SEO
How to create B2B content that ranks and drives sales
Content is crucial for just about any B2B business as it drives traffic and convinces your leads to become your customers. No wonder, most B2B businesses are increasing their content marketing budgets every year.
But do they use content marketing to its full potential? How do you create content that serves several goals, like traffic acquisition and rankings?
The big challenge with B2B content
While being extremely valuable to business success, B2B content is also extremely challenging for marketers to execute properly. The problem is twofold: Targeting.
Unlike B2C content where you usually target a single human being, in B2B you have to keep the whole group of decision-makers in mind. This group is usually referred to as a DMU (a decision-making unit) and, depending on your platform and your target organizations, it can include the head of marketing, CEO, IT representative, CTO, etc.
In other words, B2B content targets a group of decision-makers and normally takes more time (and more steps) to convert.
Creating convincing content that appeals to every single person within a DMU is hardly possible:
- CEOs may need to know how your product will save them money
- Head of marketing will need to make sure that your product solves an existing problem without making their department redundant. In this case, the best interests of the CEO may be in conflict with the best interests of the marketing team, and yet, the latter is likely to be the final decision maker, so you will need to keep their needs and challenges in mind.
- The IT team will have to ensure your platform is technically possible (it is possible to integrate into their technical environment).
Before you start creating your B2B content strategy for traffic generation, you need to know your decision-makers and be able to plan your content around possible conflicts.
In other words, plan your content assets that convey value and then decide which keywords you can optimize for.
Knowing your decision-makers
So what is the best way to know who you are targeting? You already know your target businesses in mind (those you created that B2B product for) but how to better understand their internal decision-makers?
B2B audience research is different from B2C audience research: You can hardly apply your web analytics demographics info because you have to keep all those intra-organizational levels and politics in mind.
To better understand your target DMU, try several of these options:
- Talk to your sales and customer support teams. They already interact with your potential and current customers on a daily basis. Let them describe their contacts and who those report to. Get all the details they can share, including their frequently asked questions and common challenges.
- Survey your customers. Using on-site and on-registration surveys will help you collect more data on the size of companies you are dealing with and your actual users’ roles within those companies. There are a variety of plugins allowing you to integrate surveys with your content.
Additionally, inbox Insight offers a handy checklist for you to organize your data and better understand your target DMUs.
From there, start creating a list of problems each person within a DMU may have and how your product may solve all of them. This is where matching those problems to searchable keywords is the required next step.
Planning your keyword strategy
It is not often easy to identify how people may be searching for solutions and answers to relevant problems. While there’s no such a thing as an ideal word count which would work in every niche, try and create a resource that will answer several related questions.
Google is now mature enough to steer your search into a more popular direction, so I suggest starting your keyword research by simply searching Google. Type the search terms as you yourself would use them, and pay attention to:
- What Google Autocomplete suggests in the search box
- “People Also Ask” boxes and featured snippets
- Words Google shows within search snippets in bold (on desktop)
- Google’s “Related Searches” and (on a mobile device) Google’s categories that usually appear below organic search results:
All of these will help you collect the core terms your target B2B customers are using when searching for solutions to their problems.
From there, use keyword research tools to extend your core terms and discover even more related terms.
Keyword clustering is a good way to better organize your keywords by intent and identify some common searching patterns. Here’s a good guide on using those identified keyword clusters to create a content strategy that will apply in both B2B and B2C.
Promote and repurpose your B2B content
Publishing your content is a good first step to start generating some organic search visibility. But unless you promote your content, you will not achieve much as search engines need more signals than just useful copy.
Promoting your content is a whole new topic that has already been covered in much detail. A lot of content promotion ideas apply to both B2B and B2C content, including social media sharing, email marketing, and more.
When it comes to the B2B niche, some of the more effective content and link acquisition methods include:
- Organic promotion via email messages. Emailing is the main source of communication for most B2B businesses, so including your recent or most important content assets in your email signature will get you some clicks and possibly even backlinks. Wisestamp will help your employees create a cool signature that can pull your recent articles. They offer some cool email signature examples for you to get inspired.
- Content repurposing. With so many complicated DMUs in mind, you will need different content formats to cater to all of them. Making your content possible to download as a PDF file (to make it shareable within a company) is the first step. You can make that happen using Google Docs. Another idea is to turn your content into a video format which is pretty easy using Movavi. This would expand your reach to video-only platforms, like Youtube. Additionally, consider reusing your visuals (graphs and screenshots) in a PowerPoint format to create content to promote on Slideshare and Linkedin. Venngage makes it very easy. In other words, turn your content into lead magnets!
