Just like a song, your B2B blog must be unique and carefully composed in order to attract an audience. Musicians release singles hoping their listeners will love them so much, they’ll want to hear more, leading to the purchase of the entire album. Your blog should work the same way: when readers feel genuinely excited by any single page on your site, they’re more likely to purchase your product or solution. And that truism leads us to a strategy that I’ve seen succeed many times over the years — creating a personalized blog on every niche search term your target audience types into Google. Doing so is the surest way to increase your blog’s conversion rate.
To help you build a blog that is composed only of articles that are custom-tailored to your target audiences’ niche interests, I’ve laid out five B2B blog best practices to follow, which together are sure to increase your conversion rate:
- Choose a title that captures search intent, making sure blog posts (and their meta titles) contain commercially valuable keywords;
- Create visual harmony with eye-catching imagery and a user-friendly layout;
- Make your content accessible by using a mobile-friendly theme;
- Support your fans by ensuring your website is secure and safe to use; and,
- Get to the chorus quickly by focusing on readability and avoiding long introductions.
Here’s a little more on each topic, to get you started on writing attractive, conversion-oriented blog posts today.
#1. Choose a Title that Captures Search Intent
Genre labels help radio stations and streaming services get the right songs to the right people. That’s why you see bizarrely specific playlists like “Lost in the depths of the forest.” Blog titles (and by extension, meta page titles) do the same thing by helping Google direct relevant traffic to your website. Choosing a title for your blog that is a “bullseye” keyword, i.e. would be typed in only by a potential customer, and contains a long, highly specific search term will attract a small, niche audience to your page. That’s exactly what increases the page’s conversion rate: the moment where the reader thinks to themself “This page is giving me exactly what I was looking for!”
#2. Create Visual Harmony
The obvious musical metaphor here is an album cover. Your blog’s visuals should complement and illustrate its text.
Make sure to break up walls of text with headers, graphics, and creative formatting. It’s ideal to use a color scheme that matches your logo, but you’ll need to use those colors harmoniously—don’t make your audience strain their eyes to read your posts. Choose a layout that’s eye-catching, uncluttered, and make sure the visuals you use match the tone and topic of your content. This includes navigation—the easier it is for your audience to move around your site, the more likely it is that they’ll eventually find their way to a contact or sales form.
#3. Make Your Content Accessible
A song that only gets released on a single platform won’t reach as many listeners as one that sees both a digital and radio release. To see the greatest ROI, you’ll need to make sure your blog is widely accessible to avoid shutting out potential customers.
This goes beyond merely making sure your content is publicly viewable. According to recent studies, as much as 40% of internet users only use their mobile devices, rather than desktop computers, when searching online, meaning mobile-friendliness has become one of the most important B2B blog best practices you can follow. Without this, you’ll be missing out on nearly half of the total conversions your blog could be generating.
#4. Support Your Fans
If you (legally) downloaded a song that then infected your computer with a virus, you’d probably think twice before buying from that band’s website again. The same is true of your own customers—if they’re worried your site isn’t secure, they’re more likely to search for a safer alternative.
The best way to thank your audience for visiting your blog is to let them know your site is safe by acquiring an SSL certificate. While it’s always been recommended that e-commerce sites have one, it has now become the ideal standard for every website to have at least basic certification. Being greeted with an “https” URL, it turns out, is far more comforting than spotting a “Site not secure” flag the moment you enter a new blog.
Lastly, don’t risk losing your audience to a catchier tune with a quicker hook. Optimize your site speed to ensure they get to the chorus—your content—as soon as possible so they don’t click away in search of a faster answer to their question.
#5. Get to the “Chorus” Quickly
Rare is the listener who will patiently wait through a slow, extended intro to a song on the radio—or a reader who will put up with a fluffy introduction in an article. When content gets to the point quickly, with a focus on readability, busy readers can easily skim the article to learn the main concept. And since they get value quickly, they are more likely to stay on the page and, ultimately, convert.
Implementing B2B Blog Best Practices
At first glance, blogs seem pretty straightforward: You create a website, post some content, and wait. But with so many companies now operating online and doing the exact same thing, it takes a more strategic approach to build a blog that will generate not just the traffic you want to see, but the conversions you need to reach your financial goals. We’ve written a thorough article on B2B best practices if you’d like more information on the topic.
Building many authoritative pages and blog articles on your site that follow the best practices we’ve outlined here will attract visitors to your site and down the sales funnel, ultimately boosting conversion rates. Without a rich web of expert pages, a visitor may not have continued and you could have lost a crucial sale.
Some businesses choose to manage their blogs completely in-house. This can be very effective, but it can also be a drain on resources and difficult to maintain long-term. A better choice may be to outsource the work to a third-party SEO agency. An external content marketing team specializing in thought leadership can provide the time, energy, and specialist knowledge you need to make your blog the absolute best B2B blog of its kind.
First Page Sage is a leading-edge SEO agency with over ten years of experience working with B2B clients in a wide variety of industries. To find out more about how we can help you implement these best practices on your blog, contact us today.
