can continue to establish your SEO dominance by updating content and building links to your post.

How does B2B SEO work?

Don’t let the SEO jargon complicate things, B2B SEO is fairly straightforward.

There’s not a specific algorithm or Google rules that separate B2B SEO from anything else. It’s all SEO.

The reason why it’s labeled B2B SEO is because of the targeted demographic (B2B). In a nutshell, SEO is basically writing content and building links so your website can get higher ranking on Google for a given term. The more traffic you can get to your site, the more people will buy your products and services.

In general, SEO focuses on getting high traffic keywords for a broad audience. In B2B SEO, you will generally target lower traffic keywords that are very lucrative. This is because these lower traffic keywords are searched for by decision makers like managers and executives within a company. If you can get a few hundred or thousand decision makers to your site each month from SEO, you can add thousands of dollars in revenue each month.

It can be a little difficult to wrap your head around how it works, let me show you an in-depth example using this blog post to show how B2B SEO can add thousands to your bottom line.

Example of how SEO works

For this blog post, I targeted the keyword B2B SEO agency. I use an SEO crawling software called Ahrefs to find the demand for this keyword on Google and how lucrative it is:

As you can see, this keyword is relatively easy to rank for and even a newer blog like mine can rank for it. It gets about 600 monthly searches on Google and the CPC (cost per click) is extremely high. This is a good indicator of how lucrative the keyword is. This keyword is very lucrative because the reader is likely someone who’s looking to hire a B2B SEO agency.

Once you find a keyword that’s easy for your website to rank for, it’s time to create high quality content that answers what the Google searcher is looking for (ex. this blog post). After giving helpful content to the reader, you can offer your services or recommend other products.

Let’s say this blog posts ranks well and gets 200 of the 600 searches each month for this term. At the end of this blog post, I can pitch you SEO services or recommend other agencies. This can net me a few hundred dollars each month just off this one blog post.

If I had a larger business (ex. a B2B SEO agency), I can offer SEO services worth thousands of dollars each month. Using the same conversions above, this blog post alone could generate several thousand dollars each month if not more.

Use this example and think about the most important keywords for your business. This is good to have in mind when you talk to an agency to see the revenue potential for a given keyword.

This is a very brief overview of how SEO could work for you. Of course there’s the technical details of how to maximize getting traffic, but having this basic understanding will help you dramatically when picking between agencies.

What should you look for in a B2B SEO agency?

There are several key characteristics you should look for in a B2B SEO agency. Some of the prominent characteristics you should look for is:

Results-oriented: If you’ve ever hired a marketing agency or consultant, you know first hand that you can get offered a variety of services that don’t affect your bottom line. In SEO, there’s no certain guarantees that you can rank #1 for a term, but your SEO provider should be generating results for your online business.

It can take several months before you start seeing tangible results, but you need to make sure that your SEO provider is results-oriented and can help get you more leads and customers. Some results you should look for when working with a B2B SEO agency is:

• Organic traffic: The number of free organic visitors to your site should increase
• Leads/customers: You should be getting leads from the content you produce after a certain amount of time

Track record: The track record of your SEO provider is extremely important. If the agency you’ve worked with has not provided significant results for previous clients, you will likely not be the first. The B2B SEO agency you work with should have a track record of successful SEO campaigns for many clients.

For example if you’re looking to rank for a keyword like “IT support London“, you should work with an SEO agency that has previous SEO experience with IT companies. You can ask for their track record in regards to how much traffic they brought in and how that converted to sales. Be sure to use a local rank checker to track your rankings and your agencies progress.

Top B2B SEO Agencies

I’ve listed some of the best B2B SEO agencies you can work with here. Explore these companies first before looking elsewhere. I’ve left some other resources you can use to find SEO agencies at the bottom of this post.

1. TopSpot

TopSpot is a comprehensive marketing company that is very competent in B2B SEO. With TopSpot, you can get both a short-term and long-term SEO strategy based on your specific needs. TopSpot will help you create content that ranks based on your highest value products, company brand and more.

TopSpot’s SEO services will provide you with an SEO specialist, conversion optimization specialist and paid search specialist to give you the best services to establish your digital presence. This provides you with a holistic approach to generating leads, improving organic traffic and turning your visitors into paying customers.

TopSpot offers a free website assessment where they will review your website and tell you how you can improve your SEO, lead generation, mobile strategy and more. You can take a free website assessment from TopSpot here.

