Monitor keyword diversity

One of the things that makes B2B search challenging is the lack of shared lexicons in most industries. As a result, the same product or service may have 6-7 different, yet fairly popular, names for it. And with each of those names comes countless permutations in long-tail search engine queries.

While the effects of Google Instant have yet to be quantified and fully understood, it has the potential to concentrate the same number of searches into a smaller number of SERPs; as people begin to type their queries, they may opt to choose a popular query rather then complete their original, perhaps less-popular query.

You should keep an eye on changes to the number of unique keywords sending traffic to your site. Material decreases in the diversity of keywords may indicate more searchers opting for Google’s suggested queries.

Explore your head terms

If you notice reduced keyword diversity (and even if you don’t), you should know what queries Google is suggesting. Google Instant’s suggestions are based on the characters and words with which you start your query. B2B marketers should be aware of the most popular suggestions Google Instant makes as relevant head terms are typed. Pay attention to what Google Instant suggests and whether you have SERP visibility for those queries. It’s another way to do some quick keyword research.

Monitor your organic click-through for non-branded terms

Track the click-through from Google for your top 30 or 40 non-branded keywords. Watch for material changes in click-through volume pre- and post-Instant. If there are sharp changes in the your traffic for any of these keywords, you should investigate the queries Instant suggests as you begin typing these non-branded keywords (assuming of course there are no other apparent reasons for these changes.) You may need to optimize your pages to align better with Instant’s suggestions.

While the general, market-wide effects of Google Instant have yet to be determined, the specific effects on your site may be quickly visible. Make sure you take the time to assess Google Instant’s impact on your site.

Ascribe is a shared platform that allows members in the architectural, engineering, and construction industries share project information and images to build online project portfolios. It promises quick and easy set up, increased traffic to your site, and a substantial increase in search visibility.

The upside

Ascribe’s technology lets members quickly set up a project portfolio that can either stand alone or be incorporated into your site. It saves a lot of time and programming; you don’t have to build it yourself. Ascribe also lets you customize the look and feel of your portfolio, so you can not only match design of your corporate website, but you can also include your site’s navigation within the portfolio. This not only helps drive traffic from the portfolio into your site, but also helps bots find your content. Here’s an example of an Ascribe user’s portfolio. You can refer to this example as you consider the factors below.

Ascribe allows users to leverage the photography of other members. When users upload images to their portfolios, they indicate whether other Ascribe members may use such images in their portfolios if they participated in the same construction project. Good architectural photography is expensive. When users have rights to share such images and choose to do so, the broader community of users benefits greatly.

When a member, such as a general contractor first loads a project, the originator typically writes a detailed summary of the project. Other contractors on the project can choose to use the same project summary or edit it for use on their portfolios. Other members save substantial time by not having to write original copy and research details and data regarding the project; they can leverage what others have already done.

A good feature of Ascribe is the ability to specify body copy text links within each project’s description. This didn’t exist in the beginning, but it does now. Although I see few Ascribe members doing so, savvy members will use this capability to build keyword-rich anchor text links to deep pages within their own sites.

At the bottom of each online project profile are links to the other Ascribe members who also worked on the project. For example, visitors viewing a project within the general contractor’s portfolio will see links to the sites of other Ascribe-using contractors who worked on the job. This helps send traffic from one Ascribe member’s portfolio to another’s portfolio or corporate site, increasing traffic throughout the portfolio network and to members’ sites.

Ascribe’s platform also has the option to push members’ new project information their respective Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.

The downside

Although the portfolio is easy to set up, your portfolio is not on your domain. The best place for your portfolio is on your domain. While the design of an Ascribe portfolio can be adjusted to match the look and feel of your site, the portfolio itself is on Ascribe’s domain (check out the URL.) Any trust and authority built up with the search engines will accrue to Ascribe’s domain, not yours. If anyone links to a page in your portfolio, it will be a link to Ascribe’s domain. If your portfolio’s content shows up in a search result, searchers will click through to content on the Ascribe domain.

