Are you struggling to create blog content that generates conversions and demonstrates credibility? In this blog post, I’ll cover the B2B blog best practices that can help you inform and educate your ideal audience, while showcasing your industry expertise.
Why is blogging important for B2B business?
Since blog posts are focused on informational queries, where the commercial intent is not yet very clear, some business owners might think that producing them is a waste of time. Nevertheless, blogs remain a crucial component of an overall website content strategy, and some research shows that 81% of B2B companies have included blogging in their marketing strategy.
Here are seven distinct SEO and marketing benefits that B2B businesses can obtain through blogging:
- Generating leads – addressing customers’ pain points will help you establish your company as a go-to solution,
- Increasing brand awareness – by reading your blog posts, you make an initial introduction to your target audience,
- Informing and educating your audience – which increases trust and credibility,
- Increasing the credibility – which can lead to increase in signing up for demos and consultations,
- Establishing yourself as an expert in your industry – blogs are an opportunity to showcase your expertise and experience in the niche,
- Facilitating content repurposing and distribution – blogs are very easy to share on social media, email campaigns, PR, etc
- Cost-effective way to promote – which is typically easier and less expensive than ads, videos, and PR campaigns.
Main characteristics of a successful B2B blog
From an SEO perspective, a successful B2B blog has several key characteristics:
- Helpful content written by an expert that educates and shows credibility,
- Contributing to overall website traffic and conversions (demo sign-ups, product purchases, consultations),
- Building the topical authority on your website with the proper blog strategy,
- Engaging users at the top of the sales funnels.
Best practices for B2B blogs
To optimize your B2B blog, ensure you adhere to the best practices outlined below:
Blog content strategy best practices
Blogging can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness and establishing thought leadership within your industry. However, to truly succeed, it’s essential to follow SEO principles and best practices that will help you align your blog strategy with your company’s KPIs. The strategic aspect of blogging is crucial, as only about 29% of marketers say they consider their organizations very successful with their content marketing.
One thing you should definitely avoid in B2B blogging is randomness. When creating content plans for new content pieces, it’s always best to use a strategic approach. To make sure you maximize the impact of blog posts on conversions and traffic, follow these content strategy best practices:
- Define content strategy and KPIs up front – define what you, as a business owner, want from this blog. What are some important KPIs to achieve? Defining KPIs in the initial stage of planning blog posts will facilitate making content strategy decisions.
- Focus on topics & keyword research – start with broad topic research. Gather data about your ideal audience pain points, and perform keyword research to check if these proposed content topics have a decent search volume. Analyze search intent and top ranking results to see if they are informational queries suitable for blog post formats. The best type of keywords for blog poss are the informational keywords that are relevant to your target audience, with a potential to convert. In some cases, even zero volume keywords would be OK, if you have a strong opinion that this is something your audience would love to learn more about (even better if you received their feedback).
- Base content decisions on keyword research and clustering – define which keywords will be used for which content pieces. You can map more than one keyword per one blog post, but use keyword research and clustering tools to see if you can rank with one page for multiple keywords. You can also perform a manual check to see if the search results for the proposed keywords are similar. That would mean that you can use one content piece to rank for those keywords.
- Create a detailed content plan with specified content pieces – Nowadays, a topical authority matters a lot. By carefully choosing your blog topics, you can increase your topical authority, and that would be a strong signal to search engines that your website is a safe bet to be showed in top results in search engines.
- Create optimized content briefs per each content piece – before the actual writing part, map all relevant aspects of a topic that should be discussed, and organize them into headings and subheadings hieratically. Check what content aspects or subtopics your competitors wrote about, and find a way to add even more value and unique information.
Blog content creation best practices
When it comes to content creation, two words are crucial: relevancy and informativeness. It’s always better to compete with quality over quantity. When creating blog posts, the main goal should be to demonstrate your industry experience and provide your potential clients with valuable information. To achieve this, follow these content creation practices:
- Write for your target audience – show how you can help them and address their main pain points and concerns. Write about topics that matter to them, and don’t rely solely on keyword difficulty and search volume for content decisions. Write about topics that can educate and inform them, focusing on informational queries. While these may not reflect sales intent, your readers will consider you as a credible product or service provider when they are ready to make a purchase.
