If our B2B SEO clients had unlimited budgets we’d recommend that they hire a full time content writing team that could produce a never ending stream of blog posts, press releases, white papers, case studies, videos, podcasts, etc.
After all, content is what really makes an SEO campaign work today. It’s what gets optimized to appear within organic search, gets shared in social media to generate traffic and social signals, and is linked to naturally within content that appears on other sites boosting the trust and authority of the author and the website that the author represents.
The businesses that are producing quality content on a regular basis have the best chance of having a successful SEO campaign and generating visibility across the web. Unfortunately, unlimited budgets don’t exist and many small to medium sized B2B organizations just don’t have the resources to be creating mass quantities of content. They need to pick and choose the best way to spend the time that they do have.
With a limited amount of time and or resources to dedicate to content marketing, our recommendation is that the focus should always be on the company blog housed on the company website.
What puts blog posts on the company blog housed on the company website at the top of our list from an SEO perspective is that any traffic that it generates, either from organic search or from links to the post that are located elsewhere on the web is that the traffic is going directly to your site. Once a visitor lands on a blog post on the site, they are only one click away from visiting another page on your site which could turn into another click, and another as they could start browsing the site to learn more about the products and services that you offer.
If you are more actively publishing content on other sites, it takes one additional click to get over to the company website. Publishing content on other sites is great for link building, but tougher to get the click through to the website. If the blog post is already on the company blog, the visitor is already where you want them to be.
You may wonder, “There are plenty of other types of content that we can share on our site- why are blog posts the best option?” Other types of content may be white papers, videos, case studies, etc. Don’t get us wrong, these are all valuable pieces of content. However, we find that many B2Bs will gate this type of more in depth content behind a lead form.
A visitor needs to provide contact information in order to read the white paper. This is great for generating leads, but not so good for SEO. Why? Well, the search engine spiders can’t see any content that is gated like this. And when it comes to videos, the spiders can’t “see” any of it. They can only see text content, so there isn’t as much opportunity when the only content that they can see is the description and title of the video.
Any and all online content is valuable and serves a purpose. However, if your time is limited or you only have a finite budget to allocate towards content creation, we’d recommend focusing on the business blog.
