The modern local marketing can be a very intimidating, since indeed, the landscape has significantly changed from the traditional local marketing we are all familiar with.

Here, we will discuss how we should approach local marketing. However, let us begin by discussing the most important thing: the customers.

How Local Customers Have Changed

Every marketing effort should sprout from a thorough understanding of the market—our customers.

So, before we begin, it’s important to understand how our behaviors in learning about local businesses have significantly changed in the past decade.

In the past, we learn about new businesses from billboards, newspaper articles, and direct mails, among others.

Nowadays, there are two primary ways to learn about the existence of a local business: social media (including posts and reviews from influencers), and Google Maps queries—including “near me” search queries—.

Of course, there are other ways like online advertising or recommendations from certain apps/sites, but the fact remains that nowadays, we learn about local businesses online.

So, in this guide, our strategies will revolve around this customer behavior, and capitalize especially Google Maps and social media platforms to capture our audience’s attention.

I. Google Maps Marketing

Also often referred as “local SEO”, there are two main ways people search for local businesses in Google Maps:

1. Straight from Google Maps app
2. Performing location-based search queries (i.e. restaurants in LA) or ‘near me’ queries (i.e. restaurants near me) on Google search.

For the latter, Google will display the top 3 results from Google Maps above the organic results (but below the paid ads).

Depending on your device, you can usually see 2-4 results before you need to scroll while using the Google Maps app.

So, our priority here is to get ranked on the top-3 results according to our location and niche—often called the ‘3-pack’ —.

Before we can learn how, we have to discuss the important ranking factors for Google Maps.

Google Maps Ranking Signals

It’s important to first understand that ranking signals for Google Maps SEO is significantly different than traditional SEO, and here are the top ranking signals we will need to focus on:

1. Google My Business signals

Google My Business is where you list your business to be featured on Google Maps, including various information from your address to the description of your business.

The most important signal here is your business’s proximity to the searcher’s. For example, if your Google My Business listing is similarly optimized as your competitor’s but their business is slightly closer, they will rank higher.

The more complete and informative your listing is, the higher the chance to rank.

2. Backlinks

Your website can (and should) be listed on your Google Maps Listing. Here, Google will take into account the backlinks coming to your site, the quality of backlinks, and so on. Quite similar to what you would see in traditional SEO strategy.

Note: since this will also affect your website, we will discuss this in the website section further below.

3. Reviews

The quantity, velocity, and diversity of (preferably positive) reviews on your Google Maps listing. Google will also consider reviews on third-party major sites (TripAdvisor, Yelp!, Facebook Places, etc.) depending on your niche.

4. On-Page Optimizations

In Google Maps SEO, the most important on-page optimization is the presence of your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information. Keyword optimizations and other on-page signals for traditional SEO will follow.

5. Citations

Local citations are any mentions of your business’s NAP on other sites. The more, the merrier.

6. User Experience signals

Both on your website and Google Maps results. For example, the number of people who calls your business directly from Google Maps results, the bounce rate on your website, and so on.

7. Social Signals

Engagement on various social media networks.

Note:  we will discuss this on the social media section further below.

Google Maps SEO: Step-By-Step Guide

Based on the ranking signals discussed above, there are four key steps in climbing the ranks of Google Maps:

1. Claim, Optimize, and Verify your Google My Business Listing

If your business has been around for some time, it’s possible someone else has claimed your business listing (in most cases, with a good intent). If that’s the case, you can claim the business by simply providing proof of ownership in the verification process.

If your business has a physical address, the verification process usually involves Google sending a postcard containing a verification PIN, so it’s fairly simple. Depending on the type of your business, Google might also allow verification via email or phone.

When optimizing your listing, the most important thing to consider is providing clear information for your human audience. Make sure they will know what your business’s about immediately, what you sell, any unique propositions, and so on by focusing on these areas:

• Make sure all your information (especially NAP information) is accurate, complete, and up-to-date
• Choose your business category carefully. The business category should describe what your business is doing rather than what you sell
• Use attributes to inform about your unique services or value propositions (i.e. if your business has a smoking area or kid-friendly)
• Use well-taken photos, preferably those taken on or nearby your premise. Listings with photos get 35% more conversions.
• Specify your service area, for example, if you provide delivery.

In general, avoid stuffing your Google My Business listing with keywords (Google is strongly against it). Use your keywords sparingly and focus on bringing clear information for your human readers.

2. Get More Reviews

Getting more (positive) reviews both on your Google Maps listing and other platforms are not only beneficial for Google Maps ranking purposes.

Reviews are also important social proofs that will drive conversions.

There are several effective tactics you can try to encourage more reviews:

• Ask at the right time.

Sometimes, that’s all it takes. Timing, however, is important to maximize the chance of getting the best possible review. For example, ask when they just made a repeat purchase.

• Offer incentives

A fairly common practice is to offer incentives in exchange for their review (and social media post). For example, you can offer discounts or freebies after they show you their valid reviews.

• Respond to existing reviews

Including and especially for negative ones. People are more likely to leave reviews for businesses that frequently respond to previous reviews. Address all negative reviews quickly and politely, and fix the underlying issues.

Obviously, the most important thing in getting positive reviews is to actually deliver good products and services.

Thankfully, Google actively encourages you to get more reviews, and nowadays they even send a push-notification asking your visitors for a review automatically after their visit.

3. Building Local Citations

As previously mentioned, citations are any mentions of your business’s NAP information that can be indexed by Google.

NAP information in a standard text format is easier to index than an image, so it’s important to consider.

There are several ways to get a local online citation:

• When other website or an influencer mentions your business’s NAP (i.e., in a review for your business)
• Asking your business partners to cite your NAP on their website
• By listing your business on various online directories according to your location and niche

While the first and second options are fairly limited and harder to control, you can definitely put more efforts on the third.

Do a quick Google search to find online directories according to your industry and location. If you are located in the US, you can also use this list to find online directories by category, and this list for directories by city.

The most important thing when building your local citation is to maintain consistency in information. That is, if, for example, you just changed your business address, you must update your NAP information on all these listings.

II. Optimized Local Website

It’s easy to be tempted to solely focus on the looks of the website rather than its performance and functionality—a common mistake made by many local businesses.

However, your website as a local business is a very important part of your digital marketing strategy. One one hand, it’s your online business card, and it’s where people are going to visit when they want to check out your brand.

On the other hand, when used properly, your website can be a steady source of traffic, prospects, and ultimately, paying customers.

When planning and developing your local-focused website, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1.Mobile-Friendly

More and more people are using mobile devices exclusively, and as mentioned above, many are using “near me” queries on their mobile device to find your business.

So, having a mobile-friendly (or mobile-responsive) site is a must.

2.Load Speed

Studies have suggested that if your site loads in more than three seconds, more than half will leave immediately. Use Google’s PageSpeed insight to assess your current website speed, and make the necessary improvements.

3.Embedding Google Maps API

Embedding Google Maps on your page used to be a major local SEO ranking factor, and thus often abused by marketers. Since mid-2018 or so, Google has updated its algorithm and if you overuse Google Maps API, you can get penalized.

So, use Google Maps API according to its original purpose: providing a better user experience for your audience. Embed Google Maps API with proper location tag in your About Us (or similar) page.

Also, if you have several locations for your business, create different location pages and embed the right Google Maps location for each.

4. Content and Keyword Optimizations

We can divide website content into two different categories: static and dynamic.

Static content is the pages that are relatively “fixed”, you won’t update it frequently, and mainly contain fixed information about your business. For example, your About Us page, locations page(s), product/service page(s), and so on.

Dynamic content, on the other hand, is the pages that are frequently updated. The most common form of dynamic content pages is a blog, but nowadays it can also be videos and podcasts.

When developing your content, there are three main purposes to pay attention to:

• To attract more people to your website, and convert them into prospects and visitors.
• To get backlinks for each content page, which will also help Google Maps SEO, as discussed above
• To target location-based keywords so your page and site can rank on these keywords

III. Social Media Marketing

As we have mentioned at the beginning of this article, social media is now one of the main ways people can learn about local businesses.

It’s worth discussing that social media marketing consists of three different aspects:

• Organic social media marketing. Which is, building organic followers by consistently posting engaging and valuable content.
• Paid social media marketing. Using paid advertising options provided by the social media network, and other paid marketing options to reach more audience.
• Influencer marketing, endorsing an influencer to promote your brand.

The key here is to find a balance between all three: organic social media marketing is obviously important, but it will take time and significant effort before you can build your followers.

Paid social media ads and influencer marketing, on the other hand, can work instantly, but obviously the issue here is budget. Also, influencer marketing won’t be maximized unless you already have a decent organic social media presence.

End Words

We have discussed the three most important channels to focus on in local marketing. All three are long-term tactics, so the most important thing to focus on is consistency.

Evaluate your progress regularly, hire a local SEO expert and reoptimize or adjust your strategy whenever necessary.

The post Local Marketing: 3 Important Areas To Focus On appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Most people know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and most also understood the basic concept that SEO is about optimizing your website to rank higher on Google’s—and other search engines’ — SERP.

However, there are still many misconceptions surrounding B2B SEO, especially regarding the technicalities and purpose.

First, B2B SEO is not a secret method to cheat the search engine’s algorithm so you can rank quickly. Instead, it’s a series of optimizations so your site—and your content— aligns better with Google’s goal, which in their own words is: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

The more useful and accessible your content and website are for the user, the higher you will rank, period. SEO is simply a series of optimizations both on-site and off-site to achieve more usability, relevancy, and accessibility.

Also, the end purpose of B2B SEO is not the #1 ranking, it’s just a means to the actual end: increasing the quantity and quality of organic traffic to your B2B website.

Building 7-Figure Companies With B2B SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

Learn more

How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

With those points being said, there are three additional terms we should understand to learn the concept of B2B SEO:

• Organic traffic: simply put, any traffic to your website that you don’t pay for. A huge portion of traffic coming from Google and other search engines come from paid search ads.

• Traffic quantity: pretty self-explanatory, the more people coming to your website by clicking on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) results, the better.

• Traffic quality: not all traffic is equally valuable for your business. You want to attract visitors that are actually interested in your brand/product/service with the highest chance of conversions.

Organic SEO for B2B is not only effective in getting more organic traffic (quantity), giving you a more cost-efficient source of leads. However, SEO also ensures that you get the most relevant, most valuable traffic with the highest chance of conversion (quality).

How B2B SEO Actually Works: Understanding The Ranking Signals

Above, we have mentioned that B2B SEO is as simple as a series of optimizations. So, what do we need to actually optimize?

There are some aspects on and off our site that will affect SEO performance more than the others, and we call these the ranking signals, or ranking factors. While there are over 200 SEO ranking factors considered by Google’s algorithm today, we can divide these optimizations into three main categories:

•  On-Page Non-Technical SEO. Referring mainly to any optimizations you implement on your content, such as optimizing keyword usage, meta descriptions, optimizing titles and headings, proper website design to achieve decent user experience score, and so on. So, also often referred to as “content SEO”.
• On-Page Technical SEO. Any technical optimizations on your site from improving the load speed of your site, implementing a mobile-responsive design, structured data markup, AMP, SSL, improving XML sitemap, and so on. Often called just “technical SEO”
• Off-Page SEO. Anything outside your website that will affect your SEO results. While there can be many different ranking factors that can be categorized as off-page, most of them will deal with backlinks quantity and quality. Backlinks—links pointing to your website—, are the most expensive asset you can have online, not only for B2B SEO, but for the overall digital marketing results.

With those three being said, there are only 4 crucial steps in implementing SEO for B2B brands:

1. Find what people are searching for via a proper keyword research
2. Develop high-quality, relevant content to target these keywords according to the searcher’s user intent.
3. Optimize the technical and non-technical SEO aspects on your site, with the goal of providing the best experience for the user and keeping them as long as possible
4. Promote your content and get more backlinks in the process. Remember that the quality of your backlinks is more important than quantity.

That’s it, and the key here is to do these consistently and slowly climb the SERP rankings.

B2B SEO VS B2C SEO

Now that we are starting to understand the importance of having a B2B SEO strategy and its key concept, we can discuss how B2B SEO is quite unique compared to its B2C counterpart.

Remember, that SEO is essentially about reaching your ideal audience via the SERP. In a B2B environment, this will translate to getting the professionals/stakeholders within your target company to find your business from search engine results.

For example, let’s say you are a B2B SaaS company selling a cloud-based big data analytics tool, then the possible targets for your B2B SEO campaigns can be:

• An IT manager or CTO searching for “Big data analytics”
• An entrepreneur or startup founder looking for “startup analytics tools” or “big data for startups”, among other keywords
• A data analyst or data scientist looking for data science-related keywords

So, while the main principles of SEO remain the same, there are a few uniqueness you can expect in B2B SEO compared to B2C, and here are some of them:

1. Targeting Multiple Stakeholders and Decision Makers

B2B products and services are generally—although not always— more expensive than B2C products and typically designed for long-term investments. Organizations tend to have more considerations and tend to involve more decision-makers before deciding on a purchase.

These different decision-makers can consist of different roles—managers, staff, financial directors, etc. —, and they will use Google with different search intents.

So, in implementing SEO, a B2B company must target all these different stakeholders and decision-makers while considering the different intents, for instance:

• Practitioners (i.e., marketing officer) might require more actionable, tactical content like “How to improve click-through rate”.
• Executive and managerial roles might want a more high-level strategic content, for example, “How to develop a marketing plan”
• Finance roles and high-level executives might want content that informs how their investments will be justified, such as “key benefits of X tools”

So, you will need to develop several different buyer personas and create a content strategy that can target all these different roles. The better you can define these roles, the more effective your B2B SEO strategy will be.

2. Expect Lower Conversion Rate and Longer Sales Cycle

It’s the nature of B2B products: when 10,000 Googled a keyword related to a consumer product, let’s say “iPhone”, a bigger percentage will buy the iPhones compared to B2B-related keywords, for example, “marketing automation tool”.

This can be caused by many different factors, but the common ones are a higher price range, more decision-makers involved (as discussed above), and a longer sales cycle.

What would this mean to your B2B SEO strategy? For instance, we should develop our content pieces not with the intent to directly convert visitors into purchasing customers—which is very difficult if not impossible—, but aim to slowly inform and educate the user from more general information to specific tips and education about your product/service. Think in the mindset of B2B sales funnel.

This, however, wouldn’t mean we should completely neglect keywords with conversion intent, as there can be some high-purchase intent searches in your niche that you can capitalize upon. Also, if you are implementing B2B eCommerce on your site, you should target keywords that can capitalize on this.