Although part of the benefit of being an Ascribe subscriber is the ability to use others’ project descriptions, if you merely use what someone else has on their project page, chances are your content won’t be indexed by the search engines; they will see it as duplicate content and choose to index the original. While you can review the original project profile for background and information, make sure you write original content if you want that content to be indexed by the search engines.

Recently, Ascribe has promoted new search optimization features. Although Ascribe has been available for several years and the company has boasted about search benefits since its release, the company only recently added the ability to create custom title tags for each project page. Until now, title tags were automatically and rigidly created. The great news is that members can now specify optimized title tags for each project. The bad news is existing members will now have to go back through all of their projects to optimize the tags, but the benefits will be worth it.

While they recently also added the ability to specify captions for project images and have captions be a user-defined links, it seems crazy they also didn’t add the functionality to specify alt attributes for images. Instead, they added the capability to add meta keywords to project pages, a practice that hasn’t had any material influence on search for nearly a decade now.

Ascribe members presently don’t have the ability to specify keyword-rich, descriptive URLs for project pages within their portfolios.

Lastly, there does not appear to be any export functionality within Ascribe or the ability to redirect URLs. Keep in mind, if you ever want to stop using Ascribe, you’ll have no easy way to export and transfer your content, nor will you be able to redirect any of the project URLs to other domains or pages. The trust and authority of those pages in the search engines’ eyes, and the links leading to those pages, will be gone.

The upshot

On balance, Ascribe is a good tool for construction companies and architectural and engineering firms to use in building traffic and increasing online visibility. Recent additional features now give members more ability to optimize content within their portfolios. It can be an effective tool for those in the AEC community, especially for those with limited website content and less authoritative domains.

Like many of these platforms, there are trade-offs. The ease of use and the ability to get up and running quickly and with limited investment make tools like Ascribe appealing. Recognize, however, that you may not have all the capabilities you might like. Also, using a platform of this nature creates dependency. Once you build up significant content in your portfolio and significant traffic from search, you won’t be able to transfer it easily. You may be able to transfer some of the content, but you won’t be able to transfer any trust, authority, or traffic from the search engines.

If you’re considering subscribing to a shared platform in your industry, make sure you understand in detail the benefits, limitations, and opportunities the platform presents, both in the short and long term. Hopefully, the issues discussed above will help you do that.

Your analytics tell you what people are searching for

Recently, while waiting to speak at an online marketing conference, I was listening to another speaker share a B2B client case study. The president of a search marketing firm, he shared how studying the client’s analytics showed them searchers were using branded queries more than generic terms. As a result, they focused the client’s search efforts on branded search.

I looked around the room. No one questioned a thing or challenged the speaker. It seems obvious, but I’ve heard so many people buy this line of thinking, it warrants addressing the issue: your analytics don’t tell you what people are searching for; they tell you the queries for which you get click-through. There’s a big difference.

Don’t get so buried in your site’s numbers that you begin to view your market through them. Make sure you use a variety of keyword research tools to give you a more accurate view of searcher behavior.

High-volume keywords are the most important ones

Too often, site owners only look at the keywords that send the most organic traffic. They monitor them, make tweaks to increase the traffic from them, and obsess over any decrease in traffic from them. By focusing only on high-volume keywords, site owners miss opportunities to refine and improve their search marketing and conversion efforts.

Make sure you look beyond your high-volume keywords. Every month, you should do a complete scan of all of the keywords that drove traffic to your site. In doing so, you often find extremely low-traffic keywords that have high-conversion potential. You know what I’m talking about. Those queries right in your sweet spot. The ones you wish you had plenty more of.

Pay attention to those queries. Find out which search engine was used and where you are in the ranking for those queries. Chances are your low volume of traffic for these keywords isn’t related to low search volume. More likely, it’s because your content isn’t optimized well. Maybe the visit from that came from a searcher that pawed through eight pages of search results before clicking on yours. Make sure you look beyond the big numbers; there’s plenty of good information in the small ones, too.

The last click caused conversion

People don’t make decisions quickly in B2B. It’s a process. Visitors have likely been to your site several times before they take trigger any conversion events in your analytics. Yet, most often we look solely at the details surrounding the visit in which conversion occurred. What was the keyword of that visit? What was the ad? From where were they referred?