- Webinars make excellent B2B content because they can be used at every step of the sales funnel. You can live stream them, turn them into many videos, transcribe to create text content, enable lead generation forms to engage your prospects. There are lots of platforms that allow you to do all of that.
- Use email marketing. Email automation is an integral part of any B2B pipeline. Here are a few examples of email marketing campaigns to get you started with yours.
Creating optimized content that targets different roles and comes in different formats will require a lot of organizational efforts.
Conclusion
Content planning and creation take a ton of time, so it makes sense to set up a content marketing strategy that serves several goals, like organic traffic and sales generation. Hopefully, the above tools and steps will show you some direction. Good luck!
Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Brand and Community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.
Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.
Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
SEO
Why Building a Brand is Key to SEO
For better or worse, brands dominate Google search results. As more results are generated by AI and machines start to understand the offline and online world, big brands are only going to get more powerful.
Watch on-demand as we tackle the challenge of competing with dominant brands in Google search results. We explained why big brands lead the rankings and how to measure your own brand’s impact against these competitors.
We even shared actionable strategies for improving your visibility by weaving your brand into your SEO.
You’ll learn:
- Why brands dominate Google (and will continue to do so).
- How to measure your brand’s impact on search, and what you should focus on.
- Ways to weave your brand’s identity into your content.
With Dr. Pete Meyers, we explored why brand marketing is vital to search marketing, and how to incorporate your brand into your everyday content and SEO efforts.
If you’re looking to have your brand stand out in a sea of competition, you won’t want to miss this.
View the slides below, or check out the full presentation for all the details.
Join Us For Our Next Webinar!
Optimizing For Google’s New Landscape And The Future Of Search
Join us as we dive deep into the evolution reshaping Google’s search rankings in 2024 and beyond. We’ll show you actionable insights to help you navigate the disruption and emerge with a winning SEO strategy.
SEO
How SEO Can Capture Demand You Create Elsewhere
Generating demand is about making people want stuff they had no desire to buy before encountering your marketing.
Sometimes, it’s a short-term play, like an ecommerce store creating buzz before launching a new product. Other times, like with B2B marketing, it’s a long-term play to engage out-of-market audiences.
In either situation, demand generation can quickly become an expensive marketing activity.
Here are some ways SEO can help you capture and retain the demand you’re generating so your marketing budget goes further.
There’s no right or wrong way to generate demand. Any marketing activity that generates a desire to buy something (where there wasn’t such a desire before) can be considered demand generation.
Common examples include using:
- Paid ads
- Word of mouth
- Social media
- Video marketing
- Email newsletters
- Content marketing
- Community marketing
For example, Pryshan is a small local brand in Australia that has created a new type of exfoliating stone from clay. They’ve been selling it offline since 2018, if not earlier.
It’s not a groundbreaking innovation, but it’s also not been done before.
To launch their product online, they started running a bunch of Facebook ads:
Because of their ads, this company is in the early stages of generating demand for its product. Sure, it’s not the type of marketing that will go viral, but it’s still a great example of demand gen.
Looking at search volume data, there are 40 searches per month for the keyword “clay stone exfoliator” in Australia and a handful of other related searches:
However, these same keywords get hardly any searches in the US:
This never happens.
Australia has a much smaller population than the US. For non-localized searches, Australian search volume is usually about 6-10% of US search volume for the same keywords.
Take a look at the most popular searches as an example:
Pryshan’s advertising efforts on other platforms directly create the search demand for exfoliating clay stones.
It doesn’t matter where or how you educate people about the product you sell. What matters is shifting their perceptions from cognitive awareness to emotional desire.
Emotions trigger actions, and usually, the first action people take once they become aware of a cool new thing is to Google it.
If you’re not including SEO as part of your marketing efforts, here are three things you can do to:
- minimize budget wastage
- capture interest when people search
- convert the audiences you’re already reaching
If you’re working hard to create demand for your product, make sure it’s easy for people to discover it when they search Google.
- Give it a simple name that’s easy to remember
- Label it according to how people naturally search
- Avoid any terms that create ambiguities with an existing thing
For example, the concept of a clay exfoliating stone is easy for people to remember.
