Business-to-business (B2B) SEO is about more than just climbing rankings.
You do it for visibility to connect with the business owners, decision-makers, and industry professionals who need your product or service.
In this niche where precision is key, the following B2B SEO tools will help you boost productivity, brand awareness, and conversion rates.
1. Semrush
Semrush is a comprehensive online marketing platform with over 55 helpful tools and reports.
Its SEO toolkit has four main workflow groups:
Following the toolkit’s flow will help you cover all bases of your B2B website’s SEO.
Some of the best SEO tools to start with are Traffic Analytics, Keyword Magic, On Page SEO Checker, and Persona.
Here’s how they work:
Traffic Analytics
Traffic Analytics provides insights into your competitors’ SEO and other marketing efforts, showing where they get traffic from and which tactics are paying off.
You can use that to fill gaps in your strategy, get content ideas, and ultimately improve your rankings.
Enter a site’s URL into the search box and click “Analyze.”
You’ll get an analysis of their traffic, visits duration, bounce rate, and more.
It’s a user-friendly way to find any domain’s top-performing pages, traffic channels, and audience profiles.
Cost: Full access to Traffic Analytics data is available with the .Trends package at $200/month. You can add it to any Business, Guru, or Pro Semrush subscription.
Keyword Magic Tool
The Keyword Magic Tool is your window into Semrush’s database of 25.1 billion keywords.
Give it one seed keyword (i.e., a broad term related to your business or product) and it’ll generate thousands of keyword variations for you to research in more depth.
To start, type your seed keyword into the search box, choose a location, and click “Search.”
You’ll see a list of keyword ideas. And plenty of metrics to help you determine which ones warrant further research. Like search volume, search intent, and keyword difficulty (KD) scores.
Rearrange the list in ascending or descending order by clicking any of the metrics along the top.
For example, you could click “Volume” and then identify keywords near the top of the list with low keyword difficulty scores.
Targeting high-traffic keywords with low difficulty scores can help you rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs) faster.
Clicking on any of the keywords will take you to the Keyword Overview page, where you can see the top 100 ranking pages for the selected keyword and where you can toggle between country databases to compare metrics quickly.
You can use this detail to build a list of priority keywords in the Keyword Manager for your SEO strategy.
Cost: Available with a Free, Pro ($129.95/month), Guru ($249.95/month), or Business ($499.95/month) Semrush account.
On Page SEO Checker
Semrush’s On Page SEO Checker evaluates your content and suggests search-friendly improvements in real time.
Enter your landing pages and keywords to get an exhaustive list of ideas like:
You can also speed up the SEO auditing process by importing data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Semrush’s Site Audit tool.
To use the On Page SEO Checker, choose an existing project from the list:
Or to create a new one, click “+ Create project,” add your URL and Project Name, and head back to the list to select “Set up.”
The tool will ask for your target location and which pages you want to optimize. Choose those and click “Collect ideas.”
You’ll see a dashboard containing a range of ideas and optimization recommendations.
Click any of the numbers in the “Total Ideas” panel to see a list of relevant pages.
Click any of the blue “ideas” buttons to explore the tool’s suggestions for that page. So if we choose “Backlinks Ideas,” we see a list of pages on our site for which the tool has backlink recommendations.
Based on competitor data, the tool recommends sites to acquire backlinks from.
That’s helpful since backlinks are one of Google’s most important ranking signals.
Alternatively, we can choose a page from the Overview’s list of “TOP pages to optimize.”
Just click on any of the blue “ideas” buttons to see a full list of on-page SEO recommendations for that URL.
You’ll see recommendations around SEO “Strategy,” “SERP Features,” “Content,” and more.
Pay particularly close attention to the tool’s content recommendations. For instance, you may find that you have too many keywords in your content—or too few.
The tool can identify issues and opportunities for improving your content based on your competition. Which can improve your overall strategy.
In fact, McKinsey found that B2B businesses can see a 5-10% increase in revenue from increasing their content’s relevance and engagement.
Cost: On Page SEO Checker is accessible with all Semrush accounts, though each tier has limits:
- Free: 10 SEO Idea Units (each keyword in the tool spends 1 unit)
- Pro: 500 SEO Idea Units
- Guru: 800 SEO Idea Units
- Business: 2,000 SEO Idea Units
Persona
Semrush’s Persona tool can help you build a buyer persona in minutes.
A buyer persona is a hypothetical representation of your ideal customer based on data from market research, competitor analysis, and existing customer profiles.
The tool comes with several B2B-specific templates. And provides questions and prompts to inspire you as you build your profiles.
By creating accurate, in-depth personas in Semrush, you can tailor your SEO content to resonate with specific decision-makers online.
Start by choosing a profile image. Pick the one that most closely resembles your typical customer.
Then, pick a template—such as the B2B template.
