Search Engine Optimization

One way you should encourage more traffic is through search engine optimization. However, even though I am presenting this as the first of our audience-building approaches, it is by no means the easiest. In fact, as digital marketing has grown in popularity it may well now be the hardest.

There are, though, different levels on which you can attack SEO. Let’s start with the most basic: keyword research and optimization. The first step in any SEO work will be to establish the keywords and keyword phrases that your target audience will be using to search for solutions like those you offer. Once you have them, you’ll need to optimize the content on your site to use them appropriately.

There are a great many tools available for doing keyword research. First on any list will be your ears. Listen to the language your prospects and customers use when you are talking to them about the issues they are facing, the costs to them for not addressing the root cause, and the outcomes and improvements they expect once the solution is implemented.

Competitive research can help, too. Doing a search for the various keywords you want to rank well for will point you to the websites of competitors who are at the top of their SEO game. You can also reverse engineer competitors’ sites to see what keywords they are ranking for.

These tasks—and many more—can all be accomplished with tools built specifically for these purposes. Some are free, and some require subscriptions. Which tool is best for you will depend on your goals, level of knowledge, and budget.

Among those you might consider are MOZ, SEMRush, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, KeywordATool.io, Ubersuggest, and many others.

Your goal will typically be to find the keywords that have the best combination of high traffic and low competition. As we’ll discuss below, this will keep your costs down when you’re doing PPC advertising. For SEO, it will increase your chances of success since it can be very hard to unseat the incumbent leaders for particularly competitive researchers.

This is one of the reasons you will hear people talk about long-tail keywords being particularly important. For example, if you sell insurance, you may be tempted to rank for the keyword, “insurance.” After all, there are about 550,000 monthly searches for “insurance” according to my last search. Of course, if you search for “insurance” you’ll see that there are about 2,270,000,000 results, most of which would love to be at the top of that search engine results page.

The zero-sum nature of the search game means your chances of getting to the top of the heap—or even just onto the first page—for a search this broad are fleetingly small. Enter the long-tail keyword.

(You will hear people use the term long-tail keyword interchangeably with the term “keyword phrase.” They are not necessarily the same. A keyword phrase is any keyword of two or more words. For example, “insurance agent” or “insurance agent near me.”)

Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases, but they go beyond that. If you think in marketing terms, long-tail keywords are slicing a large audience into more manageable chunks. Doing so allows you to target their interests more tightly.

So while you might be very attracted to the idea of reaching 550,000 new customers every month, in reality not all of those 550,000 searchers are likely to actually be prospects for you. There’s a pretty good chance that they may be looking for a type of insurance that you don’t sell. Homeowners insurance if you only sell health insurance. Health insurance in Alaska when you only work in the Southeast. And so on.

There will undoubtedly be far fewer than 550,000 months searches for so specific a term. In fact, there are fewer than 500 searches for this term each month. If you sell small business workers comp policies in New York, though, these are exactly the people you want to reach. And you won’t be wasting time fielding phone calls from Alaskans looking for health insurance.

You also won’t be competing with as wide a field of suitors hoping to find those same buyers.

To reach them through the search engines, you will need to build pages that are about that long-tail topic specifically. The search engines’ goal is revenue for themselves, of course. The lifeblood that allows them to deliver it is high-quality, relevant search results. So when someone searches on a long-tail keyword, the search engines will return pages that are about that topic and only that topic.

Our discussion in the next chapter about landing pages will dive into this in a bit more detail from a slightly different angle.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Google Ads is the first thing most people think of when they think of PPC advertising, but PPC takes on many different forms. Most social media platforms include some kind of advertising, including LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook, and there is also display advertising that allows you to reach app users and visitors to websites other than your own.

Mastering any of these requires a significant investment of time. You can DIY it, but this typically only makes sense for businesses where the net result of a successful PPC ad is a direct sale.

This allows you to devote your time to implementing and tweaking an ad campaign strategy since that work is contributing to your bottom line in and of itself.

