The Ultimate B2B Blog Toolkit: How to Build Authority & Boost Traffic

These days, it’s nearly impossible to run a Google search or open a social media feed without running into a blog post. While blogging may be ubiquitous, it’s also effective, and not just for food and finance bloggers. B2B blogs are a fundamental marketing tool for a wide variety of B2B-leaning industries like SaaS, wholesalers, and professional service providers

Did you know that business blogging can boost your website traffic by as much as 55%? Or that, according to a study by HubSpot, businesses that regularly blog earn 97% more inbound links and an average of 434% more indexed pages? 

Those are impressive statistics. For B2B, a blog is a means to deliver helpful, informative content to your target audience, build brand awareness and authority, and – when done strategically – drive traffic to your website boosting your lead generation efforts. 

Below we’ll walk you through how to approach your B2B blog in an effective and efficient manner. No throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, we’ll show you how to craft posts that matter to your audience (and perform well with the search engines) and how to create a content calendar to stay organized, plus share our best tips for how to structure your articles so they win at SEO. 

How to Choose Topics for Your B2B Blog

Before you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) to start the writing process, it’s important to pause and be strategic about what topics you’re going to write about. First, consider your audience – what are their pain points? What problems are they trying to solve? What are their most frequently asked questions? List all the answers to these questions because they are excellent potential B2B blog post topics.

Next, consider your business or industry. What can you write about with authority? What is your specialty? Does your business serve clients in specific industries? These answers can provide topic pillars - big, broad subjects that are likely to have hundreds of related subtopics all of which could be great subjects for your next post. Add all of these to your list as well.

Finally, take this list and use it to drive your keyword research. What is keyword research? It’s researching search terms that your audience is likely to enter into a search engine. The goal? To analyze their search volume (popularity) and difficulty (how hard it is to rank for them in the SERPs). You’ll need a keyword research tool like SemRush, Ahrefs, or Moz to do this step. 

Put the terms from your list into the keyword research tool and it will tell you not only what the volume and difficulty (sometimes abbreviated KD) are for that term, but provide you with tools to discover related keywords and search for additional keywords by looking at different variations of the keyword by displaying additional broad match, phrase match, and exact match results. Researching keywords for your B2B blog is a lot easier than it sounds. And it’s an essential step to ensure that you’re writing content that will actually rank.

If you’re brand new to blogging your “domain authority” (how search engines measure your website’s authority on a topic which then influences how well your pages rank) will be low. Because of this, you’ll want to seek out keywords that have low difficulty (less than 30) but reasonable search volume (from the dozens to the hundreds). Make a new list of all these analyzed search terms noting their relative difficulty and volume. This is where you’ll draw your blog post topics from.

Creating a B2B Blog Content Calendar

Great, you’ve got a healthy list of audience or industry-appropriate keywords for your B2B blog that are lower difficulty but modest traffic, now what?

We won’t lie, turning all those keywords into content is going to take some time. So the next step is to plan out your posts by creating a blog content calendar. First, decide how many posts you would like to publish (and can reasonably accomplish) each week. The key is to be consistent. Increasing your website traffic and improving your domain authority with search engines is a bit of a long game, but once you gain traction the growth can be exponential. B2B content marketing is all about putting in the hard work now for a steady, consistent payoff later. So while 2 or more posts per week are ideal, one B2B blog per week is fabulous if that’s what you can sustainably manage.

Next, plan out your quarter with your weekly blog post schedule in mind. Publishing your B2B blog twice a week means you’ll need 24 keyword-driven and polished blog posts ready to publish. No pressure, right? It’s less overwhelming if you break it down a step at a time. 

First, write your headlines. Pick 24 distinct keywords and come up with blog post titles for each. These headlines should ALWAYS have the keyword in them, be less than 60 characters, and appeal to your audience’s urge to click by evoking emotion, demonstrating authority, or using an element of surprise. 

Then, figure out who is going to do the writing, when they will fit it into their schedule, and how these articles will get written. More on that part, below.

B2B Blog Structure – How to Make Both Readers & Algorithms Happy

Good content is important, but so is building your B2B blog the right way, from an SEO standpoint. Interestingly, more and more, the algorithms value the user experience and topic relevance, and penalize quick and dirty methods to increase SERP results that annoy users and distract from a quality online experience. There are no shortcuts, but there are best practices that will help your B2B blog slowly and steadily reach more of the right people.

12 Best Practices for Your B2B Blog

1. Use H1, H2 & H3 headers, and be sure to feature keywords in those headers in a natural way and near the beginning of each headline if possible.
2. Length: Shoot for posts of at least 800 words and up to 3,000 words.
3. Sprinkle the keyword(s) throughout the post. Again, the keyword should appear naturally. Sprinkle - do not saturate. Too much repetition doesn’t make for happy readers & can penalize you in the search rankings.
4. Style: Avoid big blocks of text and use bold to make your posts more scannable.
5. Incorporate lists
6. Use original images or graphics
7. Leverage video
8. Use internal links to connect to other relevant posts on your site. 
9. Write an optimized meta description
10. Include Alt Tags that incorporate keywords for all images
11. Include calls to action – after all, you have earned their attention.
12. Be thorough, demonstrate authority, and freely share your knowledge. The quality of your content matters to both your audience and to the search engines. The better your content, the more folks will share it and link to it, which tells Google (and other search engines) that you know something about something. 

Leveraging Your B2B Blog

Bravo! You’ve begun publishing blog posts. Don’t rest easy just yet.

You’ve put a lot of time and effort into creating these well-thought-out, properly structured, articles – now it’s time to maximize the benefits of this long-form content by sharing links on your social media platforms and using the blogs themselves as sources for new marketing content, from social media posts to emails to podcasts or webinars, or original graphics and illustrations. And while it’s not necessary to do ALL of these things, repurposing this content allows you to extend the reach and benefits of the time and effort you invested into your B2B blog. It’s a smart use of your resources, and after all of the above, really requires minimal additional effort. You’ve got this.

Blogging is second only to video when it comes to how content marketers choose to reach their audiences. For B2Bs, blogging offers a means to connect with the decision-makers at other companies, a way to build authority and drive valuable traffic to your business’ website, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

Done right, a blog can be an invaluable resource for customers and an incredible marketing tool for brands, but it’s not a recipe for overnight success. Blogging, like all organic search techniques, is a long game. Play it consistently and well, and you’ll start reaping the benefits in 6-12 months. 

We leverage this B2B blog process for our blog and the content we create for our clients. This step-by-step system delivers results consistently, but there’s no question that it takes time. If all this content creation sounds daunting, schedule a one-on-one no-obligation introduction to Brand Theory today and find out how we use blogging and other inbound marketing strategies to fuel exponential growth for our clients.