Now, enter the abstract buyer’s details into the various tiles. And add custom tiles if anything’s missing.
Having a template to work with ensures you don’t forget any important details when building your B2B buyer personas.
Cost: Free.
Helpful B2B SEO features (across Semrush):
- Discover untapped keyword opportunities in minutes (Keyword Magic Tool)
- Crawl pages to detect technical issues impacting SEO (Site Audit)
- Crawl pages to find ideas to improve SEO based on top-ranking competitors (On Page Checker)
- Find B2B-specific templates to speed up SEO processes (Persona)
User review (Semrush): “I **** that Semrush offers a pretty complete package for an SEO campaign. It offers in-depth insight into anything from backlink metrics to keyword performance. It’s also great for scoping out new opportunities for new business or pitching, by giving top-level estimated performance metrics about almost any website”—Chris C., SEO Specialist [via G2]
2. Google (GSC, GA4, PageSpeed Insights)
Google’s search and website performance toolkit provides a wealth of data to help you make more fruitful SEO decisions.
Its three main tools are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights.
Here’s what you need to know:
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Google Analytics 4 shows you how people find and use your website. And how it performs in paid (i.e., pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and organic search.
Its information is crucial for measuring your B2B SEO strategy’s effectiveness. And the impact of smaller on-page SEO tweaks.
You’ll find insightful data on:
- Users
- Sessions
- Page engagement
- Traffic sources
You can use GA reports to understand the impact of your SEO activities, fix inefficiencies, and repeat winning actions.
Cost: Free.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC), formerly Webmaster Tools, monitors how your website performs on Google’s SERPs. And it helps you fix indexing and crawling issues that hinder your search performance.
GSC’s accessible reports make technical search and SEO data easier to understand. They’re ideal for business owners with limited B2B marketing or analytics experience.
The reports are also easily shareable, so you can keep team members and stakeholders up to ****.
Submitting sitemaps and individual URLs for GSC to crawl helps Google see, understand, and rank your site.
The faster it understands your sitemap, the faster you can get high-quality content in front of your target audience on Google.
Cost: Free.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights assesses your website on a technical level and suggests ways to increase its performance.
When your site loads faster, it improves the UX and can boost your ranking potential.
The tool gauges the performance of any URL using metrics it calls Core Web Vitals.
This tells you if the site is likely to meet visitor expectations—like whether pages load fast enough and whether links are responsive.
Only one-third of websites pass the Core Web Vitals threshold. So, working toward a pass could help you outperform others in your field.
Whether your site passes or not, PageSpeed Insights will offer recommendations for improving site performance.
You’ll see verdicts and suggestions for mobile and desktop sites—ideal for reaching business owners on various devices.
Cost: Free.
Helpful B2B SEO features (across GA, GSC, and PageSpeed Insights):
- Segmentation for analyzing high-value site traffic
- Goal conversion tracking for quantifying SEO return on investment (ROI)
- Index coverage reports to diagnose content issues
User review (GSC): “The best thing about [GSC] is that it saves me hours and days’ worth of time by telling me which keywords I need to work on so that my rankings boost in a few days. With this tool, I’ve been able to increase my website’s clicks from 400/month to 48,000/month in two years.”—Shivam A, content manager at AiSensy [via G2]
Further reading: We explore GSC, GA, PageSpeed Insights, and more in our Guide to Google SEO Tools
3. Screaming FrogSEO Spider
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider finds technical and indexing issues on your site that could hurt search performance.
It’s a web crawler, much like Google’s own, that checks for:
All these issues can make your site less visible online. But spotting them is difficult and time-consuming, even for expert SEOs.
Screaming FrogSEO Spider simplifies and speeds up the process.
The result?
You get time back to work on other areas of your business.
What’s more, it integrates with GSC, GA, and PageSpeed Insights to present the clearest picture of search performance.
Cost: There are free and paid plans, with a detailed comparison on Screaming Frog’s website. The free account has a crawl limit of 500 pages. The paid version is unrestricted for $259/year.
Helpful B2B SEO features:
- Complete technical and on-page auditing for full optimization
- XML sitemap checker to identify indexing gaps
- Integrations to connect your existing technologies
User review: “Screaming Frog gives me all the data I need to audit and optimize every website I want, at least if it’s about on-page SEO. Due to the local installation, you don’t have to wait until your crawls start. And if you buy a license, there is no quota for URLs or domains. Just crawl whatever you like.”—User in the software industry [via G2]
4. Yoast
Yoast SEO is an SEO plugin for WordPress, the massively popular content management system (CMS).
It simplifies basic and technical SEO actions, like setting and editing your web pages’ title tags, URL slugs, and meta descriptions.
You can also set up canonical URLs, create meta robots tags, and stop search engines from indexing your pages.
