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?

1. 5 Steps to Building
a Strategic B2B
Keyword List
1 2 3 4 5

2. 5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List
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. efine your business goals --what’s your product or service fo-
D
cus or priorities? What type of visitors are you trying to attract?
The holy grail of keywords
How are you going to capture these visitors? What are the best
offers for you to convert your SEO visitors to leads? How many To pass muster and end up on your
visits and leads do you expect from your SEO efforts? list, keywords must be:
• Highlyrelevant to your
2. evelop a detailed picture of your audience—how many
D
business
different types of buyers are you trying to reach through your
SEO efforts? Once you’ve answered this question we recom- • Have good search volume
mend developing search personas for each of your targets. At
• Not impossibly competitive
the end of this exercise you should know the following for each
persona: • Able to convert someone
to a lead
• 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.
2
© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved.
www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

3. 5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List
STEP ONE
Finding your ‘seed’ keywords 1
Taking the first step to building a keyword list can be a little daunting. The good news is that you’re not starting
STEP TWO
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:
STEPYou sales and marketing materials – how do you describe your product and services? How do you explain
»» THREE
to your family and friends what your company / products do?
STEPYour business goals—remember those?
»»
FOUR 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.
3
© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved.
www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

4. 5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List
STEP ONE
Plug your ‘seed’ keywords into an
STEP TWO 2
SEO keyword suggestion tool
With your seed keyword list in hand it’s time to get some hard facts on your keyword contenders. To make your
STEP THREE
final list you’re looking for keywords that are:
»»Highly relevant to your business
STEPHave good search volume
»» FOUR
»»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.
Here’s Optify’s keyword suggestion tool in action. Data can be
exported into a spreadsheet for further analysis.
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.
4
© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved.
www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

5. 5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List
STEP ONE
STEP TWO
Let the culling begin—first cut on
STEP THREE
relevancy & convertibility 3
Chances are that you’re now looking at a spreadsheet with hundreds of possible terms. Given that you’re aiming
STEP FOUR
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
HIGH HEAD TERMS - 1-2 WORD PHRASES
“CRM”
“CRM software”
CHUNKY MIDDLE OR “TORSO TERMS” -
COMPETITION
SHORT WORD PHRASES
“CRM Saas software”
“best CRM software”
LONG TAIL - MORE DESCRIPTIVE WORD PHRASES
“review of CRM Saas software vendors”
“whitepapers on CRM best practices”
LOW
HIGH SEARCH FREQUENCY LOW
5
© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved.
www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

6. 5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List
STEP TWO
STEP THREE
STEP FOUR You’re honing in on your targets—sort by
4
volume and competition
With 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.
6
© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved.
www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

7. 5 Steps to Building a Strategic B2B Keyword List
STEP FIVE
Get benchmarks and start tracking 5
Congratulations 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.
7
© 2012 Optify, Inc. All rights reserved.
www.optify.net 1-877-2-OPTIFY @optify

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keters responsible for fueling their company’s growth. Optify Twitter: @optify
helps professional B2B marketers reach more buyers and gen- Email: info@optify.net
erate more demand for their products or services month-after- Visit our website: www.optify.net
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Create a flow of high quality Nurture your house list with Help sales reach prospects and
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