B2B Growth Marketing

I was in a meeting awhile back, and a service provider in the traditional on-page SEO business actually said this. “Content? Why produce more content? The Internet is already full of content!”

For real.

At first I was sort of stunned. Having seen so many instances of Inbound Marketing, and specifically, strategically generated blog content drive high quality web traffic, my initial reaction (non verbal) was, well let’s just not go there. However, it made me think how people who are looking for a B2B SEO Agency really need to be careful.

Subsequent to this conversation, I’ve had other people whom I respect also question the potential longevity of a Long Tail Keyword publishing strategy. As one person noted last night, granted it was over a few really tasty beers at The Wooden Spoon, at some point is there so much ‘noise’ that even LTKW hunting becomes too competitive? The other question he asked, that I think is more pertinent, is, in the next year or so, are keyword strategies even going to be relevant?

Great stuff!

Here are some thoughts. It’s been famously noted (way back in 2013) that ‘Google search scratches its brain 500 million times a day’. At that time, of the 3.3 billion daily searches being executed by Google, 15% or more have never been seen by Google before.

15%!!

Isn’t that incredible?

It’s a testament to the unlimited imagination of the human species. It’s also an indicator of the changes in the way that we are using Google to find information. More and more of us are learning that it can be useful to put very specific questions, or at least very long strings of qualifying terms (natural language) into the search box to accelerate our satisfaction. Search engines are responding by getting semantic.

Google likes to use behavior (engagement in content) as an indicator of both a match to a search query as well as of the quality of the content. But if it’s never seen this search before, what can Google fall back on to try and generate quality results?

You’ll be hearing more about AI (Rankbrain) and there’s a really great explanation from MOZ about how the Penguin update affected long tail strategies.

The upshot I think is this. Up to 50% of daily searches are classified by Google as long tail. Up to 20% are classified as extremely long tail, ie. never been seen before. This has huge implications for B2B Content Marketing.

Competing in this space leaves an enormous volume of searches that are up for grabs and not focused on by your traditional SEO practitioners who tend to compete on core BoFu (Bottom of Funnel) keywords. These searches also have less Adword clutter, because Google is still figuring out how to maintain the quality of ads related to long tail searches. If you want a great example of this, type your full name and your state into Google and see if any Adwords ads come up.

Having been deeply involved in Persona development and subsequent keyword attraction strategy, I can tell you that the process for identifying long tail keywords that mate to a day in the life of your key personas is an excellent creative exercise to develop a high quality editorial calendar and guide your strategic publishing efforts in an organized and productive way.

Will the Internet ever be full? I think that’s like asking, has everything been invented? People who have answered this question yes along the way have consistently been very, very wrong.

Do changes in Google’s algorithms affect your publishing strategy? Possibly in the future. But right now, I think that we are safe using Inbound Marketing LTKW strategies to attract specific audiences to our sites. I have yet to see a well structured LTKW strategy not work.

Simply follow the mantra, Create Marketing People Love.

• Understand who you can have meaningful relationships with and develop solid Personas that you write to.
• Empathize with your Personas about their pain and opportunities in their business life.
• Develop content that is sincere in its intent to help them out.
• Make your content easy for your Personas to find by:
  • wrapping it around less competitive keywords or in the form of answering a likely question and
  • using the HubSpot page optimization tool to give Google clues as to what you think is important about the content.

Are you still paying an expensive SEO firm to charge you every month and deliver back fuzzy meaningless metrics?  

2012 has called and they want their marketing strategy back.

If you follow this playbook, and generate enough content, your online search visibility will typically increase 4X over 6 – 12 mos and 10X over a couple of years.

And the best thing is, you can do this yourself! We can show you how, but you need to empower yourself and take the first step in your SEO recovery program. Fill out the form below and one of our helpful counselors will reach right back and walk you through this crisis one step at a time.