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In the previous article we discussed: An Introduction to Gorilla Guides.
🤫 PS: Looking for pricing on custom Tech content? Get a price list here
Now that we’ve introduced our Gorilla Guide series (and content subscription model) as a promising catalyst to your content marketing success, the upcoming articles, including this one, will dive deeper into the different tactics and actionable tips on how exactly you can leverage ActualTech Media content to drive your efforts.
In this chapter, we’ll paint a complete picture of the art and science of SEO, why it’s vital for B2B success, and how your team can lay down a solid foundation.
Let’s dive in!
Search engines are easily one of the best things to happen to humanity. As key features in the age of information, they’re used by consumers and businesses alike to get instant access to any content that can help answer their questions.
Note to Reader: Pay Attention
On average, Google processes around 40,000 search queries every single second! This translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day. This is a small glimpse of just how much we rely on search engines for finding information and discovering new things.
In laymen’s terms, search engines like Google are Internet directories that index and fetch information (webpages, images, videos, news, and more) that is most relevant to whatever you type in.
Of course, how it all works is a lot more complicated than that. While they might make it seem simple, there are complex algorithms that work behind the scenes to display the most relevant results each time you type in a query—based mostly on the content that those sources have published.
Search engines analyze (or “crawl”) billions of live webpages on the Internet, store what they’ve learned about them in a database (a process called “indexing”), and then decide which order to rank them in for various search queries. Ranking, as you’ll soon see, depends on a bunch of different factors. The search engine’s goal is to surface and rank the content that is most applicable to your query.
With potentially hundreds of websites producing content on similar topics and fighting to grab the attention of the same segments, businesses in every industry are collectively spending a fortune on understanding ever-changing search engine algorithms and experimenting with different tactics to appear on the first page of search results—a practice that we all know and love as search engine optimization, or SEO.
If you haven’t been focusing on SEO lately, you’re missing out on some serious conversion potential. Don’t believe us? Here are some eye-opening statistics on just how effective SEO is in the B2B battleground:
Approximately 45% of enterprise businesses were investing roughly $20,000 in SEO in 2017. That figure has likely increased over the past few years.
Nearly 57%of B2B marketers claim that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative. Whoa!
62%of business buyers say that they make their purchase decisions by online content alone.
SEO is an experimental practice. A certain set of tactics that work for one website may not necessarily work for another.
Google has told us that rankings are based on hundreds of factors, but has never revealed (and will never reveal) exactly what those factors are.
As a result, marketers have spent years trying to figure out (by experimenting) those ranking factors and how the algorithm works. See image above for an illustration of Google’s confirmed ranking factors.
The fact of the matter is that modern SEO is more about understanding the users, and less about trying to wrap your head around how the search engine algorithms work (💡).
This is something that even the search engines have been struggling with for years. Google and other search engines roll out tons of algorithm updates throughout the year that bring them closer to understanding the search intents behind queries and the type of content that would be best suited to answer them.
At the end of the day, understanding search intent is an AI and Big Data problem. That’s why companies like Google love to collect data. More data to train AI with means more accurate search results.
While there’s still a lot of ground to cover, search engines have certainly come a long way. Today, a Google search almost always returns results that satisfy the intent a user had when conducting the search.
All of this implies that, if you want prospects to visit your websites in droves, it’s time to buckle down and focus on SEO.
To stay on top of the search game, Google rolls out nearly 1,000 algorithm updates every year. Needless to say, this keeps the global SEO community on its feet, as some of the more major updates have huge implications for websites in terms of rankings. That’s why SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” kind of deal.
Remember: The end goal of nearly every algorithm update is to improve the UX. A recent example of this was the 2019 rollout of the natural
language processing model “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers” (or “BERT,” if that’s a mouthful), which helps Google continue to better understand the actual intent behind different searches.
Generally, SEO can be split into the following two categories:
Check out the image below to learn more about the basic building blocks for any SEO strategy.
Since we’ve already discussed off-page SEO at some length in this article on link building, for now, we’ll keep most of the discussion limited to on-page SEO.
