Are you wondering how businesses like HubSpot, Neil Patel, Drift, and others are using the B2B blog to generate massive brand awareness, millions in organic traffic, thousands of leads, and growing their business?

The key to their success is properly planned and executed B2B Blog Strategy and in this article, I am going to share with you 9 step process on how you can do that too!

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What is B2B Blog Strategy?

B2B blog strategy is a process of analyzing your market and creating blog posts to bring your B2B target audience to your website in order to meet your business objectives and KPIs. It includes steps like defining your B2B audience, creating content, promoting your blog content all the way to measuring the success of your B2B blog strategy.

Why Do You Need B2B Blog Strategy?

B2B blog strategy helps you to prepare a plan for your B2B blogging to ensure you meet your business objective and KPIs.

With a written B2B blog strategy you double your chance of success with your B2B blogging. According to Content Marketing Institute, 60% of organizations with a written content strategy are effective, compared to only 32% of those with a purely verbal content strategy is effective.

written b2b blog strategy improves your success statistics

Not only that but with a proper plan, you will save tons of time, resources, and money by avoiding mistakes like targeting wrong keywords, not growing your ranking, or not generating leads for your business.

And there are more reasons why you need a B2B blog strategy, so let me share with you the 3 main reasons why I think you should start with one:

Reason #1: Overwhelming Brand Awareness

The first reason why you should implement B2B Blog Strategy is that you will generate massive brand awareness across your B2B target audience.

Each and every day, your B2B audience is searching for answers related to your product or services. This could be because they are trying to solve their problems, find the right solution for their needs, or want to get the benefits it comes with your solution.

And by addressing those topics, problems, needs, questions, and benefits with your blog posts, you can rank for them and drive those that are searching for it, which means people that are in the market for your solution.

Therefore, you will increase your organic traffic. As more than 52% of the B2B business marketers agree with the fact that blogging is the only content marketing strategy that gets most of the web traffic, engagements and generates high-quality SEO leads.

b2b marketers on blogging increase organic traffic

On top of that blog generates more backlinks for your website and brings ton of link building benefits and backlink benefits. Having a well-structured link building plan can significantly enhance these benefits, leading to a higher authority and more website traffic for your blog posts, product pages, and the rest of your website.

Reason #2: Perfect for On-Boarding/Pre-Boarding

Another super important reason why you should start with the B2B blog strategy is that it is a great strategy for on-boarding or as Tim Soulo said in his video, they use blogging as pre-boarding.

Basically, as Tim explained, they are using blogging to educate their audience on different SEO tasks using Ahrefs to give them the “Aha” moment before they actually sign up for their software.

So, once they actually sign up to Ahrefs, they already figure out what and why they actually want to use the tool. Therefore, have a much bigger motivation to stick around for a longer period of time to learn using the tool.

Plus, they already have a certain knowledge of using the tool which means the user adoption becomes much easier.

Blogging is a great strategy to educate your B2B audience on how to solve their common problems using your product or services and how they can benefit from using it, regardless of the nature of the business.

Shifting your marketing and selling towards educating your B2B buyer personas on problems and needs your solution is solving before any selling and marketing are done is a great way to increase your trust with users and increase onboarding success.

Reason #3: Cheapest Lead Generation in the Long Run

And the last reason why you should implement a B2B blog strategy is that it is the cheapest way to drive high-quality seo leads. This is especially important if you sell leads to have high profit margins.

Many statistics have proven that inbound marketing is cheaper and more effective such as:

And your blog is part of a content and inbound marketing effort.

81% of businesses report that their blog is important or critical in generating leads and B2B companies that use B2B blog strategy generate 67% more leads than companies that don’t.

And the reason behind all these numbers?

This is because the buyer journey shifted to digital and B2B buyers are using search, social media, and other online platforms to proceed in B2B buying jobs.

b2b buying jobs for b2b blog strategy

Therefore, fish where the fish are!

How Do You Plan B2B Blog Strategy?

So, let’s have a look at how you can plan a B2B blog strategy with my 9 step process.

Here you will learn how you can plan your B2B blog strategy plan from start to finish as well as important practices for every step that you should keep in mind.

So, let’s get started with planning your B2B blog strategy:

Step #1: Target Your B2B Audience

The first step of starting with the B2B Blog strategy is to clearly define your B2B target audience.

Your B2B blog is as effective as your targeting, if you target the wrong audience, then you cannot simply convert your users into leads.

And in this step I am going to share with you some of the B2B blog strategy best practices you should know when it comes to targeting your B2B audience:

Practice #1: Define Your B2B Target Audience

The first practice and definitely one of the most important parts of your blogging process to attract leads is to define your B2B target audience.

Before we start It’s important to note that B2B and B2C target audiences are different even despite every influencer and decision-maker is a consumer as well, but not every consumer is a decision-maker or influencer.

B2C vs B2B Target Audience infographic

Your B2B target audience is essential for your marketing including the B2B blog as it helps you to focus your marketing resources and effort to attract the best prospects for your business to maximize your ROI and profit from your activities.

