How Strong SEO Strategies Will Boost Your Lead conversion

Whether you work at an agency or you’re managing a marketing budget in-house, you’ve probably had the classic debate before: do you focus on organic lead cultivation through SEO or try to generate as many leads as possible with aggressive tactics right now? 

I won’t pretend to be impartial: When you have the choice, favoring SEO is almost always the better investment. This isn’t an unfounded hunch, either: in our client programs here at TopRank Marketing, organic traffic consistently converts at a higher rate than overall traffic across a range of conversion types. 

Marketers tend to argue that SEO is important because it’s essential for “long term” growth. The time’s come to reframe that argument: SEO is essential because it unlocks the true potential of a brand’s lead conversion. 

Here are the big ways SEO unlocks that potential, with real-world examples from TopRank’s case studies.

Brand awareness generates more leads than demand generation over time

When the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) noticed that brand marketing was “losing the budget war” to lead generation a number of years ago, they conducted a large scale study to find out why. 

At first, this study confirmed the conventional wisdom that led to marketers emphasizing lead gen over brand marketing in their budgets. Direct response efforts yield much faster results that translate to a quick spike in leads. Marketers can point to these short-term results as a measurable win. 

As they looked at the results, however, the IPA noticed something else: brand marketing driven by SEO took longer to ramp up than lead gen, but while these lead gen tactics fizzled out quickly, the brand marketing’s effectiveness kept rising.

Ultimately, the IPA study showed that SEO-based brand marketing initiatives reliably generated more leads for the same share of budget than their direct response counterparts. On average, your money goes further when you use it on brand marketing than when you spend on lead gen.

This conclusion led the IPA to formulate the famous “60-40” rule, which states that the optimal balance of brand and demand is 60% branding and 40% direct response. Your lead gen efforts guide your customers through your sales funnel to conversion, but your SEO brand marketing is what brings them into that funnel in the first place. 

As this study proves, when you emphasize brand marketing, you simply put your brand in front of more leads overall than you would with lead gen alone. And if you want to maximize your lead gen potential, SEO is a clear necessity. 

Intent-driven SEO provides the right kind of visibility for lead gen

Impressive as these numbers may be, the best argument for the importance of SEO has more to do with quality than quantity. In today’s SEO, search volume isn’t the end-all, be-all it once was. When determining which keywords to pursue now, SEO experts carefully consider a combination of search volume, keyword difficulty, and — most importantly — search intent. 

Search intent attempts to understand why a search engine user types in the keyword they’re looking for. Understanding this intent is the best way to provide best answer content to these users. As search engines become more intelligent, intent is increasingly the best way to rank highly in Search Engine Result Pages. But understanding and capturing search intent is also one of the most important things you can do to generate leads. 

Your ideal leads have specific intent whenever they use a search engine. If you can understand this intent and provide users with the information they’re looking for, the quality of traffic to your site will rise. The people who find you via organic search will be looking for what you have to offer. Through your best-answer content, get to know your brand, start to associate you with your area of expertise, and then look to you for help if and when they become leads. 

The right intent-focused SEO doesn’t just raise your brand visibility; it brings you the right visibility to generate leads. And, as the IPA proved, it continues to do so effectively over time.

An example of how this works: one of TopRank’s clients, a public accounting firm, came to us for help raising their brand visibility. Instead of focusing on general visibility, we developed a highly-focused SEO strategy to zero in on the relatively low-volume but high intent keywords the firm’s highly-educated, relatively technical audience would be looking for. 

This strategy helped the client rank for over 55 new keywords in SERP positions 1-3 and earn a 96% year-over-year gain in new keywords in top search positions. Even more crucially, however, the keywords we were able to rank for drive the right kind of audience to the firm’s site permanently. The client has become visible to the right people for the right reasons, and the leads follow.

Strong SEO can multiply the effect of all other lead gen initiatives

As the examples above show, SEO strategies aren’t just for raising brand awareness. Instead, it’s more accurate to think of them as the central hub of any digital marketing strategy. 

After all, everything you do — from your long-term brand raising efforts and content marketing to your SEM lead generation — feeds back to your site. The more effective you can make this hub, the more all your other efforts will benefit as a result.