3. Low Search Volume Keyword With High Value

It’s no secret that the B2B environment is much smaller than B2C. More people will, for example, search for “recreational fishing tools” than “marine fishing solutions”. A lot more, in fact, and so B2B businesses should focus on high-value, hyper-targeted, and very low-volume keywords.

So, if you are already familiar with B2C SEO, this fact can throw you off balance. In B2C SEO, it is common to target keywords with over 10,000 or even over 100,000 searches a month. In B2B SEO, even keywords with just 10 searches a month can be extremely valuable.

The common (and effective) approach here is to group several keywords together into a topic we can address with just a single content, so it will bring more traffic every month. However, even with this approach, hundreds of organic views per month is already pretty good.

In short, focus on the quality of your traffic instead of quantity.

4. The Importance of Establishing Expertise and Thought Leadership

Since, as mentioned, B2B site visitors aren’t likely to convert at their first visit. For example, an IT manager might stumble upon your content and is now aware of your brand. They are interested in your product, but now they have to convince their higher-ups and the finance team.

It’s also possible that problems related to your niche haven’t materialized in the searcher’s organization but only appear a few months after this initial “encounter”. In this case, establishing your brand in this searcher’s memory is very valuable.

This is why in B2B content marketing and SEO, we should approach our content with a long-term approach. It isn’t solely about making sure your site shows up when people search for keywords related to your product, but it’s about getting your presence everywhere in the SERP when your ideal audience asks questions and tries to find information related to their work.

In short, one of the goals of B2B SEO services and arguably the most important one is to establish your brand’s position as a thought leader in your niche. This will mean consistently publishing high-quality, relevant, and informative content covering all the possible nooks and crannies of your industry.

Developing a Comprehensive B2B SEO Strategy in 2025

Above, we have mentioned that there are only four crucial steps of implementing a B2B SEO strategy. To reiterate, they are:

1. Proper Keyword Research

No B2B SEO strategy can run without proper keyword research, since SEO for B2B is mainly about optimizing our content to rank for certain keywords.

With that being said, we should run our keyword research based on the following principles:

1. The keyword should be relevant and popular for your target audience. This is mainly measured by monitoring monthly search volume.
2. The keyword should be relevant to your brand and product/services. Not all keywords that are popular with your target audience are going to be relevant for your brand.
3. Depending on your available budget and timeline, the competition for the target keyword should be manageable. The more popular the keyword/query is, the heavier the competition, so finding the right balance is key.

2. Content Development

B2B SEO is about content, period. Your SEO performance will only go as far as your content’s strength, and not the other way around. That is, no amount of optimization will help weak, low-quality content to rank higher on the SERP, but on the other hand, there is a chance that high-quality and relevant content can rank higher even without any specific SEO optimizations.

How can we determine if a piece of content is ‘good’, SEO-wise? The secret is not to focus on pleasing Google and the other search engines but instead focuses on how we can provide value to our target audience with the content.

While content development for B2B can be a very broad subject on its own, here are some best practices to follow:

1. Do a quick Google search for your target keyword and check the highest-ranking pages on the first page. These are your competitors, and your job is to develop content better than them. Analyze their structures, flow, length, and check their readability, and aim to develop something better while focusing on your target audience.
2. Make sure your content has a clear structure: intro, challenges, solutions, conclusions. Make sure your posts are non-promotional.
3. Include your target keywords naturally throughout the content. Again, focus on delivering valuable information for your human readers.
4. Include external/outbound links to prove claims and points in the post. Also, make sure to link your own content (internal links) and maintain a healthy internal linking structure.
5. Don’t forget to include other forms of media (images, infographics, charts, video) to keep your readers engaged.

However, even after you’ve created high-quality, relevant, and valuable content, your job is not yet done, as we will discuss below.

3. On-site Technical Optimizations

Another important factor in implementing SEO for B2B is ensuring your website and all the pages are performing well so that your audience can consume your content with an optimal experience. On the other hand, you’d want to make sure Google and the other search engines can index your site.

While technical SEO is a pretty deep subject, and you can check out our previous guide on the technical SEO checklist to get started, here are some important areas for you to consider:

• Optimize each page for the target keywords that have been identified in the keyword research stage. Make sure to naturally include the focus keyword in the page’s title/heading, META description, and URL beside the body of the content itself.
• Make sure your site has an optimal load speed. According to Google, more than 50% of users will bounce when the page loads in more than 3 seconds. On the other hand, bounce rate is now a B2B SEO ranking factor.
• Make sure your site is mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive. Remember that more and more people are not accessing websites exclusively from their mobile devices. Again, if your site is not mobile-friendly, it can increase the bounce rate.
• Make sure your website is using HTTPS instead of HTTP (SSL certificate), if you are not using HTTPS, Google might brand your site as unsecured and Chrome might block your site from their users.
• Make sure your site can be properly indexed by Google, and fix any existing crawl errors
• Implement structured data markups (schema.org) so Google can understand all the different elements on your site.

To reiterate, remember that there are three objectives of technical SEO for B2B:

1. Ensuring your audience can comfortably consume your content and use your website’s functions
2. Keeping your audience for as long as possible on your site
3. Ensuring the search engines can properly understand your site’s content and all the different elements in it

4. Link Building, Both in Quantity and Quality

Backlinks or inbound links remain the most important ranking factor in B2B SEO, but it’s important to know that nowadays, the quality of your backlinks is just as, if not even more important than quantity.

So, we can no longer rely on simply getting as many low-quality backlinks as we can in our link building, but we know getting those high-quality backlinks from famous sites that are relevant to our niche can be easier said than done.

So, how can we do it?

First and foremost, give them a reason to link your content, what we call the link hook. For example:

• Totally unique data or information (statistics, research reports, etc.)
• Aesthetically pleasing assets (infographics, beautiful photos, well-designed images, etc.)
• Engaging original stories
• Informative, actionable tips not available anywhere else

Again, your content is going to be the key.

However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t really bring any value if it doesn’t reach anyone. This is why promoting your content is very important in link building and also to generate more traffic to your content.

Utilize all possible marketing channels like social channels, guest posting, outreach, and other means to build your backlinks while also promoting your content.

You don’t even have to do it manually, as there are numerous automation tools that will get the work done in no time. For example, with an outreach automation software like Snov.io, you can conduct email address search of your target audience, check their validity, and craft email drip campaigns, all in one place.

That’s it, there are only four key areas in implementing B2B SEO strategy, and while they might seem complicated at first, implementing them is actually quite simple once you’ve got the hang of it.

So, when developing our B2B SEO strategy, it’s important to keep things simple and focus only on the important aspects, instead of over-complicating it.

There are only three key considerations to address when developing a B2B SEO strategy.

1. The Intent(s) Of Our Audience

B2B SEO marketing is only as good as how well our content and keywords are reaching our relevant audience.

We can certainly rank for all the possible keywords out there, but it won’t bring any value to our business if our ideal audience is not searching for them.

So, here we should focus on two things:

1. Understanding our audience through methods like market research, buyer persona development, using the latest analytics tools, etc. We should find out our audience’s behavior, pain points, needs, and how to address them.
2. Keyword research. You most likely will need a paid keyword analytics tool (Ahrefs, SEMRush, among others), and remember that B2B keyword research can be a deep and painful process.

Here are some common approaches to finding keywords for your B2B SEO campaign:

• First and foremost, check keywords you already rank for (if any), and emphasize on them if they are valuable
• Check your competitors’ keywords. If you can beat them with better content, do so. Also, check keywords of publications in your niche.
• Group different keywords by intent. You might be able to target several of them with a single content.
• Consider the competition. Most keyword research tools will provide “keyword difficulty” metric.
• Remember, relevance is more important than search volume in the B2B environment.

2. How To Deliver Value-Based on These Intents

Now that we know what our audience wants, how can we address their needs?

In short, here is about content and providing information. Develop a content calendar. Remember that SEO for B2B companies is a long-term game and you’ll need to maintain consistency both in quantity (how often you publish) and quality (maintain high relevance and value).

For each keyword you target, you have two different options:

1. Create content that is significantly better than your competitors’ (the top-ranking pages)
2. Take a different approach and cover the topic from a different angle. In short, be different

That’s it, and again, don’t overcomplicate things.

3. How We Can Convince The Search Engines

You might want to check out this guide by Search Engine Journal for the most important ranking signals we have today. However, in the end, it will boil down to just two things:

1. How recognizable and indexable your site is by Google and other search engines (technical factor)
2. How many sites are linking to yours, and if there are any relevant sites linking your site (backlinks quality)

The first is mainly about technical optimization, and you might want to check out this technical SEO checklist to get started.

For backlinks, although there can be many different strategies, remember that the best approach is to actually have content worth linking to. If your content is good and it’s promoted properly, sooner or later you’ll get those valuable links to fuel your B2B SEO strategy.

End Words

SEO for B2B is actually pretty simple. Executing it, however, will require commitment and long-term consistency and in some cases help of an SEO consultant. Remember that there are only three things to consider: your audience’s needs, how you can cater to these needs, and how you can appeal to the search engines.

The post B2B SEO: How to Develop an Effective B2B SEO Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Let’s carefully consider three factors:

• The number of people using search engines is increasing at a rapid rate, each and every year. There are over 3.5 billion searches being made daily.
• The search engine results page (SERP) has significantly improved since the early days of the internet. In the past, we only get website results, but now we can get various “rich” and interactive results from featured snippets to embedded results from Google Maps,
• The search engines—and especially Google—is now a very important aspect of our lives. It’s now one of our main ways to find information—besides social media—. It is also one of the primary ways we learn about new brands, products, and services.

So, SEO is obviously very important for any industry nowadays, an effective way to get noticed in this very saturated market where everybody got their voice (or rather, noise).

With that being said, SEO is even more crucial in IT and technology companies due to several reasons:

First,  in the IT niche, more of your competitors know about the technicalities of SEO and already have a strong online presence.

In short, you are in the big leagues and the competition is even tighter.

Next, your prospects—or leads— are generally tech-savvy. They expect more from your content, and you can’t use gray-hat SEO tactics to get your shallow content to rank. They will notice when your content isn’t well-developed and will be quick to jump to your competitor’s.

Last but not least, especially if you are a B2B technology company, SEO is an important but risky tactic that can make or break your business. According to Junto back in late 2017, 57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO for IT and technology companies generate the most leads. On the other hand—as mentioned above— if your content isn’t powerful enough, these leads simply won’t convert.

Building 7-Figure IT and Tech Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow IT, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

Learn more

How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

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The Future of SEO and The Importance of a Right SEO Mindset

Seemingly each and every year there’s always a piece of news or two stating the death of SEO—like this one.

Here’s the deal, if you think of SEO for IT and technology companies as a tactic, it will always die every couple of years or so.

Think about it. SEO used to be all about keyword stuffing back in the early 2000s. The practice is now mainly dead ever since the introduction of Google’s Panda algorithm update back in 2011, but there are still many marketers and “SEO experts” that are still focused on keyword optimizations and keyword density.

What about link building? Yes, backlinks are still important, but nowadays it’s more about the quality rather than quantity. Think about it. Is there any tactic or strategy that can let us consistently get links from high-quality websites and relevant influencers? None, besides actually producing high-quality content and build your credibility. So, link building as a strategy is also dead.

Thus, before anything else, let’s first change our mindset: SEO for IT companies is not actually a strategy, but rather, a philosophy.

A very common—and dangerous—mistake is to think of SEO for IT and technology companies as a way to “beat” the search engines, as we treat Google and the search engines as the enemies we must defeat.

Instead, a better mindset is to treat Google as a partner, and the job of SEO is to align our online presence—our website, our content, and even our social media presence— with Google’s and the other search engines’ goals.

So, here comes our next focus: what actually is Google’s goals?

What Google Actually Is About?

Let us be clear first. Google today has expanded tremendously as a company, encompassing several different industries outside the search engine focus, from its Android OS to hardware production (Google Home, Pixel Phone, etc.)

Here, we are solely focusing on Google as a search engine.

According to Google Search’s mission statement, we can summarize that their main focus is to: create a better search engine that can deliver the most relevant, reliable, accessible, and useful for the human searchers.

We tend to forget that the end aim of SEO is the human audience, not the search engine algorithm.

Also, we can see again in that mission statement that one of Google’s goals is to help creators succeed. Don’t forget that the search engine algorithm is being updated and perfected not to give SEO marketers a harder time, but on the other hand, to ensure that the best, most relevant content and the best content creators will be the ones found by the searcher/user.

So, to reiterate, don’t treat the search engine algorithm as the enemy you must beat, but a friend you must embrace—or even a lover—. This way, think of SEO for IT and technology companies not as a strategy to help beat this enemy, but as a dating guide to help you get this girl.

Let us finally begin.

Step-By-Step Guide to Building SEO for IT and Technology Companies

Now that we’ve established a better mindset to approach SEO, it’s finally time to start developing our SEO strategy for IT and technology companies.

Although we can always use the complex technical lingo and jargon to describe the process, SEO for IT companies is actually a pretty simple concept—as we’ll learn together—. So, below we’ll break down the process into a simple, step-by-step guide, starting with the first one.

Step 1: Define Goals, Assign KPIs, and Define Ways To Achieve These Goals

In short, have a working strategy. Above, we have stated that one of the most common mistakes is to treat SEO for IT and tech companies as a strategy to beat the search engines, but it’s surprising that even many of these people actually have no working strategy at all.

First, and arguably the most important. Define your SEO goals.

Wait, isn’t the goal of SEO is obvious already? To rank higher in the SERP?

Here’s another common misconception: SERP ranking—and even ranking #1—, is not the end goal of SEO, but rather, a means to an end.

You can, for example, rank #1 on an unpopular keyword quite easily, but that won’t bring any value for your business since you won’t get any traffic, right?

Instead, here are the common objectives of IT and technology SEO:

• Organic Traffic: simply put, getting more people to click the content and visit your website.

• Lead Generation: we go a little further from just “traffic for the sake of traffic”, and aim to get some leads by converting some of them into prospects—and in turn, customers

• Sales Conversion (eCommerce or affiliate marketing): convert those who consume the content to purchase our product/service (or others’ through affiliate marketing)

• Brand Presence: improving our company’s online presence to increase awareness and perceived credibility

• Online Reputation Management (ORM): manage your online reputation, for example by preventing negative reviews to rank higher for your branded keywords (and let your own content rank on these positions)

• Reaching to a Specific Target (Consumer or Company): Difficult, but possible, mainly by targeting keywords that are searched by specific customers. We call this Account-Based Marketing

• Customer Service: optimizing content that can provide useful information and answer your customer’s specific questions. This can be effective in building continuous engagement with your prospects and customers.