If we look only at that visit in which conversion occurred, we’ll make some poor decisions. We’ll ignore the value of the display ad that triggered the first visit to the site. We’ll miss the fact that PPC triggered the second visit and the referral from editorial content that caused the third. All of these impressions begin to build trust and reduce the searcher’s perceived risk of taking action. But if we don’t look beyond the details of the last click, the fourth visit in this hypothetical example, we’ll devalue the impact and importance of the earlier channels, possibly even deciding to eliminate them. Be careful not to do that. Before you act, make sure you look at the whole picture.

For more on the issue, last year Business.com published a study on B2B analytics (registration required) that explored this problem. It’s worth reading and understanding.

What faulty assumptions have you made or seen others in the B2B world make?

Full posts on the home page

Surprisingly, each blog was showing lengthy, full posts on the home page of the blog. As a result, many single-post URLs were not getting indexed, presumably because the same content was on the home page. Make sure your blog’s homepage contains only an excerpt or abstract from each post, and a link to the single-post page. Optimizing individual posts and getting the post URLs indexed is the key objective. You want your traffic to come to posts inside your blog, not the homepage.

Not rewriting title tags

By default, most blog platforms will incorporate the title of your post as the title tag for the post page. In some cases, this may be okay, but in most cases not. You want the visible title of your post to be engaging and creative, inducing site visitors to read more and share your post with others via social media. Creative and engaging titles, however, aren’t always keyword rich. Specify a keyword-rich title tag to help with search. But keep in mind, the title tag isn’t just for search engines; the title tag is also the heading of the search result. Make sure your title tag also induces searchers to click on it. If you’re using WordPress, a plugin like All in One SEO Pack will give you the functionality to do this.

Lack of (optimized) alt tags on images

While all of the blogs reviewed contained images to create visual interest for the reader, many of the images did not have alt tags specified. Where alt tags were used, they generally weren’t written with search in mind. If you’re not specifying alt tags aligned with the keyword strategy of the page, you’re missing another significant opportunity to tell the search engines what the post is all about.

No control over what is indexed

A quick look at what the search engines indexed from each blog showed low value URLs. Among indexed pages were URLs resulting from the blogs’ on-site search tools, and author, date, and tag archives. These URLs were indexed at the expense of indexing single-post URLs; many single-post URLs were not indexed. Blogs have lots of ways to get to the same content. These are great for users, but can create problems with duplicate content and unwanted things getting indexed (e.g., blog search tool results). Make sure you control what content you want indexed. If you’re using WordPress, Joost de Valk’s Robots Meta plugin is a great tool to help you do this.

Poor meta descriptions

Most blog posts did have meta descriptions, however, they were generally written with little care. Depending on the nature of the query, search engines may choose to display the meta description of the post as the search-result snippet. Ensure meta descriptions are aligned with the keyword strategy of the post and are interesting enough to get searchers to click on the search result. While the meta description may not always get chosen as the search result snippet, just in case it does, make sure it has the potential to pique searchers’ interest enough to click on the result.

No redirects

The lack of 301 redirects on all of the blogs created several versions of each page. Not only were there www vs. non-www issues, but issues of trailing slashes on URLs and no trailing slashes leading to the same content; and other related instances of the same content at different URLs. Review of site analytics of the blogs indicated many different URLs for the same content. Having multiple URLs for the same content will cause PageRank to be split among these pages rather than being concentrated into a single URL, especially as others linking to the content link to a variety of URLs instead of a single URL. While certain blogging platforms like WordPress automatically include the canonical tag on posts, your blogging platform may not. Yet, if your blogging platform does include the canonical tag on posts, you would still be better off fixing these issues rather than relying on the canonical tag.

While some of these items may seem pretty basic to experienced SEO professionals, it was clear from review of these three blogs and from the discussion at the session that these issues are not generally known among general B2B marketing professionals. Take some time to take a fresh look at your blog. While things may look good on the surface of a blog, a look under the hood can reveal significant roadblocks to achieving the SEO success you’ve been seeking.

