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The rules of the game are changing. No longer can you blast your target audience with outbound emails hoping that one catches their attention. Very quickly, your business's email efforts will put you in Google Jail and trust us - that is not a fun place to be. If your spam rate rises to about 0.3%, your messages will not be delivered.1 So what’s a B2B org to do?
Turn to the tried and true old Hollywood adage: “Content is king 👑”! Did you know businesses with blogs generate 67% more leads per month2 than those that do not, and are considered 3X more effective at generating leads than traditional marketing?3
Unique and/or helpful content is what draws audiences into digital properties (i.e. websites) and gets them to convert to a demo and later to become a customer! Content is what builds organic traffic that will pay dividends the more effort you put into it. By following Google’s framework of E-E-A-T framework, or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, you too can be a content king.4
Start with defining your audience. Make a list of 25 companies you would love to work with and draw patterns from there:
Build out your persona slide for each distinct type of customer you are going after. This will give you a vivid picture of who you are writing for. By understanding who your audience is, you can identify their issues and needs. Once you address their pain points and provide solutions their trust in you will increase and your SEO will soon follow.
For example, our personas at Mesh are divided into Revenue Operations Leaders, CROs, and CMOs. Each persona has distinct concerns and topics that would appeal to them and different perspectives on the same topic. For example, with Marketing Analytics CRO might care for an article about how to get ROI right while a RevOps leader might be more focused on the best way to do a funnel analysis of your leads.
Keywords are the terms your users are entering into Google to find information. Your goal with your content is to ultimately acquire customers and build a community. What will help you do this? By showing up on the first page of Google search results using your target keyword, where a whopping 91.5% of Google traffic stays5 you are significantly increasing your chance of being considered as a vendor for your target company.
There are several ways to understand what keywords to go after to target your personas:
Interview your customers or potential customers and find out what their biggest challenges are. What topics interest them and what questions they are looking to answer?
See what your competitors are doing using services like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to identify what your competitors are ranking for.
Use Keyword research tools like UberSuggest and Google Keyword Planner to find related keywords.
Using our platform as an example, we searched for words related to Revenue Analytics and Marketing ROI. We then wanted to target long tail keywords that have a higher chance of us ranking higher.
For example “ROI Analysis” When searched for has a KD (Keyword Difficulty) of 93/100 meaning it is very difficult to rank in the top 10 for the word, however “B2B Marketing ROI” has a KD of 13 meaning it will be significantly easier to rank in the top 10 for that term. Therefore as a newer start-up with a more limited budget, it would make sense to tackle the keyword that is searched less however a larger company with an order website would be more comfortable going after the harder words.
Now that you know your audience and understand the right keywords to focus your efforts on - it’s time to create your content!
Ensure that the content you are writing directly addresses the issues of your persona and weaves in the keywords you identified.
🚨 Pro tip: Put your keywords in as the headers of your article. When you have H1 and H2 headers that match your keywords, Google will crawl through the site to find that your content matches your topics and pays extra attention to your headings. This will also increase the chances of your content being featured as a Snippet in Google results!
Include internal and external links to provide even more value and credibility to your claims. By citing high-ranking sources and linking to other articles within your property, Google will better understand the structure and hierarchy of your content.
Remember to not overly rely on the AI content creators which dehumanizes your content. Google can identify content that has generically been written by AI which will get you penalized by the crawler and ultimately detract from your goal of ranking highly in the search engine!6
If you are measuring your success based on traffic alone (which Google Analytics will provide you), you could easily be steering your ship in the wrong direction as a result.
Why? Because when you only look at traffic or event-based measurement (think clicking a button on your site) you are missing the key metrics that are important to B2B businesses, namely identifying the number of account-level opportunities created and actual pipeline/revenue generated from your conversions.
The way to tie Organic Search Traffic to key metrics in your CRM (Qualified Demos Booked, Opps Created, Pipeline & Revenue) is by stitching together that data using a Revenue Analytics tool like Mesh!
Tools like Mesh allow you to drill down into your data to see what pages your users are landing on directly from Google and what the downstream impacts of that traffic are, including influenced revenue and ROI.
This way, if you have a page that does make it to the first page of the rankings, you can then vet if it is resulting in dollars for your business or a bunch of irrelevant traffic. As a B2B content creator, pipeline is the ultimate outcome you are looking for. Now you have all the components you need to close the loop for your content creation efforts.
Good luck! If you want to learn more about how Mesh can help. Book time here.
Citations:
1 https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/03/googles-making-big-changes-to-prevent-gmail-spam.html
2 https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/business-blogging-in-2015
3 https://www.wpbeginner.com/research/marketing-statistics-trends-and-facts-updated/
4 https://searchengineland.com/google-search-quality-rater-guidelines-changes-december-2022-390350
5 https://reputation911.com/do-people-click-past-the-first-page-of-google/
6 https://blog.google/products/search/more-content-by-people-for-people-in-search/