Defined B2B target audience helps you to:

  • Effectively drive good quality leads
  • Lower expenses by focusing on your prospects needs
  • Improve your messaging and information
  • And overall, your personalization for your B2B content marketing

For example, here you can see an example of B2B Target Audience for SaaS ERP & CRM company:

example of b2b target audience for b2b blogging

Practice #2: Create Your B2B Buyer Personas

Another important part when you are defining your B2B target audience is your B2B buyer personas.

Your B2B Target Audience is an imaginary group of people that fits certain criteria that makes up perfect customers or prospects for your company.

However, your B2B buyer personas are fictional characters, which you create based on your B2B target audience and research to represent different ideal buyers that might be interested in your products or services.

b2b buyer personas from b2b target audience b2b blogging

Having your B2B buyer persona profile will help you to better understand who might be your potential buyers and based on that you know what topics you should cover on your blog in order to attract them to your website and create brand awareness.

A great example of creating B2B buyer personas is HubSpot.

If you don’t know, HubSpot is selling Inbound Marketing, Sales, and Service software that offers a full platform of marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM capabilities, plus their own CMS software.

hubspot b2b buyer personas example

And they know that the people that use their software’s the most are in the roles of Marketing, Customer Service and Sales.

And if you look at HubSpot Blog, they are mostly focusing on topics within Marketing, Sales,  Customer service, and website in order to attract their buyer personas.

hubspot targeting topics to attract b2b buyer personas

Practice #3: Map Your Customer Journey

And the last important practice I have for you, when you are creating your B2B target audience is to map your customer journey.

The customer or buyer journey is a visual representation of your prospects and customers and the actions they take from the beginning they don’t know anything about your company and the challenges they are facing to becoming loyal customers of yours.

It includes important aspects such as the buying process, user actions, emotions, pain points, needs, and solutions and maps those aspects within the different stages of the buyer journey.

The basic customer journey has 3 simple stages that are Awareness, Consideration, and Decision Stage, however later on we will be talking about the 4 stage journey.

classic three stage b2b buyer journey

(Source)

However, according to Gartner, The buying journey isn’t linear and doesn’t play out in any kind of predictable, linear order. Instead, customers engage in what one might call “looping” across a typical B2B purchase.

b2b buyer journey not linear gartner b2b blogging

Now, the modern B2B buyer journey has changed and it’s no longer a funnel, but a Loop.

customer journey loop example

(Source)

or Hubspot calls it Flywheel.

hubspot flywheel customer journey

Regardless of which one you use, you need to have at least a basic customer journey map to effectively market with your B2B blog.

Step #2: Know What You Want to Achieve

Step #2 is to define your goals and set your KPIs and targets for your B2B blog strategy.

If you don’t know where you go, then you will not get anywhere, or worse, get somewhere where you don’t want to be.

The same applies to your blogging for B2B. For you to achieve something worthwhile with B2B blogging you must set your goals, KPIs, and targets.

So, in this step I am going to share with you some of the best practices:

Practice #4: Determine Your Goals

So, the first practice or step when you are defining what you want to achieve with your B2B blog strategy is to determine the goals you want to achieve.

This is what you are trying to achieve with your B2B blog, common goals for B2B businesses are:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Attract the new target audience
  • Expand markets
  • Increase trust with the target audience
  • Promote product or service
  • Become a recognized brand in the industry
  • Grow email marketing list
  • Increase lead generation
  • Help existing customers
  • Increase website authority
  • Reduce cost per lead
  • Reduce cost per opportunity
  • Increase conversion rate from MQL to SQL

Here is an example of my goals:

  • Objective #1: Increase Brand Awareness
  • Objective #2: Attract New Target Audience
  • Objective #3: Grow Email Marketing List
  • Objective #4: Increase Lead Generation
  • Objective #5: Increase Website Authority
setting goals or objectives for b2b blog strategy

Determining your goals is the overall objective you are trying to achieve. It is the “WHY” you are starting with B2B blog in the first place and the desired outcome you want to achieve.

And ultimately it is what you will be looking at the end to determine if you are getting what you want even if you are hitting your target KPIs.

Practice #5: Defining Your KPIs to Your Goals

Alright, once you have your goals or objective determined, then you need to give metrics behind those goals, so you know what to measure to see if you are getting closer to your objectives.

Now, depending on the objectives you choose, there will be different metrics you need to track.

So let me give you a few examples of defining KPIs to your goals:

Objective #1: Increase Brand Awareness

  • Metric #1: Impressions (Google Search Console)
  • Metric #2: Keywords Ranking (SE Ranking)
  • Metric #3: Avg. Ranking in the USA (Google Search Console)

Objective #2: Attract New Target Audience

  • Metric #4: Total # Blog Posts (From CMS)
  • Metric #5: Monthly Organic Traffic (Google Analytics)

Objective #3: Grow Email Marketing List

  • Metric #6: Avg. Conversion Rate of Lead Magnets (Optinmonster)

Objective #4: Increase Lead Generation

  • Metric #7: Avg. Organic Conversion Rate (Google Analytics)
  • Metric #8: Avg. Cost per Lead (CRM)
  • Metric #9: Conversion rate MQL to SQL (CRM)

Objective #5: Increase Website Authority

  • Metric #10: Domain Trust (SE Ranking)
  • Metric #11: # of Backlinks (SE Ranking)
  • Metric #12: # Referring domains (SE Ranking)
defining your KPIs to your goals for b2b blog strategy

As you can see, each objective has certain metrics that are tied together and from where I will be collecting the data.

