EP106 SEO Best Practices for B2B E-Commerce in 2025
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[00:00:00] Joshua Warren: Hello everybody. Welcome back to Commerce Today. I am super excited that we have a new guest today, Ryan Metcalf, um, an SEO expert. I actually, um, reached out to him because of his deep experience with B2B SEO, which I know is a common question. Many of y'all, uh, have. So Ryan, tell us a little bit more about yourself.

[00:00:25] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah. Nice to meet you, Joshua. Thanks for having me on. Uh, but yes, uh, answer your question about LinkedIn. I've been in the SEO space for over a decade now working with a lot of different, verticals, a lot of different companies, pretty much the whole spectrum, whether it's startups, agencies. So working with the clients there also on the B2C and the B2B front as well.

[00:00:45] Joshua Warren: Nice. Very cool. Yeah. And I find that B2C and B2B SEO, um, Almost like everything else in the B2B and B2C e commerce, they've been converging more and more, it seems like, where I think a lot of B2B companies never [00:01:00] really invested in SEO the way they ought to have. And then they did some kind of weird things.

[00:01:04] Joshua Warren: So, um, what do you see, I guess, to, to kick us off? What do you see as some B2B SEO best practices?

[00:01:11] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah, so kind of the, before I get into that specific question, but to allude to it, yes, it's absolutely true. Our B2B SEO has kind of been an afterthought, I'd say, maybe until recently. People are just now starting to pay attention to it because that they're, they're looking for new ways to get new customers.

[00:01:27] Ryan Metcalf: The B2B side has been more on kind of the traditional marketing. So trade shows, relationship based, maybe some email marketing or social media here and there. But yes, they have not paid attention to SEO at all. Uh, but yeah, to answer your question for the B2B SEO kind of best practices, it actually is very similar to B2C, but the, the caveat there is a lot of the, kind of the, the terms that you would go after blend into those B2C terms.

[00:01:55] Ryan Metcalf: So like with its keyword, the research, like, well, the best examples I can do is working for a [00:02:00] company called SRS, where like there's a home builder, landscaping and pool supplies. But a lot of the contractors and professionals, they just search for pool supplies. They don't like specifically search for like pool supply distributor or like wholesale as much.

[00:02:16] Ryan Metcalf: So those terms actually run together. So it gets a little muddy, the waters get a little bit muddy. But you have to go through and then your research and actually figure out, hey, these are actually similar keywords. We still have to go after it. But then the tricky part there is Google, um, actually doesn't know the difference at times either because Google doesn't have enough data to actually be able to, uh, differentiate those.

[00:02:37] Joshua Warren: That's interesting. And yeah, I see on the B2B side, guess one area, especially speaking of like SRS, um, that differs from B2C is just the number of products. Like some of these I've worked with some B2B clients where they have literally millions of SKUs, often with minor variations. So do you see like, what sort of, um, change in your approach to SEO do you need to have when you're working with [00:03:00] that many products?

[00:03:01] Ryan Metcalf: so a lot of people like to say that there's a change in our approach. Uh, that's like a common cliche question. I'm also, I'm on more on the side that, hey, it's still the normal SEO. You still want to make sure that you follow SEO's best practices in general. There's like a thousand different things.

[00:03:16] Ryan Metcalf: I think all your customers know that. And I say a thousand things only slightly exaggerating or being slightly sarcastic, but that is the way almost it's getting to these days. With what goes into the algorithms. But yeah, your website needs to be focused, have content on it, individualized content for those products.

[00:03:33] Ryan Metcalf: Sometimes with all those SKUs, they can actually end up running together and be duplicate or cannibalize each other. And what I mean by that is the content is not differentiated enough. Or you have the different SKUs that basically the only difference is like a, like a size of it or the quantity that you can order.

