SEO
With the right SEO campaign small, local businesses can expand their reach nationally or even internationally. With the right approach, they can compete with well-known brands in certain key areas in a way that would be extremely difficult in the bricks-and-mortar world.
SEO is never a quick or easy solution (unless your business genuinely does just want to target an immediate neighborhood) but it’s possible with a focused strategy that follows a logical process to succeed in organic search. Better still you will be building a rich content asset and a dynamic website, and won’t be at the mercy of rising pay-per-click costs from Google Ads or social media advertising.
Content is crucial for every SEO strategy whatever the business size or the industry – but SEO experts always advise that it needs a well-thought-out process that attracts, informs and engages potential customers and clients. A process that builds up your content and brand as a reputable, trustworthy place to go for information, advice and, ultimately, products or services. This is especially true in the B2B arena.
Of course, any good SEO strategy will ensure that the key landing pages of the business website are well optimized and there are plenty of tools to assist with an SEO Audit and on-page optimisation (such as SEMRush, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, SEO PowerSuite etc. etc.). The right strategy will also include a high-quality link-building process with focused outreach to relevant potential linking domains. But tying these other parts of the process together is the content so getting that right is vital.
How to develop a content marketing process
There are a number of ways to develop a content marketing strategy that will assist with SEO efforts. As you produce more and more content and start to see which types or topics are most successful you can adapt your approach. No content marketing strategy should be static so be prepared to change and adapt as more analytics data is available to assess the impact.
Here is a basic content marketing process you could use to increase traffic, exposure and sales:
- Produce high quality content for your website in the form of guides, reports, case studies etc. If you can produce independent survey data with detailed statistics that would be a great added bonus.
- Share the content on social media channels to connect with new audiences. Choose social networks carefully depending on your industry. B2B businesses will tend to get better engagement on LinkedIn, for instance.
- Reach out to industry influencers to generate links back to the content on your website – make sure you use highly personalized emails and avoid standard templates for the best chance of success.
- Alternatively, produce high-quality content and offer it to industry influencers and other likely linking domains as a guest post or article. Just make sure they will allow a link back to your website. This is ultimately your main goal.
- Create easily shareable content like infographics and promote and publish them wherever you can. Again with a backlink.
- Create podcasts and webinars to attract new audiences.
Final thoughts
Any digital marketing strategy needs to be able to evolve and adapt as more analytics data becomes available. So for every content marketing process assess and analyze the results regularly and at least once a month.