Note: There are various reasons why you might not want Google to index or rank certain pages on your website. Learn more in our Guide to Meta Robots Tags & X-Robots-Tags.
It’ll also analyze your site and make recommendations (or congratulate you for doing a great job).
Yoast’s accessibility is a major selling point for business owners and junior marketers. The tool even uses the tagline “SEO for Everyone.”
Further reading: Check out our How to Use the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress guide for more details.
Cost: Yoast’s free plan has some limitations, or there’s a “Premium” plugin with extra features and 24/7 support for $99/year.
Helpful B2B SEO features:
- Optimizes on-page elements like titles and metadata
- Readability analysis to make crafting high-quality content easier
- XML sitemap integration with WordPress sites
User review: “For a non-professional WordPress developer like myself, the depth of support and information is fantastic. I’m able to research before diving in and have confidence that timely and useful support is there when, not if, I need it.”—Richard D, small business developer [via G2]
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO toolkit that helps users with competitor analysis, link building, keyword research, content optimization, site audits, and rank tracking.
Use it to track metrics like referring domains (new and lost), organic traffic, traffic value, and more.
You’ll see it all in clean, intuitive dashboards and reports—with plenty of supporting information to help you navigate and understand your data.
One of Ahrefs’ major selling points is a highly active web crawler.
Ahrefsbot collects and processes “petabytes of data every day,” which means you get a clear, up-to-**** view of your site’s search performance. And lots of helpful recommendations to climb the rankings.
Cost: The Lite plan starts at $99/month, rising to $399/month for an Advanced plan. An Enterprise tier targets agencies and other businesses, starting at $999/month.
Helpful B2B SEO features:
- Discover high-potential content gaps to target
- Compare your content volume to your competitors
- Identify linkable content opportunities across your website
User review: “The way [Ahrefs] uncovers competitor strategies and gives you the lowdown on their backlinks and keywords is pure gold. And those keyword research features? They’ve saved me hours of guesswork and brought in serious traffic. Plus, the site audit – it’s like having a virtual detective that points out exactly what’s wrong with your site’s SEO.”—Ali S, digital marketing executive [via G2]
6. Little Warden
Little Warden automates important search engine optimization checks that B2B business owners, marketers, and site admins often don’t have time for.
Things that can negatively impact SEO performance, like
- Domain expirations
- SSL certificate expirations
- Title and meta tag changes
- Robots.txt changes
The sooner you know about these issues, the sooner you can address them to maintain your online visibility.
Image Source: Little Warden
Little Warden is especially useful if you manage more than one website. Like if you have a consumer-facing site as well as your B2B one. Or manage other companies’ websites.
It’ll walk you through setting up tailored checks for your whole portfolio, then deliver automated updates through your favorite communication channel (e.g., email, Messenger, or Slack).
Image Source: Little Warden
Cost: There’s a Small Team plan for $54.99/month, an agency plan at $99.99/month, and a Large Agency plan for $199.99/month.
Helpful B2B SEO features:
- Technical SEO audits based on latest Google requirements
- Actionable on-page optimization recommendations
- Site crawling and monitoring for ongoing changes and new issues
User review: “It’s beneficial for sites that multiple developers manage because they have a habit of overwriting code and pushing changes that break search visibility. For example, it’s caught and notified me of robots.txt changes that could have de-indexed the site if I hadn’t known about it.”—Jon Henshaw, founder of Coywolf [via Coywolf]
7. SplitSignal
SplitSignal is Semrush’s A/B testing tool. Its statistical ****** accurately predict the SEO impact of certain changes to your site.
This way, you can experiment without wasting resources and make informed decisions to grow organic search traffic.
You can test various SEO tweaks on SplitSignal like changes to titles, meta tags, ad-block placements, alt tags, and structured data.
If the tool suggests a change will work, you can apply it to the rest of your site and potentially rank faster.
Cost: SplitSignal is currently available only by application. Complete a request form for more info.
Helpful B2B SEO features:
- Tests new page versions against existing content for optimization
- Provides feedback on content changes
- Offers a “Confidence Level” for more informed decisions
User review: “It made the whole process of testing and changing metadata more efficient. We didn’t need to get the developers involved and could test every idea that came to our minds without having to run for approvals. This opens up so many possibilities.”—Stephan Cude, Senior Tech SEO Manager at Leafly [Semrush testimonial]
8. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is an all-in-one SEO toolset for carrying out site audits, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and keyword research.
This software aims to “remove SEO complexity” using a blend of intuitive dashboards, customizable reports, and proprietary metrics.
Page Authority (PA) is one of Moz’s most useful performance indicators. Based on a machine learning algorithm, it predicts how well a page will rank in Google on a scale of 1-100.
There’s also a Spam Score, which can help you identify content on your site that needs optimizing for relevance and originality.