As we pointed out earlier, there are several factors (more than 200, at least) that can affect the chances of your pages showing higher up in search results. A few of those that fall under on-page SEO include:
And that barely scratches the surface.
While improving any factor brings you one step closer to ranking higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), one thing that you absolutely can’t compromise on (or can’t even get anywhere without, for that matter) is, you guessed it; content.
Equip your team with the tools they need to plan out and execute their SEO strategy.
Some of the hottest resources include:
Ahrefs: One of two go-to platforms for top-of-the-line SEO tools (such as keyword research, link building, site audit, and more) and resources for millions of marketers around the globe.
SEMrush: The other go-to platform. A one-stop solution offering an extensive suite of SEO, PPC, and social media marketing tools.
BuzzSumo: An online tool that scours the Internet for trending content and helps you discover new ideas.
Exploding Topics: A free tool that lets you identify topics with trending potential from different industries.
You can have the fastest website with all of the technical variables taken care of, but if it doesn’t have highly valuable content, it won’t rank. (And that’s no bueno.) Even if—by some cosmic accident—it does rank, you won’t be able to engage, convince, or convert prospects.
That being said, let’s look at the process of how you can create highly valuable and SEO-optimized content assets, from keyword research to actual creation.
In a fast-paced world, it only makes sense for your website to not take longer than a few seconds to load. Search engines reward websites that load quickly, and, of course, your visitors will love you for it. Here are a few things that you can do right now to optimize your website to load faster:
First and foremost, you have to start by discovering, identifying, and selecting key phrases that are closely related to what you do and what your ideal prospects usually search for—known as “keyword research.”
This is the most basic aspect of SEO and lays the foundation for any comprehensive content strategy. Surprisingly, this also happens to be one of the things that most marketers get wrong. Since keyword research is an integral part of any SEO strategy, the practice has also evolved over the years. It deepened from only focusing on the individual keywords to understanding the reasons behind why anyone would search for it in the first place. See the image below for a quick comparison.
By identifying the right keywords, you’ll get a roadmap (or topics) for your on-page and off-page content efforts. Here’s a complete breakdown of the keyword research process:
Before anything else, start by brainstorming topics that you feel are related to your niche. For now, don’t worry about digging deep—just think of the terms that your target audience could search for off the top of your head.
For instance, if you offer hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, a few base topics could be:
With a list of base topics at your disposal, it’s time to pick out specific keywords that you wish to target. Before we discuss the actual steps, it’s important to familiarize yourself with two of the most critical metrics that you’ll come across while conducting keyword research:
Get Base Topic Ideas from Gorilla Guides
While you can extract complete articles from one, a Gorilla Guide that discusses your areas of specialty in great depth can also provide you with some great ideas for base topics for SEO efforts. A quick overview of the table of contents can help you identify promising starting points for your keyword research process.
With that in mind, it’s often useful to target keywords with low difficulty scores and high search volumes.
Unless you already have a stellar DA (Domain Authority), you don’t want to go after keywords with 40+ KD scores. At the same time, you don’t want to write content on stuff that no one is searching for in the first place. To find the perfect difficulty-to-volume balance, use the Tripod Rule shown in the image below.
With that out of the way, it’s time to plug in your base topics to the keyword research tool of your choice and extract related keywords. To help you narrow down your focus even further, here is a quick breakdown of the main types of keywords by length:
If you already have existing content assets at your disposal, you can potentially stumble upon long-tail keyword ideas that you can elaborate on. For example, the callouts in our Gorilla Guides might help turn up great long-tail keyword material.
It’s worth mentioning that, at one point, marketers were obsessed with Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are words that are closely related to your keywords. However, John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, came out and said that LSI keywords weren’t a thing.
Moving on.
Since search engines have become smart enough to understand the intent behind search queries, they look for any relevant phrases that might help them in displaying the perfect results.
For instance, “networking” can either mean building profitable business relationships or a system used to transmit bits of data over wires. Including words like “TCP/IP” and “computer” will let the search engine know that the content is about the latter. The search engine will then use this information when deciding to show results each time a user types in a relevant query.
At times, when you’re digging for new keyword/topic ideas, the typical keyword research tools don’t cut it. That’s because these tools focus on just numbers. Sometimes you need inspiration!
