#The SEO experts understand the industry from a deeper perspective. They know the industry demands and what makes it unique. They can conduc

[prabhatjairam]

5 Prompts to Enhance Your Content Marketing

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, one thing remains constant: the power of compelling content. Yet, creating content that truly resonates with your audience requires more than just a stroke of inspiration—it demands strategy, innovation, and a deep understanding of what captivates and engages. 

In this article, we delve into five prompts designed to supercharge your content marketing efforts. From sparking creativity to fostering meaningful connections with your audience, these prompts offer a roadmap to elevate your content strategy to new heights. 

Whether you're a seasoned marketer seeking fresh inspiration or a newcomer navigating the world of digital content, these prompts are sure to ignite your imagination and propel your brand forward in the digital realm. So, let's dive in and explore how these prompts can transform your content marketing game.

Here are five prompts guaranteed to revitalize your content strategy:

1) The What-If Scenario

Embrace the power of imagination by exploring alternative realities. What if your product could solve a problem nobody else has tackled? What if your service could revolutionize an entire industry? By diving into these hypothetical scenarios, you can uncover fresh perspectives and unlock innovative ideas that resonate with your audience.

2) The Customer Story

Your customers are the heroes of your brand narrative. Take a deep dive into their experiences, challenges, and triumphs. Share their stories compellingly and authentically. Whether it’s through testimonials, case studies, or user-generated content, centering your content around real-life customer journeys adds credibility and fosters a sense of community.

3) The Contrarian Viewpoint

Challenge conventional wisdom and stir up conversations by presenting a contrarian viewpoint. Identify commonly held beliefs or industry norms, then flip the script. Offer thought-provoking insights, backed by data and research, that challenge your audience to reconsider their assumptions. This not only grabs attention but also establishes your brand as a bold thought leader in your field.

“As you explore these five prompts to enhance your content marketing strategy, consider leveraging resources like Study24hr.com to further enrich your knowledge and skills. The platform offers a wide range of courses tailored to digital marketing, content creation, and brand storytelling. Whether you're looking to master the art of content strategy or delve into the intricacies of SEO optimization, Study24hr.com provides comprehensive courses taught by industry experts. With flexible learning options and practical insights, Study24hr.com empowers marketers to stay ahead of the curve and unlock their full potential in the ever-evolving landscape of content marketing.”

4) The Trendspotter’s Lens

Stay ahead of the curve by keeping a keen eye on emerging trends and topics within your industry. Monitor social media, industry publications, and consumer behavior to identify the latest buzzworthy subjects. Then, leverage these insights to create timely and relevant content that positions your brand as an authoritative voice in the conversation.

5) The Interactive Experience

Break through the noise by engaging your audience in interactive experiences. Whether it’s a quiz, poll, interactive infographic, or live webinar, invite participation and encourage dialogue. Interactive content not only captures attention but also fosters deeper engagement and encourages social sharing, amplifying your brand’s reach.

The Bottom Line

By integrating these prompts into your content marketing approach, you can inject fresh vitality into your campaigns, captivate your audience, and achieve meaningful outcomes. Remember, creativity knows no limits—so embrace experimentation, take calculated risks, and push the boundaries of what's achievable in content marketing. Your audience awaits eagerly, ready to be inspired and entertained by your next masterpiece.

[sathl]

[lakelandseo]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[epackingvietnam]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[nutrifami]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[xaydungtruonggia]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[ductrungnguyen87]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[camerasieunhovn]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[gamebazu]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/2MQKVTx

[kjt-lawyers]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[noithatotoaz]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[thanhtuandoan89]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[drummcarpentry]

5 Ways to Use Search as a Growth Channel for B2B in 2021

Posted by Victor_Ijidola

Unlike B2C brands, B2B businesses are often characterized by:

low search volumes on Google.

high competition on scarcely available keywords.

And there’s evidence to support this — usually, where a seven-year-old B2C company is getting 500K visitors per month from SEO, a B2B brand the same age could be seeing only 15K visitors per month. (This is assuming all other things are equal.)