If, on the other hand, a successful conversion for your business is getting a new prospect into your funnel, getting them to move through the funnel, or getting them to a point where they are interested and willing to talk to you directly about your services, chances are you’ll want to bring in a PPC specialist.

Because of the rapid change of pace in the PPC world, it is not possible to perform well unless you are doing PPC advertising all day every day.

For service-based B2B businesses, that means bringing in an expert. There is no shortage of “experts” out there—run as fast and as far as you can from anyone promising to deliver you a too-good-to-be-true number of leads every month for “just $399.” (The same holds true for SEO practitioners promising to get you to the top of the search results page for similarly low prices.)

PPC advertising (and SEO) takes a lot of hard work, a willingness to experiment, and an attention to detail to allow you to track what parameters you might want to change.

You also have to be comfortable with the idea that what you learned to be true yesterday may not be true today. While PPC isn’t a zero-sum game in quite the same way that SEO, it is similar in that getting the PPC engagement you need at a cost that keeps clients acquired this way profitable does pit you against other advertisers vying for the attention of those very same eyeballs.

This is why we almost always recommend bringing in a PPC advertising specialist if PPC advertising fits the overall marketing goals. If you are already working with a marketing consultant—in areas like content marketing, public relations, etc.—asking them for recommendations is an excellent place to start.

You’ll want whatever PPC or display advertising you do to mesh well with the other marketing you have in place or are about to start. It’s critical that all of these individual efforts are pointed in the right direction.

Issues arise because nearly every marketing discipline can have a reasonable claim to the lead role. You aren’t likely to convert many site visitors without a site that is intelligently organized and well-written. But what’s the point of a great website if you aren’t driving any traffic to it with great social media. (Or email marketing. Or SEO. Or PPC advertising …)

As important as specialists are in some areas, like SEO and PPC advertising, they have to answer to a strategist with a clear picture of goals, strategies, and tactics in mind, and an unwavering ability to communicate that picture to every member of the marketing team.

That strategist can be a full-time employee or a consultant working with you on a more limited basis. There are advantages to both. Just be sure that marketing is getting the attention it deserves. Unlike managing the office or overseeing computer networking, marketing should not be viewed as an expense, but as a profit center. It should drive sales and it should get the same respect that the sales team does.

Whatever shape your PPC advertising efforts take, and however they fit into your overall marketing, it’s important that all of the elements you include in your arsenal work together.

Generating Inbound Links

PPC advertising and SEO aren’t the only way to bring more prospects to your website. Working to generate inbound links can pay benefits in two ways.

There is SEO benefit, since the search engine algorithms value links as an indication of how useful your content is. If lots of websites are linking to your content, that’s a pretty good indication that your content has value. The search engines reward this.

(This can create a virtuous cycle, where your content is strong enough to generate links, which improves your search ranking, which in turn puts your content in front of more people—which can help generate even more links …)

However, not all links are created equal. Link farms, which are websites set up specifically to create links to other sites solely to improve the search rankings of those other sites. The link farms themselves don’t provide any real value to anyone searching the web, and the search engines either ignore or penalize links from sites like this.

Link farms can be part of the too-good-to-be-true come-ons from shady SEO operators, which is one more reason those scammers and schemers should be avoided.

Context matters, too. A link to your accounting firm’s website from a site selling sunglasses isn’t going to count for much in the eyes of the search engines. It simply doesn’t make sense for an ecommerce page devoted to sunglasses to tout a great accounting firm.

This makes good sense when you think about it from a human perspective rather than an algorithmic one: A person shopping for eyewear isn’t particularly likely to have an interest in accounting services. And since the search engines are desperate to provide valuable information to searchers—that’s what powers their ability to sell advertising—they tweak their algorithms constantly to discern between legitimate links and questionable or fraudulent links.

