The Ultimate B2B Blogging Guide For Professional Services Firms

There are millions of service companies today that post blogs on their websites. Amidst this fierce competition, you want your target audience to read your business’s blog posts. You need your blogs to be worth reading. You want them to be perfect.

A perfect blog post should have the right keywords that will ensure your site ranks high on search engines and drive quality traffic to your posts. To achieve that, consider the following best practices in your B2B blogging strategy.

Start with keyword research and competitor analysis

The key to creating a successful B2B blog lies in your ability to target the right keywords. You can do this by conducting keyword research and competitor analysis. Understanding your competition and what keywords they are targeting can help you create blog posts that are specifically tailored for your audience — and rank high on Google.

If you want your blog posts to rank high on Google, it’s essential to do keyword research. First, identify the primary keyword that you want to target. When creating a blog post, you should target a specific primary SEO keyword that is relevant to your business and has a decent amount of monthly searches.

There are different tools that you can use for keyword research, including HubSpot’s keywords tool, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, SEMrush, and Google Keyword Planner. These tools allow you to see how many people are searching for specific keywords every month, as well as how much competition there is for those keywords.

It is also essential to conduct a competitor analysis, which involves taking a look at the top-ranking websites for your target keyword and seeing what they are doing right. Are they using specific keyword phrases? Do they have well-optimized titles and descriptions? By understanding what your competition is doing, you can make sure that your blog posts are even better.

Here’s how to do keyword research:

• Make a list of general topics based on the information you wish to include in your post. Then, break down the broad categories into smaller groups and come up with related phrases for the parent topics you’ve identified.

For example, if you wanted to write a blog post about “time management for entrepreneurs,” your broad themes would be time management, productivity, and business. From there, you could break down each of those broad topics into smaller sub-topics, such as:

• • Time management: tips for reducing distractions, creating a daily schedule, setting priorities
  • Productivity: tips for increasing productivity, improving focus, eliminating procrastination
  • Business: time management software for entrepreneurs, ways to delegate tasks

     

• Next, go to Google and use the auto-suggest option while typing your keywords, then expand your buckets using the related search terms listed at the bottom of the page.
• After you’ve decided on the key terms you wish to target in your post, it’s time to look at the top 3–5 Google results. Take note of the following:
• • What do those pages look like?
  • What do these pages cover?
  • What don’t they cover that you feel should be mentioned?
  • Make a note of all of this information and use them as references when laying out your content piece’s outline.

Now let’s take a look at some tips that will help you optimize your blog posts for SEO.

Create an article brief or outline

To write an effective B2B blog post, it pays to create an article brief or outline. This document should provide instructions to your writer on what the article should be about, as well as what keywords to target.

An article or content brief should include:

• An article topic and title
• A primary keyword that you want to rank for
• A list of secondary keywords that you want to include
• Your target audience, as defined by your campaign objectives
• The searcher intent, or what you want the reader to do after they finish reading your article (e.g., sign up for your newsletter, download a white paper, request a consultation, etc.).
• The article thesis, or the statement that addresses your viewpoint or claim about the issue
• The target word count
• Tone of voice
• The content format (e.g., listicle, how-to guide, case study)
  
  

For an example of what an article outline looks like, download this template.

When you have a well-written content brief, there will be no misunderstandings between you and the writer. Once you have created your article brief, it’s time to start writing.

Write a catchy, keyword-rich blog title

Your B2B blog posts should have catchy, keyword-rich titles. This will let Google know what your article is about, and it will also help to entice readers to click on your post. If you want people to click on them in Google’s search results, it’s important to understand how to create attention-grabbing blog post titles..

To create a catchy blog title, it’s best to include your target keyword in the title of your article. In the example of writing an article about time management for entrepreneurs, your title could be “Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs.” From this headline, readers know exactly what they can expect if they click on the article. Using numbers and/or statistics to clarify things and create intrigue is also a good idea (e.g., “7 Effective Time Management Tips for Busy Entrepreneurs”).