When a luxury home décor retailer approached TopRank Marketing, they were looking for a way to stand out against much larger national brands and e-commerce juggernauts in their competitive category. To do that, they would need to carefully manage a long, multi-touchpoint customer journey.

To help them achieve their goal, TopRank incorporated every tool in our tactical mix into an integrated, multifaceted strategy with SEO at the heart. 

Through competitive auditing and analysis, our SEO experts identified high-intent keywords our client’s audience was searching but their competitors weren’t winning. We pivoted the client’s SEO and content strategies to focus on these opportunities, then used a combination of lead-generating influencer marketing, social media marketing, and video and content affiliate marketing to drive leads back to the newly SEO-optimized pages.

The result of this strategy was a 11.2% month-over-month increase in revenue, driven by +28.6% MoM gains in organic traffic, +30.9% gains in total website sessions, and a +55% return on ad spend. 

By starting with SEO strategy, TopRank was able to provide the backbone that the rest of the initiatives needed. First, organic SEO, focused on intent, captured the attention of the right audience. Then, we retargeted this audience with social media and influencer lead generation advertising. Finally, these ads led the audience back to search engines – and back to the high-intent pages we optimized to give them what they wanted. 

It’s time to stop thinking of SEO and lead conversion as two separate objectives to be pursued in isolation: they are both a part of the same buyer’s journey. If you want your marketing to convert leads as effectively as possible, building a strong SEO strategy should be one of your top priorities.

For more help using SEO to drive the measurable results you need, check out our Top SEO Strategies for Lead Generation.

The post How Strong SEO Strategies Will Boost Your Lead conversion appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

Should You Develop a Microsite for SEO? Learn Why and How

If you’re searching for Nike shoes, you might go to Nike.com and browse. But what if you want to know more about Nike as a company? Say you wanted to research their sustainability commitments and practices before you buy your new kicks. In that case, you can visit nike.com/sustainability and find a whole mini-website dedicated to everything Nike and eco-friendly.

Nike’s sustainability hub is a great example of a microsite. It helps a particular audience explore a single topic, with depth and breadth of coverage. It’s easier for people to find the information they’re looking for and explore related topics, too.

Microsites can be a powerful way for B2B brands to reach specific audiences with specific messages. Here’s what you need to know about microsites for SEO.

Developing a microsite SEO strategy

Microsites have a bad reputation in some SEO circles, and it’s true the technique can come off as spammy or convoluted if it’s not done properly. But the right microsite strategy helps everyone:

• Improves the user experience
• Helps people find information easily
• Highlights topics important to your brand
• Helps your audience self-select
• Builds your domain’s authority around a specific area

But let’s start with the basics:

What is a microsite?

A microsite is a small standalone website with a specific focus on a topic, product, campaign, sub-brand or event. They usually have their own subdomain or even a unique url, such as business.att.com or HubSpot’s Website Grader at website.grader.com.

Advantages of microsites for B2B

There are a few key ways that a microsite can improve your site SEO and your customers’ experience:

1. Targeted content. Microsites are highly focused, which helps attract niche audiences and can boost rankings for long-tail keywords.
2. Link building. When microsites are crosslinked with the main website, it helps the SEO of both sites.
3. Enhanced user experience. Microsites encourage users to explore the entire collection of pages, which helps boost time on page, lower bounce rates, and signal to search engines that the content is valuable.
4. Brand authority. Specialized microsites can establish a brand’s authority on a particular topic, with in-depth content that boosts credibility.

Microsites in action: A case study

A TopRank Marketing client has a solution with two distinct audiences: 

1. Individual end users, who might purchase a monthly subscription (B2C)
2. HR leaders, who would purchase a business licenses for their teams (B2B)

It’s easy to see how these two audiences need dramatically different messaging. Trying to reach both with one site was underserving the B2B audience and failing to generate traction.

To better reach the B2B audience, we helped this client develop a microsite focused on the benefits of the solution for teams. We created content aimed at helping this audience, and at  demonstrating the solution’s value.

Ultimately, the microsite helped target the B2B audience more effectively. The site is now ranking in the top 10 for dozens of keywords with B2B-specific intent — a feat that would have been almost impossible without the microsite.