Legitimate links, though, are valuable. For example, if your accounting firm is linked to from a page on a law firm’s site that is all about tax issues, the search engines are likely to view that as a positive signal about the value of your web content.

Though there are legitimate ways for SEO pros to generate inbound links for you that don’t involve link farms and other scammy techniques, there are also ways you can generate links yourself.

Create More Website Content

It may sound counterintuitive to think that creating more content on your own website can help with link building, but internal linking and increased page counts can help your search rankings tremendously.

Even better, you control the context. So, the link to your page about, say, accounting services for non-profits can be linked to from, say, a page you might have about smart non-profit business management.

Blog posts, resources articles, and even news items can help serve this purpose.

Guest Posting

We’ve talked already about the power of content partnerships. One way to partner with complementary firms—firms with whom you do not compete but who have the same target audience—is to create content for one another’s sites.

If your marketing firm’s website includes a guest post from a sales trainer—and vice versa—you both benefit by having inbound links from websites that are far more relevant to your audience than any link farm could ever be.

You also get an implicit seal of approval. Your partner’s audience trusts them, so they are also inclined to trust you, too. You gain inbound links and, if your content is strong enough, you expand your audience, as well.

Participate

It is well worth your time to interact with the content you consume, whether on social media or other websites. Thoughtful comments that engage with the original post and author or with other commenters can help forge relationships and create backlinks.

Note that not all platforms/websites will allow links in comments. Commenting was one of the earliest backlink strategies and was widely abused before steps were taken against it. And it’s why you still sometimes see comments that consist of nothing more than a link to some miracle cure for male pattern baldness.

Commenting can also be a great way to introduce yourself to someone you’d like to meet. Whether your focus is on selling or networking, taking the time to interact with someone’s content can be a much more productive way to introduce yourself than a cold email or DM.

Other Link Building Techniques

You can also DIY some of the same approaches that the pros use. If you have news that is worthy of press release distribution via wire services, be sure to enable the social/sharing tools most of those services offer.

You can also submit your content to directories that aggregate content around particular topics or industries. (You could also create a page on your own site that does this, though the benefits here would be different, primarily offering you an opportunity to establish or deepen relationships with folks whose content you feature and also providing a resource for your target audience.)

Whichever techniques you choose, don’t feel the need to dive so deeply that you can’t sustain your effort. You will be more likely to gain traction if you work at a comfortable pace and build links consistently over time.

Resources Pages

The first of these are resources pages, which we touched on briefly in the previous section. Resource pages can be created with your own content or by aggregating content from other thought leaders. (Or by a combination of the two, of course.)

Typically, resources pages are a collection of links to articles all focused on a single topic. Done well, your resource page will leave a lot out. By this I mean that it will not focus on every aspect of what you do, but will focus on a single sliver of your services and expertise. (And, of course, it will really focus on the benefits to your target audience rather than on the services and expertise themselves.)

(Side note: you are welcome to note that I said “could have resources pages” and not “does have resources pages.” Would having resources help our marketing? Without a doubt. Do we have more than the standard 24 hours in a day? We do not. Neither do you, and it’s OK for all of us to make decisions about how to use our time and what we want to devote our marketing efforts to. No guilt, no shame, particularly if you are paying attention to what works and what doesn’t, and replacing anything that isn’t working for you with something that does.)

As you build out these pages, you should think about how they will be most useful. Context matters greatly, and a long list of links under a single headline isn’t likely to be approachable or useful for your target audience.

On the other hand, 3 long paragraphs of explanation for each link you offer could turn your resources page into a resources tome. Striking a balance is what’s required. You should probably aim for a short paragraph at most, and something a bit more than, say, a Google search results page offers in terms of detail.

You want to make it clear to your site visitor what they will find and why they will find it of value. That’s the only way anyone will click through to any of your suggested links, whether they are to pages on your own site or to other sites: they will first want to know what the page is about and why it might matter to them.

Not every entry needs its own description, though. It’s perfectly acceptable to group similar items together and provide a single introductory blurb. You still provide the necessary context and you can keep the page uncluttered and easily digestible.