You can define specific goals for all of these objectives. For example, x % increase in traffic, y% increase in lead generation, specific goals in brand awareness, and so on. Or, you can focus on just a select few, or even just one of them.

Nevertheless, make sure to define at least one goal that is:

• Specific: that is, clear and well-defined

• Realistic: achievable. If the goal is too big or too long-term, break it down into smaller, more realistic milestones

• Measurable: fairly straightforward, you should be able to measure the performance by measuring a specific metric tied to a KPI. (i.e. measuring the number of social engagements instead of abstract

Next, develop a clear strategy on how you can achieve these goals. For example, if your goal is to increase organic traffic by 10% in a year, how can you achieve it? Should we develop new content to target a new audience? Should we create new landing pages or even a new site altogether?

No matter the strategy or tactic you choose, the core of any SEO tactic for technology and IT company will revolve around the target keyword(s), so this will be the focus of our next step.

Step 2: Proper Keyword Research

Above, we have established that today’s SEO is no longer about keyword stuffing, but it doesn’t mean keyword optimization is no longer important—we just need to approach it differently, as we’ll learn together further below—.

Keyword research remains one of the most important steps in developing an SEO strategy, and here are some key considerations:

• The first and most important thing here is to define and understand your audience properly, based on the goals we’ve established above. Conduct market research and develop a buyer persona, and the key here is to especially find out your ideal audience’s search intent.
• In a nutshell, search intent is the reason behind any search query: why the audience is making the search in the first place. The idea here is to align these potential search intent with your SEO objectives—as discussed above—. For example, if your SEO objective for your IT or technology company is to increase traffic, you might want to target keywords related to informational intent. Similarly, you might also want to target keywords related to transactional or commercial intent. You might want to check out a brief guide on the different types of search intent here.
• Based on these possible search intents, find your target keyword by following these important principles:
  • The keyword must be relevant to your audience. This is commonly identified with a high monthly search volume.
  • On the other hand, the keyword must be relevant to your business. Fairly obvious, but often neglected.
  • The competition for the keyword must be manageable according to your budget and timeline. Some keyword research tools will display “keyword difficulty” or similar metrics to assist with this.
  • Last but not least, after the keyword fulfilled all the three criteria above, is it possible to expand the keyword into a proper content—or better, topics you can create several content pieces from—
• Use as many keyword research tools as possible (according to your budget). You can use tools like Spyfu to check your competitor’s target keywords, Buzzsumo to search for trending keywords—and topics—, or SEMRush and Ahrefs, among others, for more traditional keyword research. (possible affiliates here)
• However, even with all the available tools and technologies, sometimes going with your guts and trusting your instinct (and experience) is a better approach. For example, keywords like “slam dunk” might be obvious for us as humans if we are targeting the basketball-related niche, but it might not be noticed by the basic keyword research algorithms.

Make a list of your target keywords and divide them by SEO goals and user intents (as we have discussed above), and divide them by priorities.

Step 3: Starting a Content Marketing Plan

Let’s reiterate what we have discussed further above: as the search engine’s algorithm getting smarter, there’s no shortcut to SEO for technology and IT companies besides actually having high-quality, relevant content that is valuable for your audience.

So, planning how you will approach your content marketing ahead will tremendously help you in the process. We’ll always start, however, with why, which is the searcher’s intents, that should be the main driving force behind the content creation process.

In general, here are several key steps in developing a content marketing plan:

1. Decide ahead on who is/are going to work in the content development process, which can possibly include:
   • You yourself (if you are willing and have the time, you can do it yourself)
   • Content writer
   • Videographer/filmmaker
   • Voice artist for podcasts
   • SEO marketer and/or strategist
   • Graphic designer
   • Programmer (for web design, technical optimizations of SEO, etc).
2. Examine the keyword list you’ve made above and expand it into a topic list. If you’ve already published content in the past, you can include them and mark them as (done). In the future, you might decide to update or re-use them in one way or another, so having them on the list might help. Again, structure the list according to objective/search intent, and priority. This is the what.
3. Decide on possible publication channels—how you are going to distribute the content—, or, the where:
   • Your blog
   • Guest posting opportunities
   • Medium.com and other similar publication sites
   • YouTube
   • Other video sharing platforms (Vimeo, etc.)
   • Email newsletter
   • Podcast publication
4. Determine the when: when to publish the content, how frequent, and so on.
5. Also very important, but often neglected: how are we going to promote the content (we’ll further discuss this one in the backlinks section here.)
6. This is where we can develop an editorial calendar using all of our decisions above. You can create a basic spreadsheet containing:
   • Publication date
   • Who’s going to work on the content (creator/author)
   • Tentative title or just the topic name
   • Target keyword(s)
   • Description
   • Goal(s) for this specific content
   • Planned publication/distribution channels
   • Call-to-action (if any) and lead magnet (if any)
   • References/resources/ideas
   • Development/publication status
7. Execute, monitor, and evaluate the workflow of your content marketing. This process will include maintaining consistent communication with your team members (if any) about:
   • Your overall marketing goal(s), content marketing goal(s) and SEO-related goal(s)
   • Whether the content is developed with the right tone, whether the quality is up there and whether it’s up to your standards. For SEO purposes, the main benchmark here is whether your content is better than the ranking competitors.
   • Make sure your team member understood your content marketing plan and can use the content/editorial calendar properly
8. If necessary, adjust your content marketing strategy based on your evaluation, including and especially evaluation on SEO performances (more on this further below, or here)

In SEO for IT and technology companies, the phrase “content is king” can’t be any truer. On the other hand, however, the IT and technology niche is a sector with a lot of opportunities to develop various forms of content from technical tutorials to the latest news in technologies to actionable tips and tricks, among others.

An important thing to consider here is not to focus too much on keyword optimizations. Include your target keywords naturally, use synonyms and semantically related words. Focus on delivering relevant and valuable content for the human audience.

Remember that how good your content is will ultimately be the main factor in deciding the results of your SEO campaign.

Step 4: Proper Link Building

Further above, we have mentioned that today, the quality of the inbound links—backlinks— is significantly more important than quantity.

So, how can we determine the quality of a backlink? While there isn’t any one-size-fits-all approach to answer this, in general, the main thing to consider is that a backlink’s quality is directly proportional to the source website’s authority.

We can use various analytics tools—both free and paid—, to check website authority, for example, Moz’s famous Domain Authority metric, and Ahref’s Website Authority Checker, but there are also various free alternatives available.

The point is, getting backlinks from any high-quality, authoritative sites is going to be difficult, unless you are already a big website or brand in the first place—most of us simply aren’t.

So how can we do it? The answer lies in your content. If it’s any good, someone will link your content sooner or later, especially when your content is a good source of reliable data or unique information.

With the quality of your content as the prerequisite of proper link building, there are still several tactics you can use to amplify the results:

1. Deliberate add something linkable in your content but make sure it’s natural and relevant

What’s our most common reason in adding an external link to our content? It’s to back-up relevant data or to provide information about something—that is indirectly related to our content and usually too long to discuss.

For example, in this article, we might not want to provide the definition of backlinks but it might be useful for you—the readers—, so we can add an external link to content that specifically discusses inbound links/backlinks.

Another common reason is to add references to the data presented in the content to give it some weight. For example, if we make a claim that 50% of B2B technology companies are using Linkedin (it’s just an example), we can link content that provided the original claim.

We can add these kinds of data and information to our content—let’s call it a link hook— in various forms such as:

• An original research report or case study (white paper, ebook, etc.)
• Infographics, images, and well-taken photos (makes sure to optimize these images properly so Google can index them as valid inbound links)
• Data roundup content like this one will always attract a lot of backlink opportunities when done properly
• Unique information, how-tos, and interesting content will always attract links

Be creative, and don’t be afraid of trial and error. Thankfully in the IT and technology niche, there are plenty of ways to include data, actionable tips, and technical facts in our content. Meaning, many opportunities to get these valuable inbound links.

2. Promote your content to get backlinks

Here’s the deal: we’ve discussed how the quality of your content is very important in getting these backlinks. However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless someone actually notices and consumes the content.

This is where promoting your content has twofold importance:

1. Getting more organic traffic to the content (which will bring various benefits for your website in general)
2. Getting more backlinks in the process, which in turn will improve your SEO ranking, generate more organic traffic, and produce even more backlinks. This will create a long-term ecosystem where you can continuously generate traffic and backlinks.

Promote your content using all the available channels, and always aim to get both traffic and backlinks within each promotional channel. Always build relationships with business partners, influencers in the tech industry, and even your competitors. Be generous and link their content first, and they can be valuable sources for your backlinks in the future.

The good news is, you don’t really need to be aggressive in your link building effort.

In fact, building a lot of links too fast might be counterproductive and might get you penalized by Google—especially when you get a lot of low-quality links—. Instead, just aim to get 1 or 2 high-quality links per content, and you should be good to go. You can also check my link building services and consulting if you want to work with a professional.

Step 5: On-Site SEO Optimization (Technical Optimization)

Now that your content has (hopefully) performed accordingly, it’s time to optimize the technical factor and any other aspects of your website.

Optimizations are done outside our site, especially content promotion, and backlinks building, are often called off-site optimizations. Here, we will focus on on-site optimizations, both technical and non-technical.

Non-technical on-site optimizations mainly involve content optimizations like keyword usage, the readability of your content, and so on.

Technical SEO, on the other hand, can be really complex and cover various different areas from improving your website speed to structured data markup.

You might want to check out our previous guide covering a technical SEO checklist here for a better picture. But first, there are two main objectives in attempting technical optimization:

1. Ensuring Google (or other search engines) can index and understand your website (and all the included pages properly
2. Providing the best possible user experience (UX) to keep visitors on our site for as long as possible. UX metrics like bounce rate and dwell time are now both indirect and direct ranking factors.

Based on those two objectives, here are some important areas to focus on.

• Mobile-responsiveness (or at least, mobile-friendliness) of your site. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to check your site’s current condition.
• Page load speed. Some studies have suggested that 50% of visitors will leave the website immediately if it loads in more than 3 seconds (standard 3g connection).
• You can follow this guide by Neil Patel for a series of steps to ensure proper and instant indexation of your site.
• Implement structured data markup properly. This will allow your site to be viable for featured and rich snippets. You might want to check out this guide on how to implement structured data markup for SEO.
• Optimize the website’s interface (navigation menus, layout, etc.) to ensure your visitor can get the best possible experience—to maximize dwell time—.
• Optimize all the different elements in your content, including videos and images.
• Test everything regularly, and test on as many different devices as possible.

Technical SEO optimizations are generally not a one-off thing, but a continuous process where we might need to readjust our approaches and reoptimize different aspects. This is where our next (and last) step comes in.

Step 6: Evaluation and Re-Optimization

This last step is about establishing a system where we can audit and monitor our website and specifically, SEO performance.

SEO for IT companies is—it’s important to note— a long-term strategy where commonly we’d need to spend 6 to 12 months before we see our site on the first page of Google’s SERP. This is why maintaining consistency and performing regular evaluation is integral.

We can use various tools to assist us in this step, from the free Google Analytics to premium tools like Ahrefs/SEMRush/Moz Pro to HubSpot. However, knowing what metrics to track is more important than simply using the most advanced tool out there.

Here are some of the most important performance metrics to pay attention to in an SEO evaluation:

• Technical side
  • Whether the search engine can index your website properly
  • Loading speed (you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for this)
  • Mobile-responsiveness/mobile-friendliness
  • Title tags and meta descriptions on all pages, and whether they are properly optimized
  • Alt text on images
• Content aspect
  • Whether your content is free of grammatical and spelling errors.
  • Check the relevance of the information, and whether there’s a more up to date data. You might need to update your content otherwise.
  • Proper internal linking structure
  • Whether the content has fulfilled the intended objective/catering to a specific search intent
• Performance metrics
  • Traffic from organic search
  • Referral traffic
  • Pages that have relatively low/no traffic
  • Improvements/negative changes in rankings
  • Backlinks profile and its improvements over time
  • Best performing and least performing content
  • Content conversion rate

Based on these metrics, make the necessary adjustments to your SEO strategy for IT or technology business to improve the results.

Schedule a regular evaluation of your overall SEO strategy, and dedicate time to update and leverage existing content according to their performance—as this is often the most time-consuming aspect of the whole process.

End Words

Voila! Your technology company’s SEO strategy is set and ready to execute.

To reiterate, it’s very important to understand that SEO for IT and tech sites is a long-term game and you will need to invest at least 6 to 12 months before you see significant results from SEO services for IT and technology companies. Once your SEO strategy is well established, however, you will get a sustainable source of traffic and prospects that can generate revenue for years to come.

As we can see from the step-by-step guide above, there’s no secret tactic and holy grail strategy for improving SEO for your IT or technology company: it’s all about consistency both in quality and quantity. The quality of your content and quantity in publication. The quality of your backlinks and consistency in growing your backlinks profile naturally, and so on. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Everybody can certainly attempt and execute SEO, the hard part is to stay consistent until the finish line.

The post SEO For IT and Technology Companies: Your Ultimate Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

There are many different guides for keyword research available. The thing is, each of them offers completely different instructions, that may end up confusing you in the end. This is mainly caused by the fact that keyword research for a certain business might need a different approach when compared to other companies, due to many factors.

So, here we will try to discuss a framework of keyword research that can be applied to any company. Before we begin, however, let us discuss the main concept of keyword research.

The Concept of Keyword Research

Keyword research, in a nutshell, is the process of finding the keyword(s) you want to rank for.

There are three main concerns in finding these keywords:

• How relevant the keyword is for your business. For example, if you are a restaurant business, sports-related keywords are probably not relevant
• Are many people searching for the keyword? Even if the keyword is relevant, it won’t bring much value if not too many people are searching it. This is what referred by “search volume”
• How difficult it is to rank for the keyword (keyword difficulty and/or competition). Also, the more competitive the keyword is, the more expensive the CPC (cost-per-click) for paid search ads.

Although these three factors are the most important ones, there are other concepts we should understand when discussing keyword research. Here are some of them:

• Generally the shorter the keywords (or key phrases) are, the more competition you’ll have. So, long-tail keywords are generally less competitive than short-tail ones.
• Focus keyword, or main keyword, is the keyword we deemed as the most important, and our main goal is to rank for this keyword.During keyword research, finding the focus keyword is your priority.
• Behind every keyword or search query is a deeper concept we know as search intent. Which is, the actual goal of the searcher. Knowing the search intent can further maximize your SEO result.