Check out the example below comparing Zola.com (a B2C brand) and Yiedify.com (B2B):

These two sites were founded around the same time (2013) and have been publishing lots of content. Yet, the difference in their traffic numbers makes it look like Yieldify hasn’t been doing much SEO, but that’s not the case.

For instance, when I used the MozBar to analyze the on-page optimization they did on their article about trust badges, I could tell they’re at least following basic SEO principles, like having focus keywords in their URL, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions:

I’d say they’ve not been terrible at optimizing their content for SEO — if they do optimize all their content like they did this one on trust badges.

My point here is: B2C and e-commerce businesses (usually) have way more opportunities in SEO than B2B, especially in terms of search traffic.

But while that is true, it’s also true that no matter how few the search visits, there are still a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B businesses.

Most of the time, what B2B brands lose in search traffic, they make up in revenue — since their products/services are usually more expensive than those in B2C.

Long story short: there are opportunities for B2B companies in search, and here’s how to capitalize on them in the year ahead.

1. Start from bottom (not top) of funnel

Every funnel begins at the top, but if you want to generate results as quickly as possible, you should kick off your B2B SEO strategy targeting customers at the bottom of the funnel.

Ready-to-buy customers are already at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu), searching for information that’ll help them make a purchase decision. They’re often searching with keywords like:

“[industry] software”

“[industry] tools”

“[competitor] alternatives”

“Is [competitor] a good product/service?”

As a smart marketer, your strategy should be to prioritize reaching them with the bottom of funnel content they’re looking for.

You probably know what BoFu content looks like, but just so we’re on the same page as to what it really is, see these examples of BoFu content from SocialPilot ranking on page one:

I’m not affiliated with SocialPilot, so I don’t know if they kicked off their SEO content marketing with these BoFu topics (search terms).

But if they did, chances are they experienced quick success (in terms of relevant product awareness and sign-ups), since the articles are ranking on Google’s front page for searchers looking for “Buffer alternatives”.

Bottom line is, as a B2B brand, you’ll be better off prioritizing BoFu topics in your SEO strategy. It’s a much better approach than starting all the way at the top of the funnel, which would be targeting searchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase (or sign-up) decision.

But shouldn’t you start with top of funnel content, since that’s where buyers start their journey?

If you think your strategy should be to first target visitors at the top of the funnel (ToFu), you’re probably assuming that your prospects will first consume your ToFu content before ever getting to the bottom.

That’s hardly ever the case in real life. What often happens is:

A prospective customer knows they have a problem

They search Google for a solution

Google shows them multiple solutions on page one

They read reviews and supporting information to help them make a purchase decision

They make a decision to either buy or not buy

If you think back to the last purchase decision you made, this was probably the route you took.

So it’s not all the time that buyers will start reading your top of funnel content, discover your product, and then decide to start consuming your BoFu content. Sometimes they’re already at BoFu and all it’d take to convince them to buy your product is the right BoFu content.

2. Make your content t-shaped (for demand and lead generation)

You’re probably thinking, “what’s t-shaped content?”. Allow me to explain.

At my agency (Premium Content Shop), we use “t-shaped content” to describe the type of content that performs two functions at the same time:

It provides real value to your ideal prospects

AND

Generates relevant organic traffic, demand, and quality leads for your business.

This little illustration below should help you better understand what our “t-shaped content framework” means:

In practice, this is an example of t-shaped content from Mailshake:

Right after the fifth paragraph of the article, they introduce a CTA:

This is a t-shaped content piece because:

The guide is focused on helping Mailshake’s potential customers — “cold emailers”

The guide is designed to use the CTA to generate demand and leads for Mailshake

I often advise clients not to introduce anything about their product/service until readers have scrolled about 40% into the content they’re consuming, just to avoid coming across as overly promotional. And I’m not saying putting your CTA that early in an article could never work — it could — but your readers should feel like you're prioritizing them getting value from the content over trying to sell your own stuff right off the bat.

