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How Content & SEO Strategy Can Turn Your Website Into A Lead Gen Machine
00:28:28
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- [00:00]
Jessica Woodside
Like you don't want to try to shoehorn a search term into content that just doesn't make sense because it's not going to rank. But where we can, where it makes sense, let's make sure that we're optimizing for those search terms that we know are of interest currently for our Target Industries.
- [00:21]
Claudia Tirico
The B2B Marketing Exchange brings together B2B marketing and sales practitioners from across the country to get the latest tools and tips they need to succeed. Now we're bringing the insights from this day to your ears. I'm Claudia Tirico. And I'm Kelly Lindenow. And this is the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the B2BMX podcast. We're taking you back to Alpharetta, Georgia today, where we had our first official B2BMX east event this past October. Today's replay is presented by Jessica Woodside of WEKA and Laura Lee of EVG Media, who took the stage to share how the two companies work together to content that generated warmer, lower cost leads for weka. SEO and content strategy were the primary focus areas of this project, with the WEKA USA blog being the most active content publication vehicle. So tune in now to learn how to develop a winning SEO strategy. Focus on optimizing content with low search rankings, increase the number of Google featured snippets via content editing, and so much more. Let's roll the tape in 3, 2, 1.
- [01:39]
Jessica Woodside
Hi everyone, my name is Jessica Woodside. I work with WICA usa. I'm the marketing director for our headquarters here in the U.S. located in Lawrenceville, so not far away.
- [01:51]
Laura Lee
And I'm Laura Lee. First name is just Laura. I'm not that Southern, so it's not Laura Lee. I work with EVG Media and we're based in Greenville, South Carolina, but it's an international agenc. I'm actually from Atlanta and before EVG, I worked in Midtown at WebMD. So that's where I got my start in SEO.
- [02:13]
Jessica Woodside
And we have been working together for several years now. And this morning we're going to talk to you a little bit about a project that we started working on in 2018, which is using your content and SEO strategy to turn your website into a lead generation machine. So hope you guys enjoy it. Real quick, just a disclaimer. Laura and I are in fact both Elder Millennials. And so while we were working on this presentation, we started talking about how could we make things more memorable for you guys? So every concept or every slide that we talk about will have a song from the 90s or early 2000s associated with it. Yes, I know that you love that. Thank you so much. So, like I said, we started working on this project in 2018. And in 2018, our marketing strategy was primarily focused on live events. We were exhibiting at 50 plus live events a year. You can see we had huge booths. That's at the Interfax trade show in New York. I think that actually was 2018. That was our primary lead generation source at that time. Of course, you guys all know events are amazing and wonderful. Those leads are expensive, right? So we started thinking about what can we do to diversify our spend, diversify our lead generation and bring down our average cost per lead. So at the time, our content creation and SEO strategy was trapped in a box just like Gwen Stefani there. We were focused on a pre selected list of short tail search terms that were chosen by our friends at our corporate office in Germany. Most of those search terms were super general. The primary selection criteria for those was monthly search volume. So we were optimizing all of our website and our blog content for terms like pressure measurement, temperature measurement, super, super general. We weren't taking search intent into consideration at all at the time. We were publishing on our blog sporadically at best. And we were trying to plan our annual content calendar at a very granular level. So we're starting at the end of the previous year saying, okay, what articles are we going to write next July? Realized that was a little ambitious. And we were really focused more on executing tasks than collaborating on strategy with our friends at EVG. So that was our current state in 2018 when Laura and I started this project.
- [04:42]
Laura Lee
And with that strategy, as you can imagine, it was a lot of search volume terms. And people would get to the website and then realize, this is not the product I'm searching for. So for things like pressure measurement or temperature measurement, I mean, they might have been looking for something for their tires on their car. And so we were getting a lot of visits to the website, but they weren't converting as leads. The bounce rate was really high. So we were not. We were hitting the corporate goals in terms of, yeah, we've got so many clicks coming into the website, but almost none of them were actually people that we wanted to be on the website.