Most B2B company locations serve a large region, and it can be challenging to get found in the local search results for geo-targeted search queries. Let’s say a business is located in Gary, Indiana, and primarily serves the Chicago area. Downtown Chicago is about 30 miles away from Gary. With the new features in Google Places, the business can specify whether it primarily serves customers at its location or serves customers at other areas in the region.

Google Places now allows the business to specify the zip codes, cities, or counties it services, or specify a service-area radius from the business location, apparently up to 600 miles. This should be great, especially, dealers, distributors, and others serving a broad region.

At first, this sounds like a promising enhancement; now the Gary company may be able to better compete with rivals whose addresses physical location is closer to Chicago. Hopefully, the ability to specify service regions will lead to more visibility in the local search results, right?

Probably not.

While it’s yet too early to determine the extent to which this information will influence visibility in the local search results, I’m guessing it will have little impact.

When you first receive local search results for a query, the map is usually pretty tight; it’s not unusual to have the top ten local search results in a radius of 10-20 miles. If there is little competition in a given area, you might get shown a bigger map so more search results can be included. However, unless your information somehow is so highly relevant to a searcher’s query, closer businesses will almost certainly be more visible in the local search results.

There’s nothing necessarily unfair about this; most searchers using geo-specific queries want to know the closest businesses first. And there’s nothing wrong with including the information on the service areas; it will be beneficial to searchers when reviewing details of a given search result.

Many B2B companies serving broad geographic regions may be suddenly relieved there is an apparent solution to their challenge of getting found for geo-specific queries, but I wouldn’t expect this new feature to have a material impact on local-search-result visibility. Don’t think merely specifying a region or service area is going to displace your competitors’ visibility.

Better to keep your focus on optimizing other aspects of your business listing data be highly relevant to target queries and employ non-maps strategies (i.e., organic and paid web search results) for getting found for geo-specific queries.

Here are a few tips on the proper care and feeding of your dragon:

Appoint a dragon keeper

This is the chief content officer. This person keeps the dragon in line. The keeper needs to be strong, insistent on regular feedings of great content, watchful of mischief and laziness.

Establish a consistent process. Create an editorial calendar to keep you ahead of the game, instead of rushing to identify and produce content under looming deadlines. Allow enough time for content ideation, and build in sufficient time for review and revisions to make the content great. Hold contributors accountable for both quality and deadlines, the same as you would for any of their responsibilities.

Create a team of caretakers

No single mortal can feed the content marketing dragon by himself. (There are some gods, but these are few.) Everyone needs to contribute; everyone needs to learn to cook. The dragon is always hungry.

Share the responsibilities. Identify a group of potential contributors, and ask them what they’re passionate about, what interests them. Writing will come easy if they’re focused on what they love. Meet regularly as a team. Remember to continually recruit new people to create content. This brings fresh ideas and new energy. It’s also a great compliment and opportunity for staff members.

Focus on the customer, not you

Although smart, dragons tend to be vain. They like to look at and talk about themselves. They could care less if anyone is listening. Make sure your dragon serves others and shares his wisdom generously—but in a nice way. Nobody likes a cocky dragon.

Your content marketing efforts are bound to fail if they’re focused on you. If you’re struggling to identify meaningful, valuable content, you’re probably too focused on promotion. What do your customers and prospects need? What would be helpful to them? When you’re focused on what they need, identifying and creating content becomes easy.

Share

Dragons tend to hoard things. Greedy and jealous, they like to keep their jewels in their lair. When developing content, keep your focus on giving, not on what you hope to get. Too many organizations say, “We can’t share that. We can’t give that away.” That mindset limits possibilities and opportunities. I’m convinced that whatever you “give away” you’ll receive five-fold in return.

Groom your dragon’s tail

Content marketing assets are great for organic search. Allow sufficient time prior to release to align content with a keyword strategy for the piece. Make sure you optimize not only for head terms, but also for the long tail. That’s where these assets can really shine. If the full asset is only available with registration, be sure to create a publicly available optimized summary or abstract that can be indexed by the search engines.