In any case, creating and ranking t-shaped content helps you achieve two objectives:

Build a brand that people trust.

Create awareness and generate leads for your product.

3. Don’t just rank content — rank “from-field-experience” content

One reason SEO gets a bad rap, especially among B2B marketers, is the sheer amount of low-quality B2B content that’s ranking on page one in the SERPs. And that’s because, while Google’s algorithm is able to determine search-friendly content, it’s currently not able to see if a page is relevant for a searcher, at least from a human perspective.

So, it ends up ranking content on page one that meets Google’s ranking standards, but not always the searcher’s standards.

As a B2B marketer, you don’t just want to meet Google’s requirements and rank on page one. You need your content to rank AND impress your audience well enough to convert them into leads.

How do you do that? You need to write like professionals speaking to professionals.

Usually, this means you need to see what other industry professionals are saying or have published on any given topic and spell out:

What you agree with

What you disagree with

What you want to change about how something is currently done

How you want it to change or change it

Derek Gleason of CXL mirrors the same idea in a recent tweet:

And as an expert in your field, this is a no-brainer: you’ll almost always have a different opinion to share about popular topics in your industry.

For instance, as an SEO expert, you most likely have fact-based opinions about topics like Google ranking factors, B2B marketing, technical SEO, etc. This knowledge you have about all the topics in your industry is “from-field-experience” ideas that’ll help you connect with customers on a deeper level.

And when you’re creating content based on your original opinions, experience, thoughts, or convictions, you won’t be sounding like everyone else and your content will stand out. Even if it’s similar to other competitors’ content, it’ll still have your original ideas.

But how do your original ideas impact revenue or growth?

Your clients aren't all at the bottom of the funnel. While I’ve advised kicking off your SEO marketing strategy by addressing BoFu topics, many of your potential buyers are still at the top and middle of the funnel.

This means, at the stage where they’re reading your “from-field-experience” content, they’re not even thinking about your product at all. But with the right type of content — with your original thoughts and ideas, you can move them from the top/middle to the bottom of the funnel.

So, if they’ve been consuming your ToFu content for any amount of time, your brand will get their attention better when it’s time for them to consider making a purchase decision.

And yes, they’ll ultimately make a decision based on reviews and other BoFu content, but your ToFu and MoFu content will help you develop authority and trust with potential customers. This will often give you a leg up on your competitors when it’s time for ToFu/MoFu prospects to make a decision.

For example, Dom Kent of Mio once shared how people in the collaboration industry keep finding Mio whenever they search for anything related to their industry; that’s one example of what ToFu and MoFu content does for your brand.

It's like when you Google something about sales management, and Close’s content keeps showing up. When it’s time to buy — or even just recommend — a sales management tool, guess which product you’ll think of? That’s right, Close. It doesn’t always mean you’ll sign up for Close, but that’s at least one of the brands you’d think of first.

4. Avoid covering too many basic topics

Often in B2B, your ideal buyers are experienced professionals. This means that most of the time, they don't need content on the basic topics that entry-level employees might.

If they're sales leaders, for instance, they seldom search for content on basic topics like "what is a sales script" or "how does CRM work?".

You're better off covering more important and sophisticated topics — regardless of whether those topics have high search volume or not.

For instance, CRM provider Copper currently ranks for “cold call script to get appointment”.

It’s a long-tail keyword with only about 500 searches per month.

The low search volume may look unattractive on the surface, but Copper’s target customers are the ones searching for it, and that’s more important than them ranking for a high search volume keyword like “what’s a sales pipeline?” that doesn’t frequently get searched by those customers.

During your keyword research phase, it’s easy to get distracted by high search volume keywords that your target audience barely ever searches for on Google. Move past that distraction and focus on creating content for keywords your target buyers need content on — even if those keywords have low search volumes.

5. Take care of your technical SEO

In my first four points, I covered things you need to know about high-quality content creation and the content strategy side of SEO, but I haven’t forgotten about the technical side.