- [05:20]
Jessica Woodside
So we started doing our research, which is the most important thing. Right. And we brought in other members of our team. We brought in, in our market segment specialists, some of our product managers, and Laura did some excellent research for us on what search terms are currently trending in the industries that we're focused on selling into. Right? Like what are people in those industries searching for in the power generation industry or oil and gas? And then I sat down with our internal stakeholders and said, okay, we know that not all of these search terms are going to be relevant for our products, our services, our buying committee, right? So which of these search terms that are trending that we know people are looking for are going to be relevant for what we're trying to accomplish? And that focus ended up being primarily on those long tail, the hyper relevant search terms that honestly would never have been approved as official search terms by our corporate office because the monthly volume was pretty low, but the intent was incredibly high, which is what we were looking for.
- [06:29]
Laura Lee
So we took a new approach to content strategy. Once we had approval from corporate, we started with just completely overhauling the way we were planning our content and doing research. Although we always focus on the EEAT principles, experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. We took that to another level, which we'll talk about in just a minute. We focused on some special projects that would not normally have fallen under the initiatives that corporate was laying out for us. So whereas they were saying, you know, hit these search terms with all of your, all of the things that you're trying to work on, we took some side projects that ended up paying off a lot. And then we looked at the content that we already had. Some of the low hanging fruit that was maybe not ranking as high as we wanted or it just wasn't optimized well and we enhance that content. So we're going to break down all of these for you now.
- [07:23]
Jessica Woodside
So our content strategy became more than words. We started having regular internal meetings with our subject matter experts as opposed to trying to plan our content at a granular level for the entire year. We were primarily initially focused on publishing content on our local blog because that was where we had the free freedom to test this strategy. Our corporate friends in Germany were not so keen on us messing with content on the website that they felt like was optimized incredibly well. We got there eventually, but we started meeting with those subject matter experts regularly and asking questions. What are some questions that you're getting regularly when you're out in the field talking to end users? Maybe if you're hearing the same questions over and over again, maybe we can write a content piece on why we offer different connections on our instrumentation because we know that people are interested, right? So what we had done in the past is start with, okay, we need content optimized for these search terms. Hey, product manager, what do you think we could write using these search terms that worked? Not at all. So instead of handing them a list of search terms and saying, okay, what do you think that we could write? We just started having conversations about potential case studies. What are those common questions? What new products or applications do we have that we should be talking about? And then we went together as a team and said, okay, let's align our planned content, those ideas that we came up with with our internal subject matter experts, with the search terms that we've identified as being important to us that are trending in our target industries when possible. Like, you don't want to try to shoehorn a search term into content that just doesn't make sense because it's not going to rank. But where we can, where it makes sense, let's make sure that we're optimizing for those search terms that we know are of interest currently for our target industries. At the time, we were publishing content one to two times a week on our blog, where in the past we have been publishing sporadically and we were trying to vary our content types. So we weren't just talking about product applications, we were talking about case studies, we were talking about industry trends. We did a blog series last year on the trend of hydrogen mobility and not just talking about our products, but demonstrating our thought leadership and our expertise, which was really important.
