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You've probably heard that SEO is the backbone of digital marketing. While it may sound a bit cliche, it is true — trust us, it's our business.
SEO can increase brand awareness, online visibility, lead generation, and conversions — the makings of sustainable, organic business growth. But with so many tasks on your plate, handling it alone can be challenging.
Cue SEO agencies.
The right partner can launch and foster a successful SEO strategy or scale and support your current plan, sparing you the stress of doing it alone. When choosing one, consider factors like alignment with your business goals, experience, technical SEO expertise, strategy customization, content creation capabilities, and results.
Let's start the process off for you with some of the best options.
How agencies make or break B2B SEO success
A great agency brings experienced staff with knowledge of everything from customer trends to search engine algorithms to your team. With these experts, you can establish brand authority by optimizing your website for specific keywords, creating great targeted content, building more backlinks, and refreshing existing content.
Working with a content and SEO agency also saves you time. You don't need to keep up with current trends, search engine algorithms, or high-ranking keywords since you already have people doing that for you. Instead, you get to focus on core business operations and nurturing the clients the revamped SEO efforts bring you.
However, you can only reap these benefits if you choose the right SEO agency to partner with. Working with the wrong one or just picking a top-rated agency without doing your due diligence can result in suboptimal search engine rankings, lost opportunities to beat your competition, penalties from poor SEO practices, and wasted resources.
To prevent this, take the time to assess your SEO options. Some things to look for in a potential partner include:
- Expertise in your industry: An SEO expert who is knowledgeable about your offerings and industry can position you as authoritative and authentic in the field.
- An understanding of your ideal customer profile (ICP): Knowing your target audience's behaviors, pain points, and needs puts the agency in a better position to meet them.
- Proven results with websites in your niche: The better an agency's results with websites the same size or shape as yours, the likelier they'll deliver high-quality services.
- A willingness to undertake strategic research: This is the only way to create a custom strategy that aligns with your business goals.
- A focus on the services you need: You don't want to spend thousands of dollars on services that aren't bringing you any closer to your goals.
- Expertise in technical SEO: An agency with this expertise does more than just keyword research and content optimization — it also makes your website easier to crawl and understand, allowing search engines to index pages and rank you.
- Transparent reporting and communication: An agency that regularly checks in with your in-house team can make faster adjustments to your strategy to continuously improve your return on investment (ROI).
5 Best B2B SEO agencies (+ who should partner with them)
Sifting through the hundreds of SEO agency options currently available is a lot of work. It can be time-consuming and delay SEO strategy development and execution, something you don't want in the fast-paced online world.
To spare you the stress and time, we've done the research to bring you some of the best options in the market.
1. Ten Speed
Ten Speed is a digital marketing agency specializing in product-led content to drive organic traffic, conversions, and business growth. We provide full-service SEO, content marketing, and audit services to keep you at the top of your vertical.
We have a holistic approach to SEO and focus on aligning all our services with your overarching business goals for the best results. As a Ten Speed client, you can expect:
- A custom SEO strategy that scales with you and adapts to meet new business needs.
- High-quality content that includes subject matter expertise and your brand’s unique point of view to boost your search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
- Strategy, SEO, migration, and content audits to identify opportunities for better performance.
- Technical SEO analysis to optimize your website.
- Keyword and competitor analysis to identify opportunities to rank better in organic search results and outperform other businesses in your industry.
We manage thousands of pages for clients like Bitly, Workvivo, Ziflow, and AlphaPoint and have helped each one elevate its SEO performance. For example, by providing product-led content, we've helped Workvivo grow its website traffic value from roughly $28,600 to $54,000 per month. We conducted a site audit to determine what to improve and based our strategy on the findings. In this case, we refreshed existing content that was experiencing decay, increased non-brand keywords, and expanded MoFu content.