Also, be careful with setting your KPIs to your goals as you can easily make mistakes and track wrong KPIs for your goals.

Practice #6 Setting Your Target

And once you have your KPIs set to your objectives, is time to set hard numbers or your target so you know what you are aiming for.

So, going back to our example:

Objective #1: Increase Brand Awareness

  • Metric #1: Impressions: 10M (Google Search Console)
  • Metric #2: Keywords Ranking: 50K (SE Ranking)
  • Metric #3: Avg. Ranking in the USA: 40 (Google Search Console)

Objective #2: Attract New Target Audience

  • Metric #4: Total # Blog Posts: 100 (CMS)
  • Metric #5: Monthly Organic Traffic: 10K (Google Analytics)

Objective #3: Grow Email Marketing List

  • Metric #6: Avg. Conversion Rate of Lead Magnets: 0.5% (Optinmonster)

Objective #4: Increase Lead Generation

  • Metric #7: Avg. Organic Conversion Rate: 1% (Google Analytics)
  • Metric #8: Avg. Cost per Lead: $100 (CRM)
  • Metric #9: Conversion rate MQL to SQL: 40% (CRM)

Objective #5: Increase Website Authority

  • Metric #10: Domain Trust: 70 (SE Ranking)
  • Metric #11: # of Backlinks: 12K (SE Ranking)
  • Metric #12: # Referring domains: 2.5K (SE Ranking)
setting targets for b2b blog strategy

As you can see, I add the target that I want to achieve. Of course, you also need to set the timeline of your targets, but I assume you are preparing your blog SEO strategy plan along with your other marketing plans so let’s say this is for one year.

Practice #7 Set Your Strategies

So now, when you have your goals, KPIs, and targets, you only have to select the right strategies to achieve your targets. For example:

Objective #1: Increase Brand Awareness

  • Metric #1: Impressions: 10M (Google Search Console)
    • Strategy #1: Writing blog posts for keywords with search volume 200<.
  • Metric #2: Keywords Ranking: 50K (SE Ranking) (Learn how to track keyword ranking)
    • Strategy #2: Target 100 keywords with blog posts.
  • Metric #3: Avg. Ranking in the USA: 40 (Google Search Console)
    • Strategy #3: 90% Targeting only keywords below 70 Keyword Difficulty in SE Ranking.

Objective #2: Attract New Target Audience

  • Metric #4: Total # Blog Posts: 100 (From CMS)
    • Strategy #5: Writing 2 blog posts a week.
  • Metric #5: Monthly Organic Traffic: 10K (Google Analytics)
    • Strategy #6: Improving ranking for ranking pages 5-20 by internal linking and building backlinks.

Objective #3: Grow Email Marketing List

  • Metric #6: Avg. Conversion Rate of Lead Magnets: 0.5% (Optinmonster)
    • Strategy #7: Create relevant lead magnets based on categories of my article, e.g. SEO guide for beginners for SEO category, etc.

Objective #4: Increase Lead Generation

  • Metric #7: Avg. Organic Conversion Rate: 1% (Google Analytics)
    • Strategy #8: Add personalized CTA to a blog based on relevancy.
    • Strategy #9: Create persona lead nurturing for lead magnets.
  • Metric #8: Avg. Cost per Lead: $100 (CRM)
  • Metric #9: Conversion rate MQL to SQL: 40% (CRM)
    • Strategy #10: Create relevant blog CTA based on our personas and target audience.

Objective #5: Increase Website Authority

  • Metric #10: Domain Trust: 70 (SE Ranking)
    • Strategy #11: 1-2 weekly published guest posts on websites with DT 40<.
  • Metric #11: # of Backlinks: 12K (SE Ranking)
    • Strategy #12: Do skyscraper technique for our blog posts
  • Metric #12: # Referring domains: 2.5K (SE Ranking)
    • Strategy #13: Create 1 industry study
completing your goals,kpis and target to achieve for b2b blog strategy

As you can see almost every metric has one or two strategies so you can achieve your targets.

However, don’t worry if you don’t have a strategy for some of your metrics as sometimes one strategy can address multiple metrics.

Or you can also have more than one strategy per your target. I recommend up to 3 strategies, depending on the size of your team.

And lastly, you can also find strategies that address one specific target, but influence others. Like for objective #5. All the strategies influence each other, but each of these strategies works best for the specific target.

Step #3: Perform Keyword Research

Step #3 is to perform your keyword research for your blog posts based on your goals, targets, and KPIs as it’s the essential part of SEO pyramid.

Based on my KPIs I want to produce around 100 articles for the next year. That means I need to have around 100 keywords to target.

