Basic SEO Writing Tips for B2B Marketers

We’ve been hinting at the importance of SEO (search engine optimization) through several posts since we launched this website. If you want to build your B2B website’s audience and you’re not also employing basic SEO techniques with every single post on your brand’s website, you’re missing out on potential viewers (and, therefore, customers).

Why bother with SEO on your B2B website?

Search engine optimization is the very thing that helps potential followers (and potential customers) find your brands. It’s what positions your websites higher in Google searches, therefore making it more likely that new people will find them.

This year has served as an excellent case-in-point for why all brands should take SEO very seriously. The pandemic has been and continues to be an enormous obstacle to growth, but the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is that customers are eager to return to events and to read great web content.

About 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine (source). The top 5 Google results get 75% of the clicks (source). Our point is: if you invest the little time it takes to utilize good SEO, you will see growth in the years to come.

8 SEO tips for EVERY blog or article you post

Your website probably publishes blog or news update posts. We at M2X brands use WordPress to publish our stories, but the following checklist consists of things you can do to optimize your post in any website management program (note that I’ll be showing you what things look like in WordPress).

Here’s a basic checklist for B2B website search engine optimization:

1). Make sure you have at least one good keyword in mind while you’re writing.

A keyword is, essentially, a phrase that you put in your story a certain number of times that matches what people are searching for in Google.

This is a step that warrants greater discussion, so we’ll be sure to write a separate story about keywording. But the best thing we can tell you is this: choose a word or phrase which speaks to the topic of your post from the perspective of someone in your audience who is looking for this content.

Example: I’m writing a blog about a niche topic — let’s say it’s the game of pickleball. My article is something like “10 Pickleball Tips for Beginners.” In your case, it might be “10 Reasons More Orgs are Buying LED Screens Instead of LCD.”

What should the keyword be? Well, technically, there’s no singular best answer. But there are some bad ones. I would NOT choose something too broad, like simply “pickleball,” because there are already so many Google results for that very general keyword.

In your case, “LED screens” is too broad: people looking to buy them/integrate them might search that keyword, but if they’re on a buying journey, they’re more likely to search for something more specific.

Related: Marketing To (and WITH) an Integrator

Instead, for this specific blog and its content, I would choose a couple of keywords (yes, I encourage you to use two keywords or more wherever doing so naturally fits the flow of your writing): “beginner pickleball tips” would be a good one; so would “pickleball training tips.” These more closely match the tone of the article I’m writing as well as the way someone might be searching on Google to arrive at content like this.

If you’re ever unsure of which keyword you should use, type your story’s broad topic into this nifty tool, which skims keywords real Google users are searching for and makes suggestions.

When choosing a keyword(s), always think about what your specific audience members might search for in order to find the content you’re writing. Sometimes, that’s a very specific phrase.

2). Once a keyword is chosen, incorporate it a few times naturally into the body, headline, subheadline, and URL.

Avoid “keyword stuffing,” or using the keyword as many times as possible. Instead, incorporate it/them naturally within the flow of your writing.

I recommend using a keyword 1-2 times for every 400 words. If you can naturally put the keyword in a subheading, all the better.

3). Keep the URL short & free of “stop words.”

You should be able to change a story’s URL (also called a “slug” in WordPress).

You want to eliminate any “stop words,” which are essentially the most common prepositions: the, is, at, which, and on.

Also, try to incorporate one or more of the keywords into the URL, but be sure to keep the URL relatively short — no more than 6 words or so. Less is better.

4). Include at least two inbound links and at least one outbound link.

For those unfamiliar, an inbound link is a link to another story or page on your site, while an outbound link is simply a link to another website.

It is important to choose one “Related” link; something to give your readers a chance to click on once they’re done with the article they’re currently reading. Choose another article that is at least somewhat related to the one you’re adding it to.

It’s also important to have at least one other inbound link tied to a word or phrase in the body of the article. For example, if I see something in the body of the article that I know we’ve written about before, I’ll link it.

Here’s a “trick of the trade” to remember: for outbound links, choose websites that are high quality and use the same concepts I’m talking about here for their posts.

Every link should open in a new tab once clicked (you can edit that in link settings for each new link you create). This keeps the user’s current tab open while creating a new one for the other click, thereby maintaining one last connection to your web page before they go looking at something else. Always give your users an easy excuse to stay on your website for as long as possible and to return to it.

Don’t go crazy with links, but feel free to add more than the recommended numbers above if you can do so naturally. A longer article can support a few more links.

5). Make sure you write a deck/summary/meta description.

“Deck,” “summary,” and “meta description” are three terms which mean the same thing: that little description underneath the story’s headline.

As said above, you should include the main keyword in this description, but you should also aim for a length of 50–160 characters (not words, characters & spaces). Any shorter and you may not sufficiently describe the article; any longer, and Google will truncate it when it shows up in search results.

Apart from those requirements, there are no real tricks to writing these. Just do your best to describe the main point of the article in a way that includes its main keyword. Don’t skip this step, it’s an important way for Google to recognize your article and for potential readers to skim what it entails when they’re looking at search results.

6). Add alt text to the article’s main image.

WordPress allows you to very simply add “alt text” to images – but every editor should have this function.

Alt-text is another signifier for Google as to the content of your article and it is important that you complete this step. It’s also a matter of accessibility, as this is the text that visually impaired users with screen readers will be read to better understand an on-page image.

You want to describe the image in a detailed way which – you guessed it – also includes the article’s keywords where possible.

The MOST Important Rules of B2B website SEO

If you learn nothing from the above steps, just be sure to keep two things in mind when creating content:

1). Create the best, most well-researched copy you can. Focus on referring (and linking) to hard research wherever possible. Answer questions in the copy that you know your specific audience would ask about the topic – don’t be afraid to be blunt in doing so. Don’t write something just to write something; try to bring quality and value to everything you publish. Keep the specific quirks and motivations of your audience in mind the whole way.

2). Wherever possible, follow-up with story sources by trying to earn backlinks. If you use any experts or other bloggers as sources in an article, try asking them to blog about their inclusion in your story (and link back to your article on their website). Doing so should be considered “Part 2” of any longer feature article you write. Offer to help them write a brief summary of the article if it helps, and stress that their publishing about your article helps them by providing more chances that it’ll be seen (thereby boosting their reputation as a thought leader).