Roger Wigington: SEO Harmony: Why B2B Marketers Need To Integrate Search With Content Strategy

People pushing giant puzzle pieces together at sunset.

Siloed and segmented SEO and content strategies work against B2B marketing success, but can they come together and work to compliment one another? The best SEO specialists can use their skills to make even the most boring B2B content shine in the search engine spotlight — for better or worse, as the case may be. The very top content creators can craft fantastic digital assets that are often able to rise to the heights of search success with little to no accompanying SEO. Both of these scenarios are all-too-familiar in B2B marketing efforts, however segmented SEO and content don’t need to be so separate, and indeed the best efforts occur when both SEO and content practitioners or teams work together in harmony. Let’s take a look at why it’s important for SEO and content marketing to achieve harmony, including actionable steps to help start making the change.

SEO Specialists Gain By Reaching Out To Content Teams

Just as old-school account-based-marketing (ABM) has evolved into the type of marketing automation journey that Jon Miller, chief marketing officer at Demandbase, recently spoke about in “Find, Engage and Close: Demandbase’s Jon Miller on Recasting the B2B Marketing Automation Journey,” savvy practitioners of SEO are also evolving their processes to learn more about the content marketing landscape. In the ABM world it’s the sales and marketing teams that benefit from learning more about each other’s unique goals, struggles, and strengths. Similarly, SEO and content marketing stand to see improvements when their teams can see each other with greater clarity and understanding. Some of the ways SEO practitioners are increasing their understanding of content marketing and cross-team learning include:

Scheduling regular formal or informal time together with content teams
Streamlining the process of sharing between SEO and content teams
Bringing in live or viewing taped virtual content marketing guest speaker presentations

When SEO specialists are able to work more closely with content creation teams, they’ll learn just what it is that sets the organization’s content apart from the competition, which makes it much easier when it comes time to focus SEO efforts on specific areas. We put together a list of top SEO trends from 12 search industry influencers, which can offer insight for content marketers looking to learn more about the latest concerns than SEO professionals are facing today — you’ll find it in a recent infographic, “Infographic: SEO In 2021 — 12 Influencers Share Their Best Tips For The Road Ahead.” Additional resources that content marketers can use to learn more about the importance of SEO include the following articles we’ve published on the subject:

[bctt tweet="Marketers need to break free over the next 10 years by radically changing how they work with sales, stopping the baton hand-off model and moving much more of an integrated team. ” — Jon Miller @jonmiller" username="toprank"]

Audience Insights Benefit Both SEO & Content Marketing

Organizations can strengthen both SEO and content marketing efforts by giving each team accurate audience insight data, whether it's what potential or current customers are seeking to learn more about, or demographic information that can help better inform SEO targeting efforts. What barriers prevent this audience insight data from reaching the SEO and content teams at organizations? Sometimes it’s simply that this data isn’t being actively collected, so often there isn’t anything new to share. Other times communication process hurdles prevent the sharing of helpful audience insight information. Aligning interdepartmental communications is an important part of any company’s success, and not only in marketing. As Jon Miller has noted, with today’s B2B buyer journey being so complicated, a simple baton hand-off approach doesn’t work, Jon observed, and instead has encouraged a team approach more like the way a soccer team functions, passing customer engagement and insight data back and forth as needed, in a coordinated way. Search practitioners looking to gain new insight into the world of content marketing and the concerns content professionals are facing today can learn more in the following articles we’ve published on the topic:

[bctt tweet="“Segmented SEO and content don’t need to be so separate, and indeed the best efforts occur when both SEO and content practitioners or teams work in harmony.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis" username="toprank"]

Content Teams Thrive By Making SEO A Fundamental Concern

Content creation teams at organizations with dedicated SEO departments often have a certain amount of fear when it comes to the technical intricacies of search optimization. By nature SEO works in an ever-changing environment dictated by the ceaseless updates and refinements implemented by Google and other search engine firms, which leads many to see SEO as being more of a math and programming oriented job than the generally word-smithing and grammar-driven practice of content marketing. When it comes down to it, however, the two aren’t so different when we consider the commonalities that both practices share. Both SEO and content marketing teams strive to:

Increase content visibility
Raise audience engagement levels
Surface best-answer content

Just as SEO teams can learn more about great content marketing from occasional guest speakers or lunch-and-learn sessions, content professionals can gain newfound understanding of the search optimization process when search industry expects can share their knowledge and passion. By demystifying the sometimes murky waters of SEO efforts, search professionals can enlighten content marketers with data and other insight that will make content marketing efforts more streamlined and ultimately more effective. [bctt tweet="“By demystifying the sometimes murky waters of SEO efforts, search pros can enlighten content marketers with data and other insight that will make content marketing efforts more streamlined and ultimately more effective.” @lanerellis" username="toprank"]

United SEO & Content Form A Powerful B2B Marketing Union

via GIPHY The more aligned your organization’s SEO and content marketing efforts can become, the greater their combined power is, to build and promote content that can reach heights that aren’t possible when using just one of these two important ingredients. Most B2B efforts include both SEO and content marketing elements, yet until both teams have truly understood what each does, campaigns will likely suffer from a lack of a cohesive and united marketing front. We hope that the ideas and practices we’ve shared here will help unite and harmonize your own search and B2B content marketing efforts. Creating harmonious and award-winning B2B marketing takes significant effort, which leads more firms than ever to choose working with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Engage with us today and let us know how we can help, as we’ve done for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others.

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