In 2025, B2B SEO needs to be a priority for any company that sells products to other businesses.
While business-to-business companies have all kinds of other options for marketing their products compared to their B2C cousins, B2B business owners can’t afford to ignore the revenue that could be theirs if they learn to win over search engines like Google.
Over the last 10 years, many B2B companies – empires, even – have learned this the hard way as they watched much smaller, much younger competitors scale Google and enjoy the riches that wait for them at the top…while they languish heading the opposite direction.
Fortunately, B2B SEO isn’t difficult to understand and doesn’t even have to be too expensive to afford. I’ve been working in SEO for almost 15 years and for the past 5, the vast majority of my clients have been B2B companies – most in e-commerce.
So, if you need more B2B traffic and all the revenue that follows, let’s start talking search engine optimization.
What Is B2B SEO?
B2B SEO is a specialized approach to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that focuses on improving search engine visibility and attracting high-quality leads for businesses that sell products or services to other businesses.
Unlike B2C SEO, which typically targets a broader audience looking for immediate purchasing, B2B SEO is more intent-driven, aiming to attract decision-makers, such as executives, business owners, or procurement managers who are looking for solutions, partnerships, or specialized products and services.
B2B Search Engine Optimization Is Very, Very Important
Over the past decade, we’ve seen many B2B companies take advantage of other channels – namely video and social – often to great effect.
But this doesn’t mean SEO is any less vital to successful business-to-business marketing.
Almost half of marketers still report that SEO is their highest-ROI channel, which makes sense when you consider that almost half of consumers start their buying journeys on search engines. So, if your B2B company sells products, it literally pays to make sure your category pages and products show up at the top of Google to grab this lion’s share of traffic.
And this isn’t just good advice for e-commerce companies.
SEO has been the preferred marketing channel for B2B companies looking to generate leads for decades. According to research from Databox, 50% of B2B marketers attribute a large number of their new leads to their SEO efforts:
So, whether you’re selling products or services, your B2B company can’t afford to ignore all the prospects who turn to Google and other search engines everyday for help finding the solutions they need.
B2B E-Commerce vs. B2B Service SEO
Speaking of the different types of B2B companies, let’s quickly cover how this distinction affects Search Engine Optimization.
This is another really, REALLY important distinction you need to understand if you’re going to have success with SEO for your company.
As I just touched on, “e-commerce” means that you’re selling a product. Now, whether these are your own brand’s proprietary products, other brands’ products, or a combination of the two, your customers are largely only interested in what those physical items have to offer them.
Sure, your warranty, guarantee, shipping times, and customer service may definitely play a role in locking in conversions.
But at the end of the day, if you don’t have the products they want at the prices they want, they’re not buying.
No amount of blogging, or SEO, or “thought leadership” is going to change that. It’s not that these things can’t be important, but you have to understand how to use them if your B2B company is selling products online. I cover this in section 5 below about blogs.
Now, on the other hand, if you’re selling services, blogs might be as much a part of your B2B company’s livelihood as the service pages where you actually advertise your company’s expertise.
A good blog could be what convinces a potential client that you know more about the inner workings of corporate HR than any of your competitors. Branding can convince your market that your business is the perfect partner to help with their ongoing hiring needs. The list goes on and on…
Again, I’ll go into this in more detail below, but my argument is that both types of B2B companies should use blogs – just for slightly different reasons. I’ll elaborate on this in section 5.
What’s the Difference Between B2B and B2C SEO?
While I hope the above has helped you better understand how B2B SEO works in 2025, it’s probably also a good idea to quickly break down the difference between B2B and B2C SEO.
Although they’re fairly simple, they’re also essential to understand if you’re going to be successful. If all you’ve ever done is B2C SEO, applying the exact same tactics to a B2B website will produce lackluster results at best.
Let’s look at these differences by three vital categories:
Market
Obviously, B2B and B2C companies have different markets. This means the “audience” for your content is going to be significantly different if you’re doing SEO for a B2B website.
B2B: The audience in B2B SEO consists of decision-makers within companies, like managers, executives, or procurement teams. If you’re selling services, these individuals usually require more detailed information, industry insights, and proof of expertise before making a decision. If you’re selling products, this might not necessarily be the case. Just positioning your products to get as much traffic as possible – and competitive pricing – may be enough to win their business.
