Should I care about Search Engine Optimization for my B2B company? The answer is yes.

In recent years many clients have come to us with search engine optimization (SEO) as an item in RFP for websites. Once they see what it takes to really make a go of it, to compete for first page, they’re turned off. They think it is not important or relevant to their business after-all, or at least not enough to pay so much. ‘We’re B2b, we provide a professional service, not sell products. People find us through word-of-mouth, not Google.’ I used to feel that way myself, but now I’m a convert.

Social media has created reasons to care about SEO from both ends of the spectrum.

First, because we all know how much user generated content, blogs, review sites are out there, more and more people are using search to find information or do research. When you search you are most likely to land on a blog or such like. If you generate content, people will find it.

Second and from the other end, social media has made it easy for companies to create opportunities for their brilliant content to be found in search, by writing blogs, participating in other blogs or discussions, having key people involved and hopefully active on sites like LinkedIn and Twitter – which all leads back to your company site.

Two sides to Social Media

There’s the literal driving people to your site, but those link-backs to your site also tell Google you’re important and socially active.

There are a number of things Google evaluates to rank your site; like in-bound links, conversion forms, alt text for images, blogs, meta descriptions, etc. They change the algorithms all the time but recently made a higher than usual significant change placing importance on social relevancy. Do you have an active Twitter account associated with your domain? Etcetera.
So what this means is, it’s not hard to build a website with good search-ability right from the start, like conversion forms, alt text for images, meta descriptions, etc. but then why not use social media to generate the content to be found? Google is a hungry beast, give it something to gorge on.

By the way, I learned a lot of this stuff from brilliant Smojoe, who we hire to help Rapport clients learn to make that content more findable and use social media for search with really different and interesting campaigns.