What does a B2B SEO agency actually do?
A B2B SEO agency grows qualified pipeline from search, not just traffic, by serving an entire buying committee instead of a single visitor. In practice that means owning the bottom-of-funnel pages stakeholders compare on (your /vs, /alternatives, category, and integration pages), building content that answers the specific questions each role on the committee researches, fixing the technical layer so those pages scale and stay crawlable, and earning the third-party citations B2B credibility depends on. Because the same pages now feed AI answers, we also track whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews name you when a buyer asks for the best vendor in your category, weekly.
How is B2B SEO different from regular SEO?
Regular SEO usually optimizes a few head terms for traffic and treats the visitor as one anonymous person. B2B SEO optimizes for a buying committee of five to eleven people, each of whom researches independently before anyone fills a form. The economic buyer wants ROI and category framing, the technical evaluator wants documentation and integration detail, procurement wants comparison clarity and the security gates cleared (SOC 2, the security questionnaire, vendor risk review), the end user wants workflow proof, and the internal champion needs the proof points to build a business case and sell the purchase upward. So the page set is wider and more bottom-weighted: comparison, alternatives, category, and integration pages carry the weight, not a top-of-funnel blog post. The content source is different too, mined from sales calls, RFPs, and won-and-lost deal notes rather than a keyword tool.
How much do B2B SEO services cost?
It depends on how much of the program you run in-house. A focused engagement on comparison and category real estate plus technical fixes sits lower. A full program covering content for every committee role, scaled integration and category pages, off-site citations, and AI-answer measurement sits higher. We scope to the gap the audit surfaces rather than sell a fixed retainer, and after the first audit we tell you honestly whether you need the full program or a single track. Pricing is custom, because a long enterprise sales cycle with a large committee needs more coverage than a self-serve B2B motion.
How does AI search change B2B SEO?
It changes who reads your pages first. Increasingly, members of the committee open ChatGPT or Perplexity before they open Google and ask for a shortlist of vendors. The model assembles that shortlist from comparison pages, category explainers, review sites like G2 and Capterra, and community threads, the same surfaces bottom-funnel B2B SEO already targets. This is the dark funnel made worse: research that already lived where intent platforms like 6sense and Bombora try to see it has now moved inside a chat window no analytics tool tracks. So the work converges: a well-built /alternatives or category page now has two jobs, ranking on Google for the stakeholders who still search and getting cited in the AI answer for the ones who do not. If you are not on the shortlist the model returns, you are quietly cut from deals you never see. Most agencies cannot measure that exclusion.
How do you measure B2B SEO results?
To pipeline, not to a rankings dashboard. We track organic demo requests and qualified leads by landing page, influenced pipeline and deal velocity where your CRM can attribute it, branded-search lift, and where AI search is in scope, citation share: the percentage of priority buyer prompts where your brand is named in the AI answer across all five engines. Rankings and traffic are inputs we watch, but with a long committee-driven sales cycle the report leads with influenced pipeline, because that is the number the board asks about.
Should we hire a B2B SEO agency or build the team in-house?
If you have a senior SEO lead who understands complex sales cycles, can brief content for each committee role, and can staff engineering against a roadmap, in-house usually wins on context. Most B2B teams do not, and a year of generalist SEO that chases traffic terms and never builds the comparison or category pages costs more in missed pipeline than it looks. We plug in alongside a strong in-house team without duplicating work, or run the whole program when there is no one to own it. The audit tells you which model fits your motion.