The Importance of Keyword Research

Here is the deal: sometimes the words or phrases we use to describe our brand, product, or service don’t really align with the phrases our audience are using. When this mismatch happens, your potential prospects simply can’t find your product, service, or content.

This often happens when you have a unique product description: for example, you are a restaurant which, in essence, is selling sandwiches, but you call your sandwiches “healthy bars”. If you’re solely focusing on “healthy bars” as your keyword and not on “sandwiches” and its variants, your potential audience might not be able to find you through search engines.

So, we are back to the three key factors we have discussed above: we should focus our optimization efforts on phrases and words that people actually use.

The 3-Step Keyword Research Tactic

Below, you will find the keyword research method used by SEO expert Mike, which comprises of just four steps. Obviously this is not the only tactic available, and further below we will also discuss some other tips to maximize your keyword (and topic) research results.

1. Define Keyword Research Goal(s)

Above, we have mentioned why keyword research is important, and three important factors to consider when performing keyword research.

Here, we will expand that concept: to have a successful keyword research, you must first define your goals. The key here is truly understand your business and your audience, and align those two to find the right keywords.

Here are some important questions to ask in this step:

• What is your business?
• What is your website about? (Can be similar to the first question, but can be different)
• What is your unique proposition?
• What promises do you make on your site?
• What niche are you in?
• How can you be a thought leader/expert in that niche?
• How usually your audience find your business (or your competitors?)
• What are your audience’s common problems?
• What is your audience’s need?

And so on. The more (proper) questions you have, and the more detailed your answers are, the better you can define your goal(s).

2. Understanding Your Audience’s Search Intent

We have briefly discussed the concept of search intent above, but how can we effectively utilize it to maximize our SEO results?

Whenever someone (including us) searched something, we are aiming to get something, the search query is just a mean to an end. Generally, there are four different types of search intents:

1. Transactional intent

Here, the aim of the searcher is simply to make a purchase, and finding the best possible location to make that transaction. This can be finding the best restaurant near you at the moment, finding an online product to buy, or even creating a new email account.

2. Commercial Investigation Intent

Quite similar to transactional intent, but here people are researching and comparing different products or services before making a purchase. For example, you are looking to buy a new book but you can only purchase one. Here, you are searching for different reviews and recommendations before you decide on a book.

3. Navigational Intent

Navigational queries are simply performed with the aim to visit a specific website, but the searcher don’t know the specific URL. So, usually the search queries here are the name (or close variants) of a website.

4. Informational Intent

People are looking for a specific information or an answer for their question. This can be finding directions to a destination, finding solutions for a specific problem, finding out the score of last night’s football game, and so on. Most of the queries here are non-commercial, people are not looking to make a purchase but to find an answer.

After we’ve understood those four different intents, ask yourself what are the intents of your potential audience before they usually find a site (or product/service) like yours?

For example, if you are a SaaS company selling a marketing automation tool, some of your prospects might directly look for your site after a colleague’s recommendation (navigational/transactional intent). Some other can stumble upon your site when researching for different products similar to yours (commercial investigation intent). Some others might be looking for a solution for their business issue, and stumbled upon your content (informational intent).

As we can see, the SaaS business can have potential audiences from all four different intents, and so this business must optimize different keywords covering all those intents to maximize visibility.

However, there are cases where a business might only get traffic from one or two intent types. For example, it’s quite uncommon for people to directly visit a restaurant’s website with an informational intent, usually they’ll first visit a food blog instead.

Finding out the search intents of your potential audience will be a core step in deciding on your keyword(s).

3. Make a List of Keywords and Possible Topics

This is probably the most important step, but this step won’t be as effective without a thorough understanding and execution of the two previous steps. If you skipped to this section, we strongly encourage you to go back to step 1.

There are many different approaches you can use in this step, that’s why your goals (step 1) and your understanding of your audience (step 2) are important to limit your options.

Remember the three main principles of keyword research we have discussed at the beginning of the article:relevancy, search volume, and competition. Based on these principles, here are a few approaches we can do in this step:

1. Start From a Single Focus Keyword

Depending on your business model and industry, there will be main, focus keywords that can define your niche or industry. For example, if you are a digital marketing consultant, your focus keyword can be “digital marketing tactics”. If you are an ecommerce site selling smart home technologies, your focus keyword can be “smart home”, “smart home tech reviews”, and so on.

With this approach, we can first figure out this main focus keyword, and then we can find more keywords related to this focus keyword. For example, if your focus keyword is “digital marketing tactics”, you can try to find related, even long-tail keywords with enough relevancy, search volume, and reasonable competition.

2. Monetization Approach

This approach is useful for blogs and sites that are mainly aimed to generate money from the blog itself (not selling ecommerce products, not directed as an inbound marketing channel for the main business, etc.).

In this method, we find a product, service or offer we can monetize, and then we try to find keywords or queries related to this product/service with enough search volume.

A good example here is for affiliate marketing blogs, commonly covering products from Amazon or ClickBank. For example, there is an affiliate marketing opportunity for a product named X, which is a smart home hub product. In this case, we can target keywords like “smart home assistant reviews”, “best smart home hub”, and so on.

3. Using The Available Data to Generate Keywords

There are at least four ways you can use the available data to find your keywords:

1. See what keywords you already rank for. Also, check out keywords where you are ranked on the second or third page, where you can optimize them with just a little boost
2. See the keywords your competitors are ranking for. You can aim to compete on these keywords or use them as your inspiration to find other keywords
3. Based on number one and two, you can use keyword suggestion tools like UberSuggest, Soovle, and others to generate keyword ideas
4. Manual keyword research by truly understanding your niche. For example, if your main niche is basketball, keyword suggestion tools might not suggest keywords like “best slam dunk” or “best Michael Jordan highlights”, you will need to think them manually.

For these three approaches, you can use various tools from Google Search Console, Adwords Keyword Planner to third-party tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to assist you. The fourth approach, however, is a little different, as it will rely on your expertise and experience regarding your niche.

The key to success in this step is a thorough understanding about your niche/industry, and your audience. The more you know about your niche, and the more you understand your audience, the more precise and relevant your keywords will be.

Important Keyword Metrics To Understand

There are literally millions of keywords and key phrases to choose from. So, how can we determine the “right” ones? Above, we have discussed that there are three main factors to consider: relevancy, search volume, and competition. These metrics below will help you measure those three factors:

1. Search Volume

We have repeatedly mentioned the term “search volume” above. However, what actually is it? The search volume as a metric refers to the overall number of searches of a given keyword, usually measured monthly. So, a search volume of 10,000 will mean 10,000 searches a month.

The important question is, how high a search volume can be considered decent? The answer will depend upon several factors, especially your niche and your market size. Generally, search volume around 800-1,000 and above is worth pursuing.

2. Clicks

Even when the search volume is high, it won’t bring much value when not many users are actually clicking the link. This especially happens of search queries where Google display featured or rich snippets.

Generally, aim for keywords with at least 50-60% clicks over the search volume. If not, it’s probably not worth it.

3. Competition/Difficulty

The more popular and specific the keyword is, the more competition you will have. Measuring competition can be difficult, and more often than not, you will need to manually research the keywords by Googling it, looking at the top-ranking content pieces, and so on.

Third-party tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs do offer keyword difficulty metrics, mainly based on the backlink profile on each keyword.

4. Cost-per-click (CPC)

CPC is more important for PPC advertisers than for SEO purposes. However, if the CPC is high, it is a strong indicator of a valuable keyword, especially if you value commercial intent.

If you want to measure CPC accurately, make sure to monitor it on Adwords dashboard instead of third-party tools. This is mainly because CPC fluctuates a lot over time, and third-party tools often only offer a snapshot of the data.

End Words

Keyword research is a rather tricky subject: it is fairly simple to understand, but can be really tough to implement as it also involves a lot of manual fine tunings and guessworks.

However, by using the framework we have shared above, you can have an easier time in executing your keyword research.

In the end, keyword research is about priority: SEO can be time and resource-consuming, and you should prioritize the keyword(s) that will bring more value to your business. Keep that in mind when choosing the right keywords, and keep evaluating your progress.

The post Your Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In a nutshell, hosting a website simply means uploading and storing the files related to your website on a server.

A server, on the other hand, is a dedicated computer (or can be just a program within a computer, or another device) that is tasked with storing and managing resources. The server is a centralized resource—in this case— for the website.

This process allows other people—from all around the globe— to “pull’ the necessary resources from this server and view your website. The server’s main task here is to receive and interpret incoming requests from users and then send the requested files (associated with specific page(s) to the user’s internet browser.

In the past, we will need to invest on our own server and hire a server engineer (or, learn the necessary skills ourselves). Yet, today we have thousands of companies providing the service to host and manage your website, at very low costs starting from below just $5/month.

In fact, today only a handful of giant enterprises with the size of Google and Amazon, to name a few, that host all of their websites and services on their own servers. Even companies like Netflix relies on a third-party hosting service (in this case, Amazon’s) for their hosting solution.

Using a third-party hosting company, simply allows us to “bypass” the necessary technical and financial requirements to host our own site.

Where To Start?

In the process of hosting a website, there are two different things we need:

• The web hosting service
• Purchasing a domain name

A web hosting service, as we’ve briefly discussed above, is a company that owns their web servers, and sell their services to host and manage your website. They simply take care of all the programming and technical needs, and usually us—as the website owner— will be given an easy-to-use interface to manage this hosting.

A domain name, is essentially the name of the website in the eyes of the human users. For example, _________.com will bring you to this site, and _________ is our domain name.

Some web hosting services, like NameCheap and GoDaddy,  among others, act as both a web hosting provider and domain name registrar, so they might be a good choice for you if you’re a beginner and are currently confused about the whole process.

Step-by-Step Guide To Host Your Website

Step 1: Figuring out The Type of Your Website

In general, there are two different types of websites, which will dictate different hosting needs. They are:

1.Static Site 

A static website is a website that doesn’t change in response to the actions taken by the user. So, the main goal here is informational, for example, in our About Us page, we only want to inform the visitors about the details of our business, and the page—and the source code— won’t change according to the user actions.

A static website is typically created with ‘just’ HTML and CSS in a simple text editor. However, static here doesn’t necessarily mean all the pages will look the same. Each of the pages can use different HTML codes0 and look very different. 

Another common misconception is that static websites is solely about textual content. Truth is, we can include videos, audio files, and beautiful images in a plain HTML message. 

Again, static here simply means the website’s source code won’t change no matter what actions a user performed on the site. 

2.Dynamic Site

As opposed to a static website, a dynamic website allows users to interact with the website’s elements, and the website will provide feedback according to the user actions. 

While static websites—as discussed above— use only client-side CSS and HTML, a dynamic website will also rely on server-side languages like PHP or JavaScript. 

A website with eCommerce functionalities (i.e., online store, is a good example of a dynamic website, as well as any websites that allow users to have individual accounts (i.e. forums, social network sites, etc.)

Step 2: Choosing Between Different Types of Web Hosting

Different kinds of websites might have different hosting needs depending on various factors from size to pricing to reliability.

On the other hand, there is not one single web hosting service —even if you opt for your own private server— that can cover all your bases. Some web hosts might be better in certain areas like server response time (speed) or might offer the latest technologies. Other platforms, however, might offer a more reliable server or a more affordable rate. 

In general, however, we can differentiate the different hosting services into several types, and here are some of the common ones:

1. Dedicated Hosting

When you subscribe to a dedicated hosting service, it means you are renting one physical server, and you can use this entire server for your website.

This will translate to a faster, more reliable, and more secure hosting, but you also get additional flexibilities like the ability to use your preferred operating system and install your own software.

However, a dedicated hosting service is usually the most expensive out of the bunch. Also, since you’ll be managing your own server, it might require some technical skills and programming knowledge (or you might need to hire a system admin). 

You generally only need a dedicated hosting service when your business is already so big you are comfortable to afford the necessary costs of hiring a system admin (or even a team of admins) and the monthly costs of dedicated server. 

Pricing: starts from around $70/month.

Recommendation: GoDaddy and NameCheap offers some of the best, most reliable dedicated hosting services out there.  

2. Shared Hosting

As opposed to dedicated hosting, here you share one physical server with other websites. You do have your separate (secured) account, so you still own your website privately. 

The main advantage of this type is the shared cost, so your overall hosting cost can be much cheaper than a dedicated hosting, as low as $5/month. 

However, since you share the server with other sites, if there’s a site with a lot of traffic sharing the same server with yours, it can compromise your site’s speed and performance. On the other hand, if you are the site using the most traffic on the server, you get the most of this server’s speed and performance while spending very little. The speed of the site is an important ranking factor in any SEO strategy.

A good choice for businesses that are just starting out or if you don’t expect a lot of traffic (at least initially).

Pricing: Starts from around $5/month to around $30/month

Recommendation: Bluehost is a popular and affordable shared hosting provider, NameCheap and GoDaddy are also good options. 

3. VPS Hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, and is essentially a shared hosting server with extra features. VPS hosting especially offers tools and resources to handle traffic spikes—the most common issue with shared hosting.

With a VPS hosting, we get a partition of the shared hosting, creating a “private server”, hence the name. With this, a VPS service offers the affordability of the shared hosting while also providing the stability and versatility of having a dedicated resource. 

A great choice for medium-sized businesses and eCommerce businesses, or those looking for an upgrade from shared hosting.

Pricing: Starting from around $25/month

Recommendation: NameCheap and HostGator offer good VPS plans. 

4. Managed WordPress Hosting

This type refers to hosting services made specifically for WordPress. In essence, this is a shared web hosting service where the service provider will also help maintaining your WordPress environment from making sure everything is updated correctly (and won’t clash with other updates), protect your site from hackers and other security risks, and so on. 

Relatively affordable—-while not as affordable as a standard shared hosting service—, and is a good option if your site is WordPress-based or some alternative CMSs to WordPress. 

Pricing: Starts from $35/month

Recommendation: WPEngine for affordability, GoDaddy for reliability. ) 

5.Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting allows more than one physical servers to collaborate together via the cloud, before they host a website or several websites—like a shared hosting system. 

In theory, hundreds of servers can work together. So,with this type of hosting we have a virtually unlimited potential to scale our website’s hosting according to our needs. 

Cloud hosting is usually very good at handling traffic spikes (i.e. during a DDoS and application layer attack). 

A very versatile hosting service type where you can also adjust your budget based on your needs.

Pricing: Typically uses a pay-per-use model, so will vary depending on your needs.