Also, I have set that I want to be targeting mostly keywords with keyword difficulty <70. So I must take this into an account as well.

Now, I won’t teach you how to do proper keyword research as you can watch my video right here:

Or you can read my article for this. However, let me share with you two important practices that you should focus on when you are doing keyword research for your B2B blog strategy:

Practice #8: Target Keywords Across All Stages of Buyer Journey

One of the most important parts of doing keyword research for your B2B blog strategy is to focus on targeting keywords across all stages of the buyer journey.

To do that you must understand two things. First the different stages of the buyer journey and second the different types of search intent for keywords.

There are four different stages of the B2B buyer journey:

  • Awareness: Potential prospect becomes aware of their needs or challenges and starts searching for how to solve them.
  • Consideration: Prospect is evaluating different solutions in the market.
  • Intent: Prospect selected the most suitable solutions according to his/her research and start engaging with companies for the final vetting process.
  • Purchase: Prospect made the final decision to purchase your solution.
four stages of b2b buyer journey

And there are also four different types of searcher intent:

  • Informational: Prospect is searching for information keywords with modifiers like “how”, “what”, “why”, and other informational content.
  • Commercial: Prospect is searching for comparison type of content with keyword modifiers like “best”, “top”, “popular” and reviews to better understand current solutions.
  • Transactional: Prospect is searching for a price, best deals, and free trials with keyword modifiers “deals”, “price”, “demo”, or “trial”.
  • Navigational: The customer is searching for your product and brand name or the service name.
b2b buyer journey aligned with search intent of keywords

As you can see, the buyer journey and search intent are aligned. So, for you to target keywords across all stages of the buyer journey, you just need to recognize the search intent of each keyword and then have a mix of all search intent keywords.

And to recognize the search intent you can use my table of keywords modifiers that indicates search intent, but take it with a pinch of salt:

keyword modifiers table indicating search intent for b2b blog strategy

For example, let’s say you want to analyze the keyword “seo strategy”. So, just pop it into keyword research tool or Google and check out the SERP.

example of identifying keyword search intent

And as you can see, this is clearly an informational keyword.

Or the keyword “seo tools”.

example of commercial keyword search intent

Is obviously commercial according to the table and as you can see, it’s all list of recommended SEO tools.

So, based on the search results, type of content, and angle you will analyze the search intent and then map it to your buyer journey.

Practice #9: Analyze Competitors Blog Ranking Keywords

And the second practice I recommend you perform is to analyze your competitor’s blog ranking keywords.

Analyzing competitor blogs to find keyword ideas is one of the best ways to find great and high-quality keywords for you to target.

So let me show you how you can do that:

Step #1: Find your competitors

To do that I will use SE Ranking Competitor Analysis. I just pop my domain there, select my targeted location and click on “analyze”.

analyzing competitor blogs for b2b seo strategy

Then, I go to the “Competitors” report. And here I have hundreds of close competitors based on my ranking keywords.

competitors report in se ranking for finding competitors

Step #2: Select right Competitors

So now, I have to select the right competitors of mine. The goal is to find competitors that rank for keywords in my targeted niche. For example, I am in the SEO niche, thus, I need a competitor that is mainly in the SEO niche as well.

For example, the domain g2.com is not a good competitor for analyzing their blogs.

example of bad competitor for analyzing their blogs

Because, they are mainly focusing on the business software and services industry and provide reviews, user ratings, and social data. This also includes marketing and SEO software, that’s why they rank for “seo” related keywords.

A great example of a competitor is the domain singlegrain.com as they are an SEO company, focusing on B2B, especially in the US, which is exactly like me.

a good example of competitor to analyze their blog

Step #3: Analyze competitor ranking keywords

And once you have your competitors, then you just need to pop their domain into the “Competitor Comparison” report.

competitor comparison tool se ranking for b2b blog strategy

And here I will get all the keywords both sites rank. Now I just need to scan the “missing” or “unique” keywords tab for any keywords related to me.

The tool gives me important information like keywords and the page ranking for the keyword, the keyword difficulty, search volume and so much more.

analyze competitor blog ranking keywords

And just like this, you can analyze your competitor blog ranking keywords to find plenty of keyword gems and hidden opportunities to grow your website traffic.

Step #4: Create Editorial Calendar

After your keyword research, you will have plenty of topics to write about, so the next important step is to create an editorial calendar for your B2B blog.

An editorial calendar helps you organize your content responsibilities for your team to ensure everything goes as planned.

It helps with:

  • Map out keywords and plan keywords targeting
  • Frequency of publishing new content
  • Creating content across all stages of the buyer journey
  • Easily manage content team
  • Keep your team accountable
  • Improve the workflow of content creation and promotion
  • See what is slowing down your progress (and so much more)…

Now, most likely you have been already using some content calendar if you have been doing content marketing for B2B.

If not, then I recommend using a simple spreadsheet. If you are using Microsoft 365, then you can use Microsoft Projects or Excel.

create editorial calendar for b2b blog strategy microsoft projects

(Source)

Or you can use Google Spreadsheet. Either way will work fine. There are plenty of templates you can use and choose from.