Creating a catchy title for your blog article is essential as according to SEO company Moz, 80% of people never read past the headline. The better your headline, the more people will be likely to read your blog.

Get your article URL right

Your article’s URL should be short, keyword-rich, and easy to read. It should also be optimized for SEO and should, as much as possible, match your blog title. For example, if your blog post title is “Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs,” a good article URL would be something like “time-management-tips-for-entrepreneurs.html.”

If you’re including numbers in your title (which is a great idea), be sure to include them in your article URL, as well. For example, “50-time-management-tips-for-entrepreneurs.html” would be an ideal article URL for a blog post with that title.

The bottom line is that an article URL with the right keyword can help you optimize your article URL for SEO and help ensure that it is getting the traffic it deserves.

Write a good meta description

To create a keyword-rich description, include your target keywords in the meta description of your blog post. The meta description is the short paragraph of text that appears beneath your article’s title in the search results. It should give readers a brief overview of what your article is about.

A good meta description is between 150-160 characters, includes the target keywords, and is written in a way that entices readers to click on the article. By including your target keywords in both your title and meta description, you are more likely to rank higher in the search results and get more clicks to your blog post.

The meta description, according to search engines, provides no immediate SEO advantage as it isn’t used in their ranking algorithm. However, there is an indirect effect: Google uses click-through rate as a metric for determining if you’re a high-quality result.

Use relevant images (and/or videos)

Another way to make your blog posts more engaging and visually appealing is to include images (and videos). In fact, a study revealed that articles with images get 94% more total views than those without images.

When selecting images for your blog posts, be sure to choose high-quality photos that are relevant to the article’s content. And if you can, try to include a mixture of both original and stock photos.

Including at least one image (preferably more) is a great way to make your blog post look more polished and professional. But don’t just add images for the sake of it; always ensure that they serve a purpose and help to improve the article’s overall message.

Use headings and subheadings

Another important SEO tip for blog posts is to use headings and subheadings. Headings help to break up your content and make it easier to read, while also helping Google understand what your article is about.

To optimize your headings for SEO, simply include your target keyword in one or several of your headings. In addition to using headings and subheadings, you should also include your target keywords in the body of your article. However, be sure to avoid keyword stuffing, which is when you include too many keywords in your content. A good rule of thumb is to use your target keyword(s) a few times throughout your article without making it sound forced or unnatural.

Mind the headings’ hierarchy

When using headings and subheadings in your blog post, it’s important to follow a heading hierarchy. That is, you should start with your main heading (H-tag), followed by subheadings (H-tags), and then finally your body copy.

The heading hierarchy helps Google understand the structure of your article and makes it easier for readers to scan your content. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to structure your B2B article’s heading hierarchy:

Add internal links

Any link from one page on your website to another is known as an internal link. For instance, it makes sense to link your blog article about “effective communication techniques” to a product page on your site that offers VoIP products and services.

Internal links help improve the user experience by making it easy for readers to find related content on your site. Moreover, they help with SEO by giving Google an idea of the structure of your website and how it all fits together.

To add an internal link to your B2B blog post, simply highlight the text you want to link and click on the “Insert/edit link” button. Then, enter the URL of the page you want to link to and click “Insert.”

Add external links

In addition to internal links, you should also include a few external or outbound links in your blog post. An external link is a link to a website that is not your own. 

External links are important because they help improve the user experience by providing readers with additional resources on a topic. Moreover, they help with SEO by showing Google that your content is well-researched and authoritative.

To add an external link to your blog post, simply highlight the text you want to link and click on the “Insert/edit link” button. Then, enter the URL of the page you want to link to and click “Insert.”

When adding internal or external links to your blog post, be sure to use keywords in the anchor text, or the highlighted text that appears when you hover over a link. Using keywords in your anchor text helps Google understand what your article is about and can also help improve your ranking for those keywords.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post about “effective communication techniques,” you could link to an article about different communication tools that you may cite as examples, with the anchor text “communication tools.”