[00:03:49] Ryan Metcalf: If you're doing like a bulk thing, Well, that content on the page or the product or the root product is basically the same exact thing. And so in SEO, those efforts, so those [00:04:00] website pages actually end up cannibalizing as the terminology. And that means you actually end up hurting yourself by having more or two or more products that are basically the same thing.

[00:04:09] Ryan Metcalf: So with there's different things you can do on the technical side to prevent that. Like canonical tags. And maybe I'm getting too specific here, but the canonical tags, there's like one thing you can do there, kind of just differentiate that with common variants on some platforms that you can actually do to help mitigate that.

[00:04:25] Ryan Metcalf: But I know that was a mouthful, but hopefully that all makes sense to your customers.

[00:04:29] Joshua Warren: It does. It does. And definitely feel free to get as in depth as you want. One of the things that I always try to do with Commerce Today is, um, make sure that we're giving people like specific things that they can go apply today. That's why we put it in the

[00:04:41] Ryan Metcalf: There you go. Yeah. Canonical tags, easiest answers to do there, but at scale, when you've got millions of products, then obviously that can be a big undertaking and that, that takes resources and time to get that fixed. Right. And the other thing to keep in mind, SEO, I think your customers know this, but SEO is not an overnight thing.

[00:04:57] Ryan Metcalf: It takes multiple months sometimes to [00:05:00] see that full impact. So if some of the businesses have seasonality, hey, you need to be starting to plan for that like months in advance to help prioritize maybe certain areas of the website too.

[00:05:10] Joshua Warren: Such a good point. Yeah, that's something I've seen people get wrong on both the B2B and B2C side, where they launch a brand new product, like they have a new spring line, they put it online in the spring and they start SEOing it in the spring. It's like, well, that's a little too late.

[00:05:23] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah, so one of the common things I always tell people for like the holiday shopping push, like start getting that done in like maybe August or September at the latest. And even if you don't have all the specific details of like your holiday promotions, create that landing page. Get it on the website just so Google can go in there and crawl it.

[00:05:40] Ryan Metcalf: You can fill in some of the other details later, but then Google knows, hey, this is an active page, it's a live page. Go in there and start indexing it accordingly.

[00:05:49] Joshua Warren: that makes sense. Good advice. so we joke sometimes on the show that, uh, I can't go a single episode without talking about AI. And so I'm just kind of curious what you're seeing. I know that, uh, There were [00:06:00] so many people concerned that, Oh, SEO is going to be dead because of AI, or, Oh, everyone's going to fill their websites now with just nothing but low value content, but what are you seeing like real practical use of AI and SEO?

[00:06:13] Ryan Metcalf: So AI is definitely a thing. It's not going away. Uh, like two, maybe two ish years ago now, I'd say that Google was coming out in here and saying, we hate AI, do not use AI content whatsoever. But Google kind of caught or got caught with their pants down a little bit to use that phrase. Or Google's been trying to catch up a lot of times.

[00:06:31] Ryan Metcalf: So Google's actually trying to create algorithms or AI algorithms to detect other AI algorithms or AI content, which is kind of ironic. Right. But since the cat was already kind of out of the bag, there's no going back. So Google has over the months and years now has softened their policy on AI content, mostly because everybody's already using it.

[00:06:51] Ryan Metcalf: And because companies actually legitimately need to use it from a resource perspective or time. Uh, if you have a website or two, you're talking about like millions of products. Well, [00:07:00] the only way to do that fast and at scale is to create AI generated content. Now you do not want to copy word for word directly from AI content.

[00:07:09] Ryan Metcalf: That is bad because Google still at the day wants to have content written for the human, preferably by the human. But again, there's some caveats and nuances, but just don't copy word for word. Make it unique and tweak a little bit, tweak it a little bit. And keep in mind, AI is not perfect. There's some wording that on the AI tools I've seen, it's just really wonky and doesn't make sense.

