Most B2B SEO best practices are borrowed from consumer sites: pick high-volume keywords, publish, chase traffic. That fits a product someone buys alone in an afternoon. It fits badly when a purchase takes months, involves a room full of people, and is half decided before anyone speaks to a sales team. The searches happen anyway. They are just spread across more people and more stages, and each one needs a different page.
The numbers below come from Google’s own research, published on Think with Google. None of it is about SEO directly, and this post says so where it matters. But it describes how business buyers behave, and that behaviour is what your search strategy has to fit.
Why B2B buying changes SEO
A 2024 Think with Google article by Eoin Cahill, “B2B marketing: Connecting with new & existing business buyers”, sets out the shape of the problem. The purchasing journey “is generally longer due to the higher price point of B2B products.” And “research by Google and Bain revealed that today’s B2B buying committees have an average of 17 cross-functional stakeholders.”
Long cycles and large committees multiply the searches. A finance lead, an engineer and a department head may all research the same purchase, at different times and with different questions. The article also notes a shift in who those people are, “with 64% of business buyers now either a Millennial or Gen Zer”, and cites a report saying “49% of all B2B spending now takes place online, while 68% of buyers say they will increase their use of digital shopping channels in the future.”
The shortlist is made before you hear about it
This is the figure that should shape a B2B SEO strategy. According to the same article, “Research by Bain & Company and Google also revealed that 92% of B2B buyers already have a shortlist of preferred vendors before they start the buying process, highlighting the importance of building brand awareness and trust early on.”
The pattern is not new. An older Think with Google paper, “B2B’s Digital Evolution” by Corey Mull, published in February 2013, reported that “on average, business buyers do not contact suppliers directly until 57 percent of the purchase process is complete.” That was based on a survey of 1,500 business leaders run with CEB’s Marketing Leadership Council in 2011 and 2012, so treat it as evidence of a long-running habit rather than a current statistic.
Put together, the point is simple. If you aren’t found while buyers are researching, you probably won’t make the list, and no amount of bottom-funnel content will help a vendor nobody shortlisted.
B2B SEO best practices: map pages to buying stages
The practical answer is to cover the whole journey, with a page type for each stage and each kind of person. The table below is a planning frame, not research: the stages and example queries are illustrative.
| Buying stage | Who is searching | Page type | Example query |
|---|---|---|---|
| Problem | The person who feels the pain | Problem and how-to guides | “why do invoices get paid late” |
| Solution | The researcher building the shortlist | Category explainers, pillar pages | “accounts payable software” |
| Comparison | The evaluator | Comparison and alternatives pages | “[vendor] alternatives” |
| Fit | Technical and finance reviewers | Integration, security and pricing pages | “[product] ERP integration” |
| Sign-off | The committee member who approves | Case studies, documentation | “[product] case study” |
Early pages earn the shortlist; later pages win the deal. Our guide to search intent explains how to read what each query wants, and pillar pages covers how to group early-stage content so it builds topical depth rather than scattered posts.
Comparison and fit pages
These are the pages most B2B sites skip, often because someone worries about naming competitors or showing prices. But evaluators search for them anyway, and if you don’t publish an honest comparison, a review site or a competitor will. Our post on bottom-of-funnel content covers how to write these pages without turning them into sales copy. Integration pages matter for the technical reviewer, whose question is usually whether your product works with what they already run.
Expect small numbers on these queries. A search for one product’s integration with another may be typed only a handful of times a month, and a keyword tool may show it as zero. That is not a reason to skip it. In B2B, the people typing those narrow queries are often already evaluating, and one of them can matter more than thousands of casual readers of a broad guide. Judge these pages by whether the right people find them, not by volume. A useful habit is to ask your sales team which questions come up on calls and check whether a page answers each one.
Content for the whole committee
With many stakeholders, one persona is not enough. Write for each role’s real question: the user wants to know if the product solves the problem, finance wants cost and payback, IT wants security and integration, and the approver wants proof that others like them succeeded. Proof content, such as case studies, documentation and original research, also earns links, which is why our guide to linkable assets fits here.
Video deserves a mention. The Think with Google article cites a Gartner report that found “65% of B2B buyers were influenced by YouTube during a recent purchase decision.” That is not a search ranking claim, but it does suggest your explainers belong on more than one platform. The article’s own conclusion is blunt: “Conventional B2B marketing tactics, such as focusing on professional platforms and long-form content, will no longer cut it — if they ever did.”
Measure pipeline, not traffic
A long cycle breaks traffic as a success measure. A post read today may influence a deal that closes in two quarters, and the person who read it may never be the one who fills in the form. The article makes a related point about first-party data being under-used “due to the longer sales cycles and the time it takes to feed offline data back into marketing platforms.”
So track what organic visitors do further down: demo requests, assisted conversions, pipeline from organic sessions and deals that touched organic content. Our post on SEO KPIs covers which measures fit, and the guide to SaaS SEO applies much of this to software specifically. For planning the whole programme, see our SEO content strategy guide.
One limitation matters here. The Think with Google article is about B2B marketing in general: video, data and advertising. It doesn’t mention SEO or organic search, and it gives no figure for how many buyers start on Google. The link from its findings to the page types above is judgement. Test it against your own pipeline data.
Frequently asked questions
How is B2B SEO different from B2C SEO?
Longer cycles and buying committees mean more people search at more stages. B2B SEO has to cover problem research, comparison, technical fit and sign-off, not just one purchase query.
How many people are on a B2B buying committee?
Think with Google cites research by Google and Bain finding an average of 17 cross-functional stakeholders on today’s B2B buying committees.
Do buyers have a shortlist before they contact vendors?
Research by Bain & Company and Google, cited by Think with Google, found 92% of B2B buyers have a shortlist of preferred vendors before they start the buying process.
How should I measure B2B SEO?
By pipeline: demo requests, assisted conversions and deals that touched organic content. Traffic alone misses the long gap between reading and buying.
The takeaway Buyers shortlist before they call. Publish a page for every stage and every committee member, and judge the work by pipeline rather than sessions.
