New research on B2B SEO in tech and SaaS from Clarity Performance

The Clarity Performance team has been working hard to deliver new research on B2B SEO in tech and SaaS, with results gathered from members of FINITE – the global B2B technology marketing community.

The full report can be viewed here.

Clarity Performance found that the majority of B2B tech marketers (81%) believe SEO has increased in importance as a channel in the last 12 months.

SEO budgets have reflected this rise in importance, with the majority having either risen or remained the same; over a quarter of B2B tech companies have increased their investment in SEO in the past year. 

Despite increasing importance and budgets, less than half of B2B tech marketers have a defined SEO strategy. Kerstin Reichert, Senior SEO Digital Marketing Manager at FinTech business bank Tide, commented, “I am actually quite surprised that only half of B2B tech marketers have a defined SEO strategy in place. SEO is a long term effort. Therefore true success can only be evaluated over time.” 

These strategies prioritise content generation (82.5%), as a mere 3.5% of B2B tech marketers prioritise link building. What’s the goal of SEO? Two thirds of B2B tech marketers use SEO primarily for lead generation, while one third feel SEO is predominantly a brand building channel. 

The report found that SEO is mainly being done in-house: only 28% of B2B tech marketers rely on third parties to help with their SEO strategies. Despite the large majority keeping it in-house, less than a third of B2B tech marketing teams have dedicated in-house SEO expertise. 

The report also found that attribution remains a struggle for B2B tech and SaaS marketers, as nearly half of all B2B tech marketers struggle to measure the impact of organic search. A majority of those who have a defined strategy can measure the impact of their SEO and 73% of those who work with agencies can measure the impact of SEO. 

Most B2B tech marketers (61%) can’t connect their SEO strategy with business outcomes, further demonstrating the challenge of attribution when it comes to organic search. 

Darren Stewart, Head of Digital Strategy at Clarity Performance, commented on this challenge optimistically: “Fortunately this can be fixed fairly easily by defining some simple conversion goals and the correct analytics configuration. This is essential for not only selling SEO into the wider business but also showing how it can improve the bottom line of a company.”

As an additional challenge, half of all B2B tech marketers feel their website & CMS are not supporting their SEO strategy. 

Finally, B2B tech marketers revealed their biggest challenges for SEO in 2021: technical SEO (38%), link building (21%) and content creation (21%). Furthermore, 91% of those who claimed technical SEO was their biggest challenge primarily focus on content and 100% of those who claimed link building their biggest challenge primarily focus on content as well. 

Read the full report here.