[00:07:32] Ryan Metcalf: Some are getting better than others when it comes to, um, like the, the voice of the customer or voice of your business, but not all of them have that kind of that voice element, so it's kind of generic content at times, but AI is definitely not going away. It's a extremely valuable tool in a lot of ways, and it's hard to say, but it could perhaps become a bigger thing where Google's market share overall, it could start to decline of these kind of AI, uh, search engines, uh, but we'll see where that [00:08:00] goes.

[00:08:00] Ryan Metcalf: That's still in its infancy.

[00:08:01] Joshua Warren: Yeah, that's such a good point. I find myself using chat GPT sometimes when I used to use Google. Um, and I also, I love your point about the voice because it's so true. And I think some of the, some of the tools are getting better, but I mean, there's certain phrases now that when I see them, especially on social media, when I see someone's social media posts and it uses like delve, we're going to delve into, I'm like, really you and me, I write that.

[00:08:24] Joshua Warren: Uh, but then there are some tools and I found if you prompt it and you say, if you explain your, Your voice and your style of your business and you tell it right in this style, this tone, some of the tools do a little bit better, but it's still, still needs that human touch for sure.

[00:08:40] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah, like I said, it's AI is still in its relative infancy, so the tools are getting better a hundred percent, but they're still not perfect yet by any means of the imagination.

[00:08:51] Joshua Warren: So I've been talking a lot the last few episodes about composable commerce, headless architectures, um, trying to figure out where [00:09:00] composable and headless is going, because I think even back 2019, 2020, a lot of people thought pre pandemic is going to be the next big thing. Kind of stalled out during the pandemic.

[00:09:10] Joshua Warren: We're seeing it come back, but one thing I haven't really seen anybody talk about is using a headless approach or even just using composable commerce. What impact can that have on SEO? Are there ways that you can leverage that even to improve your SEO or is it kind of SEO neutral?

[00:09:26] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah, I would say it's SEO neutral. Uh, people like to throw out that, Oh, it's the next big wave on everything. SEO wise, just SEO is kind of a polarizing topic in a lot of ways for a couple of people. It's an easy, like sales manipulating, uh, sales manipulation tactic, really, to tell you the truth. Uh, people can go in there and tell you things that aren't necessarily true or lack context, I'd say.

[00:09:50] Ryan Metcalf: Um, but to answer your question, yes, I think, I think it's more neutral. It's more on what the actual infrastructure, the actual technical aspects itself. You can have a good [00:10:00] website. That's not headless. It might be harder to do it without a headless structure. But it just depends. I know that's another general phrase answer that SEOs like to use, but it's the truth here.

[00:10:13] Ryan Metcalf: It depends. As with everything SEO wise. But yeah, potentially yes, potentially no. So it just depends.

[00:10:20] Joshua Warren: That makes sense. And yeah, it's so true. So much of SEO is like that, where it's very, it can be very situational. It can be very specific to a given, uh, given industry. One thing that we talked about in a previous episode was, um, basically the, the race around, uh, performance and around page speed scores and how, uh, A lot of people, there's a lot of people out there that will sell you on, especially the website performance experts will sell you on.

[00:10:44] Joshua Warren: You need a perfect 100 score, but then I've heard some other voices that were a little bit more reason that said, well, no, you just need to score better than your competitors. So it's definitely,

[00:10:55] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah, that's another can of worms, actually, to tell you the truth. Like Pagespeed, Core [00:11:00] Web Vitals, Google's Pagespeed Insights, that's where most people are probably getting it from. It's nice that it's a free tool out there that everybody can do it, but all these sales people and other SEOs are just going in there and copying SEO.

[00:11:13] Ryan Metcalf: directly from that report, what you're alluding to, but it lacks context. Uh, and that's why the other thing is when there was just AI generated reports, period. Yes, you want to have a really good page speed, uh, really, uh, score a really good to the point where it passes core web vitals. But a lot of those things are really hard to fix on a website.