You need to pay attention to technical SEO as well, as it can make or break the opportunities any B2B website can get from search. :

Here are the most important parts of tech SEO that you should get in the habit of checking:

HTML tags: Your HTML tags help search engines understand what’s on your page. See it this way: you understand English (and any other language you speak), search engine algorithms understand HTML tags (plus human language).

Meta descriptions: These help search engines understand the content of your web pages even more. It’s basically the summary of your content, showing searchers and search engines a quick overview of what’s on your web pages.

SEO-friendly URL: This one is often considered a “minor Google ranking factor” by many (if not most) search marketers. But even if it increases your chances of ranking by .5%, it’s still important. So optimize your URLs to make them SEO-friendly. This means you need to make sure they contain the target keywords you’re trying to rank for on any page.

User experience (UX): This includes site speed, navigation, accessibility (for visitors from PC and mobile devices), and everything else that makes your content and web pages easy to use for searchers. Google’s algorithm has been built to be powerful enough to determine which pages have good UX, so you need to make sure your pages are easy to use, navigate, and access.

Backlinks: They may be last on the list here, but backlinks are easily one of the most important ranking factors you need to pay careful attention to. As you know, the more backlinks you get, the stronger your chances of ranking.

In conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities in SEO for B2B companies — even though the search volumes are often low. I’ve covered what you’d need to use search to your advantage as a B2B marketer.

To recap, you should kick-off your SEO and content marketing by targeting BoFu prospects. And make your content T-shaped, so that it benefits your audience and business at the same time.

Also, don’t just rank content for organic search traffic, rank with “from-field-experience” content/ideas; this will help you generate demand and quality leads as readers will be drawn to your expertise.

And then avoid covering too many basic topics, especially when your target buyers are experienced professionals or C-level decision-makers. Finally, pay attention to the technical side of SEO, too; it can make or break your entire search engine optimization efforts.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[simplemlmsponsoring]

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6 B2B Content Strategy Pitfalls to Avoid

In the marketing world, content marketing is crucial for businesses to scale, or even get discovered. We all know that; so, what we are NOT going to discuss in this post is the importance of content marketing. Instead, we’ll talk about how to avoid six pitfalls in your B2B content strategy.

Let’s proceed with two eye-popping quotes regarding content marketing investment:

“Content creation is the area of content marketing where there has been the most reported increase in spending over the last 12 months (56%).” —Content Marketing Institute “Almost 40% of B2B marketers were using content with no particular strategy.” —B2B News Network

Kind of baffling, isn’t it? We spend more money on content creation, but around 40% of us are squandering that money away, aimlessly.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get right to the point:

Pitfall #1: Writing Blog Posts Without SEO

Without a proper SEO strategy that aligns with your brand, you aren’t fully leveraging the power of blogs.

In this day and age, we have quickly moved from optimizing for rankings to optimizing for discoverability. It’s really about understanding user intent, emotion, state of mind, extrapolation of thoughts, semantic connections, understanding entity-relationship models, etc.

It’s about figuring out what your users want, even when they don’t know that your business solution can be the answer to their prayers.

We live in a demand generation world, where our leads or prospects have completely redefined marketing. We have to first show how our solutions can help, and we hope they’ll consider us—amongst the ten other vendors they’re researching.

There is much competition and information overload, so it’s essential to make your B2B blog stand apart. From my experience, clients do focus on branding and tone (which is absolutely critical), but SEO always comes second—which always has been the most significant missed opportunity.

The Solution:

Hire someone else to create your blog strategy from an SEO perspective, suitably a content marketing agency, or an agency that does SEO AND creates content.

For us, typically the points-of-contact we interact with are not only responsible for blog content (not to mention other types of content such as infographics, videos, webinars, etc.) but other online digital activities as well.

In such instances, one cannot afford the time to appropriately focus on blogs. The same applies to in-house teams as well. Eventually, you’d scale to a point where you’d need to leverage the digital content creation services of experts that are outside of your organization. While you do that, also look into SEO strategists that have prior experience in your industry—especially with blogs.

