The Inbound Growth Blog

The Inbound Growth Blog covers all topics relating to an integrated marketing strategy. We write about inbound marketing, social media, integrated marketing strategies and the sales process.

The Foundation of the B2B Inbound Marketing Process - Keywords

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Posted by John Beveridge on Apr 9, 2012 9:05:00 AM

Small-business-marketing-automation-clockThe first step in the B2B inbound marketing process is to develop a keyword strategy. Keywords are the phrases that buyers use to find your business on search engines, so it’s important to dial in your keyword strategy to maximize your marketing ROI.

Here are 4 steps you can take to choose keywords that will work for your business:

  • Make a list of 3-5 word phrases that describe your business. Ask employees and customers how they would describe your business and review your competitors’ websites to see how they describe themselves. Start with a list of ten 3-5 word phrases that you think describe your business.

  • Research your keyword phrases using paid tools like Hubspot or free tools like Google Adwords . Both of these provide you the opportunity to input your keyword phrases and see similar alternatives and their relative value from a search perspective (the popularity of the phrase and the relative difficulty to rank for it.) 

  • Find keyword phrases in the sweet spot – those that are relatively popular in terms of monthly searches, but are not too difficult to rank for. These are typically long-tail keywords, those longer than one or two words. For example, internet marketing is a short-tail keyword phrase and small business marketing automation is a long-tail keyword phrase. It will be much more difficult to rank for internet marketing than it will be for small business marketing automation. 

  • For each phrase you chose in the first step – choose 5-10 variations that are in the sweet spot defined above. Choose both long-tail and short-tail keywords, but focus on the short-tail – they will produce higher rankings quicker.

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Now that you have the foundation of your inbound marketing program (keywords), build on them by:

  • Optimizing your website by including your keyword phrases in page titles, headers and content. It’s important to use keywords organically on your website – don’t stuff them into your content. Google recently announced that their ranking algorithm will begin to penalize sites that favor SEO over good content. A good rule of thumb is to optimize for no more than two keyword phrases per page.

  • Use your keyword phrases in your blog titles (and to generate ideas for blog posts.) As is the case with your website, it’s important to use your keyword phrases organically in your blog. The quickest way to improve your search engine rankings is to consistently and frequently create good blog content.

  • Use your keyword phrases in your content offers and optimize the landing page for those phrases. For example, I might title my eBook, “Nine Steps to Small Business Marketing Automation Success.” The title of the landing page would be “Small Business Marketing Automation eBook.”

Now that you have your keyword strategy in place, analyze it and iterate it. Review your analytics data to see which keywords are producing the most traffic to your sites and which are producing the most lead conversions.

Like anything else, success is built on a solid foundation in B2B inbound marketing – a good keyword strategy.

 

Topics: Inbound Marketing

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