Take care of the content marketing dragon, and it will advance and protect your brand. Feed it continually, and it will work its magic to deliver website visitors, generate new leads, and nurture those prospects until they’re ready to buy.

Develop optimized pages for channel partners

Previously, I wrote about creating optimized landing pages on your site to help drive traffic and business to your channel partners, especially for relevant geo-specific search queries. Although I wrote the article almost three years ago, the information is still sound. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen many B2B marketers taking advantage of this strategy. Most still have dynamically generated dealer and location information at a single URL. Read the article on driving traffic to channel partners and review what you’re doing for you channel partners on your site.

Upload channel partner locations to Google

In addition to creating unique content with unique URLs for your channel partners and locations, you should also upload the channel partner and location information to Google’s Local Business Center.

Since upload of business locations is typically handled centrally, you should inform contacts at individual locations that Google may mail to the location a request to verify a specific listing. Generally, the request requires input of a PIN to verify the listing. People at the individual locations, however, may not know what to do with the request, since they weren’t involved in the upload and don’t have appropriate access to enter the PIN themselves. You should make sure all verification requests are faxed back to the person handling business listing so listings can be verified promptly.

Upload geo-sitemaps and KML files to your site

In addition to location uploads to Google’s Local Business Center, you should also create a geo sitemap for your channel partner locations. Adding a geo-based sitemap involves creating geo-sitemaps and KML files, and uploading them to you site. The KML file contains all the location data, including the needed geo-coding information. You have to upload both to your server and point to the KML file from the geo sitemap.

Unless you’re really into learning all of the issues and the code that goes with it, you’ll want to find a simple option for creating the geositemap and KML files. Google Earth Plus used to allow you to create the KML file, but Google Earth Plus is no longer available, and the existing free version (Google Earth) doesn’t have the same functionality.

Thankfully, Arjan Snaterse has developed the Geo Sitemap and KML Generator, a free tool to help you create the files.

The tool has been, and still is, in beta. I recently worked with Martijn Beijk and Arjan test some files and had good results. Thanks also to other local search experts, David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal, who, along with Martijn, have also been working with Arjan to test the tool.

Once you’ve uploaded the geo sitemap and KML files, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to notify Google of the sitemap, just as you would an XML sitemap. The benefit of the geo sitemap and KML information is that they provide Google with additional information it can use help verify location information, and because you’re uploading the geo sitemap and KML file to your website, Google can use those files as another authenticated source of location information. This should help visibility in the 3- and 10-pack local results in blended web SERPs and also for Google Maps searches.

Map site content to the buying cycle

Some people segment the buying cycle into three or four stages. B2B Marketing Strategist Ardath Albee segments it into seven stages. However you choose to define it, analyze your buying cycle and make sure you have substantial, valuable content that speaks to each stage. Prospects have questions at each stage in the buying process. Each question represents an opportunity for content. Think about what should be free and what should be gated (Chris Koch and Michele Linn had good posts on this recently).

Also remember people have different learning styles, and consider having multiple media available for each style. Analyze the effectiveness of your existing content vis-à-vis your buying cycle, determine the gaps in your content marketing strategy, and develop a plan to round out your content.

Reduce friction on gated content

Review registration pages for items that reduce conversion rate. Yes, this includes how much information you’re asking for, but it also includes many other things.

Ask yourself, is the page design and intent clear, or do you have many other things potentially distracting visitors from taking the desired action or perhaps even obscuring the desired action? Have you reduced the anxiety of registering? Are the benefits of doing so clearly stated? Have you illustrated credibility, e.g., are there recognized third-party endorsements on the page? Have you told visitors what you’re going to do with their information?

Todd Miechiels had a great post on reducing site visitors’ anxiety last year, and Ben Hanna gave some strong, practical examples of ways to improve B2B conversion rates by reducing buyer risk.

Review your content analytics

Analytics can be great, but too often we fail to actually learn from them. Take a look at last year’s numbers for the content on your site. What was the most popular content? What were your most popular landing pages? What were the sources of the visitors? Did those sources change over time? What organic keywords drove traffic to that content? What did these visitors do? What were the conversion rates? Where did they go next? What made those pages successful? Equally important to analyze is the content you thought would do well, but didn’t.