The Takeaway:

Writing blog content is a heavy investment. Add outside help, if not for writing, then certainly for SEO strategy. Ultimately, 57% of B2B marketers expressed that SEO generated most number of leads than any other marketing channel.

Pitfall #2: Not Having a Documented Content Strategy

What is a “documented content strategy,” you ask?

In plain terms, it’s a living and breathing document that highlights your content marketing goals, the efforts you’d have to make to achieve those goals, and how you’d measure the success or failure.

But that’s only a good documented content strategy. A great documented content strategy addresses the roadblocks and challenges your business faces that prevent you from being number 1 in your industry, and how you’d use content to overcome those challenges.

A great documented content strategy addresses the roadblocks and challenges your business faces that prevent you from being number 1 in your industry, and how you’d use content to overcome those challenges.

Sorry, but not sorry. I had to write that twice to show how essential that is. And to all the CEOs reading this, you simply have to be a part of this process!

If you aren’t, you’d only have yourself to blame for the doom of your content marketing efforts. The direction of where you see your organization of content needs to come from you, and your executive team.

The Solution:

I know what you’re thinking! This sounds like hosting meetings, meetings, and more meetings.

Honestly, you’re right! It does. But the only solution here is to get started on this ASAP.

Time is money!

The Takeaway:

Seriously, have a documented content strategy that adapts and evolves, just as your organization does. I cannot get more direct than this!

Pitfall #3: Not Having Personas

This could also be a part of your documented content strategy. 77% of the most successful B2B content marketers use personas to create valuable content.

It makes sense.

They’re directly communicating with their customers to gain a deeper understanding of their target audiences’ needs and wants.

Plus, personas help with more than just content. It creates a brand experience that is unique to your business’s solutions, and believe it or not, it will help you attract the right kind of talent for the job openings you have.

The Solution:

As said, while creating your documented content strategy, you could create personas too. In this particular instance, involving your sales or customer support team might be beneficial—as they’d have firsthand knowledge on how customers/leads reach out to your business.

The Takeaway:

If you have personas, evaluate if they’re on par with your marketing goals—especially concerning content. If you don’t, get moving, now! And remember: personas need to evolve too, as and when your organization does.

Pitfall #4: Ignoring Changes to SEO and Search Algorithms

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of B2B marketers expressed that changes in SEO/search algorithms are one of their top content marketing concerns.

Can you blame them?

After all, Google and all prominent social media platforms are designed for their users, not for websites. Further, Google ranks pages, not websites (a fine distinction that many marketers often forget). Consider this: Have you ever encountered a top Google search result, where the page you went to only had a paragraph written?

Yet, it ranked number one? Do you know why?

Google felt that the page would be the most capable candidate for answering the user’s query. So is it always about writing long blog pieces, fluff, and producing content for the sake of producing?

Certainly not!

The Solution:

Again, the most recommended solution here would be to hire content marketing services of an agency who understands search behavior, and it’s part of what they do. It can be a game changer! If not, as said, hire them for content strategy, another reason for considering SEO in your content.

The Takeaway:

In our experience here, writing content isn’t necessarily the number one problem our clients have. The problem revolves around producing quality content frequently, and most definitely about a lack of SEO in their content strategy.

To thrive organically, you need to have an SEO strategy that bolsters your content performance; it’s as simple as that.

Pitfall #5: Ignoring Video 

We live in an instant gratification marketing world. In other words, if there is a problem, we need a solution NOW!

Don’t know how to make pasta? You’ll probably YouTube it, or even better, Google it first.

Are you aware of how to install a new RAM on your desktop computer? It’s very likely you imitate the same behavior. You’ll search for a solution.

Think about it, videos are the best way to demonstrate how to fix a problem, or more accurately, provide a better solution. You may know how to make pasta, but maybe you’re looking to make pasta quicker and better. Unlike textual content pieces, videos directly present an answer; however, this can be tricky in the B2B world. You may not be able to easily record your product and present to your clients. You need to have a teaser and show what your products or services can do, as opposed to revealing the entire system or solution. Still, video could be your biggest converting asset.