[00:11:32] Ryan Metcalf: Whenever you're dealing with code manipulation, that takes weeks and even months to fix. So if you're like instantly coming in there and trying to say, Oh, we need to fix this now. Well, that's probably not going to be realistic and easy fix. Sure. There's some things you can probably do quickly, like reduce the size of images.

[00:11:49] Ryan Metcalf: Sure. Or lazy load can be relatively easy in some, in some places. Uh, but a lot of those things on a rate of the page speed are big projects. And that's not the area where you should spend [00:12:00] most of your time in most cases. I'm in the firm both that content is going to be the most important, making sure that you have good, unique content on the websites.

[00:12:09] Ryan Metcalf: Cause that's what Google's primary purpose at the end of the day is to return the best information to its customers or its searchers in the most efficient manner. Forget about the, the, the technical kind of page speed store or page speed score. Yes, it can have an impact. But most of the time out there, the websites don't have good content or they're not properly optimizing their content first.

[00:12:31] Ryan Metcalf: And then I think the, the crawlability technical stuff comes second.

[00:12:35] Joshua Warren: That actually, um, takes me to two other things I wanted to ask you and, um, the first one is when you, company comes to you and says, we need help with SEO. What do you look at first? Like, where do you go first?

[00:12:50] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah. So I would say, Hey, do you actually have analytics data or what's your actual, um, data capabilities? How do you prove that SEO [00:13:00] is actually doing bad? Is it good or bad? It could go either way, but a lot of companies don't, uh, don't know what they don't know. To where they just hear this phrase, Oh, we need SEO, but they have no idea what that actually entails.

[00:13:11] Ryan Metcalf: So like day one or close to day one, you want to get all the benchmarking. You want to make sure that all the analytics tools are set up there. Along with that, you start doing the keyword research, figuring out where you actually should be ranking your industry. Uh, what do you actually have the right to rank for?

[00:13:27] Ryan Metcalf: Sometimes companies want to go after all these keywords, but they have no business ranking for it just because it's not in their kind of wheelhouse. It's not what the website's about Google smart enough to kind of know roughly what you should rank for, whether you're targeting that specifically or not, but they kind of know loosely because all the information that's out there, what your company is loosely about.

[00:13:49] Ryan Metcalf: That can be the difference though, between ranking in the top five, top 10 versus not ranking at all is because you're not targeting that keyword properly in the various SEO elements. Um, but that, that would be [00:14:00] where I start saying on day one, Hey, it's a benchmarking. Let's get the keyword research, figuring out where you should actually rank versus, um, where you're not, or yeah, where you're ranking for, where you're not, all those things that go with that.

[00:14:13] Ryan Metcalf: And then you can start to start to put together, well, the why, like do the audits. And figure out what you need to do actually get ranking for those keywords that you want to rank for.

[00:14:23] Joshua Warren: Make sense. You have a favorite keyword research tool?

[00:14:27] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah, so I Well, my favorite is actually conductor searchlight out there, but that's the high end kind of uh enterprise level software But honestly, if you don't have a lot of budget simrush does a really good job Uh, it's the cheapest one out there one of the cheapest ones out Well, yeah, it's probably not the cheapest but it's kind of the cheapest professional kind of grade is probably where I would um kind of classify it as You Uh, maybe like 150 bucks I think is what they're charging right now or so, just for a basic kind of thing.

[00:14:56] Ryan Metcalf: 150 bucks a month is nothing. You get a lot of, uh, a lot of [00:15:00] tools in there, the keyword research, some competitive data, uh, track your own website as well. Extremely valuable information there. Um, and you can see what everybody else is ranking for that keyword and potentially identify your competitors. And I mentioned that because a lot of times people will think what they know what their competitors are, and, but it's totally different online.

[00:15:21] Ryan Metcalf: Uh, and it's sometimes that's hard, uh, hard concept for people to grasp. Is the competitors are two different, two different lists, um, compared to the traditional versus online.