- [09:59]
Laura Lee
So this song is actually more for Jessica. I'm not a swifty, but for those of you who are, you're welcome. Especially since late 2023, you probably have heard more about EEAT and the Google Google focusing on these aspects and their algorithm. Like I said, we've always done this with WCUS content because we always value having content that's trustworthy, authoritative and so forth. But with all of the algorithm updates, especially in the past year and a half or so where this has gotten really everyone's attention, even if they weren't in SEO world, we've really tried to expand how we focus on this. So as far as experience, and this applies to all of our websites, it doesn't matter your industry, but especially in B2B, this is so important because your audience that you're talking to is at a much higher level of education as far as your industry than just the average person. So as far as experience, does your website demonstrate that you have experience experience in your topic as far as expertise, and these are very similar, but do you show that you have actual expertise in whatever topic your website is about? So in Wika's case, pressure measurement, temperature measurement and so forth, authoritativeness. So this gets into who's writing your content. And if you are using a third party to write that content, are they using your SMEs, your subject matter? Experts. Experts as thought leaders as they're writing that content. Most of the B2B businesses that I've talked to have excellent thought leaders that have so much industry knowledge that can be an untapped source of information. And at the same time, a lot of times those industry leaders or those experts are so busy with what they're doing day to day, whether that's engineering or something like that, that they don't have time to sit down and write. And even if they did, it's not going to be necessarily the kind of content you want to just publish straight away on your site because it's going to be very technical and hard to read. So you take that content, whether they're writing it or you're having someone partner with them, like a writer will partner with an SME and write the content and then you make it more digestible for an online user. Right. So there's the editorial process to go through and add the H tags and add like break up all of that technical text into bits and pieces that are easy to read that make sense for whoever's reading your content and for search engines. And then trustworthiness is your website demonstrating that you are a safe and reliable place for users to go. And so this could be not just the content on your website and not just the authors of the content, but but also some of the technical stuff happening on your website. Is it secure? Are the links that point to your website showing that you're a trustworthy site? I have run into sites before where they've done some kind of link building things in the past, maybe paying for links. And I'm not saying never ever do that, but I am saying that a lot of times when you do that, you end up with some links that don't demonstrate that you're a trustworthy site. So these are the things that you have to be thinking about as you're planning your content strategy. All right, so some of the special projects that we did, the first one was featured snippets. Now, a little bit of a caveat here is there was an update, I guess it was a couple years ago where Google reduced the number of featured snippets across the board for search results. So just in case anyone isn't sure, what I mean is the text at the top of the search results page that just gives you the answer to whatever you typed in, Right? So it's like a paragraph and then it has a link. So before the update where they reduced that number, there were featured snippets like crazy. And so we decided to be strategic about this. We did rank in some featured snippets, but we had never said, okay, let's strategically try to take over the featured snippets that the competitors currently have. So there's a ton of tools out there that can do this for you. My favorite, and I'm not getting paid for this, but it's just my favorite is ahrefs. And you can go do a competitor report where you can say, show me the places that this competitor ranks in featured snippets and compare that to where I rank in featured snippets. And you can just get an Excel sheet and go through it. And so we looked at one of the competitors was just, honestly, they were killing it with the featured snippets, and we had some work to do. So we went through where they're ranking where we could hope to rank based on the fact that we had content for it. Maybe it just didn't rank very high. And we looked at their content versus ours and just sort of said, like, what are they doing better? And then honestly, in most cases, it was pretty easy to see why we weren't in the featured snippet. And so we just started like an initiative to go through all of that content and make it better. And over time, we saw really good results. Now, it does take time. Those things always take time. But within one year, we doubled the number of featured snippets, and within two years, we doubled that number again. So over time, this is just like continually building up success. Now, having said that, moving into AI Overviews, now we have a new game, right? So they reduced the feature snippets, and now we have AI Overviews, the Artist Formerly known as sge. And so from the beginning, where this was in beta mode, we started tracking and it was just manual. And even now it is fairly manual to track these things. So we just took strategic search terms that we were like, we really, really want this term or that term, whatever it is. And we looked to see where we're ranking in SGE and the AI overviews as well as the featured snippets. So a lot of times it could be both. And now as of the latest update, which, you know how it goes with Google, but as of the latest update, I Believe that the percentage of results in the AI overviews that also appear on the first page is pretty high in the first iterations. It was not we were seeing results in the AI overviews that we were like, I've never heard of this website in my life. And we go to it, it's like they don't rank anywhere. Like, who are these guys and how did they get pulled into this authoritative box of information? So anyway, we went through and just manually looked like, okay, are we ranking? How's our click through rate? It's a very tedious process. But this is just something to be aware of and start thinking about with the AI overviews. Where your competitors are showing up, where you're showing up. And just be aware. Like this does not mean that you're going to get a lot of clicks. I mean a lot of these are zero click searches. It's just people that get the answer to their information. It's top of funnel. It's educational. However, it's still important to show up there for your brand and it's still important to have top of funnel content, even though that might not lead directly to a sale because that person, especially in B2B, the sales cycle is long. So you've got to get in front of the decision makers so that when the problem occurs, they're thinking about your brand. So this is just one of the things that we've started to do and we continue to do and then an internal linking strategy. So initially when we were linking to content in, you know, whatever we're publishing, we might say, okay, we wrote a blog recently on this topic, so let's link from here back to that blog and that's fine. But when you are linking within your website, you really want to create, if you can, a map of your most important keywords that have to do with your website and the most important URL that you want to associate with each of those keywords. So for wica, it might be something like pressure gauges. And every time we say pressure gauges, we want to link to this particular page on pressure gauges. This is our number one authoritative link that we want to use. And you would do that not more than once per page. You don't want to just link all over the place. But every time you post a new article and it says pressure gauges, you link back to that page. And so you have a keyword map that is sort of a guide for anyone who touches your website that they're always going to be consistently linking to the same pages and Showing Google these are the important pages on our website. And so when we did that, that really helped with funneling those users to the most important pages.