Even if they don’t remember what Pryshan calls their product, they’ll remember the videos and images they saw of the product being used to exfoliate people’s skin. They’ll remember it’s made from clay instead of a more common material like pumice.
It makes sense for Pryshan to call its product something similar to what people will be inclined to search for.
In this example, however, the context of exfoliation is important.
If Pryshan chooses to call its product “clay stones,” it will have a harder time disambiguating itself from gardening products in search results. It’s already the odd one out in SERPs for such keywords:
When you go through your branding exercises to decide what to call your product or innovation, it helps to search your ideas on Google.
This way, you’ll easily see what phrases to avoid so that your product isn’t being grouped with unrelated things.
Imagine being part of a company that invested a lot of money in re-branding itself. New logo, new slogan, new marketing materials… the lot.
On the back of their new business cards, the designers thought inviting people to search for the new slogan on Google would be clever.
The only problem was that this company didn’t rank for the slogan.
They weren’t showing up at all! (Yes, it’s a true story, no I can’t share the brand’s name).
This tactic isn’t new. Many businesses leverage the fact that people will Google things to convert offline audiences into online audiences through their printed, radio, and TV ads.
Don’t do this if you don’t already own the search results page.
It’s not only a very expensive mistake to make, but it gives the conversions you’ve worked hard for directly to your competitors.
Instead, use SEO to become the only brand people see when they search for your brand, product, or something that you’ve created.
Let’s use Pryshan as an example.
They’re the first brand to create exfoliating clay stones. Their audience has created a few new keywords to find Pryshan’s products on Google, with “clay stone exfoliator” being the most popular variation.
Yet even though it’s a product they’ve brought to market, competitors and retailers are already encroaching on their SERP real estate for this keyword:
Sure, Pryshan holds four of the organic spots, but it’s not enough.
Many competitors are showing up in the paid product carousel before Pryshan’s website can be seen by searchers:
They’re already paying for Facebook ads, why not consider some paid Google placements too?
Not to mention, stockists and competitors are ranking for three of the other organic positions.
Having stockists show up for your product may not seem so bad, but if you’re not careful, they may undercut your prices or completely edge you out of the SERPs.
This is also a common tactic used by affiliate marketers to earn commissions from brands that are not SEO-savvy.
In short, SEO can help you protect your brand presence on Google.
If you’re working hard to generate demand for a cool new thing that’s never been done before, it can be hard to know if it’s working.
Sure, you can measure sales. But a lot of the time, demand generation doesn’t turn into immediate sales.
B2B marketing is a prominent example. Educating and converting out-of-market audiences into in-market prospects can take a long time.
That’s where SEO data can help close the gap and give you data to get more buy-in from decision-makers.
Measure increases in branded searches
A natural byproduct of demand generation activities is that people search more for your brand (or they should if you’re doing it right).
Tracking if your branded keywords improve over time can help you gauge how your demand generation efforts are going.
In Ahrefs, you can use Rank Tracker to monitor how many people discover your website from your branded searches and whether these are trending up:
If your brand is big enough and gets hundreds of searches a month, you can also check out this nifty graph that forecasts search potential in Keywords Explorer:
Discover and track new keywords about your products, services or innovations
If, as part of your demand generation strategy, you’re encouraging people to search for new keywords relating to your product, service, or innovation, set up alerts to monitor your presence for those terms.
This method will also help you uncover the keywords your audience naturally uses anyway.
Start by going to Ahrefs Alerts and setting up a new keyword alert.
Add your website.
Leave the volume setting untouched (you want to include low search volume keywords so you discover the new searches people make).
Set your preferred email frequency, and voila, you’re done.
Monitor visibility against competitors
If you’re worried other brands may steal your spotlight in Google’s search results, you can also use Ahrefs to monitor your share of the traffic compared to them.
I like to use the Share of Voice graph in Site Explorer to do this. It looks like this:
This graph is a great bird’s eye view of how you stack up against competitors and if you’re at risk of losing visibility to any of them.
Final thoughts
As SEO professionals, it’s easy to forget how hard some businesses work to generate demand for their products or services.
Demand always comes first, and it’s our job to capture it.
It’s not a chicken or egg scenario. The savviest marketers use this to their advantage by creating their own SEO opportunities long before competitors figure out what they’re doing.
If you’ve seen other great examples of how SEO and demand generation work together, share them with me on LinkedIn anytime.