Step 3: Deciding Between Linux and Windows Hosting

Most of the popular website hosting services will let you choose between Linux or Windows hosting.

Linux is the most popular operating system for web servers (as of 2019), and the common misconception is that Linux environment is more secure than WIndows. Both OSs are equally secure, and factors like the server’s setup and the team behind the servers will matter more to security. 

The key factor to consider here, then, is the fact that Linux-based hosting is significantly more popular, so there are more applications that are compatible with the OS, and more web designers/developers/admins that are familiar with it. Linux and Windows servers use different control panels, so familiarity will be important. 

With that being said, unless you have websites which need specific Windows-only applications, Linux is the better choice.

Applications Specific for Windows Hosting

• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft Access
• C#
• Visual Basic 
• ASP Classic
• ASP.NET
• Microsoft SharePoint (requires separate installation and license)
• Microsoft Exchange (requires separate installation and license)

Applications Specific for Linux Hosting:

• Many different Apache modules, scripts, and applications
• SSH
• Scripts written in PHP, Python and Unix Languages (very common nowadays) 
• MySQL and PostgreSQL, also very common in today’s websites

Step 4: Setting Up DNS Address

After you’ve decided on a web hosting service, you will get a Domain Name Servers, or DNS (also known as Name Servers). 

We can think of DNS as the Yellow Pages of the internet, where all IP addresses are listed and indexed. So, before you can get your website up and running, you will need to first change the DNS of your domain. 

Fortunately, this will only require several simple steps:

1. Go to your Domain Control Panel, will differ depending on your hosting service, but should be available on your customer account on the hosting service’s website.
2. Login to your customer account
3. Choose the Domain Name for this specific site (if you only have one site, there should be only this one).
4. Go to the Domain Registration section, then DNS or Name Servers
5. Replace the existing DNS with the ones provided by your current hosting service, and then click apply or update

Step 5: Uploading Your Website

After you’ve setup everything, it’s time to upload your website to the hosting server. You can use the hosting service’s File Manager (commonly with cPanel) or use an FTP client such as WinSCP, CyberDuck, or Filezilla.

The process will vary depending on the FTP client you use, but it’s usually a pretty straightforward process, but here are a few things to pay attention to:

• FTP always runs on Port 21, so make sure it’s set properly
• Make sure to use your website’s correct IP address in the FTP Address field
• Make sure the FTP is connected properly before you drag and drop the files and folders to upload your website
• Re-check the uploaded folders (and files), and repeat uploading if necessary

FAQs About Hosting a Website

Here are some of the most commonly asked questions regarding website hosting, and our answers for them:

1. Why do I need a hosting service to host my website?

You can certainly purchase your own physical server and host your website on it. However, you will face several issues:

• Time and Resources: you will need to scale up your physical servers as your website grows, this can be extremely time-consuming and expensive
• Human Resources: unless you possess all the required skills to maintain, secure, and troubleshoot the site, you will need to hire engineers and administrators
• Security: the risk of potential data breach and other security risks are serious, and you will need to pay constant attention to these possibilities

Subscribing on a hosting service provider will allow you to “bypass” these problems and turn your attention to things that will help your business—and website— grow. These hosting service providers specialize server maintenance, with their own system engineers and administrators that will consistently monitor their servers 24/7.

2. Can I just buy a domain name first and host the website later?

Yes, it’s possible. In fact, it’s a pretty common practice.

Remember, however, that the domain name will be “empty” and won’t point to your website before you host the site properly and set up the right DNS. 

You can use services like Name.com or Domain.com to register your domain name. They offer relatively easy to use domain management platform, so you can have an easier time in connecting the domain name with your chosen hosting service later.

3. Should I buy a domain name and hosting service from a single company?

Generally speaking, yes, unless there’s a specific reason not to. For example, the reason stated in question #2 above, or when your preferred domain name is only available in specific provider but you don’t like what their hosting service offers. 

Using the service from the same company for both will mean that you can manage them under the same platform and dashboard. Also, some companies might offer a better deal if you decide to purchase both (for example, Bluehost offers a free domain name if you subscribe to their hosting service.). 

4. Can I host the site on my computer first?

Yes, you can, and it’s a pretty common practice to test things before commiting on purchasing a hosting. However, the faster you get an actual hosting, the faster you can grow your website.

5. Can I change provider later on?

Yes, and in general there won’t be any risks involved. You can use an FTP client to migrate your website to a new host.

6. Which hosting service should I choose?

There are so many hosting companies out there, and nowadays, each of them offers so many different packages encompassing all the different hosting types.

So, understandably, choosing the right one for your website can be overwhelming. 

With that being said, here are our recommendations:

• GoDaddy and NameCheap are the most reliable hosting services with years of experience between them. They offer various different types of plans so you can choose one depending on your budget and needs
• For starter websites, Bluehost is an affordable alternative 

7. How much would it cost to host a website?

The cost of hosting your website can vary greatly depending on several different factors from the type of hosting service (as we have discussed above in step 2), the hosting plan, the reputation of the hosting company, and so on. It can be as low as below $5/month (typically for shared hosting) and as high as thousands of dollars each month for high-end dedicated servers. 

Our recommendation is to weigh your current needs and choose the cheapest possible option that provides the features you want. As your business and website grow, you can gradually upgrade.

End Words

We certainly hope this guide has helped you learn how to host your website properly. Remember that there isn’t any single best approach to host your website, but rather you have to choose the right approach and the right hosting service according to your current needs and the available budget. If you don’t have the experience you can always reach out to a B2B marketing consultant to get it right. 

Nowadays, it’s relatively easy—and safe— to migrate between different hostings, so remember that choosing a hosting service isn’t a commitment you can’t break. Choose the one according to your current needs, and as your website and business grow, upgrade to a better service.

The post How To Host a Website: Your Ultimate Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

With that being said, this guide will discuss the necessary steps required to develop a B2B marketing plan: from figuring out the right channels to measuring their effectiveness.

Let us begin.

Defining Your Goals

Every plan is, in essence, made to accomplish a certain goal or goals. So, if your goal is not totally clear, not realistic, or worse, you don’t know your goal at all, your plan won’t be effective.

The first principle here is that your marketing goal(s) should properly align with the overall goals of your business: if you are aiming to increase revenue by 10%, it can translate to putting your marketing efforts to generate more leads by 30%, for example.

So, we should start this step by defining your business goals. Your goals should be based on the current state of your business, as well as the current market conditions. Then, we can define marketing goals to help achieve the business goals. Here are a few key areas to focus on:

• Understanding your audience

In the B2B space, we are targeting organizations where there can be several different decision makers You might need to develop different buyer personas for each of them.

• Communicating the benefits of your product/service

People aren’t essentially buying your product or service, but rather the benefits tied to them. Develop and communicate your value proposition properly.

• Competitive analysis

Understanding how your competitors are approaching their marketing strategies is essential. You can either learn something from their efforts, or imitate their successful tactics.

Develop Inbound and Outbound Tactics

This is the most crucial step, as there are many different tactics, channels, and campaigns to choose from. However, generally we can divide all the different marketing activities into two big groups:

Inbound

Inbound marketing, in essence, is the marketing efforts that are designed to pull your audience “inwards”. This is mainly done by publishing valuable content out there, so that the prospects that are looking for a specific information can find this content.

The main idea behind inbound marketing is to establish your position as the expert/thought leader of your niche, and so there are two main aspects of inbound marketing:

• Developing your content: the better you understand your audience, their needs, the specific keywords they are looking for, and so on, the better you can develop relevant content pieces for them.
• Promoting your content: your content, no matter how good, will only bring value when it’s consumed by your audience. Use various channels to promote your content, and aim to get more backlinks to improve your B2B SEO.

Outbound

Inbound activities are generally more effective nowadays, especially for B2B businesses. However, outbound, or traditional marketing activities do have their benefits over inbound marketing: inbound marketing is typically a long-term tactic, and you will need to invest a significant amount of time before you see results.

In most cases, we should expect to invest at least 6 to 12 months before we see significant results from inbound marketing. Yet, not all businesses will have that luxury of time.

This is where outbound marketing activities like advertising come in: with traditional outbound marketing, you are guaranteed to get short-term results, provided you have the money to spend. Here are some common outbound marketing activities for B2B businesses:

• Advertisement, offline and online, including social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Cold-calling
• Direct mail

The thing about outbound marketing is maintaining cost-efficiency, and so, maximizing ROI. So,the key here is to find a good balance between your inbound and outbound marketing strategies: the balance between cost and time. Inbound marketing is more cost-efficient and sustainable, and outbound marketing can generate short-term results.

Optimizing Your Website

Your website is an integral part of your marketing strategy, the equivalent of a storefront in this digital age.

An optimized, presentable, and professional-looking site can help establishing your credibility. Your site’s content can be effective in generating and nurturing prospects, while optimizing your site and landing page for conversions can ensure growth.

Here are some key areas to consider when developing and optimizing your site. The main thing to consider is your audience’s needs. Understand their intent, and optimize your website to address this intent.

There are three main stages of the marketing funnel where you should optimize your site:

• Lead generation: how your site can capture more prospects, mainly covered by inbound marketing (your blog, podcast, etc). Your site should have at least several lead magnets like offering valuable content in exchange for email address.
• Lead nurturing: nurturing prospects until they are ready to buy. This is mainly done through content and email marketing, as well as on-site tutorials, etc.
• Conversion: convincing prospects to actually purchase your product is a difficult process, so don’t make things even more difficult by not giving them a clear conversion path. Make sure your site is optimized for conversion.
• Make sure your site is mobile-responsive. All your buttons should be clickable on mobile devices. Also, if you are including forms, don’t use too many fields and make sure they are easily read.
• Set up the necessary analytics to track important metrics. You can use Google Analytics or paid options like KISSMetrics and Mixpanel.

Develop a Marketing Plan

We can’t have a proper marketing plan without a proper budget allocation. Develop a 12-month marketing plan, consider all the details and the smallest possible steps.

For example, if you are planning a content marketing campaign, figure out all the details from finding the right keywords, planning the topics, finding the right distribution channels, and how you will promote the content. Allocate a set budget for each of these steps.

Evaluate this plan regularly. You can look for new opportunities, optimize the performance of your campaigns, and eliminate the ineffective ones. Adjust your budget based on performance.

Monitoring Your Progress

An important part of your marketing plan is to continuously measure your performance, the effectiveness of each campaign, and optimizing them when necessary.

We should monitor the performance of each channel, tactic, and campaign based on goals and KPIs. For example, if your marketing goal is to increase revenue by X% and you have content marketing as a campaign to achieve this goal, your KPI is can be the number of traffic and conversion rate, among others.

Set up necessary tracking tools to measure these KPIs. We can use Google Analytics to track most of the important metrics such as the number of website traffic, the number of email newsletter subscription, and so on.

For a more detailed measurement, you can implement a marketing attribution model. In essence, marketing attribution is assigning credits to various marketing channels and campaigns based on their contribution to revenue.

For example, if a marketing channel is assigned with 10% credit, and your revenue is $100, then this channel is perceived to contribute $10 to your revenue. Marketing attribution is a pretty deep subject on its own, and you might want to check this guide to learn further.

End Words

While developing a B2B marketing plan and strategy might seem complicated at first, it is actually quite simple once you get the hang of it. The first step is to define your goals. Then, you should talk to B2B SaaS marketing consultant to define the necessary steps and tactics to achive these goals and monitor your performance.

The post Developing a B2B Marketing Plan: A Step-by-step Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

For example, the common perception is that B2B content should always be technical and informative, limiting creativity. However, that isn’t always the case, as we will discuss in this guide.

Here, we will discuss all the ins and outs of B2B content marketing strategy, and how to generate more leads with it. First, however, let us discuss the differences between B2B and B2C content marketing strategies.

B2B VS B2C Content Marketing

Why does content marketing differ between the B2B and B2C? Because the audiences, and especially how they make the purchase decisions are also different.

We all have been a B2C consumer in one way or another. When, for example, we are considering purchasing a new smartphone, what is the typical buyer’s journey? Most of the time, it’s something like this:

• A company launched a new smartphone model, and we saw the trailer or read the announcement article (we consumed content that piqued our interest)
• If we do have the budget, we then consider purchasing the phone. If not, we are going to wait and see.
• Depending on your interest level, you might check different reviews about the phone, as well as competing products. Sometimes during this “research” period, we ends up picking another phone.
• The decision is made, and we make the purchase.

Both B2C and B2B purchase decisions are made to fulfill a (perceived) need. However, the main difference is that in a B2B purchase, the buyer will also consider tangible profitability. So, although both B2B and B2C purchases will use logic and emotion, in general B2C purchases are more emotional, while B2B purchases are more logical.

Although B2B purchase processes will vary depending on the business types (both the seller and buyer), size, and many other factors, in general it will look something like this:

• B2B purchases typically began when a business (the buyer) encountered some problems. An employee will then look for possible solutions for this problem (they might directly search for products to solve this issue, or just look for information).
• During this “research”, this employee stumbled upon a product, which they consider as a possible solution. They might check the features of the product, online reviews, or even contact the sales representative for further inquiry.
• This employee will then discuss the prospect of buying this product with their higher ups. Probably they will also research other alternatives for the product.
• When all the higher ups agree, the purchase finally happens.

As you can see, another clear difference between B2C and B2B purchases is the number of people involved in the decision. In a B2B purchase, multiple people with different roles can be involved, which might require different marketing approaches. For example, a marketing executive might be interested in the benefits of the product, while an IT executive might prefer a breakdown of technical features.

So, what will this mean to our approach in B2B marketing? Here are some important consideration:

• B2B marketing must target all the possible buyer personas, each with their role and behavior.
• The core of B2B marketing is communicating our product/service’s abilities to provide solution(s) for specific problems.
• We must be prepared in discussing profitability, and communicate how our product/service can provide tangible value.
• Depending on your product/service, communicating the technical aspect of your product might be necessary.

B2B Content Marketing, Step-By-Step

Based on the principles discussed above, we can design the proper B2B content marketing strategy to accommodate our audience. Here are the key steps we can do in achieving this:

1. Knowing and Understanding Your Audiences

In B2B businesses, we are targeting other companies, and within these target companies we can have several roles involved in the purchase decision. So, when identifying our audience, there are at least three different layers of considerations:

• Your ideal target companies. Different organizations will have different goals. The idea here is to find the right companies where your product/service can help in achieving their goals.
• Key decision makers within the company. Again, this can include different roles with different needs and preferences.
• Key prospects—for lack of better words—, which is, the person/role who are most likely to find out about your product/service first. For example, if you are selling a tech product, the IT manager might be your most ideal prospect. On the other hand, if you are selling a marketing tool, you should be targeting marketing managers and officers.