When to create a microsite

Here are a few simple guidelines to help determine whether your audience/message would be best served with a microsite or simply a page on your main site.

1. You’re launching a new product or campaign. If your latest launch has its own messaging, branding, goals or unique audience, it could benefit from a microsite.
2. You’re targeting a new audience. As with the B2C/B2B example, a new audience for your brand could use a clean-slate introduction.
3. You’re testing a new idea or product. Microsites are a good way to soft launch a new service without cluttering the main site.
4. You’re telling a new brand story. As with Nike’s sustainability site, microsites help tell brand stories beyond the products and services you offer.
5. You want to optimize for a subset of keywords. If you have your eye on a juicy collection of long-tail keywords, a microsite can help you rank for them.
6. You have a complex navigation structure on your main site. Convoluted navigation is a bad user experience that can hurt your ranking potential. Microsites are an effective way to get organized.

Developing a microsite SEO strategy

The process for developing a microsite is similar to strategically creating content for your main site, with a few key differences. Follow these steps:

1. Determine your objectives. Set specific goals for the microsite to accomplish.
2. Analyze your audience. Make sure it’s unique enough to warrant a microsite, and explore content and keywords related to this particular audience.
3. Develop your content strategy. Research your keywords as they relate to your audience and refine your topics and subtopics.
4. Create content. Develop your content with an eye toward specificity, depth of coverage and value for the intended audience.
5. Optimize for SEO. Meta descriptions, tags, headers and SCHEMA can all help your content get seen.
6. Publish and promote. Use paid and organic social, influencer activation, and paid search to help launch the site.
7. Measure and optimize. Keep tabs on your site’s performance and adjust as needed.

Microsite challenges to watch out for

As useful as microsites can be, there are a few challenges you’ll need to meet:

1. Keeping the site up to date. It can be challenging to manage multiple microsites. Make sure you have the resources to support what you’re creating.
2. Brand consistency. A microsite should have its own look and feel, but still be recognizable as part of your brand.
3. Duplicate content. It’s important to not cannibalize your main site for microsite traffic. Make sure all microsite content is original and unique.

A microsite with macro impact

When they’re strategically created, deployed and supported, microsites can be a great way to reach a specific audience or promote a new product, service or campaign. 

A microsite makes it easier to target a specific subset of keywords. This helps the site reach a more relevant audience, which helps search engine algorithms see the value of your content. 

Need help building your own microsite SEO strategy? Our SEO team is on the case.

 

The post Should You Develop a Microsite for SEO? Learn Why and How appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

TopRank Marketing and Sprinklr Win a Prestigious 2024 Content Marketing Award

New York, NY USA — The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) just announced TopRank Marketing and Sprinklr won a 2024 Content Marketing Award for “Across the Socialverse 2023: B2B Social Influence.” The Content Marketing Awards, presented each year by CMI, is the largest and longest-running international content marketing awards program in the world for content creation, distribution, and innovation.

The Content Marketing Awards recognize the best content marketing projects, agencies, and marketers in the industry each year. This year’s panel of all-star judges reviewed nearly 1,000 entries to determine the best of the best in content marketing excellence.

The 60 categories recognize all aspects of content marketing, including the best in strategy, automation, research, social media, video, editorial, illustration, design and much more, across many different industries from healthcare to manufacturing, from B2B to B2C. 

“It’s been another great year of content marketing excellence,” shares Stephanie Stahl, managing director, Content Marketing Institute. “The winning marketers and brands prove that content — strategic, compelling, informational, and inspiring content — is at the heart of any great marketing program. These winners showcase some of the most innovative and successful content and experiences in the marketing industry. We are honored to award their hard work and share their amazing projects with our content marketing community.”

The Socialverse campaign, developed by TopRankMarketing and Sprinklr, took shape as a documentary-style masterclass hosted by social media thought leaders, helping Sprinklr expand to new audiences and build resonant awareness around their powerful new AI-integrated Self Serve Plan offering. 

“It’s an especially big honor to be recognized among a field of finalists in this category that featured several very impressive and high-scale B2C influencer campaigns,” says TopRank Marketing CEO Donna Robinson. “This really is a sign of how far B2B influencer marketing has come, and where it’s going.”