Ten Speed may be the right fit for you if you're a SaaS business-to-business, Series A to Series C startup looking for the best content creation agencies or SEO companies. Depending on your needs, costs may range between $8,000 and $25,000 per month.
2. Siege Media
Siege Media is a full-service B2B marketing agency known for helping drive organic growth. The fully remote agency has a diverse team of professionals with expertise in everything from web design and content creation to digital public relations.
The company has a wide range of clients in industries spanning from SaaS to e-commerce. One of its most notable clients is SaaS solution provider Zendesk. By implementing a bottom-funnel strategy and expanding Zendesk's content portfolio, Siege Media helped the brand realize a 69% increase in organic traffic within one year of their partnership.
This SEO agency provides services like:
- Content strategy development to better align your content with business goals.
- Web development and graphic design to improve user experiences.
- Keyword research to identify high-ranking words and phrases in your niche.
- SEO A/B testing to identify the best-performing strategies.
Siege Media may be suitable for fintech, SaaS, and e-commerce brands looking for SEO, PR, and content marketing services under one roof. The company's pricing typically ranges from $50,000 to $200,000 based on project needs.
3. Foundation
Foundation is a global marketing firm specializing in creating content for B2B SaaS brands. The agency leverages various tools, including generative AI, to improve clients' rankings using high-quality content.
Foundation has worked with industry giants like MailChimp, Procore, and Canva. It has registered significant results for many B2B businesses, including helping a mobile app company increase organic traffic by ~1050% and bringing over 2,500 visitors to a SaaS company's website through social media. The agency offers various services, such as:
- Conducting audience and keyword research.
- Creating and distributing content through blogs, social media platforms, webinars, etc, to maximize reach.
- Performing technical SEO audits for insights on what to improve.
- Acquiring high-quality links to maintain or improve your domain authority.
Foundation may be a suitable alternative for B2B companies looking to enhance their social media engagement alongside SEO rankings. The agency offers customized pricing based on your needs, so you must contact their team for an estimate.
4. Omniscient
Omniscient is a growth-focused agency that helps software B2B brands elevate their SEO efforts and content.
Omniscient has worked with fast-growing SaaS companies like Adobe, Loom, Shipyard, and Jasper and helped grow the traffic and conversions for each one. For example, by creating search-optimized content and building backlinks for Shipyard, it realized a 771% increase in trial account registrations. Also, by improving Jasper's content strategy, it helped the AI writing platform grow its blog-attributed product signups by 400X despite having migrated in 2022.
Some of the services you get with Omniscient include:
- Content creation and repurposing to drive conversions
- Link building to improve brand authority.
- Technical SEO to make sure algorithms index and crawl your website.
The agency's full-service engagement starts at $10,000, but costs vary depending on needs. It may be a suitable fit for an already-established SaaS brand looking to transform its content and SEO into growth portals.
5. Growth Plays
Like many contenders on this list, Growth Plays is a content strategy and SEO firm focusing on B2B SaaS brands. It prioritizes revenue and pipeline in every marketing strategy, making it one of the top options if you're tired of working with companies that focus on vanity metrics.
The agency has driven conversions for companies like Calendly, Lattice, and LaunchDarkly by leveraging solutions like Positional's Internals toolset to improve internal linking strategies. Beyond link building, it offers services like:
- Conducting competitive analyses to determine what competitors are doing and what you can improve to outrank them.
- Developing content plans that align with business goals.
- Providing real-time, round-the-clock visibility into your site to quickly identify technical SEO problems.
- Offering SEO-friendly CMS or domain migration to carry SEO value to your new site.
The agency may suit software B2B brands looking to migrate or launch new services. It offers custom pricing based on individual business needs.
How to choose the best SEO agency for your business
Even with these recommendations, you need to do your due diligence to make sure a specific agency is the right fit for your brand. Here are a few tips to guide you:
Define your SEO goals
Goal setting allows you to sift through your options and find an agency partner that meets your unique needs. With clear goals, you'll know which services to prioritize during your search and have an easier time vetting your options. You just need to look at their proven track record of success, helping other businesses meet similar goals.