- Check your competitors and create content with more value – perform content gap analysis and compare your competitors’ content with your own. Check if they have covered aspects that you haven’t addressed yet. Create a unique content angle and strive to provide more helpful information.
- Share useful industry statistics – to add credibility to your content, share the latest industry statistics about the state of the industry.
- Combine different formats, such as visuals, videos, and charts – let your content flow naturally and engage users by using different content formats to add more value.
- Show your expertise – maintain a professional tone and demonstrate your deep knowledge of the industry. Create comprehensive content pieces that cover a topic from different angles. Mention your certificates, awards, or online mentions if they are relevant to show your authority in the industry.
Blog content optimization best practices
Don’t forget about content optimization, as it can elevate your SEO efforts and increase KPIs:
- Implement a proper internal linking strategy – add internal links to other relevant pages, such as FAQ pages, other blog or service pages, product demos, infographics, white papers, or resources pages, where it makes sense for your audience.
- Add a Call-to-Action button – invite your readers to take a specific action, such as subscribing, booking a free consultation, or requesting a demo. Help them take the next step and increase your conversions.
- Optimize the content for search engines – apply best on-page SEO practices, such as optimizing headings, content structure, hierarchy, and readability. Include your keywords in the Meta Title, headings, and URL, and organize your content in a way that makes sense to your readers.
- Implement E-E-A-T best practices – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness is a concept that Google emphasizes. Take care of aspects such as optimizing your “About Us” and authors’ pages, listing relevant industry experience, licenses, certificates, awards, publications, and partnerships, gathering reviews and customer testimonials, planning targeted PR campaigns, and managing your overall website reputation.
- Keep content up to date – fact-check your content periodically to ensure its accuracy and make necessary edits, rewrites, or optimizations.
Blog content promotion best practices
It’s always the best option to collaborate with other marketing channels, such as social media, email marketing, PR, and outreach campaigns to get your content in front of your ideal audience who uses those channels.
- Promote your content on other marketing channels – Create a series of social media posts using excerpts from your blog post, and tailor the message to the format and tone suitable for each specific social media platform. Additionally, you can include your latest blog posts in your email marketing campaign to make your newsletter more informative and educational, rather than purely promotional.
- Repurpose your content – Blogs are handy in repurposing content. You can create infographics, resources, downloadable sheets, and social media posts from one blog post. This will help you enhance your brand’s credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise. Repurposing content can also help you obtain new natural backlinks.
- Create PR campaigns – Do your blog posts share useful insights, stats, and expertise that might be relevant for your niche? If the answer is yes, then your content piece might be suitable for a new PR campaign to obtain offsite exposure and backlinks. Connect to relevant niche sites in your industry, reach out and share with them your content piece, so they might feature it.
Content performance monitoring best practices
To avoid aimlessly navigating with your content and strategy, establish a content audit process and define relevant metrics to track from the outset. This will help you have a clear understanding of your content’s performance and areas for improvement.
- Regularly monitor KPIs – If you regularly monitor your content performance, you’ll quickly detect where are your priorities for content improvement.
- Perform regular content audits – gather useful data from Google Search Console (clicks, impressions, CTA, average position) and Google Analytics 4 (for detecting user behavior, conversions and most important traffic sources). Based on the data, detect what content pieces are performing well, which ones need further optimization, and which ones need to be completely rewritten.
- Keep an eye on industry / niche trends – Occasionally check trending topics on social media, Reddit, Quora, Google Trends related to your industry. There might be useful insights about the next content topics you can cover in your blog posts.
Conclusion
Blogs are a powerful tool for enhancing topical authority, showcasing brand credibility, and building trust with your target audience. By approaching blogging strategically, you can cover a diverse range of informational queries that are valuable to your audience, leading to increased brand awareness and conversions. If you’re unsure about how to start blogging for your business, I can assist you with developing a blog content strategy.