As winners of Best Use of Influencer Marketing, TopRank Marketing – Sprinklr are now in consideration for Project of the Year. Finalists and winners for that category — along with Branded Campaigns of the Year, Agencies of the Year, and Content Marketers of the Year — will be announced in September and winners will be celebrated at Content Marketing World, October 21-23 in San Diego, California. 

About TopRank Marketing

Founded more than 20 years ago, Minnesota-based agency TopRank Marketing has long been a leading force in the B2B influencer marketing practice, producing the annual B2B Influencer Marketing Report and partnering with big brands around the globe to plan and execute winning strategies.

About Content Marketing Institute

Content Marketing Institute (CMI) exists to do one thing: advance the practice of content marketing through online education and in-person and digital events. We create and curate content experiences that teach marketers and creators from enterprise brands, small businesses, and agencies how to attract and retain customers through compelling, multichannel storytelling. Global brands turn to CMI for strategic consultation, training, and research. Organizations from around the world send teams to Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing-focused event, the Marketing Analytics & Data Science (MADS) conference and CMI virtual events, including ContentTECH Summit. Our community of 215,000+ content marketers shares camaraderie and conversation. CMI is organized by Informa Connect. To learn more, visit www.contentmarketinginstitute.com.

The post TopRank Marketing and Sprinklr Win a Prestigious 2024 Content Marketing Award appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

Researching Keywords for Your SEO Strategy, Step by Step

Successfully ranking for the keywords you’re targeting won’t make much of an impact on your business if those keywords are not relevant to your audience and their buying journey. In fact, many companies end up wasting a lot of time and resources in this pursuit. That’s why a smart, thoughtful and data-driven keyword strategy is paramount to an effective SEO strategy.

Fortunately, you have everything you need to start conducting keyword research and setting your strategic direction now.

How to research keywords for your B2B SEO strategy

By following this step-by-step process, you can start figuring out what your audience wants to find, how they’re looking for it, and how you show up for them in the search results.

Check your current rankings

Before you start researching keywords, it’s always wise to run an SEO audit of your current rankings as step one. This can provide a baseline of what your website is showing up, which can help you understand where search engines view your domain as authoritative. 

Checking your website’s SEO rankings is fairly straightforward, and there is a wide variety of both free and paid online tools you can use to do it. 

Conduct a competitive analysis

An SEO competitor analysis is a review of how your competitors are showing up in search. This concerns not only business competitors (i.e. companies competing for your customers) but also SERP competitors (i.e. companies competing for your target keywords), which are not always the same. 

This process can tell you a lot about how competitors are approaching their keyword strategies – and how you can differentiate yours or overtake key rankings.

Look for opportunities using a gap analysis

As you’re analyzing competitors, keep an eye out for any opportunities they’ve missed – or “gaps” in their SEO footprint. These include topics that they aren’t showing up for, but that customers in your solution category are searching for.

An SEO gap analysis can be a great place to start your search, surfacing keywords your competition may have overlooked entirely. Many online SEO tools and expert partners can help you quickly surface gaps in your competition’s keyword strategy. At TopRank, we develop keyword glossaries that list competitor rankings for each keyword alongside your own rankings to easily see where you can fill in the blanks for your audience and build share of search.

Bonus: Create a topical map 

In modern SEO, it’s very important to demonstrate topical authority by covering priority subjects in depth and at length. You want search engines like Google to recognize your domain’s expertise and focus on a topical area by covering as many facets of it as possible, creating and cross-linking content for the core keyword as well as relevant longtail offshoots and variations. (This is often referred to as a hub-and-spoke model.)

A topical map can be a fantastic tool for this purpose, helping you clearly map out different keywords that are tied together by user intent. Our agency builds topical maps for clients as part of our SEO service offerings and they are amazingly useful for content planning.

Prioritize relevance and intent over volume

When it comes to finding keywords worth pursuing, you should always consider relevance and intent more important than volume — especially in B2B marketing. As any savvy practitioner knows, bringing a dozen of the right people to your site is much more valuable than 100 of the wrong people.

Keywords with relatively low monthly search volume can be valuable if the people looking for them have the right relevance and intent. As you search for SEO keywords, try to determine how the most educated, high-intent users are searching for products and services like yours. Chances are, you’ll determine that they’re using lower volume search terms to try to hone in on what they’re looking for more specifically. 