2. CG Marketing Group

CG Marketing Group is an SEO agency with exceptional SEO services for B2B companies. With CG Marketing Group, you can get custom SEO solutions that are tailored to improve your desired KPIs for your business.

CG Marketing Group serves over 15 industries from B2B tech to asphalt, so they probably have custom solutions for your business needs. What separates CG Marketing Group from many SEO providers is their technical staff. They have developers who can tackle the most technical issues regarding your SEO, this can help improve your site speed, organic traffic and conversions greatly.

CG Marketing Group offers a free website audit and free consultation to get started with B2B SEO services. You can get your free audit of your website here.

3. SmartSites

SmartSites is one of the fastest growing digital agencies and it has been featured in INC 5,000. It’s an integrated CRO agency that provides many other SEO services. SmartSites stands out from many SEO agencies due to their laser focus on results-driven marketing. They have generated over $100 million for clients through digital marketing.

This results-driven approach is showcased in their B2B SEO services. In fact, most of the clients that work with SmartSites improve their organic traffic by 200% within 6 months. SmartSites is a great provider for B2B SEO services because they offer all of the complimentary services that empower SEO. This includes web design/development, PPC and more.

Their SEO services will provide you with SEO analysis, SEO copywriting, link building, mobile SEO, blogging services and more. You can get a free SEO proposal from SmartSites here.

4. StraightNorth

StraightNorth is a full service marketing agency that specializes in SEO services. This company has been a leader in SEO services for over 20 years. Their full B2B SEO services include content strategy, keyword research, on-site and off-site optimization, content marketing and more.

Straight North made this list because of their B2B SEO expertise and the number of markets they provide services for. They cover 28 markets that range from agriculture to pharmaceuticals. If you work with them, there’s a high possibility they’ve helped a similar client in your niche improve their SEO rankings.

Straight North offers a free SEO audit and they’ll let you know what you can do to improve your rankings. You can check out their case studies for B2B clients here.

5. MMP Associates

MMP Associates is a full service SEO content management agency. They’ve written SEO optimized content for The Chicago Tribune, Eventbrite, NBC and more. MMP Associates is different from other providers because it focuses primarily on the content side of SEO. This can be a more cost-effective option for businesses that are not looking for additional SEO services.

With MMP Associates, you’ll be provided with a content manager who will help you craft a content strategy that will help improve your SEO rankings. In addition to content strategy, you’ll get keyword research, content planning, writing/editing and article monitoring.

What’s great about MMP Associates is that there’s no bulky contracts or commitments,  you can use them as needed and choose to opt out of their services later.

6. Obility B2B

Obility B2B is a company that is dedicated to providing SEO services for B2B companies that are looking to scale. They have enterprise clients like Autodesk, Snowflake, Marketo, Cloudflare and more.

The reason why I included Obility B2B on this list is their caliber of clients and their focus on helping B2B companies scale. Many SEO companies have mid-sized enterprise clients, but you’ll rarely see SEO companies work regularly with large enterprise clients. Obility B2B has at least a dozen large, multinational B2B companies that they’ve provided SEO services for.

When you work with Obility B2B, you get technical SEO analysis, qualified leads from organic search, on-site and off-site SEO support and more. They will help you identify growth opportunities and craft an SEO strategy based on lucrative keywords for your business.

After creating SEO optimized content, Obility B2B will help you direct organic traffic to your revenue systems and optimize for conversions. This will help optimize your content and turn your visitors into paying customers. You can check out their full services and the results they’ve generated for B2B clients here.

7. SpacebarCollective
SpacebarCollective is a Canadian B2B SEO agency with a focus on SaaS. They’ve produced hundreds of pages for companies like GrowSurf, Publer and Culture Booster. One thing that makes them stand out in the market is their sliding scale pricing, making it accessible for bootstrapped and early stage B2B startups, where content production and link building increase as you increase your MRR.

Other resources:

Clutch.co: Clutch.co has one of the best free directories for SEO agencies worldwide; it has the largest SEO directory on the internet. You can filter by location, services offered, rate and more to find the best SEO company for your B2B needs. Here’s a direct link to the SEO companies on Clutch.co, there are over 36,000 SEO companies listed on there. Filter down to find the best one for you.

SEOblog.com: SEOblog is a great free resource to find SEO companies to work with. Here’s a direct link to the best SEO agencies on SEOblog, check them out here if you don’t like the providers I’ve listed above.