Step #5: Start Producing SEO Content

The next step of your B2B Blog Strategy is to start producing SEO content, so you can start driving B2B target audience to your website.

When it comes to creating content for SEO you will be focusing on things we have already discussed like keyword research, defining a target audience, and setting goals.

However, beyond that, you also need to know how to actually write your blog posts that it can rank in SERPs for your targeted B2B keywords which include:

  • Understanding the search intent
  • Creating the appropriate content type
  • Follow the content format
  • Creating resources
  • Finding relevant LSI keywords and more.

The content creation process will help you to create an outline for your blog posts to know what topics you should address and what your audience is looking for.

Having a content creation process for SEO will make it easier for your team to create pieces of content that can rank in SERPs.

With that let me share with you two best practices for SEO content creation:

Practice #10: Essential Content & SEO Tools

The first best practice for content creation is to use Content and SEO tools to produce the best quality content at scale fast and efficiently.

When it comes to content creation there are a few tools I really recommend to have, if you have the budget. With that, I will recommend to you tools that you must have and then tools nice to have.

Content & SEO Tools Must have

  • Keyword research tools: The first tool you obviously need is a keyword research tool. With keyword research tool you want to discover the LSI, relevant keywords, and related topics to your targeted keyword. And the recommended KW tools I am using are SE Ranking, Answer the Public, and BuzzSumo.
  • Writing assistant: Another very important tool I recommend is writing assistant. This will help you to fix your writing mistakes for grammar, spelling, style, tone, and more. And the recommended tool for this is of course Grammarly.
  • Competitor Analysis: And the last tool I really recommend to have to analyze your competitor blog posts is competitor analysis. This will show you important information like how many backlinks they have and what keywords they are ranking for. For this, I recommend using SE Ranking.

So here you have some of the content creation tools for SEO, and now I want to also recommend some nice to have tools to furthermore improve your SEO results with your B2B blog strategy:

  • AI & SEO Content: Definitely one of the nice to have tools is a tool that helps you to quickly analyze ranking competitors and provide great outlines and NLP keyword suggestions. It gives you keyword ideas suggestions based on your niche and helps you to write content to boost your ranking and so much more. And the best tool I recommend for this is SurferSEO.

And of course, there are more tools you can use to improve your content workflow as well optimization. However, these are some of the essential and more important that I recommend you get.

Practice #11: Focus on Topic Cluster Model

And the second very important practice for your SEO content is to focus on the topic cluster model when you are targeting keywords.

Focusing on topic cluster means addressing the topic and its subtopics with your content to create topical relevancy for your website.

topic cluster for b2b blog strategy

For example, let’s say you are a liquor e-commerce shop and one of your main specialties is Irish whisky. So to focus on the topic cluster model you will want to target all the subtopics related to Irish whisky like in this example:

example of topic cluster for b2b blog strategy

From here you should be mainly targeting keywords from your topic cluster until you finish all the keywords and interconnect them with internal links.

So, you can increase your topic relevancy, and pass your PageRank to related pages. Therefore, increase your ranking across all the cluster and dominate the search for your targeted main topic.

using topic cluster model to dominate search for targeted topic

Step #6: Optimize for Blog SEO

The next important step of your B2B blog strategy is to optimize your blog for SEO.

Optimizing your B2B blog for SEO helps you to earn more backlinks, increase your organic traffic and search visibility and help you to achieve your goals so much faster.

So, before you hit publish on your blog posts make sure you apply some of the best Blog SEO practices to maximize the opportunities from your blogging.

With that, here are 3 super important parts when you are optimizing your B2B blog for SEO:

Practice #12: Optimize for On-Page SEO

The first part is your blog on-page SEO.

Search engines are getting smarter and when it comes to on-page SEO a lot has changed and sometimes less is more. However, there are still a lot of factors that you should keep in mind.

With that let me share with you 5 best on-page SEO practices for your B2B Blog Strategy:

  • Target only one primary keyword per blog post!
only one primary keyword per b2b blog post
  • Add your primary and LSI keywords in these parts on your blog:
    • Your URL – Only your primary keyword, look at my URL.
    • Your title tag and meta description
    • Your featured picture
    • Other pictures, but sporadically
    • In your introduction, first 200 words.
include your seo keywords in these on-page seo factors
  • Add internal links to connect your relevant pages based on relevancy and keywords.
add relevant internal links to your b2b blog strategy
  • Ensure a lazy load of your images and other media.
lazy-loading part of technical seo
  • Don’t be afraid of outbound links, they increase credibility for users and Google.

So, here you have some of the best practices for blog posts on-page SEO, so let’s move to the second practice.

Practice #13: Optimize for Off-Page SEO

Another important practice when you are optimizing your website for Blog SEO is to focus on your off-page SEO.

Off-Page SEO refers to every activity that takes place outside of your website and it does not only cover link building.