One last factor in keeping these pages approachable is what you call them. I have been referring to these as resources pages, but you will find them under many, many other names. Any title can work if you’re comfortable with it and it fits your brand and your message. I would suggest you not use the word “blog”—even though these are essentially blog posts—since that term can now connote articles that are “thought pieces” rather than more actionable information.

Similarly, “Insights” might not be a great title for similar reasons. There is a place on your website and in your social media feeds for you to offer your thoughts on broad industry trends and other “big” topics, but you do want to keep your resources pages focused on more concrete matters.

In sourcing your materials, be sensitive to issues of copyright and ownership. When in doubt about a piece of content, don’t use it. A conversation with your lawyer isn’t the worst idea, either.

Most lawyers will tell you that linking to the content of others is unlikely to lead you into murky legal waters. It’s when you lift content from elsewhere and present it without attribution that you’ll have problems. Or republishing large chunks of someone else’s work, even with attribution.

Put yourself in the original author’s shoes. If you wouldn’t want your work treated as you’re considering treating theirs, that’s a pretty good sign you’re headed down the wrong path.

Once you’ve built this fantastically useful page, how do you maintain it? Since resources pages typically rely at least in part on external sources, you’ll want to check for broken links on a regular schedule. While you’re at it, check to be sure that the article hasn’t been edited in a way that changes its relevance.

Finally, let’s look at the ways you can use them. Essentially, you can promote your resources pages in the same ways we’ll outline below in the section on promoting your content. But in addition to the standard tools of email, social media, and beyond, you have two other avenues.

You can invite colleagues to contribute to your page. This can help you fill a gap in a page, beefing up content on a particular topic without you having to produce the material. It also helps build and strengthen relationships with colleagues who may be good referral partners or important collaborators.

You might word this differently depending on whether this is an article you solicited from a colleague, something you found on a colleague’s site or social media feed, or a piece by someone you haven’t yet met.

FAQ Pages

We’re all guilty of wanting it yesterday, no matter what “it” is. That’s no different for information your buyers want than it is when you find that the shiny new bike you have your eye on isn’t in stock in your size.

At their most basic level, FAQ pages are meant to answer prospect and client questions immediately and accurately. They’re happy because they get the information they want with no wait. You’re happy because you don’t have to invest time in answering the same questions repeatedly. But they can do so much more.

Most importantly for your marketing, your FAQ page’s ability to provide quick, accurate answers helps your buyers move through their decision making that much more quickly. They get the answers they need without having to contact you, wait for you to reply, etc. (And they get their answers without having to worry that reaching out to you will result in an endless barrage of emails or phone calls from a too-eager sales team.

Arguably, that asset becomes less valuable the more complex your sales process is, though even with the most high-touch sales, FAQs provide you with an opportunity to showcase your key differentiators and competitive advantages.

Best of all, they do this in a way that is almost guaranteed to get perspective correct. If the questions your FAQ answers are real questions you’ve heard from prospects and customers, you will be able to answer them genuinely and authentically, and your responses will answer their questions as you lay out your case.

Just be careful not to pull a favorite trick of politicians everywhere, answering the question you wish you were asked rather than the actual question. Answering the questions your audience is really asking is the only way to make your FAQ page a place that helps you build trust with your audience as they get a clearer picture of what it’s like to work with you.

Since your FAQ page answers will frequently link to other pages on your site, you gain the SEO benefits that increased internal linking provides. Be thoughtful in the linking you do, though. The internal linking is nice, your FAQ page’s user experience will be better if most of the answers are complete on the page. Link out to pages when providing a complete answer would become too long to comfortably display on the FAQ page itself.

Though you will rarely find an opportunity to promote your FAQ pages on social media or other marketing channels, as with resources pages, you should review FAQ pages regularly. The only thing worse than not finding the information you want is finding—and acting on—incorrect and outdated information.