Maintaining a blog continues to be one of the most effective SEO methods for generating online leads, especially for B2B companies. Blogging allows a business to discuss its products and services, interact with an audience, and establish itself as an industry forerunner.
While the benefits of maintaining a blog are well documented, creating quality content that converts traffic into leads is challenging. The best content must be strong in these three traits:
- Serves a clear purpose
- Is informative
- Is enticing
The key to an effective B2B blog is understanding how these traits are best impressed onto your audience.
- Understanding The Needs of Your Audience
Within each industry, there are seasons and events that change the needs or priorities of an industry throughout the year. Seasons are predictable spans of time that have a direct influence over the needs of your client-companies. Events are disruptive moments in time, like changes in regulation, technological innovation, or disruptions in the market.
In B2B, you will want to focus your content so that it consistently speaks directly to the needs of your client-companies. For example, if your company develops ERP software that is specialized to help mid-sized retailers track their inventory, you’ll want to take into consideration how your content can leverage the rush of the winter holidays.
Planning your topics using a content calendar is a great start to thinking about how your customer’s industry is impacted by seasons and events. For SEO, creating a content calendar will help you start thinking about keywords, incentives, and content formats to use to generate traffic for conversion.
- Creating Informative Content
For a B2B company looking to utilize SEO, content should be focused on establishing itself as a thought leader. Search engines are highly receptive of blogs that publish reportable facts, statistics, and measurable information, because client-companies are always searching for partners who will provide them with solutions that meet specific needs. Establishing yourself as a thought leader through informative content will communicate credibility and value in your company as a partner.
Creating informative content doesn’t have to be an overly complicated process. In fact, creating content that is too complicated may take-away from its message. There many practical approaches to communicating valuable information within your content. Here are a few to consider:
What To-Do
Informative content should be comprehensive with deep pools of information. Highly technical or regulated industries have well informed readers who are searching for solutions to specific needs. Consider presenting large quantities of information in a specialized blog format, like an infographic with a write-up, case studies, whitepapers, or executive interviews. Packaging complex information in an easy to understand format will make your content much more valuable.
What Not To-Do
Stay away from using unnecessary jargon and too many unrelated ideas at once. While jargon can be beneficial in making the reader feel knowledgeable and respected, it is easy for B2B companies to find themselves in a slippery slope of too much jargon that muddies your information. Jargon should be approached strategically, like creating shifts and changes in topic or in validation of claim.
Addressing multiple solutions to how your product or service will benefit a business can be helpful in differentiating yourself from the competition. But having too many unrelated ideas within a blog can also take-away from the purpose of the content. You don’t want the reader to feel conflicted with whether or not your blog has helped them.
- Enticing
Information doesn’t have to feel bland. More often than not, the voice and approach you use to communicate a topic will greatly affect how interesting your message is. B2B blogs that are future-oriented and communicate a strong return on investment do well in inspiring returning readers.
For B2B blogs, formulating content for engagement is the best way to create interesting content. Businesses are always looking for opportunities to express their expertise and branch their networks. Here are a few practical ways to encouraging engagement:
- Ask thought provoking questions
- Assert a question
- Ask for the reader’s opinion
- Offer incentives for involvement
Tailoring content that builds interest by encouraging engagement will help grow invested interest in your blog. From an SEO standpoint, having a high-level of engagement will greatly benefit your website’s ability to generate traffic for conversion.
Maintaining a blog for B2B companies is essential to their SEO strategy. Forging these three traits into your blogs is a solid foundation to establishing content that will convert meaningful traffic from your website into leads.
The SEO landscape continues to grow more competitive as companies adapt to fluid search engine rules and evolving customer expectations. Strongpages has a deep history of developing digital strategy and driving successful marketing programs for B2B clients. Strongpages provides extensive SEO and content creating services that combines search technology with the expertise of our digital marketing team. For more SEO strategies to optimize the return on your SEO, contact Strongpages today.