GEO for business services / b2b
The shortlist is now assembled before you hear about it.
B2B purchases begin with someone assembling a shortlist. That used to mean a search, a few tabs and a spreadsheet; increasingly it means asking an assistant "who are the main providers of X" and working from the three names it returns.
The consequence is blunt: a vendor not named at that stage never enters the evaluation, and never finds out it happened. There is no impression, no click, no record — only a pipeline that is quietly smaller than it should be.
These are questions, not keywords.
A question set for this industry is built from wording like this — taken from sales and support conversations, not from a keyword tool.
- "Who are the main providers of X in China"
- "What should I look for when choosing an X vendor"
- "Roughly what does X cost and what affects the price"
- "Should we build this in-house or buy it"
Constraints that shape the work in business services / b2b
These are the reasons a generic GEO playbook does not transfer here unchanged.
What changes because of those constraints.
Same four-stage loop as every other engagement — diagnosis, plan, publish, re-measure — with these adjustments inside it.
Questions teams ask before they start
Our category is niche. Is there enough question volume?
Volume matters less here than in consumer categories. A niche B2B question may be asked a few hundred times a year, but each instance is a real buyer with budget, and the candidate pool is shallow enough that a single good page can own the answer.
How do we know we are being left out of shortlists?
Measure it. Ask who the main providers in your category are, at least three times per platform, and record which names appear. Being absent produces no signal in analytics at all, which is why it has to be tested directly.
Should we publish criteria on which we lose?
Yes; that is what makes the page usable material. A page that concludes in your favour on every criterion is treated as promotional and skipped, which costs more than the criteria you concede.
Our sales cycle is six months. How is that measured?
The visibility metrics are measured monthly regardless of the sales cycle, because they change on their own timescale. Commercial attribution is handled separately, through a source field on the lead form and brand-term search volume.
Does industry media placement still matter for B2B?
It carries a large part of the answer in most B2B categories, because there is little else. Where the public material in a category is thin, a small number of substantive placements can account for most of what a model has to work with.
What if procurement asks where a claim comes from?
Every published claim should have a source that can be produced on request. Claims that cannot be substantiated are stripped out during vendor review anyway, so publishing them costs credibility without buying anything.
Other industries
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