Carefully consider these three layers, and develop the proper buyer personas accordingly. The better you understand your audience and their needs, the better you can plan your content.

2. Having The Right Mindset

Without defining proper and realistic goals, we can’t have a proper content marketing plan in place. Be as specific as possible. For the most of us, the goal is to get as many people consuming the content as possible, which in turn can be converted as paying customers.

But how can we achieve this? There are several facts we should consider:

• The market is getting really saturated. There are a lot of businesses promoting their products and services every single day through various channels. Getting our voice heard amidst all these noises will be more and more difficult.
• People will only purchase from brands they trust. This is even more true in the B2B environment where—again— profitability is the main consideration.
• Tell a compelling story. Even the most technical and complex content can be engaging. It’s no use being informative when people fell asleep when reading your content.

In short, yes, our ultimate goal is to get more people to buy our products or services, but we can only do it by building credibility and trust. So, avoid hard-selling, but be informative and deliver value to your audience. This way, slowly but surely, we can establish our position as the thought leader/expert of our industry.

3. Keyword Research

Based on the target audience you’ve figured out above, the next step is to find the target keywords that are searched by these audience groups. While keyword research can be complicated at first glance, here are the key principles to consider:

• First and foremost, the keyword(s) should align with your brand value and benefit your business goal in the long-run. While you can target keywords that will guarantee lead generation, it won’t be sustainable if the keywords don’t align well with your brand.
• In general, you should look for keywords that are relevant for both your business and your audience, with high enough search volume, yet manageable competition. Aiming for overly popular keywords with excessive competition be very difficult (and expensive), so the key here is finding the right balance
• Consider different layers of audiences discussed above when looking for different keywords. Remember that each of these groups can have different needs and will search for different queries.
• Your aim in content marketing shouldn’t always be about selling your product and service, but to build trust and credibility.

4. Expand Your Keywords Into Topics

We can expand a single keyword into virtually an endless amount of possible topics.

On one hand, this can be an advantage since we can develop a lot of content targeting the same keyword. However, too many options can often lead to confusion, so we’ll have to be careful here.

So, when planning your topics, here are some key principles you can consider:

• Remember that properly understanding your audience is key. This way, you can plan topics that they are interested in, and content that will ultimately provide value.
• Nowadays, there are various tools that can help you in this aspect like BuzzSumo, Link Bait generator and Hubspot’s blog ideas generator, to name a few. Use these tools to your advantage.
• Consider topic clustering, which is, creating a big content covering one big idea, and smaller content pieces covering the details. For example, you can have a pillar content covering “digital marketing” in general, and then cluster content pieces covering “SEO”, “content marketing”, and “social media marketing” which are linked to the pillar content. This will help increase your relevance in the eyes of Google, as well as your human readers.

5. Editorial Calendar

If you are serious about your content marketing, it is wise to develop a marketing calendar. Your content calendar should describe what (the topics you’ll cover), why (why it’s relevant for which audience), when (when this content will be published), where (the channel where you’ll publish your content), and how (how you will promote the content).

Content marketing by itself is a long-term game, so ideally you should plan an editorial calendar for at least six months to one year. We haven’t covered the where and how mentioned above, and so we will discuss in on the next steps.

6. Content Development

Now that we’ve figured out the target keywords and expanded them into topics, it’s time to actually develop the content according to the content calendar.

Nowadays, it’s important to consider that there are various forms of content we can use, four being the major ones:

• Text, pretty self-explanatory, ranging from blog posts to ebook to whitepaper among other forms
• Images, from shareable images and photos to infographics
• Audio, mainly podcast, which is increasingly popular as a medium nowadays
• Video, from the popular YouTube videos to live streaming to webinar

You can cover the different topics with various forms of content, and you can also integrate different forms in just one piece of content.

There are two main benefits in doing this:

1. Even in B2B environment, fewer people are huge readers. With this layered content, you can attract those that prefer infographics, videos, and podcasts
2. A textual content can be monotone and boring even for the most avid readers. Using images or even videos can help break this.

While content creation can have many different approaches and involve many different techniques,  here are the main principles to focus on in a B2B content creation:

• Remember that as discussed above, B2B marketing is about providing our audience with facts that our product/service can provide a tangible benefit. Let this concept translate into your content marketing: make sure your content is factual and informative.
• Your goal is not only for someone to click the content (through an interesting title or click-baiting), but for them to consume your content as much as possible, get value, and trust your business. Make sure your content is engaging throughout the whole piece.
• Remember the different groups of audiences, and always make sure that the content will provide value for the respective audience.

There is no one surefire way to develop perfect content, and you’ll have to experiment with different approaches that will fit your brand. Remember, however, that your goal is to establish trust, so develop your content with that purpose in mind.

7. Optimizing Conversion

It is important to realize that website visitors that came to consume your content are not necessarily equal to leads or prospects. We have to convert these visitors into actual prospects by capturing their contact information.

There are several different approaches we can use here:

• Using lead magnet, which is essentially, offering something valuable for free in exchange for the audience’s email address. A common approach in content marketing is to offer in-depth content (ebook, whitepaper, etc.) regarding the topic covered in the article.
• Directly offer CTAs within the content, for example, by saying “don’t forget to subscribe to our email newsletter” within the closing section of the article.
• You can use other elements within the page (which are essentially outside the content) to capture leads. For example, by using a CTA button beside the content.

Lead generation can be tricky and difficult, and without it your content marketing won’t bring any value. You might want to schedule a call with B2B marketing consultant to develop your marketing strategy.

8. Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value unless your audience actually consumes the content.

A common misconception is thinking that content marketing is only about publishing great content pieces. However, promoting your content is just as, if not even more important.

Here, we are dealing with how and where. There are various ways to promote your content, and there are various promotional channels in achieving this feat.

In general, however, the best way to promote your content is through B2B SEO. By letting this piece of content climb higher on the search engine results page, more people will be aware of the content.

While SEO is a pretty broad subject on its own, in general, there are only three key elements of SEO strategy:

1. The quality of your content, and how relevant it is to the target keyword.
2. Inbound links (or backlinks), especially from quality sources.
3. Technical aspects from page load speed to mobile-responsiveness to structured data markup, among others. You can check this technical SEO checklist for this aspect.

Backlinks are especially important here, because when we are promoting our content in other channels, we can also get more backlinks in the process, for example:

• By using influencer marketing to promote our content, we can get backlinks from the influencer
• Guest posting, another common content marketing approach where we can also get backlinks
• Social media marketing, where any shares for our content can count as social signal
• Even through various forms of online advertising, the more people consume our content, the higher the chance we’ll get more backlinks from them

In short, treat each piece of content as a landing page, promote them individually and aim to get more backlinks in the process. The backlinks—especially quality backlinks— will in turn improve your ranking on the search engine results, which will also translate to more traffic.

As we can see, content promotion is not a singular effort, but rather a continuous effort where multiple channels work together.

9. Monitoring and Re-Optimization

Our business, the market, and the industry are always evolving, and so must our content also evolve.

So, here we must monitor the performance(s) of our content pieces, and make adjustments when necessary.

Just because content is not performing well at the moment, doesn’t mean we should just ditch it or leave it as it is. There are various approaches where we can use this content in further achieving our goals:

• Update the content. We can update the information with newer ones, while we can also re-optimize the technical aspects.
• Leverage in other forms. Sometimes, a content that’s not working in its current form can be re-made in others. For example, if a blog post is not performing well, maybe creating a video of the same content will generate better results.
• Adding other forms. For example, you can add images and videos to textual content to enhance its performance.

Depending on the situation, you might also need to adjust other factors like targeting new keywords or adding more internal links. The idea is, monitor your progress and adjust when necessary.

End Words

In implementing B2B content marketing strategy, remember that the end goal is not simply more website traffic or even a higher SEO ranking, but rather, more customers. You can download my SEO Growth Program on B2B SEO service page to learn more about my approach to content marketing strategy. So, make sure your content fulfills the purpose of establishing your credibility and encouraging conversions.

Another thing to remember here is that content marketing is a long-term game, so the key here is consistency both in quality and quantity. Regularly monitor your progress, and adjust your strategy whenever necessary.

The post B2B Content Marketing: How To Get More Leads and Conversions With Your Content appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide to inbound marketing strategy, we will divide our discussion into three big parts. By the end, you can develop a sound inbound marketing strategy and start implementing it.

Let us begin with the first one.

Targeting The Right Audience

Knowing who to target and understanding their needs are very important factors for the success of your inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is ultimately about delivering valuable content to your target audience. Without knowing their needs, you simply can’t deliver value.

The market is also rapidly changing, as do the behaviors and needs of your audience. Focusing on the target audience that matters will also help you in dealing with this changes. So, how can we effectively determine the right audience? Below, we will share some of our methods:

1. Social media insights

If your business already have performing social media profiles with several hundreds followers for each, you can analyze their demographic data to figure out your existing customer base.

Most major social media platforms offer features to analyze the demographic data of your followers, especially their gender, age, and location. For example, if you have a Facebook Page, there’s the “Insights” tab on the top of the page for this purpose.

This is also why social media should be one of your main ways of publishing and promoting content.The more followers and fans you have, the more data you’ll have, and the better you can understand your audience.

2. Conducting Online Surveys

Conducting surveys can be very effective to know your target prospects, and you can easily do this if you already have a growing email database. Also, there are many different tools that can assist you in this process.

The main goal here is to find out your target audience’s needs and problems, so you can ask a question like “what is your current biggest issue related to X (your niche/industry)”. By figuring out their problems, you can then develop content pieces providing solutions to these issues.

3. Conducting Interviews

While broadcasting surveys can be an effective way to figure out the general picture of your target market, it is fairly difficult to capture an in-depth data with it. This is where phone or even in-person interviews can fill in the gap.

Select a few of your existing customers (it’s better to conduct interviews with existing customers compared to prospects, since generally they are more willing), and ask them if it’s okay to conduct short phone calls or video chats (a maximum of 10 minutes). Again, your main goal here is to find out their current problems: ask their current struggles, the solutions they’ve tried in the past, and what are they looking in a solution.

You can then use this data to develop your content.

4. Content Development

Content quality is obviously the core of any inbound marketing strategy. In fact, in theory, if your content quality is excellent, you won’t need any strategy at all.

On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content pieces. Even when a low-quality content somehow rank on the top of search engine results, it won’t bring any business, period.

The value of your content is directly tied to your audience’s needs: a good inbound marketer should always adapt their content according to the current needs of their audience. Yet, it’s not the only thing you should consider when developing your content.

Here are a few areas you should focus on:

Content types

First, understand that textual content, especially blog posts, is still the most effective content form in generating new leads.

However, more and more businesses are shifting towards podcasts and videos, and not without its reasons:you can’t consume textual content while driving or while working out in the gym. Podcasts and videos tackled that issue.

Yet, when researching for services and products, people trust textual content more, especially due to its ability to cover in-depth information.

So, a majority of your content should be textual, while podcasts, videos, and webinars can assist these textual content pieces. For example, you can create a podcast covering an outline for a topic, and offer a link to a more in-depth blog posts covering the same topic. If necessary, you can offer e-books or white papers for even more in-depth information.

Content length

This is the main principle you should understand: the longer is always the better, as long as you can maintain engagement throughout the whole content. Yet, we all know that maintaining quality will be more difficult with longer content pieces. The key is finding that balance.

For textual content pieces, the average word count to maintain this balance looks like to be 1,890 words. For videos? This research by Minimatters might help.

Optimizing titles

Titles, or headlines, if you will, are the first thing people read when they stumbled upon your content, and so they are the ones determining your click-through rate (CTR).

Optimized titles are also important for SEO purposes. You should include your target keyword in the title while making sure the title is also appealing to human readers. Putting the target keyword at the front of the title will also help. For example, if your focus keyword is “Local SEO”, you can make a title like “Local SEO: Top 10 Tactics for Higher Google Maps Results”.

You might want to check this guide by QuickSprout on optimizing headlines.

Optimizing snippet

Similar to titles, your snippet (META description) is very important not only to improve CTR, but for SEO purposes. Include your target keywords, but make sure the description is comprehensive and engaging for human readers.

You might want to check this guide by Neil Patel on how to optimize META description.

Diversify your media

Even if you should focus on primarily textual content pieces, you should utilize other media like images, infographics, audio, and even videos to enrich your content.

Remember that these additional media should support your core content, do not use them just for the sake of it. You can also optimize these images and videos for SEO benefits.

Tell a compelling story

Every human being is attracted to great story: we either spend our lives consuming exciting stories (through books, movies and so on) or writing our own (literally, or by living a successful life).

So, even if your content is technical and data-driven, doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting and fun. Use storytelling techniques to enhance your content, use a conversational approach to engage your audience, and aim to create an interactive story.

Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value if no one consumes it. This is why content development is just half of the process, and you shouldn’t neglect content promotion as the core part of your inbound marketing strategy.

There are various ways to promote your content, and below, we will list some of the most popular (and effective) ones:

1. Social Media Marketing

Quite obvious, with so many people using social media nowadays, it is one of the most effective platforms to promote anything.

The thing is, organic reach on major social media platforms have declined rapidly in recent years. So, you will need to consider paid promotional options. Your main goal here is to have more people sharing your content, which can bring exponential benefits both for short-term and long-term basis.

2. Guest Posting

When done right, guest posting can be very effective inbound marketing strategy. Why? Because you get many different benefits with one action: you get backlinks (probably not immediately, but very possible), you get awareness and authority, and you develop relationships with influencers and high-quality sites.

There are several key principles to a proper guest posting campaign:

• Consistency is key, find as many sites accepting guest posting,and approach all of them
• Take notes on sites with high engagement rates, these are your priorities
• Build relationships before you pitch them with your blog post: engage in their conversations, comment on their previous posts, and so on
• Don’t focus on getting backlinks at first, aim to get authority

3. Influencer Marketing

Utilizing influencers not only can effectively promote your content pieces, but you will also get the benefit of getting backlinks from their authority sites.

Again, here are some key principles for a successful influencer marketing campaign:

• The most important step is finding the right influencers for you. There are many tools that can assist you in this process, for example, Buzzsumo.
• Gradually build a relationship with these influencers. Engage them on their social media profiles, join their conversations, and only after gaining their trust, you can propose them for a content promotion opportunity
• Don’t solely focus on major influencers and celebrities, micro-influencers can also provide values

4. Host a Webinar

You can utilize webinars to promote your brand or your personality, while also indirectly promote your content. Host a free webinar session in exchange for their email address, which can be an effective lead generation device.