B2C: B2C SEO targets individual consumers, often focusing on a broad audience. These consumers are typically interested in straightforward benefits, and they make purchasing decisions quickly, often driven by personal needs or preferences. The ability to buy without any approval – often on impulse – may be one of the biggest differentiators between these two types of markets.
Given the fact that B2B SEO has a completely different type of audience, it should come as no surprise that the content you create is going to be different, too. So, let’s talk about that next.
Content Focus
Whether B2B or B2C, just about every website needs to publish content in order to succeed with Google and other search engines. Generally speaking, this means blogs.
B2B: Traditionally, B2B content is designed to be educational and informative, often featuring in-depth articles, case studies, whitepapers, or industry reports. This type of content helps establish credibility and expertise in the industry, as B2B customers usually seek thorough explanations before committing. But as I mentioned a moment ago, this traditional approach may be outdated for many industries. Blogs may be sufficient to build authority with Google. Pair them with winning product descriptions that rank because of that authority and you may be able to realize all kinds of new revenue without any “in-depth” articles or expensive industry reports.
B2C: In my opinion, B2C companies have been ahead of the curve in correctly using SEO content to increase traffic and generate sales. Everything from blog posts to buyer’s guides have been mainstays of B2C search engine optimization since the beginning. But their content tends to be more general. It’s about grabbing broad appeal represented by keywords that any number of different customers may be searching for in Google.
Now, while it’s true that B2B content has to be created for a “savvier” audience – one that is more educated about your products or services – I see far too many B2B business owners assume this means they can simply write about whatever was the hot topic at the most recent trade show or convention. The problem is that these topics – or at least the way they’re written about – don’t coincide with what Google sees your much larger audience looking for.
So, for business-to-business, stay focused on what your customers are using Google to discover. You can always share your thought leadership posts on social media, through emails, or as lead magnets at the end of your blogs.
Keywords
While I just mentioned this topic, keywords are important enough that I want to give them their own section, so I can go into more detail.
B2B: Keywords are typically longer-tail, industry-specific, and technical, targeting phrases that reflect the research-intensive nature of business decisions (e.g., “enterprise IT solutions,” “best CRM for small businesses”). B2B keywords also often include terms like “software,” “service,” or “solutions.” But again, this is where tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are essential. That being said, while A LOT of B2B SEO tactics obsess over the “research” aspect of your customer base, don’t forget that many of your buyers aren’t actually doing any – not anymore. They’ve long-since learned what products they need and will most likely choose whoever makes it to the top of Google. This is why proper category page SEO and product page optimization is SO important for B2B companies.
B2C: Keywords in B2C SEO are often more general and consumer-friendly. Shorter and broader phrases like “best workout shoes” or “top skincare products” attract a larger audience and appeal to users looking for immediate answers. Here, too, “research” may not be as important as SEO experts often stress. Price point is largely the decider here. The more someone needs to spend, the more research they’re likely to do before finally making a purchase.
Conversion Goals
Finally, let’s talk about the entire point of all of this. Whether you’re selling products or services, you want people coming to your website so that they’ll ultimately buy from you. So, let’s review these distinctions.
B2B: B2B SEO may be all about selling products of services, but it may also be about generating leads. In this sense, common conversion actions include form submissions, demo requests, or even in -person meetings. These conversion goals rely on SEO strategies that reflect the longer decision-making processes that often facilitate B2B transactions.
B2C: B2C SEO usually focuses on immediate conversions, like direct purchases or adding items to a cart. The goal is to drive consumer action quickly, often by creating a sense of urgency or highlighting a product’s unique appeal. While not always the case, this type of search engine optimization usually isn’t designed with a longer cycle in mind or the lengthier sales funnel that accompanies it.
As you can see, the difference between these two types of businesses isn’t exactly black and white – at least not where SEO is concerned. Nonetheless, it’s important to understand why common tactics for B2C won’t necessarily translate if you apply them unaltered to your business-to-business site.
10 Tips for B2B E-Commerce SEO
Alright, let’s get into to actual search engine optimization tactics that work for business-to-business companies like yours, especially if you work in e-commerce. Here are the 10 that I’d recommend to any B2B company, regardless of what products you sell.
1. Get Your Priorities Straight: Category Pages > Product Pages
This is arguably the most important aspect of B2B SEO that you need to understand if you run an e-commerce company. If you don’t get this right, you’re going to waste a lot of money and see very little in the way of results.