[00:15:30] Joshua Warren: Oh, that's such a good point. And even, yeah, the SEO competitors, because even thinking about creativity, the people that come up on search, whenever you're searching for our competitive keyword terms, aren't necessarily the same people that we think of as our competitors or that we even interact with on deals.

[00:15:48] Joshua Warren: So yeah, it can be very different. So

[00:15:50] Ryan Metcalf: absolutely.

[00:15:50] Joshua Warren: I will put a link to both those tools into the show notes for everybody. Um, also, I just got to say, I. I've had a long and conflicted [00:16:00] relationship with SEO in general and SEO professionals. Um, there's a lot of snake oil out there. So I really appreciate on a lot of these answers.

[00:16:08] Joshua Warren: You are very realistic and down to earth. And so that is why I'm going to ask you what at least used to be a very controversial question. And that is, what is the role of links and link building in

[00:16:19] Ryan Metcalf: Oh God, you nailed it. That is the most snake oil polarizing topic or whatever adjective you want to use out there. But link building or link generation is probably a better way of describing it because link building that exact wording is kind of a gray area in SEO and you don't want to pay for links, at least in the direct sense.

[00:16:39] Ryan Metcalf: I'm even mentioning that director paying for links in any sense could get you into trouble, but you want to make sure that you're doing it in a natural way. Whether that means guest posting or kind of a gray area on how you define guest posting. that is open for interpretation actually, but you do need links, uh, period [00:17:00] question about that.

[00:17:01] Ryan Metcalf: They can come from all kinds of websites. Some, some are more valuable than others. Obviously, uh, you're not probably going to get, you know, links from the top end publication or media websites, but go out there, your local businesses or partners, your chamber of commerce. There's a lot of free listing and for places out there that you can get a URL to point back to you.

[00:17:21] Ryan Metcalf: But also one of the things people forget and that don't just put the specific link. You need to provide like anchor text or some other wording within that because that'll better that their Google better be able to associate your website instead of just seeing that flat URL. They'll be able to associate with certain keywords or phrases.

[00:17:38] Ryan Metcalf: But yeah, link building or link generation, absolutely important. It kind of gets into the whole, uh, now even added an extra letter in the last couple of years called EEAT. So expertise, experience, authority, and trust. It's basically that's how Google measures it is how, uh, credible or how authoritative are you on that specific subject or that specific keyword that you're trying to [00:18:00] target.

[00:18:00] Joshua Warren: All right. Well, we are just about out of time. Is there any last SEO tip or insight you want to share with everybody?

[00:18:07] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah. One of the last things I want to mention, Google has gotten a lot, uh, a lot more active in pushing out these algorithm updates. You'll probably hear that in the news or the industry circles. Don't panic on those algorithm updates. You cannot specifically optimize for a specific algorithm. You always want to target just SEO best practices in general.

[00:18:26] Ryan Metcalf: And yes, sometimes you may be disproportionately or inadvertently targeted more on one algorithm versus the other, but that has nothing to do on your end. That's just Google pushing out updates on their end, and it'll be an industry wide thing that will impact that. But don't panic. Stay the course. Make sure you have a good SEO.

[00:18:44] Ryan Metcalf: system, a good SEO best practices in place, and you'll be fine over the long run.

[00:18:48] Joshua Warren: That is good to hear. Well, then I will have a link to your LinkedIn profile in our show notes. Uh, anywhere else that people should go to find you.

[00:18:57] Ryan Metcalf: Yeah, you can find me on almost all the [00:19:00] social media platforms, but LinkedIn is definitely going to be the best avenue to approach me.

[00:19:04] Joshua Warren: Awesome. Well, I really appreciate your time today and thank you everyone for tuning into this episode of commerce today. I am always looking for new guests. So if you'd like to come on the show, find me on LinkedIn. I'm Joshua Warren with a gold background behind my profile photo. Cause there's a few of us apparently on LinkedIn.

[00:19:21] Joshua Warren: I would love to have you come on the show and hope y'all have a great start of your year. 

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