Business-to-business (B2B) buyers spend nearly a third of their time (27%) on online research, according to Gartner. This, alongside similar statistics, underlines the importance of strategic digital marketing and how crucial search engine optimisation (SEO) is to ensuring success for B2B businesses.

Businesses need to assess how well their websites perform compared to their competitors. The easiest way to do that is to review SEO benchmarks.

What are B2B SEO benchmarks?

B2B SEO is a digital marketing strategy that aims to increase the company’s position in organic search engine results and website visits. The point is to boost the company’s visibility online and increase the number of visitors to the website, hopefully connecting it to business owners, decision-makers and relevant industry professionals looking for specific solutions.

B2B website SEO benchmarks are metrics like conversion rate and organic traffic that reveal whether your SEO strategies are successful. A successful B2B SEO strategy will see your website rank high on SERPs, allowing your target audience to find you more easily.

Understanding SEO benchmarking terms

When discussing benchmarking, it’s important to have a clear grasp of key terms like benchmarking, metrics, and KPIs (key performance indicators) because it’s easy to get confused.

SEO benchmarks help a business measure its marketing success in relation to industry standards or averages used to measure a website’s performance. These benchmarks provide standards for comparison of a website’s performance on KPIs such as SEO return on investment (ROI), customer lifetime value (CLV), and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

B2B website metrics and KPIs are quantitative measurements but measure different things. B2B website KPIs focus on business targets, while B2B website metrics focus on specific processes’ performance. They often overlap.

The relationship between KPIs and metrics becomes clear when KPIs are seen as the sum of the metrics integral to achieving business targets.

Why are SEO benchmarks important in B2B marketing?

SEO benchmarks are the only way to know if your SEO strategies are succeeding. Search engine optimisation remains the key to success for all businesses, whether we’re talking about companies that sell to customers or companies that sell to other businesses).

Most B2B buyers use search results as their primary source for product discovery. 66% of B2B buyers turn to the Internet when looking for products rather than relying on industry publications or relevant trade shows. So, if you want buyers to find your offerings, your business website must be a top performer in search engine rankings.

SEO is complicated, but once mastered, it’s a proven strategy for building brand awareness, thought leadership, and trust. One significant factor influencing B2B SEO strategies is the unique target audience: a company’s decision-makers. These website visitors are looking for something specific and must be sure the business is reliable and, at times, an expert in its field. Therefore, B2B websites must provide these professionals with in-depth, data-driven content that illustrates expertise, leadership, and reliability.

B2B marketers often work with high-value products or services that comprise innovative industry solutions. A single company representative visiting your website can’t decide there and then to purchase the solution—multiple decision-makers deliver their input before a contractual commitment is made. In these circumstances that involve longer sales cycles, it’s essential to know the key SEO benchmarks to target.

Here, we explore five strategic B2B SEO benchmarks for B2B marketing success.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

The customer acquisition cost (CAC) is what it costs your business to acquire a new customer. It includes marketing campaigns and other marketing expenses the business incurred to land a new customer.

CAC is a vital business metric. It is usually evaluated with customer lifetime value (CLV) to measure the value generated by a new customer. Ideally, your CAC should be lower than your CLV. A CAC three times lower than a CLV is generally regarded as excellent.

Businesses calculate CAC by dividing the total marketing and sales cost by the number of new customers.

A high CAC is a red flag, indicating that your acquisition strategy is not cost-effective. It may be useful to gain insights into industry SEO benchmarks, including the average CAC by industry. Online sources are available for this purpose.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a significant B2B website metric. It measures the overall value a customer adds throughout their association with the company. Factors like average order value, customer journey, and churn rate are considered to quantify a customer’s overall worth.

This exercise can identify high-value customers and their impact on the company’s bottom line. The company can then take targeted actions to retain these customers, as it costs less to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

The CLV is calculated by multiplying the average purchase value with the purchase frequency and average customer lifespan. This B2B website metric is especially valuable to businesses that sell products on a subscription basis or have returning customers.

This business metric is useful when compared with your CAC, as it can reveal if your marketing spend is on target.

Average Session Duration

Session duration refers to the average time visitors spend on your website. A decent average session duration indicates that visitors are engaging with your content.

Websites that are able to convert regularly maintain higher session duration rates. This metric can be increasingly useful when compared to industry benchmarks, providing a realistic comparison. According to analytics platform Databox, which calculated a benchmark from anonymised data from over 800 companies, the median time spent is 92.33 seconds.  Relatively often, visitors don’t stay on a website because they don’t find what they are looking for—or the content doesn’t match their intent or expectations. The solution is to create content that addresses search intent, which underlines the need for keyword research before developing content.

Lead-to-MQL conversion rate

When you visit a website, fill in a form, or sign up for a webinar, providing your contact information, you become a lead for that marketing team. If the marketing team deems you a member of their target audience and matches one of their personas, you are elevated to a marketing-qualified lead (MQL).

These leads are more likely to convert into paying customers. The lead-to-MQL conversion rate is an important B2B website metric as it indicates whether your marketing campaigns are hitting the mark in attracting qualified leads, and if nurtured properly, it can be the next step in the buying cycle.

The lead-to-MQL conversion rate is the percentage of leads that convert to MQLs, which you calculate by dividing the number of MQLs by the number of leads.

MQL-to-SQL conversion rate

The next step in the sales funnel is when an MQL becomes a sales-qualified lead (SQL). In practice,  an SQL is a potential buyer, deemed by the sales team to show real buyer intent.

To calculate the MQL-to-SQL conversion rate, divide the number of SQLs by the number of MQLs. Many factors influence this metric, including digital marketing goals, target market, and industry, so the metric varies widely from business to business. However, the digital marketing industry’s benchmark for the average MQL-to-SQL conversion rate is 13%, providing businesses with a target when converting MQLs to SQLs.

Utilising B2B SEO benchmarks

B2B website SEO benchmarks can help businesses gauge the success of their digital marketing efforts. Benchmarking facilitates the comparison of B2B performance metrics against industry standards, setting businesses up to improve their market positioning.

Ensure you have a clear grasp of key benchmarking terms and the goals set out by the benchmarking you undertake. This will allow your business to capitalise on available opportunities or better understand its current successes.