If you can provide value, people who attended your webinar might also be interested in future content, as you establish your position as the thought leader of your niche.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective tactic not only to promote your content, but also to encourage those who have consumed your content to convert.

Here are some important principles for a successful email marketing campaign:

• Be consistent and think long-term, regularly provide excellent content through email marketing. Don’t focus on hard-selling your products, but focus on providing value
• Understand the behavior and needs of your email subscribers (back to section I). You simply need to provide them with proper values, a reason to stay subscribed
• Personalize your email marketing by using first names. Many email marketing tools can help with this
• Use an interesting, engaging subject line.
• Keep your email messages to-the-point and engaging, you can use animated gifs, images, and even videos, but make sure they have decent loading speed
• Make sure all email messages are mobile-responsive

6. SEO

SEO is obviously an inseparable aspect of inbound marketing, and the primary way you can increase your content’s visibility.

To maximize your SEO results, there are four main areas to focus on:

• Make sure your content is targeting a proper keyword with enough search volume. Check the top-ranking content pieces of this keyword, and aim to develop a better content
• Optimize these keywords on your content, but don’t overstuff the keywords. Include keyword variants and make sure they occur naturally
• Use various content promotion techniques discussed above to generate more backlinks
• Work with SEO expert and consultant to streamline your traffic improvements and avoid search engine penalties

Remember, however, that SEO is a long-term game. Be consistent with your SEO optimizations, and expect at least 6 to 12 months before you see your content on the first page of search results.

Utilizing Your Content to Achieve Results

Inbound marketing won’t bring any value on its own, unless it can generate traffic (leads), educate customers (lead nurturing) or encourage conversions.

Below, we will discuss how to optimize inbound marketing in those three different areas.

1. Lead Generation

The most common practice in this aspect is to offer free but valuable content to acquire leads. You can offer well-researched reports, white papers, e-books, or even in-depth videos and webinar sessions in exchange of their email address.

The key here is obviously the value of your content: the more valuable it is, the more leads you can capture. Check out some of the best examples of this practice, as compiled by Contently.

There are other tactics you can try, for example, offering your readers to subscribe to your email newsletter within your blog post.

2. Lead Nurturing

This is the stage where most inbound marketing practices shine the brightest. Your content will be a powerful weapon to nurture your prospects until they are finally ready to purchase. There are two main goals here:

• Establish trust and credibility. The thing is, people only want to purchase from brands they can trust. This is the most important purpose of inbound marketing.
• Educating your audience about your product or service, especially your unique value proposition. Only when people realize your unique values, they will purchase your product and not your competitor’s.

In this stage, inbound marketing will be even more effective when combined with other lead nurturing campaigns like email marketing and social media marketing among others.

The key here is to refer to the two main goals discussed above when planning and developing your content pieces.

3. Conversion

There are two different conversions to discuss here: converting visitors to prospects/leads, and converting leads into actual customers.

Inbound marketing is very effective in driving blog visitors into leads, as we have discussed on the lead generation section above. However, inbound marketing is less effective at converting leads into actual customers, although it’s not impossible.

Here are some key tactics you can implement to optimize conversions:

• Optimize your site and landing pages

Make sure all your pages, including your email content is mobile-responsive and have fast loading speeds.

If you include links, make sure it is easy enough to click on mobile device.Similarly, make sure all forms are easy to fill on phone screens, and don’t use too many fields (4-5 is the maximum).

• Optimize CTA placements

You can include CTA buttons within your content. Yet, make sure the placement doesn’t disrupt the user in consuming the content. You might want to check this guide by Crazy Egg (written by Neil Patel) on optimizing CTA buttons.

• Monitor and Refine

Monitor the performance of your content, and aim to refine future content pieces according to this data. You can also re-optimize or even leverage existing content pieces.

End Words

As you can see, although inbound marketing seemed like a simple strategy at first, there are many different tactics and optimizations you can implement to maximize your results.

Inbound marketing is a very effective way especially to generate and nurture leads. The key here is to understand your audience, especially their needs and behaviors, and provide values and solutions according to their needs and problems.

If you work with a professional digital marketing consultant to implement inbound marketing properly, you will see sustainable growth in your business.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

To answer this question, first we will need to define the term “SEO” and “local SEO” respectively, understanding their similarities, differences, and different benefits.

First, SEO—or Search Engine Optimization—, in a nutshell, is optimizing your site to rank higher on Google’s (and other search engines’) result page for specific keywords. For example, if your business is a pizza restaurant, if you can rank for the “best pizza” New York, it will bring several key benefits including but not limited to:

• You can attract those who are searching for the “best pizza” query
• Since this is a positive keyword associated with credibility, this audience will perceive your business as trustworthy and credible
• If the “best pizza” keyword has a high number of search volume (which is, the number of searches in a given month), you can get a lot of traffic to your site, which can then translate to more people visiting your business and purchasing from you

How can we implement SEO? While SEO is a very, very broad and complex subject, it will boil down to mainly three things:

• Creating and publishing high-quality, relevant content pieces that include the target keyword(s). The keywords should be included naturally with optimal density.The main focus here is to develop content pieces that are valuable for your ideal readers.
• Optimizing your site so that it can be easily indexed by Google. This aspect will include things like ensuring your site is mobile responsive, ensuring fast load speed, and so on.
• Getting other sites, especially high-quality ones to link your site (and your content). These links are known as backlinks, and simply put, the more high-quality backlinks you have, the better Google will perceive your business as relevant (and so you will climb up the rankings).

SEO efforts are mainly centered in these three factors. So, what about local SEO? Local SEO is, in essence, attempting SEO to target the local audience: ensuring your business’s local presence to the audience within your geographic proximity, or the audience located within your service area.

In the past, this is mainly achieved by targeting “local keywords”, which are mainly keywords that include location names (i.e., “restaurants in LA”,”bookstores in NY”, and so on). While the same practice is still effective nowadays, today Google uses Google Maps’ results for location-related keywords and “near me queries”.

Try typing for “restaurants near me” on Google, and you will get a result page with the top 3 of Google Maps results just below the paid advertising (if someone places an ad for your area and for this specific keyword).

So, with this phenomenon, for local SEO we should aim for two different things:

• Ranking on organic search results page for location-focused keywords, as we have discussed above. This is mainly done through the same efforts we have discussed for organic SEO above.
• Ranking on Google Maps. Google Maps only display three of the top results before you have to click “more places”. So, ranking on this top-3, or the 3-pack is the ultimate goal.

Now, ranking organically for the local-focused keywords will produce the same benefits as organic SEO—which we have discussed above—-, but what about ranking on Google Maps? Here are some important takes:

• Google Maps result is interactive, where you can call the business directly with just a single click or get a Google Maps’ directions to the said business. Meaning, you have many opportunities to ensure conversions
• Fewer people will click on the “more places” button to check on results below the top-3. On the other hand, a lot of us simply don’t trust paid search ads although it’s placed above the Google Maps results. Simply put, by ranking in the 3-pack, you are generally perceived as the most credible business among your local competitors.

As we can see, there are a lot of benefits tied to local SEO, both by ranking on the organic search results page and by ranking on the top-3 results of Google Maps. Especially if your small business is targeting local audience, you will miss out on a lot of opportunities if you don’t work with SEO experts and consultants on optimizing your site and listing.

So, How Can I Implement Local SEO?

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits and importance of local SEO, the common question here is: a) What should I do to implement local SEO?, and b) Do I need to get help from a professional or a marketing agency? In this section, we will mainly try to answer these two questions.

First, above we have mentioned that there are two main goals of local SEO:

• Ranking for local-focused and location-related keywords on Google’s organic search
• Ranking on Google Maps’ results

Both of these will require different technical approaches, so we will discuss them separately. First, let us learn the key steps of ranking on Google Maps.

Ranking On Google Maps’ 3-Pack

Before we can optimize our Google Maps (or Google My Business—more on this later—), we must first learn about the key factors that can affect Google Maps ranking.

Although there’s always the debate surrounding Google Maps’ (and Google’s) ranking signals, generally experts agreed that there are three main factors affecting the ranking of your Google Maps listing:

• How complete, comprehensive, and optimized is the information on your Google My Business account (again, more on this later)
• The number of positive reviews on your Google Maps listing, as well as on third-party sites (Yelp, Facebook Places, TripAdvisor, other local business directories)
• The number of citations you have, which is, the mentions of your Name, Business, and Phone Number (NAP) on the internet. Citations have a similar effect to backlinks in regular SEO: the more sites (especially high-quality ones) that mention your NAP, the more credible Google will perceive your business.
• Last but not least, the searcher’s location. If another business with similar optimizations and authority is closer to the searcher than yours, it will rank higher.

Based on those three factors, here are the key steps in improving your Google Maps ranking:

1. Register and Verify Your Google My Business Listing

To have your business listed on Google Maps, you will need to register for a Google My Business account, which is totally free.

The registration process itself is fairly simple, and you can click the link here to get started right away. However, here are some key considerations when registering your Google My Business (GMB) account:

• Your Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) are the most important pieces of information in your GMB listing. Make sure they are accurate and up-to-date, and if you have previously listed your business on other online platforms, make sure the information is consistent.
• If you deliver your products/services to your customers, check the corresponding box under the location tab. There’s also the option to hide your address (i.e, if you are operating your business from home). However, your address information is a very important ranking factor, so it is not advisable to hide it from public unless it is absolutely necessary.
• Choose your business category carefully. Remember that it is about what your business is, and not what you sell/provide. You can choose several categories (which will translate to attracting different types of customers), so think very carefully about how your business will fit in within categories, and optimize this aspect.

The next step is to verify your Google My Business account. There are several features that are locked from you unless your listing is verified (i.e., Google Posts), and obviously getting verified will affect your ranking.

To verify your account, you can simply click on the verify now button after you sign in to your Google My Business account. Generally, Google will send a postcard to your business’s physical address containing a verification PIN. Verification via phone and email are also available for certain business types.

2. Optimizing Your Google My Business Listing

Now that your GMB listing is verified (or at least, in the process of verification), it’s time to optimize your listing.

The main principle here is to add as many accurate information as you can about the business. The thing is, people (yes, even random people that hates your business) can “suggest an edit” to your listing. Sometimes, Google will approve these changes without notifying you.

So, it’s important to make your listing as complete and accurate as you can to discourage people from suggesting an edit. Also, regularly check your GMB dashboard and monitor if there’s any change.

Here are some key areas where you can optimize your GMB listing:

Service area

Remember that Google Maps ranking is based on searcher’s location. So it is important to accurately provide accurate information about your service area. You can check Google’s guidelines on this topic here, but here are the key areas to focus on:

• If you are a brick-a-mortar business serving your customers at your place, check the box “I serve customers at my business address”. This will show your complete address on Google Maps
• Similarly, check the box stating that you deliver goods and services to your customers if you do so.
• Make sure to put in accurate business hours. You can also include customized hours for holidays and weekends if necessary.

Including Keywords

Similar to regular SEO strategy, Including the target keywords to our listing is an important ranking signal. The first step to do this is obviously a proper keyword research: we should find relevant keywords according to our locations, with enough search volume, yet manageable competition.

The main principle here to find the optimal keyword density. Don’t worry too much about the density percentage, but instead focus on including the keywords naturally so the content is comprehensive for human readers.

Including Photos and Videos

According to Google’s reports, businesses that feature photos will get significantly more clicks, requests for driving directions, and phone calls. Remember that Google Maps is essentially a visual platform, and we should make full use of the fact that searchers can directly ask for directions to your business, call your number, and visit your website from the Google Maps search result.

Your photos should be at least 720px by 720px in size, and make sure your photos are properly taken, well-lit, and not altered too much (filtered, photoshopped, etc.). Google might review your photos for quality from time to time, and Google does prefer photos that represent the reality of your business.

You can also add videos that are 30 seconds or shorter. Use this opportunity to highlight unique values of your business (interesting interior, product showcase, etc.).

To further optimize your images and videos, you can use metadata to ensure easier indexing.

3. Encouraging positive reviews and managing negative ones

As mentioned, the quantity of positive reviews is a very important ranking signal. If your Google Maps (and GMB) listing has a lot of positive reviews, Google will perceive your business as credible and relevant.

Obviously, there’s another significant benefit of having a lot of positive reviews. A lot of us will check for reviews nowadays, before making any purchase decision. A good number of positive reviews will encourage higher conversions.

However, it’s not always about having more positive reviews, as how you respond to bad ones is also important. Recently, Google confirmed that they do prefer businesses that respond to reviews, which might directly affect ranking.

Responding to reviews will also encourage more people to leave a review. They will feel that their voices are being heard, and that the company will respond when they have issues.

When responding to reviews, here are the key considerations:

• Respond quickly and politely, avoid giving promises you can’t deliver. If you don’t have an answer for a specific issue, just say something like, “we are investigating the issue and will get back to you as soon as possible “.
• There are always cases of bad reviews made with malicious intents (from those who never bought your product/service, non-existent issues, etc). If you have sufficient proofs, you can ask Google (or other review platforms) to remove this review. If it’s a serious case, you might want to pursue legal actions.
• For valid negative reviews, remember that there’s usually an underlying issue(s). If you don’t tackle this issue, you’ll keep getting the same bad reviews.

Another way to encourage more positive reviews is to offer incentives. For example, you can offer discounts and even freebies for those who have left positive reviews on your Google Maps listing or posted about your business in social media.

What about reviews on third-party sites like Yelp or Facebook Places? Google strongly suggested that they will indeed affect ranking. Besides, the more positive reviews you have, the more people that will purchase from you, so you might as well encourage positive reviews on as many platforms possible.

4. Building Local Citations

Local citations, as mentioned, are any mention of your business’ NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) in the internet.

In local SEO and especially improving your Google Maps ranking, citations have a similar value to backlinks in regular SEO: the more citations you have, the more relevant and credible Google will perceive your business, and so the higher you will rank.

There are generally two main approaches in building your local citations: getting relevant sites, bloggers, social media personalities, and others. The second approach is to list your business on online local directories according to your niche.

To start, list your business on major platforms according to your industry. If you are a restaurant, for example, you can list your business on Yelp and TripAdvisor among other platforms. You might want to check out this list by HubSpot listing these major online directories.

Besides these platforms, a quick Google search will help you find local online directories according to your niche and location.