Compare and contrast the successes and the failures, and you’ll likely find strong clues to help you develop a best practices model. But don’t just use this information for prospective content. You can likely redeem some of your previously less-than-successful content by making improvements or repurposing and relaunching that content.

Capture the value of content

If your content is a web page, it’s pretty easy to track the results. But what if your content is a PDF or some other digital asset? These assets can drive readers and viewers back into your website. However, unless you’ve coded the links appropriately, these visits will show up as direct visits instead of being attributed to your content marketing assets. Obviously, you should ensure future content marketing assets have such links, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t make these changes to existing content as well.

Include sharing options with your content

White papers, eBooks, case studies, best practice guides can be powerful lead generation and lead nurturing tools. At the same time, they’re expensive to create. They’re also hard to get into the hands of the right people. You may get one of these assets into the hands of one of your contacts, but there are many other people at the prospect’s company who will influence the purchase decision. Embedding social sharing options is a great way to help push the reach of great content, and modifying existing content marketing assets to include social sharing options is fairly painless.

Optimized content for search

Finally, optimize your content for search. While social media can play a big role in the visibility of good content marketing assets, SEO will help ensure online visibility over the long term. Make sure your content marketing assets and their related landing pages are optimized and aligned with the keyword strategy for the piece. This includes optimizing copy as well as other on- and off-page factors. While it does take a bit more work, you can optimize PDFs for search as well.

On the other hand, there are those that tend to lump B2B blogging in with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, social-bookmarking sites, and the like. Many of these people are in niche B2B industries where the pace of adoption of social media vehicles is slow and the potential “crowd” is thin. When they consider blogging as a part of their marketing strategy, they see little promise. Sure, they say, maybe we’ll get 20 subscribers to our blog, but what good is that? We’re not going to get large amounts of followers on Twitter. We’re not going to get large amounts of subscribers to our blog. Social media just isn’t a good fit, whatever form it comes in.

Both groups seem overly focused on the short-term, either somewhat crazed by the potential of short-term gains or convinced that such gains aren’t possible, and as a result, dismissing the very idea of B2B blogging. Both groups tend to ignore the long-term, most valuable benefits of B2B blogging—search visibility and thought leadership positioning.

Earlier this month, Jeffrey Cohen of Social Media B2B, had a great post titled Blogging for the Future, in which he discussed the long-term search benefits of consistently creating relevant, compelling content optimized for search. Even a modest commitment of 2-3 such posts per month will yield 30 posts in a year—and each of those posts will consistently drive relevant traffic to your blog and your site every single month. Forever. And the beauty of search is that you’ll be meeting those visitors at the very time they’re interested.

In addition to driving traffic, those posts will also position your firm in terms of expertise and thought leadership. This enhanced search visibility and positioning can go a long way in reducing the perceived risk potential purchasers feel when considering alternative suppliers, strengthening your position and increasing the chances you’ll be on the short list of contenders.

Sure, this isn’t as sexy as creating a lot of social media buzz in the marketplace, but unless you’re blogging for the long term, I doubt you’ll be successful in the short term, anyway.

The client is a professional services firm operating solely in the B2B space. Theirs is a complex sale with an average sales cycle of 2-3 months from first contact to the time work begins. There are typically multiple people from different parties involved in or influencing the buying process, and the average engagement is in the low-to-mid five-figure range.

We had already optimized the professional service firm’s website. Early last year, however, we recommended the client also start a blog, both for purposes of positioning via thought leadership and fulfilling the rest of the SEO keyword strategy we had previously identified. The company is now about 15 months into blogging. They post once each week, and there are seven professional staff members who contribute to the blog.

We made sure the blog was integrated with the client’s site, not a separate domain or hosted blog. We chose WordPress and made sure to integrate plug-ins that would give us the proper optimization options. Then we worked with the client to develop topics, B2B blogging guidelines, and help educate those who would be contributing.

The ongoing work is largely handled in-house, by the client. On a periodic basis, we review the posts and make or recommend changes, both in terms of editing content for readers and better optimizing individual posts for search.