- [18:24]
Jessica Woodside
The last special project that we have implemented as just our standard work as part of our annual marketing planning at this point is every year we do or we execute annual content audits, and we happen to break those up by industry that we're selling into. But however it makes sense, if you don't have a ton of content, you can just do one. If you are like us and you have a relatively complicated business, we have a lot of them. But we obviously it's a pretty heavy lift that first year to audit all of your content on a topic or all of your content on a website, right? But we had a couple of steps here. First, we just compile everything. Then we reach out to, again, our subject matter experts because we want to get that internal buy in, right? And we say, okay, is this content still relevant? If it's not so relevant, what do we need to do to make it relevant? Is there a new product, a new standard? Do we need to just unpublish it like it's just this was a moment in time and it's not something that matters anymore, or can we update it in a way to make it more relevant? And then Laura takes our content audits and she looks at them from an SEO perspective. So we're looking at how our existing content is ranked, ranking, and where we could get some quick and easy wins on that existing content. So when we first started this project, we were primarily focusing on content that was ranking a little bit lower on page one. So in that, like 6 to 10 kind of ranking, right? Like, where can we get those easy wins? Where can we take content that might be below the fold on page one, bring it up to above the fold and get a ton more traffic? Because now we're ranking in those, like, one to three, one to five positions, right? Well, as we've done this more and more and we've gotten more and more of those easy wins, we're now focusing sometimes on content that's on page two, three, four of search results. And going back to the EAT standards, because we have established our site as a place that is authoritative, that is trustworthy. When we do that now, we will. I mean, in one case, we optimized a blog that was ranking on page three on a Friday, I think we published that content by Monday, we had the featured snippet. So it takes time. And you feel like when you're in a project like this, you feel like you're not getting anywhere, but you are. And over time, as you establish more of that authoritativeness, it gets easier and easier.
- [20:53]
Laura Lee
So once we had the content strategy for the blog established and we sort of had some case studies, we prove that, yes, this is working. See, we're getting people coming in, we're actually getting leads, we're getting sales. From what we're doing, we were able to have a little more freedom to do things elsewhere on the website. So one thing we did, and this is just like a little for our website, it worked. I'm not saying that everyone should do this, but we did remove dates from the blogs because we were publishing still, like on a regular basis, but not quite, quite as frequently. And a lot of this stuff is sort of evergreen. And so as a user, you know, when you see a date for some industries that's really important, like for medical information or for legal information, I need to know this is up to date as of, like yesterday. However, for this kind of stuff, I mean, pressure measurement doesn't change that much. So we just got rid of the dates on all those blogs and we did mention in the content if it was a timely piece. Like, obviously, this is happening in this month or whatever. We started to see more monthly traffic on the blog than on the website, actually, at some point, even though there were two to three times more content on the website. So the blog was just really pulling in more users and more qualified leads. Once we did that, we started identifying content on the website because we were given, like I said, a little bit more freedom. And we decided sort of strategically which content on the evergreen website we wanted to focus on next to apply these SEO principles and to help it be more effective and helpful content for the partners and the other companies that might be reading it.