With that here are five best off-page SEO practices for your B2B blog strategy:

  • Build your social fortress first to start building trust with Google and users.
social fortress off-page seo practice for b2b blog strategy
  • Start with low and mid-range authority websites. For example, for SE Ranking this would be domains with Domain Trust between 20-50.
example of low and mid range authority domain for b2b blog strategy
  • Build backlinks from new pages instead of aged pages using link building strategies like guest posting at the beginning.
  • Build backlinks from domains with minimum organic traffic of 500, preferably 1,000 according to your SEO tool.
minimum organic traffic for link building according to an seo tool
  • If you want to allow guest contributors, don’t publicly display it, and focus on quality by posting your guidelines online.
online guest posting guideliness mistake b2b blog strategy

And of course, when it comes to off-page SEO, there are many more things you can do, but these are some of the most important that you should keep in mind. Additionally, make sure that you track your backlinks, so you don’t lose them.

Practice #14: Optimize for Technical SEO

And the last important part of blog SEO optimization for your B2B blog strategy is technical SEO and with that, here are 5 best practices:

  • Create SEO-friendly website architecture by using short descriptive words relevant to your page.
technical seo site architecture for b2b blog strategy
  • Try to keep all your pages in the page depth 1-4. Anything below can be seen as less important by search engines, thus, perform poorer in search results. To check I am using the SE Ranking website audit tool.
page depth se ranking website audit for b2b blog strategy
  • Fix your 301 and 404 status codes. If can, try to have as few 301 redirects as possible and none 404 errors for internal and external links.
external and internal redirects in se ranking issue report
  • Create a sitemap with images for your blog posts. You can use the Rank Math plugin to do it for you.
blog posts sitemap with images for technical seo during b2b blog strategy
  • Ensure your blog posts load fast by optimizing your images, cleaning up your code, using CDN and other technologies to load fast.
example of page speed optimization for b2b blog strategy

Many seem to forget about technical SEO; however, it is as important nor even more than any other optimization technique.

If your website does not perform well by the technical aspects like loading fast, then even the best quality content and most authority website will struggle with ranking and bringing users to their website.

Therefore, before you spend so much money on link building and content creation, ensure your technical SEO is up to a notch.

Step #7: Create Lead Generation Strategy

The next step of your B2B blog strategy is to create a lead generation strategy, as yes, b2b blogging is good for business.

As one of the primary reasons why you should start with B2B blogging is for lead generation.

Blogging is not only great for brand awareness, link building, and increasing trust with users and search engines, but ultimately you can drive a lot of high-quality leads, improve your conversions from MQL to SQL and even close the sales.

B2B blog is a great way to boost your lead generation and one of the greatest examples of using a B2B blog strategy for lead generation is HubSpot.

HubSpot blog is generating 10k leads each and every month with over 14 million organic traffic and 1.9 million ranking keywords according to SE Ranking and producing 200 blog posts every month.

example of hubspot that uses b2b blog strategy for lead generation

HubSpot was hammering on B2B blog strategy since the very beginning they started in 2006 and now they rank in top positions pretty much for every of their targeted keyword.

hubspot early b2b blog strategy journey

They even posted a blog post to show how important is a blog for small businesses in 2006.

hubspot blog posts about importance of having blog

So, with that, let me show you some of the best practices to generate leads with blog posts:

Practice #15: Create Specific Lead Magnets

The first practice and one of the best ways to collect email subscribers and start a lead nurturing campaign to generate leads is to create a specific lead magnet for your blog posts.

Now, there are two versions of doing this depending on the size of your team and budget:

Large Team & Bigger Budget

If you are having a larger marketing team, with 5 or even 10 people, then you can create specific lead magnets for your blog posts.

A great example of this is HubSpot as they have a massive collection of downloadable content and create specific lead magnets for every of their blog posts.

For example, the HubSpot blog post “How to Start a Blog” has a blog posts template to download.

example of lead magnet of large marketing team

Or their blog post “Does My Business Need a Website?” has a lead magnet about their CMS.

another example of lead magnet for large team

And basically, they create specific lead magnets for every of their blog posts to generate the best results.

However, the problem with such an approach is that it is extremely resourceful heavy to create, manage and keep updated this kind of library of resources.

Small Team & Small Budget

Therefore, if you have a small marketing team and budget, then you can create lead magnets based on your blog post category.

For example, Brian Dean is mainly focusing on SEO category articles, so he created a lead magnet just for the specific category.

lead magnet from small team example

And he did not have to even create a specific lead magnet as he could just take one of his blog posts, create a PDF or eBook version and use it as a lead magnet.

lead magnet from a blog post

For me, I am in the SEO niche as well. Therefore, I can take my comprehensive guide for SEO Strategy,

article to ebook for lead magnet

And then create an eBook and then offer it across all my SEO articles.

all seo articles my seo resources

And I can do this even alone, only I need to pay some freelancer on Fiverr or anywhere else to create me nice eBook from my article and I am done.

And just like this, you can easily create lead magnets for your blog posts and start collecting leads and email subscribers.

Practice #16: Create Effective Call-To-Action

The second important practice is to create an effective Call-To-Action for your blog posts and lead magnets.