Think this is baloney? How about the fact that video marketers get 66% more qualified leads in a year? Without a doubt, videos are the perfect medium to communicate what you have to offer. I mean, haven’t we all gone to a movie at the theater, because we liked the trailer we saw beforehand?

Here’s the kicker. Videos aren’t limited to only your products. You can incorporate them in your blogs, conduct interviews, create webinars, join discussions, appear on television, share company culture, and more. There’s a ton of source material out there to learn from and develop your own strategy.

The Solution:

If you don’t know where to start, ask! Tell your marketing department to look into what video development looks like and see what your competitors are doing.

Look into the infrastructure you have in place that will support your video marketing efforts. Do you need to get a CDN, do you need to buy more servers? What can you do with LinkedIn and Facebook? Is it time to hire outside services for videos?

The Takeaway:

Aren’t sure how to start with video marketing? That’s fine, start with questions!

Pitfall #6: Not Thinking About Customer Journey & Engagement With Content

Remember what I said about “optimizing for discoverability…”? Let’s dive into that a little more.

The biggest problem I’ve seen with content is that sometimes, the top dogs in the organizations look at content as a direct sales channel. There is a huge lack of patience here concerning the time it takes before content does anything. The issue really originates from the fact that a single content piece that is produced is primarily evaluated against how much money it has made (and how quickly), versus how much engagement it generates.

Wait, isn’t sales the end goal here? Yes, it is, but you need to be subtle about it with content.  You need to nurture the relationship you’ve built with your audience and convince them that what you’re saying is beneficial.

Imagine this, you go to your boss, and say, “Hey, by the way, let’s spend 50k on content this quarter. However, let’s not evaluate those efforts directly against how much money it’s making, but rather how much engagement it’s generating.” Tough conversation, right?

I’m here to tell you that it’s important to have that conversation, and it sounds tough, but it shouldn’t be. In my experience, I’ve rarely seen content make money without engagement. It’s precisely the essence of content. Will users convert if they don’t find your content useful? Will they play your video if they aren’t curious? Will they click on that internal link to your product page, from your blog post, if they aren’t piqued to learn more about what you have to offer?

Also, will Google continue to rank a page in its SERPs if no one clicks on it? Will it also continue to rank a page if users quickly bounce? Will it rank a page that takes 20 seconds to load?

The Solution:

You need to pay more credence to engagement and user experience with content—as a measurement of performance. Keep track of what kind of content creates most opportunities, what kind doesn’t, and what you need to do to optimize engagement, address user needs, and become a trusted voice in your industry.

Being perceived as reputable, trustworthy, and an expert is an intangible benefit. I challenge you to go to your tools and to use whatever method you’re using to track content performance. I bet that in 90% of the cases, the content that made money, performed well, or generated leads would be the pieces that had engagements.

If your content has had engagement but isn’t contributing to leads, the problem then lies with mismatch user expectations, which in itself is another investigation to find out the disconnect.

The Takeaway:

Write content for discoverability, engagement, and knowledge nourishment. Become the go-to source for your clients and your prospects (before and after you close the deal).

Trust me, money will follow these tactics. Change your thinking on how you evaluate content performance and remember money comes second. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but you will make more money if engagement comes first.

In Conclusion

Content will be a very big piece of the marketing puzzle in 2019. Use it wisely, but more importantly, stay in the hunt for unique content opportunities. Experiment, try new tactics and create an identity.

Content is an investment that will reap benefits in the long run. If you’re looking at it as a method to make quick money, then you’re no better than the person who judges an elephant by its ability to climb a tree.

To end, I’d like to invoke Henry David Thoreau, “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”

Don’t fall into the 40% of people who do content without a strategy. Realize and introspect what you’re really trying to accomplish with content and what value you want to create for your B2B organization—through content.