If you’re in a niche like software-defined storage for containers, chances are, you don’t have hundreds of thousands of people searching for the keywords that are related to your business. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that those keywords aren’t worth chasing after.
To discover these untapped opportunities, look for themes and trends on other platforms that aren’t primarily meant for keyword research.
A few of these include:
Pro Tip: Use Reddit and Subreddits to find long-tail keywords.
With a little research, you’ll be able to discover emerging, low-competition topics that might be of interest to your target audience.
With a list of keywords and potential topics at your disposal, it’s time to get to work and craft quality content that will rank higher in the SERPs.
Here are some not-so-secret secrets for crafting content that will rank:
A common mistake that most content creators make is thinking that longer content will always perform better than shorter assets.
While this may be true for certain topics (apparently like this one...) that demand a good few thousand words to do them justice, hitting a certain word count should be the least of your concerns when writing most content.
The thing is, a lot of good content goes in-depth and covers everything relevant or related to a topic in detail, providing unique perspectives and insights along the way. This just ends up making the content longer. Folks sometimes overlook this and just aim to create long content.
Therefore, instead of length, you should focus more on quality and depth.
Here are some quick tips to help you do that:
While crafting your content and certainly before hitting publish, there are a few things that could give you that extra push and help you cross the finish line.
Sure, your content needs to be written naturally, with the first priority being satisfying the user intent. However, the proper usage of your focus keyword is still super important in getting the content to rank. In most cases, you should include your main keyword in:
Once you hit that publish button, run over to Google PageSpeed Insights to check for any speed issues. Some potential issues (and their fixes) include:
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Again, creating blog posts and articles from scratch can be difficult. However, if you have content assets that are already performing well (such as a video, podcast, or an e-book), you can repurpose them into content meant for SEO.
As an example of this strategy in action: ActualTech Media had a book written by a subject matter expert - Allan Liska on Ransomware: "Ransomware - Understand. Prevent. Recover". We chose to repurpose that content into a full website on the subject, and has quickly become THE resource for Ransomware information, eduction, tools, and support online.
You can do the same with an in-depth subject specific Gorilla Guide, for example, generating content for specific SEO goals becomes a lot easier.
You can extract ready-to-go reference articles (or at least, big chunks of ready-to-use information), optimize them for SEO, and publish them on your website or any third-party platforms, such as Medium, for link-building purposes.
If you’re gating your Gorilla Guides for lead generation, don’t worry about the reference articles cannibalizing your lead gen efforts. It’s a common concern, but in practice, it doesn’t happen.
If anything, the reference content will help you set the main stage for the actual Gorilla Guide, spark interest, and potentially bring in more prospects who will convert into leads.
By carefully extracting just the right amount of content for your articles and embedding enticing CTAs that compel your readers to check out the entire Guide, you can potentially kill two birds with one stone by ranking for competitive keywords and getting new leads in the process. See Figure 18 for all kinds of ways that you can deploy and repurpose a Gorilla Guide. You’ll see that SEO and paid search support are just a few of the myriad ways.
If you don’t have an existing blog or other resources on your website, feel free to skip this section.
For everyone else, performing a quick audit can reveal some amazing opportunities to further perfect your existing content and plan out your future assets.
Furthermore, this will also help you decide which content assets to keep, which ones to update, and which ones to remove.
Here’s how you can go about doing this. It may only be three bullets, but completing this audit is a major feat.
Performing a content audit like this on a regular basis gives you the data you need to make informed decisions about your SEO strategy moving forward.
ActualTech Media is NOT an SEO Agency, but we are the successful Tech Marketers' secret weapon - and as such, we are in your corner to help you leverage the custom expert content we create in as many ways as possible. Whether that is through republishing it for SEO purposes as discussed in this article; or you choose to leverage it to get more leads through our targeted B2B Content Syndication services; or you choose to elaborate on the series and turn it into pre or post Tech Webinar support on the subject. Whatever your goal - ActualTech Media can help you reach it. Let's chat about it.
In our next article we will discuss: Catalyst To Your Sales Success.