When it comes to CTA, the sky is the limit and your imagination is what will lead the way. I have seen so many unique CTAs on websites as well as the average CTA to encourage readers to download or test a tool.

For example, Singlegrain.com led by Eric Siu has created a tool called ClickFlow and he created a banner CTA on his website to promote his tool.

example of banner CTA in sidebar

He also has his lead magnet CTA banner, which in this case is his free training program and not an ebook.

lead magnet cta banner example

Another popular CTA for blog posts is to include simple written text in the conclusion, introduction, or in the middle. A good example is an Active Campaign using this method.

text written CTA for b2b blog strategy

Or one of my clients used CTA for both lead magnets and their system at the end of their article.

cta for demo and lead magnet example

What’s great about CTA for blog posts is that they can be easily customized and managed to generate brand awareness and leads from your blog posts.

And I recommend you always look around for CTA ideas when you are browsing. You would be surprised what creative ideas you can find and use for your own B2B blog.

Practice #17: Set Up Retargeting

And the last important practice I recommend you to do is to set up retargeting for your website.

Retargeting can help you with many of your goals including brand awareness, driving sales, and lead generation.

retargeting statistics

And on average only 2-3% of visitors will convert to your website according to some researches.

only 2-3 percent of website visitors convert

This of course includes anybody who takes action on your website, whether download your lead magnet, sign up to your webinar, or request for a demo, pricing, or get in touch with your sales.

With that being said, retargeting is a great way to address the rest of the 98% of visitors that did not take any action on your website and left.

Having set up retargeting from main platforms like:

  • Google
  • Bing
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Enables you to store the history of those that visited your website and create ads to address them, thus increasing your conversions.

And even if you don’t plan to start with retargeting ads, it’s better to have the audience already prepared in case in the future you will start with retargeting. It does not cost you anything and can help a lot.

Step #8: Promote Your Blog Posts

Another essential step of your B2B blog strategy is to promote your newly published blog posts.

There are many ways how you can promote your blog posts and according to Brian Dean, promoting your content should take more time than creating it or at least the same amount of time.

With that, here are some of my favorite ways to promote your blog posts:

Practice #18: Create Newsletter

The first way to promote your blog posts is by creating a newsletter for your blog.

A newsletter is one of the easiest yet very effective strategies to promote your blog posts and there are numerous ways how you can do that.

For example, HubSpot created a newsletter based on your profession or interest to deliver only blog posts you want.

hubspot newsletter signup form with interested

And then once a week they send you an email newsletter.

hubspot email newsletter for their blog

Or Matt Diggity is sending email newsletters to promote his blog posts and videos with his subscribers.

example of newsletter matt diggity

Or Brian Dean is using the newsletter to share his new and updated articles and pages with his email subscribers as well.

brian dean newsletter example of promoting blog posts b2b blog strategy

With that, I just want to say, using the newsletter to promote your articles is not rocket science and simply creating a way for your readers to subscribe to your newsletter can be a great way to boost traffic to new blog posts and even generate new backlinks.

Practice #19: Share It with Those You Have Mentioned

Another great practice that you should definitely implement for every of your blog post is to share it with those you have mentioned in your article.

This is one of the greatest link building and brand awareness strategies everybody can implement with minimum effort!

You just need to make a list of those you have mentioned in your article and then reach them out and inform them you have used them as an example, use their research or their article.

For example, as you can see, I have mentioned HubSpot, Matt Diggity, and Brian Dean in this article as great examples.

So, what I can do now, is just send them a short, personalized email about the mentions and say thank you.

email to informed about blog posts mentioned

As you can see, I am very personalized. He recently shared that one of his investment houses got burned down, but luckily insurance covered that.

Also, I am just informing him, not asking for anything as it is my first email and I want to create a connection by offering value upfront.

And if he likes it, he might share it with his followers or even link back to me, if he found it useful.

Remember, you want to use the rule of reciprocity in a natural and friendly way, without them feeling being pushed to do something.

Practice #20: Do Skyscraper Technique

Another great way to promote your blog posts is through the skyscraper technique.

The skyscraper technique developed by Brian Dean is a way how you should think about creating blog posts on your website regardless you are doing for promotion.

Basically, this technique is all about creating better, more comprehensive, and in every way more superior content than your competitors by analyzing SERPs for your targeted keyword.

For example, if you are targeting the keyword “how to clean computer screen” then you will want to analyze the current ranking competitors in the SERPs using Google or keyword research tool.

skysraper technique keyword analysis in SERPs

And by going through the ranking competitors, you will see what topics each of them covered in their articles and you will want to address those topics as well in your article and even consider adding one or two extra topics to play it safe.

keyword and topics analysis for skyscraper technique to earn backlinks

On top of that, you will want to provide more information as well. However, this doesn’t mean having more words in your article, but more value that ultimately helps your readers.

providing more information on topics for skyscraper technique

Then you will want to analyze other aspects such as the graphics they are using. For example, if they are using stock photos, then you will want to use custom images.

improving quality content and graphics for skyscraper technique link building strategies

Or getting experts to give you some input or quote to your article, creating videos to help them understand it better, or anything you can think of to make your article better.