Cost: Moz Pro’s Standard plan costs $99/month with some usage limitations. There are also Medium ($179/month), Large ($299/month), and Premium ($599/month) plans.
Helpful B2B SEO features:
User review: “Having all [SEO] issues in one place with the ability to filter them allows us to tackle high-priority site issues first. I also really like the keyword research tool and how the dashboard is laid out with monthly volume, SERP features, difficulty, organic CTR, and priority. This is also very nice to have in one place.”—Jake P, small business marketing director [via G2]
9. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that can simplify all kinds of SEO and content marketing processes.
Give it questions or prompts and it’ll use natural language processing (NLP) to provide helpful, conversational responses.
For example, you can use it as a basic keyword research tool by prompting it to find relevant keywords to target with your company’s SEO efforts.
Then, ask follow-up questions to get more information.
You can also ask ChatGPT to:
- Suggest content headlines based on keyword research
- Create blog outlines
- Write blog posts or sections
- Proofread your content
- Provide lead generation ideas
- Generate basic code (e.g., XML sitemap, schema markup, header tags)
ChatGPT isn’t always accurate. So, use it to assist your B2B companies’ SEO work—not do it for you.
Thoroughly edit the content it generates before publishing any on your site.
And explore keyword research and other search suggestions further with a dedicated SEO tool, like Semrush’s Keyword Overview.
Further reading: Learn more about ChatGPT’s digital marketing capabilities in our guide on How to Use ChatGPT.
Cost: Free, with a faster, more advanced version (ChatGPT Plus) available for $20/month.
Helpful B2B SEO features:
- Generates basic search-friendly content in seconds
- Answers site audit questions to identify issues/gaps
- Provides SEO advice and solutions when given context
User review: “Tasks that took me 20 minutes or longer can now be completed in under five minutes. Additionally, it has helped my understanding of website development. If you’re not achieving the desired results, I suggest learning about effective prompts. With a bit of practice, you’ll see improved results.”—Dan M., business development executive in marketing [via G2]
10. Qwoted
Qwoted is a public relations (PR) tool that connects businesses and subject matter experts with journalists, public relations agencies, and media outlets.
It’ll help your website performance in two ways.
- As a subject matter expert: Find opportunities to contribute to journalists’ articles on your niche, gaining exposure and backlinks to increase organic traffic to your site
- As a content creator: Source contributions from experts in your industry to make your content more original and valuable
That second point is particularly important for B2B SEO.
Why?
Because industry voices make your content more original and add Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
These factors form E-E-A-T, part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. So meeting those guidelines could improve your ranking.
Successful collaborations that start on Qwoted may also turn into more valuable, longer-term relationships for your brand.
For example, you could connect with an influencer or reporter who can regularly promote your products.
Price: Qwoted has a free version, limited to two pitches per month. Go unlimited for 124.99/month (billed annually) or build a custom Team plan.
Helpful B2B SEO features:
- Organizes outreach contacts by responsiveness
- Lists contacts’ expertise to speed up research and outreach
- Filters by job title to find relevant contacts and build valuable relationships
User review: “I **** that Qwoted lets me present myself professionally, and allows people to create different portals for themselves and their clients. I have seen and worked with a dozen pitching portals so far. Qwoted has the best user interface (UI) of all of them.”—User at a non-profit organization [via G2]
Bing Webmaster Tools is the Microsoft version of GSC.
It offers many of the same metrics (e.g., click-through rates (CTRs), impressions, keyword rankings) but in relation to Bing rather than Google.
Why use both of these marketing tools?
Google dominates search, but Bing still has over 100 million active daily users. And some will be business owners in your target market.
Monitoring and maintaining your Bing search performance will make you more visible to these people.
You can also use Bing Webmaster Tools to submit sitemaps for indexing and fix crawlability issues.
Bing Webmaster Tools isn’t as advanced as GSC, but it continues to evolve. It’s also simple to use, with a clean interface that’s likely familiar for most Google regulars.
Cost: Free.
Helpful B2B SEO features:
- Identifies Bing-specific crawl errors and indexing issues
- Allows URL submission to improve Bing visibility
- Provides query data for keyword performance insights
User review: “This tool helps in understanding how Bing sees my website and how it crawls. I recently liked the feature of Bing indexing API. It helps in indexing and deindexing pages in a short time span. Moreover, the sub-domains info given in the site explorer helps me when cleaning unwanted subdomains.”—Atinder S., SEO manager [via G2]
Build and Implement a Winning B2B Marketing Strategy with Semrush
Building thoughtful, data-informed SEO practices into broader, omnichannel marketing strategies is how successful B2B businesses thrive.
Plan, execute, and measure your search, social media, online advertising, PR, and content campaigns with Semrush’s comprehensive toolkit.
Sign up for your free 7-day trial to get started.
Source link : Semrush.com
