Had a conversation the other day with an SEO about strategies for B2B keyword selection. I was surprised to find out that someone whom I have seen some pretty cool stuff actually has never thought in real terms about real alternative approach's and how to use knowledge of the customer to find better niche / related keywords.

So in an effort to give some insight into how this approach can be taken I thought I would write this quick blog giving an simple example.

So lets say that I am selling commercial insurance products to mid sized companies and I want to develop a keyword strategy.

OK so normally step one is to pull up google adwords, wordtracker etc. etc. and stem off the basic insurance keywords to find variants, then do some analysis to see whats really competitive and whats not.

This normally throws up some good stuff and will be really well targetted as a rule however there is an alternative way of doing this.

So lets take a look at the scenario from an alternative SEO strategy viewpoint.

Firstly who are my target customers?

• Normally the target would be the MD/FD/OD in this scenario.

Why are do they buy insurance products?

• To protect themselves
• To protect the company
• to protect the shareholders
• To protect employees

So which are has a angle we can exploit? The obvious one is to protect themselves, so what could be related here?

Well for the purpose of this lets go with "directors liability" if we compare this with "Commercial Insurance" we see:

• Commercial Insurance = 12,700,000
• Directors Liability = 372,000

Likewise

• corporate manslaughter = 241,000
• shareholder liability = 323,000

So we have found keywords that targets our customer perfectly, ensures that they are in the right frame of mind and is reasonably easy to rank for.

Once you have choosen alternative keywords / strategy you then develop some content that leads the user from the topic they were looking for to the obvious solution i.e. they need to buy my product.

The major benefits of this strategy?

• Its usualy easier to find some easy keywords to rank for
  
• You get to ensure that your visitor is the right frame of mind
• Your doing a landgrab on topics that your competitors probably have not spotted yet
• You can position yourself as supporting the visitor in more areas of their job than just trying to sell.

Remember this is an extremely simple example and that utilising your knowledge of your industry and customers is key to making this approach work.