- [22:32]
Jessica Woodside
So we all know B2B marketing is complicated, right? So some of the complications that we deal with, and you will probably deal with too, are long sales cycles we have. Depending on what industry we're selling into, some of our sales cycles are five to seven years long, which is huge. And it also means that you've got to make sure that you are identifying meaningful leading indicator metrics and that you're educating the organization on why those metrics are meaningful. One of the things that we've worked on with our team is I have banned the word impressions. We don't talk about impressions anymore. Impressions don't really mean anything, right? We proved that when we were driving a ton of content to our site and 75% of it was bouncing. We were getting a ton of impressions. They weren't doing anything for the business. So we don't talk about that anymore. We know internally that that's important internally in our team, but as far as within the company, that's not a word that we want to be using. We are also dealing with large buying committees. And I don't know about you guys, but I know for us, Post Covid, it feels like the buying committees are getting larger and larger and no one wants to make a decision without 15 other people saying that their decision is the best decision ever, right? So that makes things incredibly difficult because you have to write content and you have to create content not just for the different stages in the funnel, but for the different perspectives of the different members of the buying committee. Somebody in purchasing is going to think completely differently than an engineer year, right? So you've got to think about not just journey stage, but also your, your Personas, your members of your buying committee and what they care about. And then again, I don't know about you guys, but for us, our customer journey has become more and more anonymous. People are not, you know, walking up to a salesperson at a trade show and saying, hi, I don't really know anything about you. Tell me all about your company. They might walk by and say, oh, I wonder what those guys do. And Google you, right? People are not raising their hands and letting you know that they're interested in your product or your service until you're in the final consideration set. So you've got to make sure that you're putting the right content in front of the right people at the right time to capture their attention without knowing who they are. And that is a whole other presentation on account based marketing. But you also have to make sure that you're creating content that is going to speak to people when they're not ready to speak to you yet. So then we start talking about metrics and our tangible results. So some of the leading indicators that we saw was we had 148% increase in blog page views in our blog page views from Q2 of 2018 to Q2 of 2023. So that sounds awesome, right? But we also are publishing on that a lot, right? We're publishing on our blog quite often. So we definitely want to contextualize that and say during that same period, we increased the amount of content on our site by about 104%. So it wasn't just that we put a bunch more content on our blog, it was that that content was also generating More meaningful traffic. We saw a I need better glasses. A 366% increase in featured snippets search results from 2019 to 2022. And that was the period that we worked on that project. To Laura's point, a Google algorithm changed and we decided that our attention was better focused elsewhere. But from 2019 to 2022, the three years that we worked on that project, actively trying to overtake our competitors, featured snippets. We increased our number of Featured snippets by 366%, which was awesome. Now, of course, the numbers that the organization cares about, we saw 180% increase in leads generated on our website from 2019 to 2023. I did want to make sure that we compared 2019 to 2023, because if we were comparing 2020 to 2023, that number would be even better. But we all have to remember that 2020 was a year when nothing was happening. So it's not really fair to even talk about that. Our current engagement rate on our website is now at 66% for this year for year to date. As you remember, our blog or our bounce rate was at about 70 to 75% in 2018 when we started measuring that metric. Of course, we. We all know, because we've all suffered through the transition from universal analytics to GA4, that we are now measuring engagement rate instead of bounce rate. But we're basically at a point now where our engagement rate is almost as high as our bounce rate was in 2018, which is pretty awesome.
- [27:29]
Laura Lee
All right, awesome.
- [27:30]
Jessica Woodside
Well, thank you guys so much. We'll be up at the front if you have any other questions. And thank you for joining us this morning.
- [27:35]
Laura Lee
Enjoy the music.
- [27:42]
Claudia Tirico
Thanks so much for joining us today. Remember, B2BMX west in Scottsdale is right around the corner and now is the best time to get your ticket since prices are so, so low. Plus, check the show notes where you'll find a special discount for our podcast listeners. I really, really hope to see you all in Scottsdale in February. As always, find us on social media to share feedback. Or just say hi and subscribe to the pod so you don't miss any new episode drops. That's all I have today. Thank you all again, folks. Take care.