The post 6 B2B Content Strategy Pitfalls to Avoid appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Read more: blog.marketo.com

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Top 5 Highest Paying Digital Marketing Skills in 2018

To know about the highest paying digital marketing jobs, let us first understand what is digital marketing, why is it trending and why it can prove as a good career choice.

What is Digital Marketing?

Millions of people are using the Internet daily for various purposes. Some use it to search particular information, some might use it to find a job and some might use it just for their online presence on a social media platform.

With online media skyrocketing, digital marketing has almost become mandatory for every company in any industry. Digital marketing has become quite vital to the global economy and has been the fastest growing industry till date. It is one of the most lucrative industries in the modern world.

Why Digital Marketing is Required?

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. And with online marketing, reaching the target audience is quite easy as most of them are online. This shows that digital marketing is just not the new trend but one of the effective ways to reach prospective customers in less cost.

Some of the common forms of digital marketing are SEO, search engine marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, inbound marketing and affiliate marketing. The most used assets for the same are the website, blog posts, social platforms, whitepapers, infographics, branding assets, and ebooks.

Why should one Build a Career in Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is very exciting, fast-moving and a creative field. As organizations invest more and more in digital marketing and online branding, there has been a huge surge in recruitment for digital marketing experts. However, demand for expertise professionals in this field is not able to meet the supply of the same. Hence, any prospective candidate with the certain level of expertise and hands-on in this field comes under the radar of the desired employee. However, there are certain skills which are important and high-paying in the job market.

Top 5 highest paying digital marketing jobs and skills

SEO

SEO is the science of optimizing a particular website for a search engine. It deals with all the technicalities of a website like code, information architecture and much more.

SEO can also be termed as a form of art to make the website search engine friendly as it also deals with user search.

However, with regular updates in the algorithms of search engines, SEO has become mandatory for every company’s website. Hence, website owners or different companies are looking for professionals who can tackle the latest search engine algorithms and get the top search rank. These professionals are termed as SEO experts, SEO professionals or SEO consultants.

The segment has emerged as a hotspot for a job opportunity and is in high demand. SEO has almost become a necessary skill for everybody right from a blogger to a web designer.

To gain hands-on experience, one should start SEO career with an entry-level job as SEO executive. With experience, one either move on to higher job profiles or study further in relevant subjects. An alternative SEO career path for a prospective candidate could be freelancing and consultancy. Some of the common job openings in SEO are that of SEO trainee, SEO Analyst, SEO Trainer, Link building expert, SEO project manager and much more.

Salary: The salary for a SEO executive starts from around Rs. 1,20,000. A 4 years experience person gets an average salary of 4,50,000 to Rs. 6,00,000. 8 years+ experience person gets on an average 9,50,000 to Rs. 15,00,000.

A search engine optimizer could graduate to head of digital marketing as, during his journey, he acquires basic knowledge of other areas in Digital marketing.

2. PPC

PPC stands for pay-per-click which means one needs to be paid every time one of their ads are clicked. There is another form of the rate which is called CPM. This stands for cost per impression. The 3 top players in the PPC are Google PPC Online Advertising, Bing Ads, Facebook Advertising

As we can see around us, there are less and fewer advertisements in radio, newspaper, and even TV advertising and thus ad spending has decreased relatively. However, digital ad spending in areas like search and mobile advertising have increased steeply. Hence there are huge job opportunities in PPC. But following are certain mandatory traits for a prospective candidate.

Adaptability: PPC is an ever-changing field with a new     update almost every day. Hence one needs to be aware of every update     happening in the industry.

Calculative: Though one does not have to be math oriented     completely, one needs a calculative approach for there are many metrics     and analytics.

Creative: Other than dealing with AdWords or its operations,     writing an ad text creatively is also required.

Excel: Excelling in Microsoft Excel is a plus as most of     the paid search campaigns are built in excel.