Put simply, the most important aspect of B2B SEO is: Do you sell a product?
In other words, do you own a B2B website or a B2B e-commerce website?
If you do e-commerce, your product pages probably don’t drive the most amount of traffic. And even if they do, you run into the issue of people shopping around.
Long story short: drive traffic to your category pages.
If you don’t do E-Commerce – if you’re a “service-based” business, then you may very well need your blog to sell your services, but I’d do the research to see if your service pages aren’t actually your most important asset.
For example, this page may earn us some B2B customers, but it’s far more likely that by internally linking to our relevant service pages, those pages will have a better chance of acquiring leads because they’ll rank better for searchers who are ready to buy.
2. Optimize Your Title Tags and H1s
Both your Title Tags and H1s should focus on your highest-traffic keyword that you can rank for.
If you’re selling a product that is dominated by competitors that have been investing in SEO for a lot longer (and maybe even other e-commerce titans like Amazon), you’re going to have a really hard time climbing the rankings – at least at first.
My advice is to choose keywords that are accurate but realistic in terms of rankings. You can always go back and update these later when you’re having more success.
For the Title Tag, check to see what seems to work on the first page. Google will usually cut your Title Tag at 600 pixels, which is about 70 characters, but it also modifies these important elements about 60% of the time.
So, I often recommend to go for broke in trying to fit relevant keywords into the Title Tag. Let Google decide what makes the most sense based on what users are searching for.
However, it’s not that simple. Taking this approach may have the exact opposite effect, which is why I always look at what seems to be working for competitors that have made it on the first page and steal their ideas emulate what’s working.
For a really great resource on this topic, check out Cyrus Shepard’s deep dive into the science of Title Tags.
Your H1 is usually going to be much simpler. Google isn’t going to step in and help format it, so keep it simple. Use your most relevant keyword and…that’s about it.
Unpopular Opinion: Ditch Your Brand Name
A lot of e-commerce companies – both B2B and B2C – automate the inclusion of their brand name in every single Title Tag on their site.
And sometimes this may make sense, but this also means that you’re probably taking a lot of those aforementioned 600 pixels to mention something that…and I hate to say this…doesn’t matter.
If someone is using a search query that includes your brand name, you’re going to rank in the top spot. If you don’t, something is horribly wrong and you should contact us right now to get this fixed.
But if you currently have your brand name in your Title Tags, I would encourage you to experiment with replacing it with a more impactful keyword.
3. Add Body Text to Your B2B Company’s Category Pages
More and more, I’m starting to see e-commerce companies wake up to the fact that you can add text to your category pages. B2B companies have been slower to adopt this tactic, but it’s beginning to happen.
I go into more detail about how to do this on my blog post about category pages, so definitely check that out for a full breakdown, but here are the two main reasons I strongly recommend you add text to these pages that mean so much to your site:
- They give you the opportunity to use more keywords that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to use in your Title Tag or H1
- The text provides an easy opportunity to add internal links to these category pages to boost the rankings for other pages on your site
Of course, you can also use this text to remind your customers about your guarantees, warranties, or even to showcase testimonials your customer service team has received. This is a great way to use the text for SEO and CRO purposes.
4. Come Up with a Plan for Your Product Pages
Despite what I said earlier, it’s not that I actually think product pages aren’t important.
Of course they are!
After all, they’re where your company actually makes sales.
However, as I touched on above, product pages generally don’t have as much traffic potential as your Category Pages.
And yet, because they’re the pages where sales actually happen, a lot of B2B SEOs start with them when optimizing websites.
The problem is that:
- Again, most of them have low traffic potential
- There are often tons of them
As a result, SEOs could take years to work through an entire B2B company’s inventory. And after all that work, they might not have much to show for it in terms of actual traffic and revenue.
So, my advice for product pages is to start by identifying which ones have the most traffic potential. It’s probably worth spending time on optimizing these pages to reach that full potential.
For the rest, I’d check to see what seems to be working for your competitors. I’ve noticed that a lot of very successful B2B companies are able to “get by” with very little information on their actual product pages.
A lot of B2B buyers are perfectly happy to see a blank page with the SKU they need a “buy” button.
If that’s the case, spending time and money on adding more to these pages may not produce much in the way of a return on that investment.
Don’t get me wrong.
