B2B content best practices: creating content your audience (and Google) will love

Selling B2B products and services can be tough. Potential customers can’t often physically touch or see them in person. Instead, they rely on content to describe the problem it solves and how it makes buyers feel – to earn more sales. 

Yet many businesses struggle to create the kind of high quality content that Google loves to rank, customers love to read, and partners love to share. 

However, as a B2B company, creating high-quality content is fundamental to creating awareness of your products and services. With a solid strategy in place, it can be a phenomenal growth engine. 

That’s why:

• 89% rely on organic search as their most effective distribution channel

• 79% rely on it to generate quality leads

What is high-quality content? 🤔 The best content provides value to your ideal customers. It does this by giving your audience free expert guidance, insight, and top tips to help to solve their pain points. What’s more, high-quality content converts, has a high click through rate, and ranks well in Google.

The problem?

There are tons of blogs, guides, webinars and more out there, popping into your target audiences’ LinkedIn feeds, dropping directly into their inboxes and getting picked up by search engines – leaving your competitors to rank on the first page of Google.

So how can your content cut through the noise and attract attention?

With the right content strategy in place, even as a new entrant to the market or one that’s just started to actively market itself, it’s possible to rank higher than competitors in Google and pique interest on all other channels.

How? Content cluster planning.

What is content cluster planning?

Google has made huge changes to the way search results appear – essentially, they favour content that is based on topics. Instead of creating content that hits several keywords, a topic cluster model focuses content on one central topic.

Several supporting blog posts (or a cluster) are planned, written, published and distributed from this pillar. These cluster posts offer a variety of angles from the main topic and link to one main pillar - often called ‘the definitive guide to XXX’. 

Here’s a diagram from Hubspot that explains it well 👇

The pillar page (the item in the middle) should answer all the key questions that anyone would want to know about that topic. These pieces will naturally overlap and so you can easily add hyperlinks to the other pieces in the sub-topic blogs so that the reader can easily find more information.

This organised structure signals to Google a semantic relationship between each page communicating search engine authority - essentially, it tells Google you are the best resource for this topic.

Planning your approach to marketing cluster planning

When planning out which topics you’d like to form part of your overall strategy, we’ve found that the best approach is to select a narrow set of topics that are both highly relevant to your company, have decent search volume, plus low keyword difficulty: and then build out tranches of content around those specific topics. For example, if ‘content marketing’ was the topic, you could create blogs on:

• ‘How to maximise content marketing with these distribution channels’

• ‘Top content marketing strategies to attract your ideal customer’

• ‘How webinars can excel your content marketing in 2023’.

Ideally, the topic needs to be in the titles of each piece, the H tags (subtitles) and throughout the body copy, and we recommend having at least 6-7 blogs per topic in order to rank well for a specific topic. Although we’ve seen examples where one brand had over 160 blogs per topic, and they absolutely dominated the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The sky’s the limit here! This is particularly helpful for SMEs who want to rank for competitive keywords, but don’t have a strong domain yet.

Generate demand: 5 key steps in a cluster content approach

We love simplicity. That’s why we’ve broken down our approach into four simplified steps you can take to get ahead of your competitors with a cluster content strategy:

1) Core topic selection - If you have value proposition documents, we recommend leveraging keywords and themes from these. A best practice value proposition will have been built around your target audience's pain points. You can also look at what your competitors are talking about.

💡Top tip: If you have lots of blog content on your site already, it may be worth optimising that rather than recreating all new. With our best practice tips (below) you can optimise your content.

2) Keyword research - From here, you want to find out if those topics have high search terms (for LinkedIn) but low competition (for SEO). We recommend looking at how your competitors and industry bodies rank for keywords too as this can give you a guide into what your target audience is searching. 

💡Top tip: You can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush for checking keyword search volumes and difficulty ratings. Ahrefs provides a few free tools with basic information too, like this one. 

3) Creating your cluster content - While you could just start with one, we recommend covering at least two clusters at a time so that there’s a variety that appeals to your target audience’s different interests.

💡Top tip: Follow general best practices for writing killer content - long-form pieces, original data, and including the keyword in your title tags. We have so many tips for this - check out the list below.

4) Distribution - To maximise the ROI of your content, you want to share it in as many relevant places as possible. For example, hosting it on LinkedIn and on guest blogging sites - this helps to increase rankings too. And of course, you should share it on as many of your channels as possible - email, social media, paid advertising.

💡Top tip: Having so many pieces may seem daunting but you can map all this out on your marketing plan - covering your topics and distribution channels - to enable you to cover key topics each month and have a stream of prepared content mapped out over the course of a year. 

5) Measure and continuously optimise - You can see how well these pieces perform by checking your SEO ranking and site visits (this takes time), seeing views on guest blogging sites and site visits on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn algorithm also favours more posts on the same topic - if it's performing well. So try not to change subjects if you are getting great traction.

💡Top tip: With tools like LinkedIn, you can quickly see how well your content is performing. This way, you can change the focus of your posts if engagements seem low.

Best-practice tips for content creation

Here are some handy tips to help you optimise your content:

SEO optimisation - Headers (H1 tags) and subheaders (H2 tags), and images (ALT text) should include keywords, (where it fits and reads naturally). Look for keywords/phrases with good search volume and buyer intent. 

Call to action - There should be a call to action at the end of each piece of content - whether that's 'Read more', 'Get in touch', or both.

Content for different funnel stages - Content needs mapping and creating for the different stages of the sales funnel to ensure there is a mix on the website that appeals to the different stages of the sales cycle - Top, Middle, and Bottom. 

• Top of Funnel (TOFU) - The "awareness" stage, where people are looking for answers, resources, education, research data, opinions, and insight.

• Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) - The "evaluation" stage, where people are doing heavy research on whether or not your product or service is a good fit for them.

• Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) - The "purchase" stage, where people are figuring out exactly what it would take to become a customer.

Technical content - When doing technical content, it's best to seek the expert's view and we find it easiest to do this with a short questionnaire.

Visual aids - Breaking text up with diagrams helps increase engagement - istock images aren't suitable for this as they don't add anything and distract from the main piece of content. Images of sensors etc. work really well here.

Word count - C. 1200-1500 words is the ideal length for SEO optimised copy. This can seem very long so bullets, sub-headers etc help break content up into more scannable and engaging bites.

Increase brand awareness, delight your customers and compete

When creating a content cluster strategy, the key thing is to focus on the topics and linking pieces together, rather than just keywords - which was the old way of increasing SEO. This topic based approach is how you maximise visibility of your content but also adds most value to your target audience.

Fundamentally, people don’t have time to search for information - they should be presented with solutions to their challenges in one place.

If you need any guidance with a content cluster strategy, drop us a note.