Last Updated on January 11, 2024 by Alex Birkett
Hiring a B2B SEO agency?
With my absolutely unbiased (narrator: he is not unbiased) and expert guidance, I’ll introduce you to the best B2B SEO agencies around.
Everyone has a different budget, organizational context, and goal, so I’ll do my best to help you marry the right SEO agency to your specific situation.
The 10 Best B2B SEO Agencies in 2024
- Omniscient Digital
- Growth Plays
- Grow and Convert
- Flying Cat Marketing
- Green Flag Digital
- Siege Media
- Straight North
- IPullRank
- Directive
- RevenueZen
1. Omniscient Digital
Best for: holistic organic growth program development
Notable clients: HotJar, Adobe, SAP, Jasper
Sup.
If you’re actually reading this, and not just skimming the subheaders, then here’s my disclaimer: I’m a co-founder of Omniscient Digital.
Of course, I think we’re the best B2B SEO agency around. That’s why I started the company.
And if you found this on the ol’ search engine results pages, then the proof is in the pudding I know what I’m doing, yeah?
What makes us different? Here’s what we hear from our clients:
Omniscient Digital is a true partner and part of your team. We don’t have formulaic processes. Our services aren’t “productized.” We don’t have a “B squad” of junior employees running a checklist on your account. We hire brilliant SEO strategists, set up our team in growth pods constructed of digital PR, editorial, analytical, and strategic talent, and we do everything we can to hit growth targets.
Omniscient Digital builds custom organic growth strategies that index on business KPIs like leads, revenue, and pipeline. We start from first principles, review your specific business model, organic maturity, and strengths, and build programs that are measured by business value. No BS KPIs or traffic for traffic’s sake.
Omniscient Digital can execute content production at surprisingly high volume. This isn’t special in consumer spaces, but how many agencies can drive 30-50 content pieces a month at high quality (meaning they deliver new insights, rank, and drive product awareness and signups)?
Services are specialized but deep: strategy and planning, on page optimization, production, conversion rate optimization, link building, SEO consulting, and measurement of SEO efforts.
We work with a lot of SaaS companies, but we’ve also grown some professional services, fintech, social platforms, and climate tech companies.
What I will say is we’re not for everyone.
If you haven’t figured out your messaging or are just trying to “test out” organic, we’re not a great fit. We don’t do extremely technical content well (as in, developer documentation). I’ve got people I can recommend to you for that.
We’re also not going to be a holistic digital agency; we don’t do social media marketing, public relationships, etc.
But if you’re an ambitious brand looking to ramp up results in organic, then we may be a good fit.
2. Growth Plays
Best for: Pipeline-focused SEO strategy for technical brands
Notable clients: Copy.AI, Calendly, Podia, Lattice
Growth Plays is an amazing SEO consultancy led by John-Henry Scherck, someone who walks the walk.
Like Omniscient, Growth Plays is heavily focused on driving tangible business value for B2B brands. The team speaks the language executives care about, builds and manages analytics reports on their efforts, and sets up internal teams with robust playbooks from which they can execute.
Growth Plays is one of the most trusted agencies in the space, at least among the folks “in the know.”
While they don’t focus on content production, link building, or tangentially related organic efforts, they’re premium when it comes to SEO strategy, technical SEO, and building out playbooks and briefs.
3. Grow and Convert
Best for: SEO-focused content marketing for startups
Notable clients: Clearscope, CrazyEgg, Leadfeeder, Troops
Grow and Convert is a content marketing agency that focuses on driving conversions for startups.
While they’re not exclusively focused on B2B organizations, a large percentage of their client portfolio seems to be B2B.
They’re a content production heavy agency that drives results through bottom of the funnel content and pain point SEO. They coined the term pain point SEO, in fact.
They’re also strongly influenced by conversion rate optimization methodologies as well as well versed in digital analytics, effectively mapping back efforts to results.
They’ve also got paid acquisition services.
4. Flying Cat Marketing
Best for: SEO-focused content marketing for HR Tech
Notable clients: Homebase, HRLocker, TestGorilla
Flying Cat Marketing is an SEO consultancy as well as content marketing team that excels at B2B traffic growth.