I’d love to convince you that all 20,000 of your products need extremely-detailed product descriptions with multiple images and maybe a video or two. That way, five years from now, we’ll be about halfway through their inventory and I’ll probably have enough to retire.
But just like with anything when it comes to SEO, you need to take a look at what’s putting other companies on the first page. If you notice that it’s clearly bare-bones product pages, that should give you a direction to take with your own.
And that doesn’t mean you can’t add lots of extras like multiple images, videos, and even custom tools for helping with their decision.
I’d just recommend that you at least cover the basics Google is expecting before you invest a fortune into features that may not actually resonate with your B2B market.
5. Have a B2B Blog (But Understand What It’s Actually For)
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve found that the vast majority of B2B websites don’t utilize blogs well.
They either don’t have one or, to be frank, they might as well not have one for all the good it dos them.
While it’s true what I said above about the importance of creating content like white papers and “well-researched” article, the truth is that I think the importance of this type of content has long-been overestimated. There are definitely exceptions, but most of your B2B buyers don’t need you to do their research for them. And if they do use your research to make a buying decision, there’s no guarantee that they’ll end up using it to buy from you. They could very well take that information you were kind enough to put together (and pay for) and use it to give a competitor their money.
If you want more traffic to your site, invest in a blog, but do it for the right reasons. Use it to increase your authority with search engines by covering relevant topics, even the most basic ones that you can’t possible imagine a motivated buyer searching for (i.e., “What is [the type of product you sell]?”). This will earn Google’s trust and then – with the right internal links – you can transfer this trust to the category and product pages where you actually make money.
Can your blog lead to sales?
Sure.
But you should never look at that as its main job. Its job is to rank, so you can use them to make your “money” pages rank better, too.
Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ Content Strategies
I’m a big fan of taking the guesswork out of content strategies. Nothing makes me bristle more than hearing that marketing teams are sitting around a table “brainstorming” what they should post on their site.
Total unnecessary.
The winning strategy is already on display for you if you know how to look.
What word do you need to rank? Let’s say it’s “commercial HVAC units.”
Take a look at who’s ranking at the top of page 1. What blogs are they using to do this? There you go. Those are the blogs you need.
Content That Doesn’t Rank Is Fine (Sort Of)
Thought leadership may not rank, but maybe it’s good for social media or your company’s newsletter. Fine. I think you can also argue that it’s good to occasionally post the random blog without giving any though to SEO after Google seemed to punish some sites last year for “over-optimizing” content by very clearly only writing for search engines and not people. That would seem to be an easy way to “prove” you’re not just in it for clicks.
At the same time, you still need to make sure everyone is on the same page about the content they’ll be posting.
For example, if you plan on writing an SEO-optimized blog post about the most important trends facing your industry this year, but then a colleague is doing the same without any thought for SEO, it’s very likely those pages will clash. Google isn’t likely to give both of them equal consideration and while I would hope your SEO-focused blog would easily win, publishing two posts on the exact same topic is an unnecessary complication.
6. Do Your Keyword Research (Not So Obvious Advice)
Just about any blog post on ANY kind of SEO is going to recommend you do keyword research.
Groundbreaking.
But here’s the thing when it comes to B2B websites: far too many business owners simply assume they know what their keywords are without doing any actual research.
And that’s not necessarily a dig.
I get it.
If you’ve spent decades in an industry – going to tradeshows, making presentations, sitting through long sales cycles – you are undoubtedly an expert when it comes to your B2B product line. You’re also probably an expert when it comes to your market, too.
That being said, in my experience, markets can act very differently at tradeshows compared to online.
Plenty of times, I’ve had B2B clients provide me with their list of “keywords” only to find that most of the terms had absolutely no searches every month. Nothing would have been easier than to take the top spots for th0se terms given that there wasn’t any actual competition for them (or traffic).
Easy money.
But not for the client. They would’ve eventually realized that ranking for these terms brought no traffic, no conversions, and no revenue.
So, for the sake of B2B SEO, you need to do actual keyword research. This means investing in tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. It means using those tools to see what keywords your competitors are already using to earn traffic, and creating the same types of targeted pages.
7. Properly Set Up Your Canonical Tags
Whenever I do SEO audits for B2B companies, I always find issues with canonical tags.
These little tags are essential for just about every e-commerce website. Selling products means you’re probably going to have variants of each product. There’s a good chance many of your products may exist under more than one category page.