The most effective SEO strategies focus on a combination of high, medium, and low volume keywords of high relevance and match their content to intent accordingly, filtering users from higher-volume keywords to more specific product-related pages.

Balance volume and achievability 

Along with the average search volume that a keyword drives, SEO tools will also highlight the keyword difficulty. This is often expressed as a percentage, with 0% being the easiest and 100% being the hardest. Keyword difficulty is essentially a measure of how firmly entrenched the current top results are in the SERP for a given keyword. As keyword difficulty increases, you’ll need better content and more referring domains to compete with other results.

Keywords with high volume and low difficulty are often the “low-hanging fruit” worth prioritizing, but chances are you won’t find enough of those keywords to build out your full strategy. 

After that, you’ll have to pick and choose your battles by evaluating what’s valuable vs. what’s achievable. Striking the right balance will mean targeting a healthy combination of high-intent, low volume keywords with low or reasonable difficulty and higher volume keywords with achievable difficulty. 

Report, rinse, repeat

Effective SEO strategy is never “finished.” As you pursue the keywords you’ve surfaced, report on your ranking progress on a regular basis. Evaluate how effective your approach is to optimize your strategy over time, and continuously look for new keywords you can start targeting to round out your strategy and build your domain authority. 

SEO keyword strategy template

Consult the following checklist for each keyword you’re considering adding to your strategy. The more boxes you can check off for the keyword in question, the better an opportunity it represents. 

• Ranking for this keyword would improve your brand’s visibility and/or drive the right audience traffic to your site
• This keyword is directly relevant to your brand’s topical pillars
• When people search for this keyword, they are looking for information you have the expertise and authority to provide
• Users who search for this keyword are at some stage of your marketing funnel
• Your direct competitors are not ranking in the top 10 positions for this keyword OR you feel confident that your content could outrank theirs
• This keyword has enough monthly search volume OR the right search intent to drive quality traffic to your site
• This keyword has low enough keyword difficulty that a site with your level of authority could rank for it 
• You already have or could create compelling content that provides what users are looking for when they search this keyword

In all likelihood, most of the keywords you find will not check each of these boxes. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not worth pursuing. Use this SEO keyword strategy template to inform your larger SEO strategy and help you determine which keywords to prioritize first, not as the sole arbiter of whether pursuing a keyword could be useful.

Despite all the advanced tools and resources you have to help you, researching keywords for an SEO strategy remains as much art as science. Finding the right keywords to pursue is as much about understanding your audience and your industry as it is practicing good SEO — which is exactly why modern SEO advice like this is all about helping you do both.

For more help finding and pursuing the right keywords, check out our full guide on Why You Need a Keyword Strategy and How to Create One. 

 

The post Researching Keywords for Your SEO Strategy, Step by Step appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

Best B2B Marketing Content for Each Funnel Stage

B2B content marketing is no longer restricted to white papers and case studies. It can’t be. B2B buyers — otherwise known as humans like the rest of us — demand more variety, more creativity, and more relevance than the old reliable formats can offer.

Your buyers are hungry for great content. Don’t serve them white-bread-and-mayo sandwiches. Create a loaded buffet of exciting, relevant, helpful content for their entire journey.

Here are the best content types for each stage of the marketing funnel.

Awareness stage: Appetizers

In the first stage, the buyer might not realize they’re even on a journey. You can’t jump right into selling. You have to whet their appetite before they attend your content feast.

Stick with eye-catching, creative but practical content at this stage, using formats like:

• Infographics with meaningful statistics
• Videos that highlight your brand’s values & expertise
• Thought leadership blogs and podcasts
• Social media posts building and engaging with a community

Remember, this stage is about possibility. You want to show people there’s a better way of doing something, introduce your brand as an empathetic expert, and make them hungry to learn more.

Consideration stage: Salad and garlic bread

Now your buyer knows that they have a solvable problem. Thanks to your excellent thought leadership appetizers, they also know that your brand is a source of valuable experience and advice. 

Now you can offer them some fresh textures and flavors to keep them engaged and get them ready for the main course.