They’ve got great case studies from brands like ActiveCampaign and TestGorilla, and they offer a portfolio of services that includes SEO strategy, programmatic SEO, and content writing.
Their process is well-documented on their website, and it includes foundational activities like persona interviews, market and competitor analysis, and deep audience research in addition to activities like keyword research, subject matter expert interviews, and tone of voice updates.
Also, they’ve got a great podcast.
5. Green Flag Digital
Best for: Digital PR and link building
Notable clients: MindBodyGreen, Reservations.com
Green Flag Digital is a premier digital PR, link building, and technical SEO consultancy that I have great respect for.
Digital PR is hard. It’s even hard to do it well, and consistently, and that’s what Green Flag Digital does.
Their data-drive content marketing services include SEO strategy, technical SEO, digital PR, and link building, all in the aim of driving organic growth results.
6. Siege Media
Best for: Premium design and content marketing programs
Notable clients: Nextiva, HubSpot, Clearbit
Siege Media is a well known SEO-focused content marketing agency that works with both B2B and B2C brands.
They’re well known in the industry for their premium content assets and well-designed content, with a large team of design resources. They’ve also been a leading voice in digital PR and link building best practices, working with both manual link building efforts as well as passive link asset creation.
The team is large and has grown a ton in the past few years, a reflection of their credibility and reputation in SEO and content marketing. They cover content marketing strategy, content production and writing, link building and content promotion, and content optimization efforts.
7. Straight North
Best for: Full-service digital marketing for SMBs
Notable clients: Clover, University of Wisconsin – Platteville
Straight North is a full service digital marketing agency that offers not only SEO services, but paid advertising (PPC, display, LinkedIn ads, etc.), web design, and creative services.
They work with all sizes of companies, but they’re especially effective at serving small to medium enterprises and offering full service engagements to maximize growth across channels.
The team is incredibly nice and cares about client success.
They also offer local SEO, ecommerce SEO, and brand development. One stop shop for digital growth.
8. IPullRank
Best for: Enterprise SEO and generative AI implementation
Notable clients: DocSend, American Express
IPullRank is where I go when I want to learn cutting edge SEO strategies.
They’re a leading voice in generative AI and AI content writing. They’re also leading experts in technical SEO – one of the first blogs I read mentioning stuff like clustering using Python.
Typically, they work with large businesses for enterprise SEO, but also offer mid-market SEO as well.
Their services include content engineering, generative AI consulting, audience research, technical SEO, and content strategy.
9. Directive
Best for: Full-service digital marketing
Notable clients: Litmus, Chili Piper, ZoomInfo
Directive is one of the larger B2B SEO agencies on this list.
They’re actually a full service digital marketing agency that focuses on growth targets. Their services include search engine optimization, but also lifecycle marketing, paid media, video, design, and growth strategy.
They work with all sizes of companies, from fast growing startups to large enterprises.
10. RevenueZen
Best for: B2B content marketing of all sizes
Notable clients: Troops, Bloomfire, Zix
RevenueZen, as their name suggests, focuses on driving revenue through organic channels.
And by organic channels, I don’t just mean SEO. They also offer B2B LinkedIn marketing, B2B content marketing, verbal identity branding, startup SEO services, social selling workshops, and content brief creation.
They specialize in B2B, and they seem mostly to work with startups and scaling companies across SaaS, financial services, professional services, and renewal energy.
5 Criteria to Look for When Hiring a B2B SEO Agency
For those of us like myself who need some instant gratification, I wanted to just list the best B2B SEO agencies first.
But for the more discerning among you all, it’s actually more important to figure out what the heck to judge your B2B SEO agency on.
How do you know who to hire? Look for these five things:
1. Track Record
A single SEO campaign is nice, but it doesn’t mean too much. Case studies are heavily context dependent.
What you want to see, instead, is a track record of great work in organic search.
Sometimes, you can see this through a company’s case study page. Look for specifics. Organic traffic growth is great. Even better if that website traffic reaches the right target audience and actually converts into more qualified leads, subscribers, and revenue.