Either of these instances require canonical tags to ensure that Google has an easy time crawling your site and knowing which pages you want indexed.
If you’re not familiar with canonical tags, that needs to change. I can almost guarantee that your website could use some help in that department. So, brush up on canonical tags or give us a call to get this handled ASAP.
8. …Then Monitor Your Indexing Report
Another fundamental of e-commerce SEO is Google’s Indexing Report. So, if your B2B website sells services, you can mostly skip this part.
Otherwise, get familiar with your Indexing Report. It tells you which of the pages on your website Google is indexing and which it isn’t – and why.
Sometimes, Google may be leaving pages out of your index for perfectly valid reasons (i.e., you’re using the aforementioned canonical tags to tell Google not to index them).
But other times, these reasons might not be so valid.
If Google tells you that one of the pages in your sitemap returns a 404 code, that’s a problem.
The same is true for 301s and 302s. Sure, they redirect traffic, but why are they in your sitemap?
Or maybe Google thinks that one of your product pages is too similar to another – marking it as a “Duplicate Page.” This is a very common SEO problem for B2B sites that often offer a ton of very similar products.
These are a few of the many reasons you need to keep an eye on your Indexing Report.
So, let’s quickly go over how to find it.
First, in order to use it, you need to upload your sitemap to Search Console. Fortunately, that’s incredibly easy. Just head here:
Finish the URL for your sitemap here:
And you’re all set!
Wait for Google to process your sitemap and crawl your map and then check your Indexing
Report for the results.
You’ll find it here:
And check to make sure that all of the reasons any pages are not showing up in Google’s index are completely valid:
For help deciphering these results, check Google’s guide to the indexing report.
9. Keep an Eye on Core Web Vitals (but Don’t Go Crazy)
By now, everyone knows Core Web Vitals matter.
Right?
Well…kind of.
I have been skeptical about the impact of Core Web Vitals since Google baked them into the core algorithm with their Page Experience Update in 2021. Sure, it makes sense that a page’s load time can impact the user’s experience and that this would affect ranking factors as a result, but the idea that it would be a massive difference maker never added up.
Too many companies – especially large B2B e-commerce companies – stripped their sites down by eliminating all kinds of helpful extensions. This made for fast sites, but they were also borderline unusable by the B2B customers who appreciated how helpful all those features were.
Anyway, I digress.
The point is that I was right the entire time and even Google has come around to admitting as much (basically).
Check out this Search Engine Journal post about CWV for the rest of the details.
My advice is to keep an eye on your Core Web Vitals but not to make any drastic changes unless you can tie it to some other, meaningful metric.
For example, if your conversion rate has dropped because your bounce rate has gone up, it’s probably worth checking your site’s Core Web Vitals to see if maybe slow load times are behind the problem.
10. Show Up on the Other Sites Your Customers Visit
Alright, this might not be strictly an SEO strategy, but it’s still very important for B2B marketing purposes and, I mean c’mon, you’re already here.
If you work in B2B marketing, a big part of your annual calendar is probably in-person events: trade shows, conventions, conferences, etc. These have become fundamental building blocks of successful B2B marketing.
Why?
B2B companies have used conventions and tradeshows forever because that’s where their customers are.
Online B2B marketing works much the same way.
While it’s wise to invest in SEO to attract customers to your site, don’t forget all the other organizations that have been hard at work building their own online audiences for years – just like the groups that put on those in-person events.
These sites are a good place to show up if they run ads (not SEO, but still). They’re also a great place to show up if they let experts like yourself submit guest posts, which can be good for SEO and branding. If customers see your company showing up again and again, their confidence in your business will increase, which can lead to more organic searches AND a higher clickthrough rate as these shoppers learn that your site is where the expertise is.
B2B SEO Is Actually Really Easy
Yes, this is where I tell you that it’s easy because you can contact us and work with an agency that understands what it takes to produce traffic growth and sales for your B2B company.
But it’s also the truth because the truth is that most of your competitors probably haven’t invested much in digital marketing, SEO or otherwise. They may know all about their “buyer personas” and “user journeys”, but when it comes to the nuts and bolts of driving traffic, they’re at the mercy of search engines.
So, whether you just want a simple audit of your site or a longer engagement to skyrocket revenue, we’d love to talk. While your competitors are still putting off this essential investment, let’s get busy building you an insurmountable competitive edge.