B2B SEO checklist

Step 0: agree what a good lead is

Before touching the site, sit with sales and write down three things: the job titles who search, the problem phrases they use and what makes a lead worth a call. Without this, SEO reports fill with traffic that never becomes pipeline.

Download the checklist as a file and use it as the agenda for the first workshop. For the full service, see B2B SEO.

Page types to have in place

Many B2B sites have strong blog posts and weak solution pages. Fix the second first. Those pages catch people who are close to a decision.

Technical and site checks

• Solution pages are in the sitemap, return 200 and are reachable in three clicks from the home page.
• Each page has one h1, a unique title and a description that names the audience.
• Forms are indexable pages or load without blocking the content. Thank-you pages are noindexed and fire a conversion event.
• Gated PDFs have a public summary page that can rank.
• Staging and old campaign subdomains are blocked or removed.
• Core Web Vitals are checked on the templates that carry forms.
• Hreflang is correct if you sell in more than one country.

The technical SEO checklist goes deeper on each item.

Connect search to the CRM

1. Capture source on every formStore landing page, referrer and campaign fields in hidden inputs and pass them to the CRM.
2. Tag organic leadsCreate a lead source value for organic search so it does not disappear into direct.
3. Track stagesReport leads, sales-accepted leads, opportunities and closed deals by landing page.
4. Review monthly with salesAsk which leads were good. Feed the answers back into page priorities.

Reporting comes from the client's own Google Search Console and CRM, so you always see the same figures we do.

A short worked calculation

Take an illustrative B2B software page set: 4,000 organic visits a month, 1.5 percent submit a form, and a third of those are accepted by sales. That is 60 form fills and 20 accepted leads. If one in five accepted leads becomes an opportunity, you get 4 opportunities a month from search. Improve the form rate from 1.5 to 2 percent and the same traffic gives about 5. Raise traffic to the pages that already convert and the result moves more than a blog post would. These are example figures, not client results.

This is why we report on pages that produce accepted leads, not on total sessions. Our SaaS SEO work uses the same method.

Content and links

• Write for each role: what the user wants to learn, what the buyer wants to see, what finance wants to know.
• Support claims with a source or a customer fact you can show.
• Earn links from partners, industry groups, integrations directories and customers' own pages. Ask for them with a reason.
• Refresh the top ten pages every six months with new facts and screenshots.
• Add the buying questions your sales team hears most as sections on solution pages.