Keep up your drumbeat of useful, practical content, but you can stir in a few more types:

• Ebooks that showcase original research and influencer insights

• Interactive content to provide novelty, creativity and value

• Webinars that aim to help buyers be better at their jobs
• Customer stories that focus on customer success, not just your brand’s role in it

This stage is about proof — proof that your brand knows its stuff, is here to help, and has helped others in the past.

Decision stage: Main course

Your buyer is seated at your table with their napkin tucked into their collar, ready for an entree. Now is the time to bring your solution to the forefront. At this stage, you can be overt about what makes your company the best one to solve this particular problem. 

Make your lower funnel content thrilling and filling with these content types:

• Case studies that show how, specifically, your solution helped solve your clients’ problems (these can be in article, eBook, blog or video format)

• Demo videos that make it clear how your solution works

• Social proof like a compilation of customer reviews or a roundup of social media posts from satisfied customers
• One-sheets that highlight features and pricing in an easy-to-share format

This stage is all about persuasion — equipping your audience with enough information to make a purchase decision.

Retention stage: dessert

Any B2B marketer worth the title knows that marketing doesn’t stop with a sale. Now it’s time to make sure your buyer is thoroughly satisfied and ready to recommend your brand to others. That means sprinkling in a little sweetness, some memorable experiences to leave a good taste in their mouth.

Offer up a decadent dessert with these content types:

• Demos & webinars that aim to help existing customers get the most out of your solution

• Community-building on social media and forums, to help customers get to know each other and become brand advocates
• Customer stories that highlight how customers in their industry have used your solution, and which upgrades are the most useful

This stage is about passion. You want customers to feel passionate about your brand, full of positive experiences, and ready to write that 5-star review.

Create a culinary content experience

In the introduction, I referred to full-funnel content as a “buffet.” That word is important because it reminds us that a customer journey is:

1. Self-directed
2. Non-linear
3. Unpredictably paced

If your potential buyer wants to load up on salad and breadsticks and then go straight to paying the check and having dessert, your content buffet will accommodate them. Full-funnel, varied content is a content growth strategy you can rely on.

Ready to upgrade your content from fast food to haute cuisine? We’re here to help.

The post Best B2B Marketing Content for Each Funnel Stage appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

How to Create Unique Content for Better SEO

Why does unique content matter?

Consider Janis Joplin.

On a technical level, Janis’ voice isn’t great. Her pitch is wobbly; her tone is nasal and gritty; her range is limited. There are hundreds of people waiting tables right now who can sing circles around her. Yet Janis is an enduring icon—because her voice is unique, not in spite of it. The moment she starts wailing, you would never mistake her for anybody else. She’s not a cookie-cutter karaoke star. She’s a bona fide original.

Uniqueness makes you stand out. That’s doubly true in the B2B content marketing world. It’s triply true now that AI-generated content is flooding search results with optimized but hollow content-by-volume.

Your brand’s unique personality, as expressed by your content team, can cut through the nonsense and earn attention. 

Here’s what makes content unique, how uniqueness helps SEO, and what you can do to get it. 

Three Ways Content Must Be Unique for SEO

We all know that content should be original, empathetic and valuable. These attributes are the price of entry—they’re the minimum. Unique content needs to also be:

Unique from AI-generated content

I had a moment of truth a few days ago. I had written an article based on a Chat-GPT outline and wanted to make sure I didn’t incorporate too much AI-ness. So I used an AI detector. 

The detector flagged my 100% original text as AI generated. 

In other words, I was writing like a bot. I quickly rewrote the paragraphs in question to make sure they conveyed the human behind the text. 

And now I’ve demonstrated what makes non-AI content unique: A human point of view. The previous couple of paragraphs are about something I experienced. AI doesn’t do that—it has no lived experience to draw from.

Keep your content unique from AI by:

• Bringing a singular personal perspective
• Using metaphor and analogy
• Practicing empathy for your audience
• Surfacing new ideas by drawing on past experience

AI can’t do any of these things reliably or well. Make sure your content won’t make anyone wonder if it was written by robots.

Unique from other brands’ content

If your content was stolen and published on a competitor’s site without your branding, would anyone be able to tell? Would your brand’s experience, insight, and personality shine through?