Remember skyscraper technique is all about BETTER! And this especially applies if you are a small business or not so well know a person as you will need to work extra hard to get any attention for your article.

And once you are done, then you want to analyze your competitor’s backlinks pointing to their blog posts (even edu backlinks and gov backlinks) using tools like SE Ranking Backlink Checker.

analyzing competitors blog posts for backlinks for skyscraper technique b2b seo strategy

And then extract all those referring domains and start doing blogger outreach.

exporting referring domains for skyscraper technique in b2b seo strategy

And just like this, you can start your skyscraper technique, however, I recommend you to check out Brian Dean’s guide.

Practice #21: Repurpose Your Blog

And the last practice or technique I have for you to promote your blog posts is to repurpose your blog posts into different formats.

For example, for every article I produce, I also create a video version of that article and link each other.

On YouTube, I add a link to my article version,

link from youtube to blog article version repurposing

And within the article, I have the video version embedded.

link to video version of a article

Like this, I can generate views from YouTube and Google and share the same information just in different formats.

Then I can also create an infographic of these 13 link building strategies and share them on social media like:

  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook

Or even do guestographic outreach.

The sky is limited and you can repurpose your content into many different formats. The key is to create a suitable format for the specific platform you are going to use to maximize the exposure and results.

Step #9: Measure Your B2B Blog Strategy Performance

And the very last step of your B2B blog strategy is to measure your B2B Blog Strategy performance.

Measuring your progress is an essential skill if every person, regardless of the business nature, and that also applies to marketers.

When it comes to digital marketing, it is much easier to measure if you are doing well or not as almost everything can be recorded, thus, the amount of information and data can be overwhelming.

Luckily, you can use data visualization tools like Microsoft Power BI and connect all your sources into 1 tool and easily track your progress.

Also, the metrics you measure will highly depend on the goals you have determined. But let me share with you 3 important metrics that you should measure in any case:

Metric #1: Organic Traffic

The first important metric you should measure is of course your organic traffic.

B2B blogging is basically about driving organic traffic to your website.

Therefore, measuring your organic traffic from your blog posts should be one of your main priorities.

Now there are several tools how you can measure your organic traffic, but they are two I recommend you start with:

Technique #1: Using Google Analytics

The first technique how you should measure your organic traffic is using Google Analytics.

Google Analytics 4 traffic acquisition session medium for b2b blog strategy

This tool gives you a precise number of your website traffic and you can easily filter down to only organic traffic from your blog posts using the Pages and screens report and setting the session medium to only organic traffic.

organic traffic only from blog posts using GA 4 for b2b blog strategy

Google Analytics is an essential tool for every webmaster and learning how to use it and measure your website progress is crucial. To learn how to use it, you can visit the Google Analytics Academy.

Technique #2: Using SEO Tool

And the second way how you should measure your organic traffic is with SEO tools. The reason why is because most of your competitors and SEOs will use these tools to analyze your website.

For example, using SE Ranking Competitive Research Tool you can get the approximate organic and paid traffic, the domain trust score, ranking keywords, and other metrics.

organic traffic measuring with se ranking for b2b blog strategy

Then you can also see top pages in organic search and the approximate organic traffic.

top pages in organic search se ranking b2b blog strategy

And this gives you a good idea of what your competitors can see and prevent anything bad from happening like stealing your ranking keywords and organic traffic.

Metric #2: Email Subscribers

The second metric you should measure is how many email subscribers you get from each of your blog posts.

Analyzing how your blog posts and lead magnets perform in terms of generating email subscribers will give you a better understanding of how your lead magnets, CTA, and copy perform and whether you are using the right lead magnet for the blog post.

Now depending on the email marketing tool, you are using and the opt-in forms you will measure this differently.

But I really recommend you make sure you track each blog post and lead magnet signups to further optimize your progress.

Metric #3: Organic Lead Generation

And the last important metric you should measure is your organic lead generation.

This should include both leads that came to your website via blog posts as well as email subscribers that became leads after your lead nurturing sequence.

Understanding what blog posts drives you the most leads will help you to update your B2B blog strategy towards lead generation and drive the best results.

Let Me Know Your Thoughts

So here you have my 9 step B2B Blog Strategy and also some of the B2B SEO best practices.

Of course, as you will start planning your strategy and updating, you will be revisiting those steps, like your keyword research, Blog SEO optimization, and others.

This should give you guidelines on how you can start planning your strategy but along the way, this strategy is designed to flow as your needs and objectives change.

So, let me know, what’s your favorite or super important step in B2B blog strategy, did I forget something, let me know on my YouTube channel!

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Disclaimer

This article was created by Eduard Dziak and may contain affiliate links. The following were used to optimize the article for the best user and search engine experience include:

  • SE Ranking for keyword research and on-page SEO optimization
  • Surfer SEO for SEO-friendly content creation for users and search engines.
  • Jasper AI for grammar correction and information enhancement.

The article is based on the author’s own experience and knowledge, drawn from both their own work and that of their clients, to provide the latest, proven methods.