Creating well-written content that engages your audience and sparks conversations within your industry is what every marketer strives to achieve. However, despite how well-written and designed your content may be, it can fall flat if it doesn’t have the right SEO embedded into it to help the content rank high on search engines.
Ranking high on search engines is essential because 75% of internet users don’t bother looking past page one of search engine results. Therefore, without correctly applying SEO to your content, it may never reach your target audience.
Learning how to incorporate SEO into your B2B content marketing strategy can be difficult, especially if you have limited experience with online marketing. So, to help you get started on your journey, we’ve shared some of our best SEO tips for beginners.
Keywords are one of the main ways that search engines organise their page results, so thorough keyword research is essential if you want to produce content that will get your technology or FinTech brand ranking high on Google.
The first step to finding the right keyword for your technology and FinTech brand is by understanding your target audience’s wants and needs. To do this, we recommend creating a customer avatar for your brand. This is a fictitious profile of your brand's ideal customer.
You can start this by thinking of the types of questions and challenges they are likely to face and how you can help combat them. Then use this to produce content that will support and direct them to your website.
If you’re struggling to do this, take a look at some of your biggest competitors and see what kind of content they’re producing. Refrain from copying their content, but use it as inspiration and guidance, then add your creative spin and think outside the box to create better-suited content for your audience.
Once you have a good idea of what your target audience is searching for, you can start thinking about primary and secondary keywords.
Primary keywords are overarching terms you want to rank for when creating a content marketing strategy.
For example, if you specialise in online banking, a primary keyword could be ‘investing in stocks’.
Your primary keyword must have a high search volume that can bring a considerable amount of traffic to your website.
Although your primary keyword can be vague and address a wider audience, your secondary keyword will help you reach your target audience with content that’s designed specifically for them.
Your secondary keyword supports your primary keyword by bringing in additional information. You can use these naturally throughout your content.
For example, ‘stocks and shares isa’ or ‘stocks to buy now’
These secondary keywords do not have as much SEO value as the primary keywords, but using them can still help you outrank your competitors.
As well as primary and secondary keywords, you also need to appreciate the difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords.
Short-tail keywords are keywords that consist of three words or less. They are normally generic terms or a short question that your audience is looking for. Therefore, short-tail keywords are more commonly searched than long-tail, which means they’re an excellent way to attract website traffic.
However, because they’re more generic, other websites will be using these keywords, which can make them challenging to rank high on a search engine’s results page.
An example of a short-tail keyword could be ‘Online Banking’.
Long-tail keywords are any keywords that are over three words long. In terms of SEO, long-tail keywords are designed to answer more specific search queries. Most long-tail keywords have lower search volume in comparison to short-tail keywords.
An example of a long-tail keyword is, ‘How to open an online bank account?’
Despite their low search volume, they are still advantageous because they can bring genuine leads to your website as users can specifically look for that answer.
Now that you know the importance of including long-tail, short-tail, primary and secondary keywords, let’s run through some other important factors to consider when competing for keywords. We recommend using Semrush when compiling this research.
It is important to observe three areas. These include:
Search intent allows you to understand the user’s intent behind their search i.e. why are they searching for this term?
For example, the image above shows that those searching for ‘artificial intelligence’ are doing so for an informational purpose, and they want to find an answer to a specific question on this topic.
Semrush is a great tool that can help you understand the different types of user search intent when researching through their keyword database.
The search volume indicates the average number of people searching for a given keyword over a 12-month period.
A high search volume means there are plenty of people searching for that term. For example, using the keyword ‘content marketing’, we can see that 5,400 people have searched for information on content marketing.
Although having a high search volume is great, there are also other factors to consider, such as keyword difficulty.
Keyword Difficulty shows you how hard it would be for your website to rank organically in the Google’s top 10 for that specific keyword. The higher the percentage, the harder it will be to achieve high rankings.
Going back to the example of content marketing, we can see that although it has a high search volume, the chances of ranking amongst the top 10 on Google will be exceptionally challenging for that keyword.
The following image illustrates how Semrush shows its keyword difficulty percentage. When selecting a keyword, you essentially want the percentage to be below 70. The lower the percentage, the easier it is to rank higher on Google.
When you search for something in a search engine, you’ll see a list of page titles and meta descriptions. A meta description is a short description that illustrates what you’ll find when you click on the link.
These two short lines of text are the first thing your users will see when scrolling through search engine results, and they’re an important factor for users when deciding whether to visit your website. Therefore, it’s crucial to optimise your page titles and meta descriptions for all of your online content.
You need to make sure that your target audience can see, at first glance, that your content is going to give them the information they are looking for.
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When formatting your page title and meta description, here are a few general rules to follow:
To help boost SEO, use internal and external hyperlinks throughout your online content. These hyperlinks must lead to helpful information from credible sources. Hyperlinks can improve your SEO in three significant ways:
For external links, it’s important to vet them before you include them in your content. They should be recent, derived from reputable sources, and be relevant to your content.
Whether internal or external, hyperlinks should be used in moderation because creating content that is overpowered with links can harm the user experience. Therefore, only include relevant links that you think users will find useful.
Many online searches are written in the form of questions, so directly answering those questions in your content is another great SEO practice. If you do this right, your content will appear as a featured snippet on the search engine’s results pages.
A featured snippet is a small piece of content that can quickly answer user questions right then and there. These snippets have high visibility, so they’re likely to attract traffic to your website because they let users know that your content will immediately answer their questions.
To appear as a snippet, your content needs to ask and answer a specific question clearly and concisely. Take a look at the following example. The answer the user was seeking was addressed within the snippet despite the article continuing to discuss different investment strategies.
Start with your headings and subheadings. It’s good practice to write them in the form of commonly asked questions. This will direct search engines towards your content.
For example, if you’re writing a blog piece explaining APIs, your subheading could take shape as a question:
What are APIs?
Instead of a statement:
A Definition of APIs
Next, you must answer that question in a short but accurate way. Even if the answer is quite complicated, you can start with a quick, simple explanation that gives a broad overview that will make sense to the general reader.
It’s worth noting, snippets are a great way to increase organic traffic because, even if your content does not rank number 1 on Google, it can still be included in a snippet if it directly answers the user's question.
Whether you’re a FinTech or technology brand, there’s only so much hard selling you can do. No matter how many ads you produce, they’re inherently limited in what they’re able to offer your target audience.
Alternatively, if you create different types of content, then you’re able to improve your reach by offering various kinds of value to potential leads and your existing customers.
For example:
Although keywords and audience intent should guide your content, don’t be afraid to produce original content that’s inspired by your unique research and interests – adding value to a conversation is great for SEO, but starting your own conversation can be much more valuable.
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