There are a few ways to make sure your content couldn’t come from anyone else, including your competitors: 

• Tell unique brand stories. Talk about your customers, your years of service, your employees. Weave these brand stories into every piece of content.

• Take strong stances on industry issues. Be opinionated and even passionate about the problems facing your industry and your proposed solutions.

• Let personality shine through. The stiff, corporate, disembodied “B2B voice” is a thing of the past. Write as a person, for people.

Unique from your previous content

Most B2B brands have been pushing out content for years, if not decades. That means the very real danger of ‘too much of a good thing.’ If you have multiple pieces of content angling for each keyword you’re targeting, your site’s SEO potential is getting diluted.

For example, you might have a dozen similar thought leadership posts about sustainability. Each post is competing with content from other businesses, but each one is also competing against your other content. It’s hard for any one of your posts to rise in the search results against that much competition.

To avoid competing with your own content, it’s worth performing a thorough content audit to:

• Identify thin or repetitive content
• Determine which content can be refreshed and which should be redirected
• Identify opportunities for creating new content

Quality is the new quantity

The gold rush for quantity content is over. It’s time for us B2B content marketers to get back to our roots: Creating high-quality, empathetic, meaningful content that inspires and moves people. Let’s aim to be Janis Joplin: Memorable, genuine, even rough around the edges, and completely unforgettable.

Ready to make your brand stand out from the crowd? We can help.

The post How to Create Unique Content for Better SEO appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

Which Factors Matter Most for Winning SEO Rankings?

The inner workings of the Google search algorithm have long been considered one of the great mysteries in digital marketing. 

Specific ranking factors, and how they are weighted, can be difficult to nail down due to the complexity, dynamism and sheer volume of attributes evaluated by search engines. Not to mention, Google and other companies tend to keep proprietary details close to the vest.

However, based on information that has been shared publicly, as well as some eye-opening document leaks, search marketers have been able to piece together a fairly complete and up-to-date picture of SEO ranking factors.

At TopRank Marketing, we make it our business to maintain a clear understanding of what matters most when it comes to ranking in SEO, and which aspects should be prioritized by brands aiming to win for competitive terms. Now, we’re making it your business as well.

SEO ranking factors according to Google

In their official resource center, Google has a page explaining how results are automatically generated, dividing the process of fetching results into five facets:

1. Meaning: Google establishes the intent behind your query by leveraging language models that match your search terms to useful content.
2. Relevance: Content is analyzed to assess whether it contains information that might be relevant to what the user is looking for.
3. Quality: The engine prioritizes pages that seem most helpful, by identifying signals that help determine which content demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
4. Usability: As a secondary threshold, content that people will find more accessible – e.g. mobile responsiveness and fast page loads – can see a boost. 
5. Context: Results are personalized for relevance based on information such as user location, past search history, and search settings.   

The screenshot above, via Google, illustrates how the search engine’s model recognizes and contextualizes intent behind various queries. Per the company, “This system took over five years to develop and significantly improves results in over 30% of searches across languages.”

Another important note from Google: “If you search for trending keywords, our systems understand that up-to-date information might be more useful than older pages. This means that when you’re searching for sports scores, company earnings or anything related that’s especially new, you’ll see the latest information.” We’ve seen this play out time and time again with client programs: pages that focus on fast-changing topics can lose rankings in a hurry when not updated regularly.

A deeper third-party look at SEO ranking factors

The above guidelines from Google are quite useful in creating content that’s built to rank. Understanding the search intent behind a keyword, and creating something of relevance and high quality to meet it, will be the primary path to gaining organic visibility. That’s no secret, although it’s easier said than done.

Within this guiding directive, there are plenty of smaller steps you can take to ensure content is optimized for search. Brian Dean of Backlinko compiled an exhaustive list of more than 200 ranking signals on Google, ranging from proven fixtures to “SEO nerd speculation.”

There are too many inclusions to cover here, and we recommend reviewing the full rundown, but here are the different categories of SEO ranking factors, and what they entail.

Domain factors

This includes things like the age, history and perceived legitimacy of your domain.

Page-level factors

These concern the composition, structure and performance of the web page itself. Here you’ll want to account for everything from using keywords in titles and headers to technical factors like page load speed.