The best way to identify a track record, however, may be simply to hear about it from colleagues and current or past clients. Reputation. It’s hard to fake.
Of course, you may find an SEO company that is relatively new, and they may be awesome. That’s a gamble, and it may pay off. I won’t dissuade you from taking that risk. I was once a no name SEO consultant, and then I started a no name SEO company.
Conversely, it’s not always helpful to go for the biggest and best known SEO company, as their best work may be behind them. They may now have a team of inexperienced employees working on your account.
There’s no definitive answer here. It’s hard to parse out exactly how an SEO company can drive SEO content strategy effectively.
But do what you can in reference checks, reviews, and analysis to see if they have a good track record and reputation.
2. Team
Team is a big factor.
Who started the company? What’s their background?
Did they ever work on an in house team at a B2B brand, or did they just start their own business as a freelancer? This doesn’t necessarily mean the agency isn’t good, but having hands-on experience at a B2B brand helps immensely when it comes to actually getting sh*t done in a company.
Additionally, who is the specific team that YOU will be working with? If the agency won’t tell you, it’s not a great sign.
Unfortunately, as agencies grow, they tend to dilute in value as the knowledge that started out strong with the founders and early team cascaded into a large, heavily process focused company of junior employees that run basic checklists on your account.
No bueno.
Personally, I’d want to know which team members will be assigned to my account and what their experience is.
3. Approach
My old boss once told me, “if you can’t describe what you do as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
I can think of some exceptions to this, but generally it’s true.
The thing you want to know is HOW does the agency think about organic marketing strategy?
Sure, the best SEO strategies are custom. But they also come with some underlying principles, not just SEO best practices applied as a checklist.
There are two great ways to diagnose this: intellectual property, and how tailored their pitch is to your business.
For the first category, look for any frameworks the agency developed, content they’ve put out, or generally any sort of thought leadership they invest in. These materials will likely show up across their website and sales materials.
Second, when you get a pitch, ask yourself, “does this look generic?” A pitch should be tailored to YOU based on the specific problems, goals, and context you came to them with.
If it’s not, that’s a red flag.
Furthermore, every SEO agency has a different model by which they operate. For us, we believe content is at the core of search results and organic marketing strategy. So we center our SEO strategies on content (not just content creation, but content strategy), but also invest in force multipliers like technical SEO, conversion rate optimization, and link building to drive additional business success.
4. Cost
Look, of course cost matters, but only on the margin.
There are some agencies that may be out of your price range. So don’t work with them!
But if it’s within a 20% range above or below your target, use other dimensions to make your decision. Hinging your decision on a few thousand dollars in price, versus the more important dimension of them being able to drive business growth, is a penny wise and a pound foolish.
5. Services
Figure out if the B2B SEO agency you’re talking to has the services you need.
Also, figure out if they’re actually good at the services you need.
For example, if you need SEO as well as social media marketing, probably don’t hire Omniscient. We’re not the best social media marketing agency. But we can get your landing pages in the search engines and drive sales qualified leads.
Need off page SEO / off page optimization? Make sure the agency has those services, and ask them deep questions about their results and process in that area.
Need someone with international SEO experience or local SEO experience? That goes beyond the ability to identify valuable keywords with high search volume, so find someone who knows how to do that.
Even within a field, say technical SEO audits, there’s a lot of detail to dig into – structured data, title tags, SEO audit of existing content, search intent diagnosis, etc.
Some agencies are full service, including paid search (PPC advertising), web development and more. Some include broader marketing strategy services like customer journey mapping.
There’s no right or wrong answer here, just make sure the agency has what you need, or you can at least complement with another partner.
Conclusion
Want to get found in the search engines with some expert SEO strategy? Hire a B2B SEO agency from this list. Or don’t. You can also hire an in house team, or some freelancer.
But hopefully you’ve found at least one B2B SEO agency here that fits your needs, whether that’s technical SEO audits, finding long tail keywords, tracking organic traffic in Google Analytics, or simply just driving sustainable growth in organic search traffic.