Ideally, your SEO goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). To set them:
- Consider overarching business objectives: Every SEO goal should align with overall objectives. For example, if your business objective is to grow revenue, a great SEO goal would be to drive organic traffic to your site.
- Assess your website's performance: This helps you create realistic SEO goals. For example, if your conversion rates are declining, setting a goal like "To increase conversions by 5% is more realistic than "To grow conversions by 30%."
- Analyze your competitors and industry: Again, this is to help you set realistic goals. By understanding how they're performing, you can set achievable goals.
Some great examples of SEO goals you can set include:
- To boost organic traffic by 50% in the next year.
- To build 100 high-quality backlinks within eight months.
- To reduce bounce rate by 15% in the next three months.
- To reduce your website's load time to under three seconds within one month.
Consider what you can invest in the relationship
The more you invest in your relationship with an agency, the better results you'll see. You can collaborate on strategy development and adjust tactics based on your business's evolving needs.
If you want to invest in the relationship, be clear from the beginning. For example, if you want to hold regular meetings with your account manager or have your in-house team work with the agency throughout the relationship, communicate this early on to determine if these things are possible. Be realistic when setting expectations for what the relationship will look like to avoid losing reliable SEO partners. For example, if you want to hold meetings, weekly or monthly sessions would be more realistic for many agencies than daily meetings.
Similarly, if you don't have the time to collaborate with an agency (as is the case with solo marketers or businesses without in-house teams), let them know from the beginning. This way, they can determine whether they can meet all your needs alone, customize their pricing to reflect the scope of services needed, and create a comprehensive plan for your business.
Consider available resources to determine what you can realistically invest in the relationship. For example, if you're a large business with an in-house SEO team, you can collaborate with an agency on some SEO tasks. But, if you're a small business with no/limited SEO expertise, it'd be more realistic to rely fully on your chosen agency and ask for regular reports.
After determining what you can invest, check your potential agency's reputation and testimonials. What do brands that have worked with them and have the same expectations as yours have to say? If the reviews are positive, the partnership will likely be successful.
Make the most of sales calls
Many agencies will tell you a lot about what they do on their websites. However, some information may not be publicly available. This means you need to talk directly to your chosen agency.
Through sales calls, you can learn if it's the right time to hire an organic growth company or if a PPC agency would better fit your needs. You can also understand how internal processes work — how invested you need to be in the SEO process and how the agency goes about elevating your business from its current position.
Sales calls are also a great way to learn about pricing. As you've seen from our list of B2B SEO agencies, many provide price ranges. To get a better estimate, a company has to first understand your needs — enter sales calls.
Here are a few questions to ask to make the most out of your calls:
- How do you handle strategy development?
- Given the information I've provided about my brand, is an organic growth strategy suitable?
- How do you generate results?
- Who will be in charge of my campaign?
- How often will you provide reports? Can you customize the frequency to meet my needs?
- What will you need from me for a successful collaboration?
- What is your pricing model? Taking my needs into account, how much will your services cost?
The agency may answer your questions during the call or schedule a meeting for a more in-depth discussion after assessing your products, ICP, and goals.
Partner with an agency that can walk a mile in your shoes
The importance of a reliable B2B SEO agency that understands your needs can't be overstated. It may be what you need to outrank other brands and drive conversions and business growth.
Ten Speed is a best-in-class agency. Our commitment to understanding who our customers are puts us "in the trenches" with them and keeps us focused on supporting their success.
Our approach is simple and effective. We learn everything about your brand during the onboarding process (from its ICP to its offerings), look at your current performance, assess your vertical to identify opportunities, customize your strategy, and then execute it and monitor its performance for continuous improvements.
Looking for a customized B2B SEO strategy to support revenue growth efforts? Schedule a call with us today.
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