Site-level factors

Google analyzes the broader website that a page belongs to when evaluating the content itself. A page can benefit or be penalized by the quality of the site’s reputation, architecture and usability. It can also receive a boost from strong E-E-A-T signals.

Backlink factors

An important part of your link-building strategy, backlinks are links from one website to another that can serve as endorsements for search visibility. Search algorithms consider not only the number of backlinks a page receives, but also the quality and diversity of those backlinks, and the authority of the sources.

User interaction

While robotic algorithms do plenty of behind-the-scenes work to organize search results, humans play a big role in influencing how the results are arranged, because Google leans strongly on user-driven signals such as organic click-through rate, dwell time, direct visits and beyond.

Special Google algorithm rules

Over the years, Google has rolled out a number of algorithm changes, often with specific purposes and implications. This includes, for example, highlighting featured snippets and applying higher quality standards to “YMYL” (Your Money Your Life) keywords.

Brand signals

Don’t underestimate the extent to which your brand’s online footprint can come into play as an SEO ranking factor. Having active company accounts on social media platforms like Facebook, X/Twitter and LinkedIn is believed to boost SEO visibility. Additionally, having your brand’s name searched frequently in combination with the keywords you want to own can be hugely advantageous.

On-site Webspam factors

Webspam, also known as “spamdexing,” refers to content that is designed to manipulate search rankings in ways that don’t serve the user. Google will punish pages and sites that it views as having low-quality content (e.g. AI-generated content farms), keyword-stuffing, hidden affiliate links, meta tag spamming and more.

Off-site Webspam factors

There are some external spam-focused factors you should also avoid being associated with. This often relates to inbound link patterns that Google views as shady (unnatural influx, low-quality sources, selling backlinks, etc.). 

Most important SEO ranking factors

Backlinko views these eight individual factors as the top ones to prioritize when creating or refreshing content, and they mostly line up with our agency’s experience. But remember, before you get to optimizing around these factors, it’s important to be sure you’re focusing on the right keywords to begin with.

1. Quality Content
2. Backlinks
3. Technical SEO
4. Keyword Optimization
5. User Experience (UX)
6. Schema Markup
7. Social Signals
8. Brand Signals

What to know about the Google ranking factors leak

It was big news within the SEO community when, in May of 2024, a massive internal Google document leak on GitHub provided unprecedented transparency into how Google’s ranking algorithm potentially operates. Many of the leaked insights served to reinforce the importance of search intent, uniqueness, and freshness of content, but there were also some surprises.

Among the big-picture takeaways from SEO legend Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro, was that brand signals – despite ranking eighth on the above list – matter a lot more than previously thought. 

“If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic,” said Fishkin, “it would be: ‘Build a notable, popular, well-recognized brand in your space, outside of Google search.’”

• Read more on our blog: How Content Marketing Propels B2B Brand Growth Today

How does AI affect search rankings?

It’s impossible to fully cover any search-related topic without discussing the role of AI. As you’re likely aware, Google has rolled out a generative search tool which provides AI-powered snapshots at the top of many results pages. This will have an effect on the searcher’s experience and the overall clicks to organic results. 

In terms of ranking factors, the most important thing to know: Google is continually growing more sophisticated in detecting and penalizing AI-generated content, as well as spammy tactics supported by the technology. 

While AI can be extremely powerful and beneficial for enhancing your marketing, brands should be very careful to avoid using it in ways that don’t ultimately lead to serving their audience unique, helpful, human content. 

Push your top content to the top of the search rankings

Developing content that ranks near the top of a search engine results page (SERP) is challenging, but crucial to driving organic traffic for key terms. Research has found that pages appearing in the #1 position generate double the click-through rate of position #2, and nearly 4x the CTR for position #3. Results at the bottom of page one (#10) drive just a 1.6% CTR on average compared to 39.8% for the top spot.

Aiming for that top rank requires a strategic approach, a commitment to developing strong authority in your domain, and a clear understanding of SEO ranking factors. 

Ready to win in the SERP? Learn more about building a powerful SEO strategy, or explore TopRank Marketing’s industry-leading SEO services.

The post Which Factors Matter Most for Winning SEO Rankings? appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.