The main principle in building local citations here is to maintain information consistency, especially your NAP. Your NAP should be consistent across all of your citations. Information inconsistency won’t only lead to confusion for your customers, but can also hurt your Google Maps ranking in the long run.

Ranking on Organic Search for Local-Focused Keywords

Now, we shift our focus to organic local SEO, and as we have mentioned, there are three main factors affecting organic ranking:

• The technical aspect of your site, which affects how easily Google can index your site.
• Your content and how it includes your focus keywords. Google will crawl this content and determine whether your site is relevant for the said keyword
• The quantity and quality of backlinks. The more quality sites that link to your site, the more credible Google will perceive your site.

So, as before, here we will focus on how to optimize our site according to these three factors, starting with the first one.

1. Website Optimization

Website optimization for SEO is by itself, a pretty deep subject. You might want to consult this technical SEO checklist to plan your site optimization according to its current state.

However, especially for local SEO, here are a few key areas to focus on:

2. Mobile-responsiveness

It’s no secret that quite recently Google implemented a new update to prefer mobile-friendly sites for ranking purposes.

If your site is not yet mobile-friendly, Google might opt not to include it in the SERP. To start, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to check your site’s current state.

If your site doesn’t pass the test, here are a few areas you can optimize:

• Make sure your content, images, and other site elements are properly displayed on mobile devices
• If you include forms, don’t use too many fields and make sure users can easily fill in on their mobile devices
• Pay extra attention of your NAP information. Make sure it’s displayed properly even on mobile devices’ smaller screens
• If you include reviews on your site, make sure it’s easily readable

Remember that besides for SEO purposes, not having a mobile-responsive site can significantly affect bounce rate and conversions.

3. Load speed

Similar to mobile-responsiveness, load speed can also affect bounce rate. Make sure your site has a fast enough load speed, and you might want to check out this guide on improving your site’s loading speed.

4. Optimizing Keywords

You should include your target keywords at least in these areas on your site:

• Site URL
• Title Tags
• Headers
• Meta description
• Your site’s content

Google nowadays is being quite sensitive about heavy-optimizations, and so there are two main concerns here:

• Use semantically-related words instead of exact-match keywords. For example, instead of always using “best restaurant in Toronto”, you can use similar phrases like “restaurants to visit if you are in Toronto” and other similar phrases.
• Focus on providing comprehensive content for human readers. Include your keywords naturally and don’t overstuff your content.

5. Location pages

Since this is especially about local SEO, including location pages, especially if you include a Google Maps snippet can significantly improve your ranking.

If your business has more than one location, create specific pages for each of these locations. Again, make sure to include accurate NAP information for each pages, and avoid using duplicate content pieces across multiple pages.

6. Local-focused content

Google’s algorithm is now much more advanced compared to the early days of SEO. In the past, we can get away with shallow content with a high keyword density. Nowadays, your content should bring value to your human readers, and Google can recognize this.

Your main goal here is to build credibility as the local expert or thought leader according to your niche, so you should focus on relevant local keywords to attract your ideal audience.

For example, if you are a home remodelling company, you can go beyond the usual keywords like “home remodelling tips” and similar ones. You can help newcomers get well-acquainted with your city, like providing a content covering important local service providers. These types of content can help attract new audience.

End Words

While local SEO might seem like a complicated concept at first, it is actually quite simple once you’ve got the hang of it.

However, since one of the main elements of local SEO efforts is citation building where quantity and consistency is the keys, the process can be long and tedious.

Getting the help of a local SEO services can tremendously help especially in maintaining consistency across all your different listings.

The post The Small Business Guide To Local SEO appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

SEO audit should be performed before you attempt any SEO efforts, especially if you are an SEO agency handling a new client’s website. To achieve the best results, however, you should do SEO audit regularly.

In this guide, we will share 9 important steps you should do when performing an SEO audit, covering the most important aspects of SEO activities.

Before we begin, however, let us discuss the concept of SEO Audit itself.

What Is SEO Audit?

SEO website audit, in essence, is checking the health of your site according to SEO principles. A proper SEO audit allows you to check the performance of your site regarding the important ranking signals. This way, you can find the important weaknesses, as well as as strengths and optimize them further.

Without SEO audit, you can’t properly identify the current state of your site and implement the necessary improvements to improve your ranking on the search engine results page.

Sites that are properly optimized get more traffic and thus, generate more prospects with the potential of converting into paying customers.

What To Expect From SEO Audit?

There are three main things you can expect from SEO audit:

1. The accurate current state of your site, which is, a detailed analysis on how your website is performing according to the ranking signals. Especially, your social media presence, search results performance, number of inbound/outbound links, and any other relevant information.
2. SEO audit checklist, which is a list actions necessary to improve your SEO results.
3. Complete internet marketing strategy according to the available data.

Step-By-Step Guide To SEO Audit

Step 1: Making Sure Your Site is Indexable

No matter the amount of optimizations you do, it won’t matter if Google cannot index your page. So, this step, and arguably the most important one, is to ensure Google that other crawl engines can crawl your site.

First, let us understand how Google crawl your website.

1. Google’s spider bot visit your web page and “crawl” it.
2. Google then add the optimized pages to their index, cataloging them
3. Google then show the best results based on queries

Fortunately, Google does provide a tool to check whether your site can be crawled, which is the Google Search Console. Google Search Console is also an essential tool for any SEO audit activities, so keep it in mind.

To use this tool, you only need a Google account, which the most of us already have at this point. Also, if you already used Google Analytics previously, you can link the two together so you can monitor Search Console data from Google Analytics.

Here are a few necessary things to consider when monitoring Google Search Console to check whether your site is crawlable:

XML Sitemap

Having a proper XML sitemap is essential in making sure your site is indexable by Google. By creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console, you tell Google the exact location of your pages, giving Google an easier time to crawl them. Also, by doing this, you are telling Google that you are the original owner of your site content, which will prevent removal in the cases of duplicated content pieces.

Thankfully, there are many available tools that can help you in developing XML Sitemap. For instance, XML Sitemaps is a fairly popular site providing this service. If your site is WordPress based, you can also use various plugins to assist you, such as Yoast SEO.

Crawl Errors

Use Crawl->Crawl Errors to check for crawl errors on your site. 404 errors are not a direct ranking signal, but the can affect your SEO performances due to bad user experience, and thus, higher bounce and exit rates. Use redirects to fix these 404s if necessary. Again, if your site is WordPress-based, there are plugins that can assist you in this process.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a small text file on your site server which tells the search engines which pages of your site they can (and cannot) index.

Not all sites have robots.txt, and Google can still crawl your site in this case. However, having a proper robots.txt can help in optimizing crawl budget.

You might want to check out this guide from Moz on how to optimize robots.txt.

Step 2: Make sure you rank on your brand name

Do a quick Google search using your proper brand name as the query.

If your brand name is properly unique, your own site should be the very first organic result. If your site is very, very new, however, you might need to wait a couple of weeks or even months.

If your site currently rank further down in the search results page, then Google thinks there are other sites that are more relevant for your brand name. Again, this often happens if your brand name is a generic word.

Here are several things you can do when you don’t rank on branded keywords:

• More backlinks, especially from high-authority sites
• Getting a PR mention from high-authority media, relevant influencers, and high-quality sites
• Have a Google My Business account (and verify it), and build citations on local directories. Make sure your Phone, Address and Name are consistent across all listings
• Have a proper presence on all major social media platforms

With these relatively simple steps, your site should slowly climb up the ranks.

However, what if your site is nowhere to be found in the SERP? If you don’t have any indexation problems, as we have discussed on the first step, most likely your site is affected by serious Google penalties. (internal link)

Again, use Google Search Console to check whether you are currently penalized by Google.

Step 3: Use HTTPS and secure your site

If you are serious about your business, you should definitely switch over to HTTPS.

Since 2014, having a secure website URL is a very important ranking signal while also bringing other direct and indirect benefits to your business.  More and more people are now really concerned about online security, and let’s face it, if you land on a site with a security warning, most likely you are going to leave.

Thankfully, migrating to HTTPS is now easier than ever, and you can check out this guide by SearchEngineLand on how to do it. Also, if your site is WordPress-based, you might want to check this guide by WPBeginner.

However, migrating to HTTPS is just one aspect of site security. So, in this step, we will discuss how to audit the possible security issues that might affect your site.

You can use SEMRush’s Site Audit feature, click on HTTPS, and SEMRush will show various HTTPS-related security issues such as:

• Internal links to non-secured pages
• Some pages on your site that are not yet using HTTPS
• Mixed content
• Checking the state of your security certificates and server security protocols

Step 4: Broken Links

Inbound links, or backlinks are obviously essential to any SEO activities: the most important and prominent SEO ranking factor.  Yet, these backlinks will only bring value when they work properly, and this is why checking for broken links is a very important step of SEO Audit.

There are many different tools you can use to identify broken links. Again, SEMRush’s site audit feature can be useful, and if you are using WordPress, you can use various plugins to help you.

Also, consider using DrLinkCheck in this process, the free version have a 1000-URL limitation, which is quite generous.

Step 5: Check for Redirect Chains

Redirect chain, is the term we use to define more than one redirects between two URLs. Redirect chains can affect your link profile, and so affect your ranking. Also, a long redirect chain can affect the page load time, which is also an indirect ranking factor.

A redirect chain can especially happen after a site migration, including when you switch from HTTP to HTTPS.

Most SEO audit tools can find redirect chains and redirect loops, and fix them.

Step 6: Checking Backlinks Quality

Backlinks from low-quality sites not only can hinder your ranking. In a worst-case scenario, you can get penalized by Google. So, during your SEO audit, it is important to find these low-quality backlinks and remove them.

Most SEO audit tools have the feature to check these low-quality links, but again you can easily do this with SEMRush’s Backlink Audit feature.

Here are a few different factors to look for:

• Link Relevancy

The relevancy of the backlinks is extremely important in determining SEO results. For example, if you are a real estate company, having a backlink from entertainment sites can be concerning.

Yet, manually checking the relevancy of each inbound links can be extremely time-consuming. Thankfully, there are many tools that can help you with this aspect, especially Ahrefs with its Bulk Backlinks feature inside Link Map Tools.

• Authority/Quality

As we have mentioned, the quality of your backlinks is significantly more important than quantity. Having just one or two authority backlinks can get your site to rank higher faster compared to having tens of low-quality links. Yet, how can we determine the quality of our backlinks? You might want to check out this guide by SEOMark, and use various SEO audit tools to track the metrics listed there.

• Link Diversity

There are many different sources of backlinks from directory links to contextual links to sidebar links, and so on. You might want to check this list to check all the different types/sources available.

The thing is, you would want a decent amount of diversity to make your link profile more natural. Also, you would want a proper diversity of DoFollow and NoFollow links.

• Anchor Texts Ratio

There are generally two different anchor text types to consider: exact match anchor text (EMA) and branded anchor. The thing is, the majority of your anchor texts should be branded anchors, so check the ratio between EMAs and branded anchors, and adjust your tactic when necessary.

• Homepage Links VS Deep Links

If your SEO is based on content marketing (which is, the most of us), the majority of your backlinks should target deep pages. Again, however, aim for proper diversity to allow a more natural link profile.

Step 7: Page Analysis

Since, as we have just mentioned, the core of most, if not all SEO activities is content marketing, SEO audit should properly address the quality of your content and page optimization of each content.

No matter how good your content is, it won’t get ranked unless the page is properly optimized, and vice versa. In this step, we will first discuss the key areas to audit when optimizing your page.

• Duplicate content check

You can use various duplicate content checker like Copyscape. This is useful if you are outsourcing your content development process, as well as to check whether there are others on the internet who are stealing your content. If you do find a duplicate content, you can remove it (if the duplicate content is yours), or file a DMCA Report to Google, which will allow Google to remove this content from indexation.

• Target keyword locations

There are four main locations where your focus keyword should be included: the title, META description, and the first paragraph (or at least, one of the earliest paragraphs, and the last sentence of your content. Mention your target keyword only once in these four locations.

• URL

Your URL should also include the target keyword. Make sure the URL is short and comprehensive enough for human readers.

• Internal links

For internal links, make sure you are using exact match anchor text (EAM).

Step 8: Content Analysis

As mentioned, an optimized page will only work with an optimized content. If in the previous step we have discussed how to audit your page optimization, here we will focus on content quality.

Analyzing content is both the most important and time-consuming part of SEO audit, and here are the key areas to focus on:

• Uniqueness

Your content should be unique not only in the eye of the search engines, but also human readers.

• Value

Your content should bring value to your audience by giving new information or solving problem. Also, your content should be engaging, usually by using “you” and “your” within your content to address your audience.

• Length

Longer content pieces generally perform better on Google SERP. 1,800 to 2,000-word is the average length for top-ranking content.

• Advertising

Avoid using excessive ads on your content pages, it can distract your audience and even cause a high bounce rate.

• Blog Comments

Look for links in your blog comment, remove any unrelated and suspicious links. Having these links in your blog comment section can get you penalized by Google, so be extra careful.

Step 9: User Interactions

In this step, we will focus on analyzing how your users are interacting with your site, and especially your content.You can do this step just with the handy Google Analytics, and here are some key data points to focus on:

• Bounce Rate

Generally, you would want a bounce rate below 60%, with 80% being the threshold until you should worry about a potential problem. If your bounce rate is above 80% or even 90%, this should be your priority to fix.

• Dwell time

Dwell time is now considered a significant ranking factor, although Google hasn’t confirmed it. However, a high dwell time means there are more chances to convert the audience, so you should definitely aim for a higher dwell time. An average dwell time of above 1 minute is decent, and you should aim for above 2 minutes. Remember, the better your content is, the more time they will spend on your site.

• Exit Rate

Exit rate measures the rate of visitors that are leaving specific pages. This way, we can identify which pages that are not performing well. Again, aim for an exit percentage of around 50-70%, and you will need. High exit rate often occurs when your content in this specific page doesn’t provide enough value or doesn’t answer your audience’s problems.

• Return Visitors

The number of people who return to visit your site is a strong positive signal. It means, your audience finds value in your content, and with more visitations, you have more chance to encourage conversions. If your return visitors rate is low, you either have issues with your content or with your overall user experience (including site optimization).

End Words

There are certainly other areas SEO experts can analyze when performing an SEO audit. However, the 9 steps we have shared above are among the most important, and you can use the same principles to assess other areas.

Regular SEO audit is a very important aspect if you want to maximize your SEO results: monitor everything regularly, find gaps, and know when to adjust your approaches.

The post 9 Steps To Perform Effective SEO Audit appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.