The results have been far beyond expectations. Today, while the blog accounts for 32% of the landing pages on the site, it accounts for more than 53% of the client’s organic traffic. The number of unique keywords for which the firm’s site is found has nearly tripled since the start of blogging. The firm’s website is responsible for more than 50% of its new business. They no longer have need for full-time people dedicated to finding new business; the firm’s new business activity is essentially responding to requests for work, not identifying and nurturing leads.

It should be noted, though, while the business results are good, it’s clear the results aren’t just about search; the quality and quantity of B2B content plays an equal, if not larger, role in positioning the firm and generating leads.

While the site optimization and corporate blogging has been successful, there were three key lessons learned along the way.

Multiple bloggers helps address diverse keyword strategy

In B2B, there is a diverse lexicon for almost every industry. Typically, there is no agreed upon, commonly used language to describe things. A given product, process, or issue may have four or five very different words or phrases used to describe it. This makes B2B keyword strategy particularly complex.

Even within the same organization, people will used widely varying terms to describe the same thing. We actually found this to be a benefit when it came to corporate blogging. Simply by having a broad range of contributors to the corporate blog, we continued to identify important keywords we hadn’t previously considered or found during keyword research.

The key, however, is not to squelch that by shoehorning blog contributions into previously established keyword strategy. Instead, you should embrace that diversity. Instead of changing copy to reflect previously established keyword strategy, optimize B2B blog copy for the newly found keywords. Make sure other on- and off-page factors are optimized for these keywords as well. This way, you’ll constantly be expanding your potential for organic search.

Let people write about what they love

Non-marketers typically don’t like to blog. Marketers, on the other hand, sometimes make the worst bloggers. Oftentimes, the people your clients, customers, and influencers find interesting aren’t the marketing people. They like to hear from the people in the trenches.

This creates a challenge for many businesses. A great question asked by one of the attendees at the San Francisco B2B Summit was, “How do you get people to want to contribute to the blog?”

Our client’s strategy was pretty straightforward.

Ask your people what interests them. What issues are they passionate about? If they’re having trouble, help them brainstorm. People have little problem writing about their passions and interests; it’s when they get forced into writing something else that things slow down.

Then together make a list of those topics and issues and see how they align with the interests of your key publics. Make your selections from there.

Schedule things out. Work with them to identify when each post works into their schedule and the overall editorial schedule of the blog.

Give them generous deadlines. Get their agreement on the dates for each post. Remind them of the deadlines the same as any another item in weekly workflow meetings.

Schedule internal deadlines at least a week in advance of the scheduled post date. This gives you sufficient time for any rework, any copy and headline editing, any necessary copy optimization for search, and for loading, formatting and optimizing the rest of the post (e.g., URL, title tag, meta description, image selection and optimization, etc.)

Follow up the day after the deadline if they don’t email their post to you. You need to hold people accountable through follow up and by making their blogging contributions as important as their other responsibilities. Make it understood it’s part of their job description and overall role.

Organic landing pages are important (and often overlooked)

In a well-optimized site and/or blog, people land everywhere. Yet often we do little, from a usability perspective, to help them with their next step. Landing page optimization receives a lot of attention in paid-search strategy, but we seldom give the same time and effort to organic landing pages.

After a while, it’s easy to see what keywords drive organic traffic to a given landing page. The first thing to do is to make sure that page is actually relevant to the visitors arriving there via organic search for those respective keywords. Is it relevant content in response to their query, or are you merely getting lots of unintended traffic (and bounces) because you happen to rank well for a given query?

Assuming your content is relevant, what are you doing to help further guide and nurture the visitor’s experience? If you know organic visitors are arriving on a given page because of a fairly narrow set of keywords, where do you think you should be directing them next?

The keywords responsible for organic traffic to a certain page should give you some idea of searchers’ intent. Rather than simply avail them of your standard navigation, you should be providing specific on-page links to other content relevant to the most popular queries for that page. Strategically selecting and placing links to other relevant content—not just automatically generated “possibly related links”—will drive deeper engagement and generate more leads.