Tips: Optimizing B2B Content Assets

Susan Kelly March 14, 2013

Does this situation sound familiar? Due to the success of your B2B SEO program, organic traffic to your website is increasing. However, visitors aren’t engaging with specific aspects of the site and aren’t taking the desired actions.

Why? Many B2B marketers fail to include informational assets in their overall SEO strategy. Information presented on your website such as press releases, case studies, newsletters, white papers, product demos, and how-to videos are all great ways to engage prospects, generate leads and acquire customers.

But, if they aren’t readily found by searchers, they will not realize their full SEO potential.

Here are three steps to fully capitalize on the SEO potential of your online informational assets.

1. Select Specific Keywords For Each Asset

Just like your website’s overarching SEO strategy, your online assets must also include targeted keywords. The keyword set may be more specific and will likely contain long-tailed terms.

I encourage you to perform keyword research specifically around the topics of your press releases, studies, etc… to better understand your prospects’ online behavior and intent.

Review your analytics data as well and take a look at the specific search queries prospects use to find your site and access various information. By targeting the right set of terms, your marketing assets will become powerful tools to engage prospects.

For example, a B2B market research company is optimizing many of their webpages for target keywords such as “local market research”, “market trends”, and “consumer research”.

In addition to website SEO, they are also optimizing a research study that addresses the topic of green consumers. The SEO plan for this downloadable asset focuses on much more specific keywords such as “Green consumer research” and “eco-friendly market research”.

This comprehensive approach to SEO allows the main pages of the site to rank well for general terms while the research download ranks well for more specific search queries.

2. Optimize Webpages & Asset Content

Optimizing online assets is not much different than optimizing the rest of your website. Specific tactics may vary based on the format in which the information is presented, but here are some general rules to follow:

  • Use keywords in the URL structure of the page that promotes the asset. For example: www.mysite.com/market-research/green-consumers is much more effective than www.mysite.com/downloadresearchstudy
  • Use keywords in the page title and META descriptions for the page
  • Within the body of the asset, insert keywords into headings.
  • Incorporate key phrases into the text links throughout the body copy.

For example: Click here for more information is not nearly as effective as Click here for more local market research data

  • Apply keyword-rich alt tags to all images

3. Utilize Social Channels

Blogs provide a wealth of content to your site, which is exactly what the search engines look for – current, up-to-date content. Blog posts can range from fun, light-hearted topics, to more serious, industry related topics. Your corporate blog is also a great way to promote downloadable assets.

By optimizing blog posts you make them more visible in search results.

Blogs should be used to:

  • Provide a snippet of a press release
  • Summarize a downloadable research report
  • Promote a product video or webinar
  • Preview a case study

Use other social media channels to promote optimized assets as well. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+ should all be part of your integrated SEO strategy to optimize and promote informational assets.

If You Have Online Assets – Optimize Them!

Don’t forget to include marketing assets and informational downloads in your B2B SEO strategy. Capitalize on all the online tools at your disposal including press releases, case studies, product demos, white papers and webinars.

Create a specific SEO Plan and Keyword map for each asset and use your corporate blog and social channels to drive searchers to these optimized assets.

B2B marketers may actually have an advantage over consumer marketers due to the wide range of assets at their disposal. Informational pieces like webinars, white papers and product demos provide great channels to expand and enhance your B2B SEO strategy.

The goal is to not only for the main pages of your website to rank well in search results, but for your online assets to appear at the top of the results too. Remember that Google displays “everything” in the search results, including images, blogs, videos, news, etc… so the more assets that are optimized, the more opportunity your site has to rank well.

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