As we’ve discussed before, B2B blogging is one of the strongest SEO tools for your B2B website: it continually creates new content and regular updates for your site … but only if you actually blog!
One of the most important aspects of blogging effectively is to blog regularly — create a blogging schedule and stick to it. Unfortunately many B2B bloggers find that they’re fired up for the first couple weeks of blogging, but then quickly have trouble coming up with new topics to blog about every week.
One of the secrets of successful B2B blogging for SEO is to have a strategy regarding blog topics that makes it easy to come up with blog topics, write those “filler” blog posts and stick to that blogging schedule. Today we’re going to talk about one of the easiest ways for B2B companies to come up with blog topics.
Going after longtail searches with your blog
One of the many strengths of a blog is the way that they can almost effortlessly capture a wide range of longtail searches.
By longtail, we’re referring to searches that have many specific keywords. So if you’re an auto repair shop, for example, you might be optimizing your SEO for “Auto repair Smallville” and variations. That’s your standard search phrase optimization for your SEO, but the lontails may include those words but also several others.
It’s probably not going to be worth your while to optimize any part of your website for “Toyota Celica GTS 2001 repair head gasket in Smallville.” Sure, a search like that no doubt comes up from time to time, but you can’t devote an entire page of your site to a phrase that’s searched only a few times in a year.
But wait! With a blog, you can do just that!
How to come up with topics: blog about your projects
An easy way to come up with blog topics and chase down those longtail searches is to blog about the projects that your company does. So if you’re the auto shop in the example above, you can write up a quick blog about various interesting (or uninteresting) repairs that you do.
Each repair becomes a blog post, mentioning the make, model, and year of the vehicle as well as what repair was done and a handful of related keywords. We can even include before and after pictures here. While these blogs posts aren’t going to have a ton of SEO weight, there also isn’t much competition for these longtail searches so ranking for them is relatively easy.
This strategy works equally well in B2B blogging.
Let’s say you run a CNC machining company — you can now blog about individual projects that you do. Possibly because of non-disclosure you can’t show images of the final product, or mention the client, but that’s fine. What’s important is that you’re talking about a specific kind of machining that you did, the demands and specifications of the job, the processes that you used, the innovative solutions you implemented, and of course a conclusion with your on-time delivery and satisfied customer.
Then end result is you’re building more and more relevant content for your website, and you’re creating bait for those longtail searches — maybe someone else is going to be looking online for that same kind of product, or making an oddly-phrased searched about the specific machining processes.
Once you start blogging about projects you’ll be surprised how many longtail searches you start collecting, and how easy it suddenly becomes to maintain your blogging schedule.
Project-based B2B blogging tips
- As always, have a blogging schedule and stick to it. Posting more blogs than your schedule is fine, but never less.
- Include customer concerns — what was important about this project? Making it cost-effective? A new engineering challenge? Turnaround time? Exacting specifications?
- If your company is based on local business, as with a machine shop, be sure to include those local terms — the city and state — in your posts!
- If at all possible include pictures of the work in progress — even if you can’t show the finished product.
- Don’t forget to link key processes to the appropriate page on your main website.
- Don’t go overboard with your linking — it looks spammy to have a dozen links in an article. Stick to one to three, as appropriate.
- Be sure to mention any industry-specific terms in your post, including the exact type of material used (e.g. 17-4 grade stainless steel), specific equipment and processes used.
Ideally you want to be able to write up these kinds of blog posts in as short a time as possible, but still craft them in a way that is relevant to your business, and has the potential to capture additinoal searches.
And finally, remember that even if any given blog post isn’t catching any searches, it’s still benefiting the SEO of your site. Every blog post is another page of indexable content for the search engines, and another update to your site so that Google knows you’re still around and still relevant.