SEO
Google Explains How Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Is Measured
Google’s Web Performance Developer Advocate, Barry Pollard, has clarified how Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is measured.
CLS quantifies how much unexpected layout shift occurs when a person browses your site.
This metric matters to SEO as it’s one of Google’s Core Web Vitals. Pages with low CLS scores provide a more stable experience, potentially leading to better search visibility.
How is it measured? Pollard addressed this question in a thread on X.
For Core Web Vitals what is CLS measured in? Why is 0.1 considered not good and 0.25 bad, and what do those numbers represent?
I’ve had 3 separate conversations on this with various people in last 24 hours so figured it’s time for another deep dive thread to explain…
🧵 1/12 pic.twitter.com/zZoTur6Ad4
— Barry Pollard (@tunetheweb) October 10, 2024
Understanding CLS Measurement
Pollard began by explaining the nature of CLS measurement:
“CLS is ‘unitless’ unlike LCP and INP which are measured in seconds/milliseconds.”
He further clarified:
“Each layout shift is calculated by multipyling two percentages or fractions together: What moved (impact fraction) How much it moved (distance fraction).”
This calculation method helps quantify the severity of layout shifts.
As Pollard explained:
“The whole viewport moves all the way down – that’s worse than just half the view port moving all the way down. The whole viewport moving down a little? That’s not as bad as the whole viewport moving down a lot.”
Worse Case Scenario
Pollard described the worst-case scenario for a single layout shift:
“The maximum layout shift is if 100% of the viewport (impact fraction = 1.0) is moved one full viewport down (distance fraction = 1.0).
This gives a layout shift score of 1.0 and is basically the worst type of shift.”
However, he reminds us of the cumulative nature of CLS:
“CLS is Cumulative Layout Shift, and that first word (cumulative) matters. We take all the individual shifts that happen within a short space of time (max 5 seconds) and sum them up to get the CLS score.”
Pollard explained the reasoning behind the 5-second measurement window:
“Originally we cumulated ALL the shifts, but that didn’t really measure the UX—especially for pages opened for a long time (think SPAs or email). Measuring all shifts meant, given enough, time even the best pages would fail!”
He also noted the theoretical maximum CLS score:
“Since each element can only shift when a frame is drawn and we have a 5 second cap and most devices run at 60fps, that gives a theoretical cap on CLS of 5 secs * 60 fps * 1.0 max shift = 300.”
Interpreting CLS Scores
Pollard addressed how to interpret CLS scores:
“… it helps to think of CLS as a percentage of movement. The good threshold of 0.1 means about the page moved 10%—which could mean the whole page moved 10%, or half the page moved 20%, or lots of little movements were equivalent to either of those.”
Regarding the specific threshold values, Pollard explained:
“So why is 0.1 ‘good’ and 0.25 ‘poor’? That’s explained here as was a combination of what we’d want (CLS = 0!) and what is achievable … 0.05 was actually achievable at the median, but for many sites it wouldn’t be, so went slightly higher.”
See also: How You Can Measure Core Web Vitals
Why This Matters
Pollard’s insights provide web developers and SEO professionals with a clearer understanding of measuring and optimizing for CLS.
As you work with CLS, keep these points in mind:
- CLS is unitless and calculated from impact and distance fractions.
- It’s cumulative, measuring shifts over a 5-second window.
- The “good” threshold of 0.1 roughly equates to 10% of viewport movement.
- CLS scores can exceed 1.0 due to multiple shifts adding up.
- The thresholds (0.1 for “good”, 0.25 for “poor”) balance ideal performance with achievable goals.
With this insight, you can make adjustments to achieve Google’s threshold.
Featured Image: Piscine26/Shutterstock
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: October 9, 2024
-
SEARCHENGINES5 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: October 10, 2024
-
SEARCHENGINES4 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: October 11, 2024
-
AFFILIATE MARKETING6 days ago
I Lead a Company Built Through Decades of Acquisitions. Here’s a Key to Making Them Successful
-
SEO7 days ago
The 100 Most Searched People on Google in 2024
-
WORDPRESS6 days ago
20 Best Online Course Platforms in 2024 (Detailed Guide)
-
WORDPRESS5 days ago
Automattic sends WP Engine its own cease-and-desist over WordPress trademark infringement
-
SEO5 days ago
What The Google Antitrust Verdict Could Mean For The Future Of SEO
You must be logged in to post a comment Login