Increase relevance = blog more than your competitors
Why is blogging important? Well, for one, it gives you fresh, relevant content—one of Google’s top three key principles. Secondly, your buyers do research. 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic search. In other words, the more content you produce, the more likely it is to match the terms that your potential customers are searching for in Google.
So, track how many blog posts your competitor publish in a month. If they post once a month, post twice. If they publish two blog posts, write three. If you’re super motivated, HubSpot says B2B companies that blogged 11+ times per month had almost 3x more traffic than those blogging 0-1 times per month.
Blogging also gives you great content to share on social media; since posts from Facebook, Twitter and other popular social sites appear in search engine results, being active on social media will help to amplify your organic reach.
Helpful hint: If you’re trying to publish a large number of blogs per month with no plans to hire additional resources, try asking co-workers to contribute by writing one post per month. That way, you'll get a variety of content—including important insights from sales, project management and IT—without having to write everything from scratch yourself. (You'll still be doing plenty of editing though…content experts are not always grammar experts!)
Increase authority = promote more than your competitors
How much time should you spend promoting your content? Derek Halpern from Social Triggers suggests using the 80/20 rule. If a blog takes you three hours to produce (20%), then you should spend 12 hours promoting it (80%).
Sounds crazy, right? Here's why it's not.
Authority—your site’s overall strength in the market—is another one of Google’s top three key principles. By promoting your content on social media platforms, you’ll gain likes, comments and shares… and brands with a strong social media presence are seen as more authoritative by Google.
Helpful hint: When you start promoting on social media, schedule posts in advance using a platform like HubSpot, Hootsuite or CoSchedule. It's easier to make sure you have the right mix of timing and messaging when you write in bulk vs. sending one-off posts over the course of several days or weeks.
Increase trust = get linked to more than your competitors
Google’s third top key principle is “trust.” One of the best ways to prove trustworthiness is through backlinks from other reputable sources, especially .gov or .edu domain extensions. It's like having a network of websites that are willing to vouch for the quality of your own site.
Not all backlinks are created equal, however. Google will penalize you if you try to obtain backlinks unnaturally using spammy tactics like:
- Purchasing links
- Swapping links
- Spamming message boards with crappy content
- Joining a paid network
Legit ways B2B tech companies can obtain backlinks:
- Check your competitors’ backlinks. Use Moz’s Open Site Explorer to see which sites are giving them backlinks and find out their page and domain authority. This will give you a few good ideas of where to get backlinks.
- Convert blogs to videos. If you're already creating traditional blog posts, make them into video clips and gain additional backlinks from sites like YouTube, Veoh and Dailymotion.
- Create Relationships with social influencers. Use BuzzSumo and to start relationships with people who have high social engagement on topics that are valuable to your audience. Start a conversation with those influencers by asking if they’ll share your content. This will create yet one more backlink opportunity from a highly authoritative industry leader.
Helpful hint: To spark an influencer’s interest, study them, reshare some of their relevant content and engage with them in ways that will add value for them. For example, if your influencer is @DanielMiessler (cybersecurity guru), he expresses interest in corporate infosec programs. After you reshare a few of his tweets, reach out with research or stats about corporate infosec programs.
