If you are responsible for marketing lead generation campaigns at a B2B company, white papers and case studies would always be in the center of your attention.
White papers and case studies is something your site's visitors (aka potential customers) will always read if they are serious about buying your type of product or services. Every purchasing decision is accompanied by research of prospective suppliers and basic price/feature comparison. It does not mean that lower prices always win, companies buy "value", but they do shop around before they pick up the phone or click on the "contact sales" link.
Most companies ask users to provide basic registration information before allowing them to download white papers. Case studies are usually available onclick, without registration, but users take case studies less seriously than white papers. Case studies are often written like infomercials and are therefore perceived as being purely of sales value, whereas white papers are more product oriented and perceived as more neutral.
As a rule, white papers and case studies are produced collaboratively by Engineering or R&D departments and Marketing & Sales. Engineering describes the product whereas Marketing explains why customers love it. Every document undergoes a few revisions and the final version usually gets approved by the company CEO (for companies under 100 people).
Marketing managers participate in the white paper production process by making stylistic edits, providing additional illustrations and examples, obtaining customer and partner quotes, and above all by coordinating activities between all parties involved, including external graphic design firms. Once the final version has been approved, marketing managers seldom have freedom to make even minor changes to the document.
So what does a marketing manager need to do in order to maximize the effectiveness of white papers and case studies for the purposes of high SEO ranking and lead generation?
The good news is that if your company has a narrow specialization, SEO optimization of your marketing collateral should not be difficult or very time consuming. First of all, you need to ensure that all your site's content is SEO optimized. Below is a how-to list. Then, you need to create quite a bit of content, i.e. create many web pages, including your PDFs. Then, you need to earn as many back links pointing at your site form external sites as possible. Then, you need to interlink your internal site's pages as often as possible. And you also need to include outgoing links to relevant large websites in your industry. While doing all this, you need to be sure to repeat your selected keywords in the exact same way everywhere.
Start by typing your company's most important keywords on Google and check to see how many search results your query has generated. Avoid using generic one-word or two-word combinations. Adjust your keywords to reflect your company profile as closely as possible.
If your keywords generated under 1 million (M) results, your company's website has a very good chance of getting on the first page quickly. A few million results - you are looking at a few months of work and need to prepare a project plan. Over 10 million results, you need to dive into a serious SEO project, so if your management is not ready to commission it, focus on paid PPC and keyword ad campaigns.
Let's assume your keywords are "worth" less than 1M, i.e. the number of search results returned by search engines in response to your query is under one million. Here is what you need to do ensure that your company's site appears on the first pages on major search engines and is found by your prospective customers:
Summary by priorities:
1) Keywords inside file names (i.e. static URLs), inside links, headers and copy (text), keywords must be repeated everywhere identically
2) Number of back links to your site (get as many as you can)
3) Number of pages and number of words per page, with keywords repeated 10-12 times per page
What Not To Do:
1) Do not start working on this project without getting approval from your boss(es)
2) Do not promise specific results to your management at the start of the project, wait until you actually get them (remember, you don't have a budget, so this project is not on your department's road map)
3) Do not try to do everything at once, split your tasks by priorities
4) Do not overdo keyword stuffing, never sacrifice quality of your content for the sake of SEO
5) Do not outsource link building to questionable SEO firms, or else you may find your site listed in adult directories
Good luck and call me if you need help, remember your first 30 minutes is free of charge: http://www.annatulchinsky.com/SEO_Ottawa_Registration.htm
Or contact me via my website design Ottawa site.
