SEO Tips for B2B Content Marketers

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Those in the B2B sector understand that content is an important piece of an overall marketing strategy.  Content establishes thought leadership in a given industry and establishes trust over time with potential clients or customers.  Consumers are savvy these days and conduct research before making a decision, especially a decision that has business implications.  Potential clients or customers want to learn about a company’s history, products, practices, and reputation before signing on the dotted line.  B2B online content like blog posts, guest blog posts, blog comments, articles, press releases, white papers, EBooks, guides, etc. all keep a business top of mind with consumers throughout their decision process.  The sales cycle in the B2B sector typically is longer than that of the B2C sector, so it’s important to publish these content “reminders” on a regular basis.  In addition to providing target audience members with knowledge and gaining their trust over time, B2B content also plays a large role in improving the efforts of a B2B SEO campaign as long as content creators do the following:

Utilize Keywords

Keywords are perhaps the most important factor of an SEO campaign.  Keywords or keyword phrases are the words that people use when conducting a search in the search engines.  If your content includes these keywords and is relevant to the search query, the search engines will include your web content on the search engine results page.  Obviously, you want your marketing content to get found right?  That’s why it’s so important to include targeted keywords within the content.  However, these keywords should be implemented naturally into the content.  Don’t force them.  Content is for readers first, search engines second.  You don’t want to sacrifice user experience just to get a few extra keywords in there for SEO purposes.

Link

The goal of your online marketing content should be to intrigue readers enough that they want to learn more and click over to your website.  Content should include links in order to help drive traffic and generate website conversions.  Anchor text links to relevant pages of your website will promote click throughs and help from an SEO standpoint by telling the search engine spiders what that page of content is about.

Make It Accessible

It has long been B2B content practice to keep content “gated”.  Users can only access it if they are a current customer and have a log in or provide the company with something in return, like information by filling out a lead form.  Keeping content hidden like this prevents the search engine spiders from being able to crawl and index it.  Content that is gated won’t improve your SEO efforts at all.

Promote

In order to build natural links to your content and to your website over time, people need to know that your content exists.  As long as you are providing target audience members with something helpful and useful, there is no shame in using your resources to promote it.  If you create a great EBook, don’t just include a link to the download page on some hidden page of your site.  Promote it via your blog, social media channels, a press release, etc.  This will improve the visibility of the content and build inbound links that will help drive traffic to your site.

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