Salary: The starting salary for PPC professional on an average is similar to SEO i.e. Rs. 1,00,000. It grows to Rs. 4 – 6,00,000 for a 4 – 6 years experience person. It goes to 12 to Rs. 20,00,000 for a very experienced person.

3. Email Marketing

As the name goes, email marketing is the act of sending commercial messages through an email. It usually involves sending an email for advertisements, request business, sales to prospective clients. Email marketing is not a single person job. In order to succeed in an email marketing campaign, an organization must have a team of professionals to execute it effectively. There are set of specialized skills required and we would discuss some of them below.

1.     Strategy: If the strategy is not in place, most of the campaigns would end up bringing poor results. The adhoc campaigns might not work in it. A strategist could plan out the campaign and align it with other marketing strategies. He should create a strategy for both long-term and adhoc activities.

2.     Graphic design: Once the plan is in place, a graphic designer would be required to develop email templates that align with the strategy. Visually the design needs to be appealing and should fulfill the business goals.

3.     Copy writing: An expert writer is required to outline the concept in simple words. It cannot be done by anybody as it is a specialized job and requires past experience.

4.     Analytics: An email marketing manager should be an expert in data administration and analytics. As they say, “If you cannot measure something, you cannot improve it.”

5.     Management: A right person for the job should be aware of major online email delivery tools, CRM and top marketing automation tools.

Top email marketing service providers are, Constant Contact, AWeber, and MailChimp.

Salary: Email marketing in itself is not a specialized profession. It is a combination of analytics, design, usability, data analysis, experience etc. Hence, the number of job opportunities in this is not huge. A manager works with several team members in different domains to get the desired output. The entry-level salary for professionals starts from Rs. 80,000 to Rs. 1,00,000. It could go up to Rs. 10,00,000 for very experienced people.

4. Content Marketing

Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach wherein the creative and focused content is created to attract and retain customers. It is the latest fad as every company is looking for unique content to stay ahead in search results. And moreover, search algorithms have also changed their code in accordance with the content. Latest research shows that a unique content, the more effective search results.

Since the concept of content marketing is new (the youngest), there is a lot of confusion around it. Often people confuse it with PR. Yes, it helps in branding but it is not completely a PR activity. Let us have a look at some of the top areas which need to be covered in it.

Strategy: Before an article is created, a video is made, an ebook is developed, one needs to have a plan. A plan goes much deeper than one might think. The elements of the plan includes –

What are the goes the company wants to achieve and how it will be measured?

Who are the target audience?

How the content is going to help the target user?

How the voice of content different than millions of other content pieces     around the web?

Is the calendar in place?

What is the approval process?

Development

Who is going to write the content – in house, freelancer or outsourced agency?

If multiple people are developing content, how consistency is ascertained?

Who is finalizing the concept?

Is the proofreading done by the developer or there is a separate team for     that?

Content Integration: Content development cannot be a standalone exercise. It should integrate with whatever is happening in a company. The content marketing efforts are going to benefit SEO, Sales, Social Media efforts etc. All the people working on these channels should have a say in the content marketing efforts.

It might be wrong to recruit one person for all 3 jobs. At least 2 people might be required for a small content marketing campaign. One of the best location to know more about content marketing is Hubspot.

Salary: Content Marketing people are the most sought-after professional as of today. Their salaries are also one of the best in the industry. It starts from Rs. 2,50,000 for entry-level jobs. It could go up to Rs. 12,00,000 for a person with 5-6 years of experience.

5. Data Analytics

One of the important characteristics of a prospective digital marketing person should be data analytics. One is subjected to various kinds of data with respect to finance behind ads, graphs indicating performance on social media platforms etc.

Moreover, most of the websites are linked to Google analytics to extract different parameters with respect to its performance.

Hence, every prospective candidate requires hands-on with Google analytics. Additionally, general data analysis perspective is also required.

Anyone who aspires to be in this domain must follow Avinash Kaushik.

Salary: They are the smallest bunch of people in any digital marketing team. The salary starts from Rs. 2,50,000 and could go up to Rs. 15,00,000 for experienced professional.