Tips & Tools for Optimizing Your B2B Content

With so much time and budget invested in content, making sure your content is viewed, downloaded, and found by search engines has never been more important to marketing organizations. Yet too often marketers invest in creating new assets instead of ways to make existing assets more effective.

At Aventi Group, we work on many content projects for clients, and this blog is all about giving you some tips on content engagement so that your content is as effective as it can be.

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Measuring & improving content performance

When assessing your content’s performance and engagement levels, reviewing the data is key. Some of the metrics you might look at are unique page views, time on page (or site), and bounce rate. But it’s really the combination of all three that provides actionable insights. The following chart shows three different scenarios where one of the three variables is strong but the other two are not. For each scenario, there are different approaches to help improve content engagement.

SCENARIO/ISSUE	THINGS TO CONSIDER
Low Views	Is it new content and not yet indexed? Can you improve the SEO? Is the navigation to the pages working/driving people to the content? What links to the content? Is it adequate? Are people using the links? Could you promote (ie, paid) the content more or do better targeting? Are your paid ads working?
Little Time Spent On Page	Is the layout and visual design inviting? Is the content easy to digest? Is the title enticing? Is it the right content for this stage in the buying process? Are you driving the right type of people to the page (both paid and non-paid? Have you considered usability testing to help determine what could be improved?
High Bounce Rate	Are the CTAs appropriate for the desired next steps? Do the CTAs stand out enough, visually? Does the page answer the questions that visitors have? Have you considered usability testing to help determine what is wrong? Are you taking visitors away from the site, to a PDF for example, and losing them?

Tips

If you are assessing your content to determine what to update or promote, you’ll want to consider content that has high views (or the potential for high views) and/or content that is most successful in helping move prospects through the funnel. Often times, older content has greater SEO value (ie, organic page views) because it’s been around longer, but older content might not be as current/relevant and worthy of updating.
Paid promotions will drive higher page views, but will also likely drive down time on page and drive up bounce rate, as the audience won’t be as targeted. It’s difficult to compare the data for a page that is being promoted vs one that is not.

Actions to take

Improve usability

Conducting just a few usability sessions can help you quickly uncover reasons for low views, low time on page and high bounce rates. Sometimes the issues are in the navigation, formatting of content and entry pages, or hard to find / unclear CTAs. Usability can also be helpful for understanding if you are addressing the right group of topics for your target market, but it is less appropriate for assessing the quality of each of your pieces of content.

Try some free tools

SEO applications such as BrightEdge and SEMRush have become quite advanced and can give you specific feedback on your SEO tactics, what changes to make and where to make them. Seobility gives you an overall SEO score, also with prescriptive “todo’s”. Often times an agency will simply regurgitate a list from one of these applications/sites and charge you a lot of money for it so it sometimes pays to just use these applications directly.

Seobility is a great free tool to get an SEO ‘score’, as well as prescriptive SEO feedback.

SEO score, taking into account the 6 components that feed SEO, along with a task list of SEO improvements, ranked by importance.

SEMRush offers a Site Audit, grouping issues by error type.

SEO Site Audit, highlighting the errors that are most prominent on your site.

BrightEdge provides Specific Recommendations by Page

Prescriptive SEO recommendations, for the top pages you should focus on, based on search volume.

These apps offer much more than you see here, so I encourage you to give them a try.

You’re investing in content development and have a content strategy, make sure it’s being executed well. If you want to put some of these tools to work to increase your content’s effectiveness, please contact Aventi Group to schedule a discovery meeting.

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Written By

Eric Rasmussen

Eric works with Aventi customers in go-to-market strategy and execution. Before Aventi, Eric had several roles at Juniper Networks including leading Juniper’s Data Center Marketing and running Americas Field Marketing. Before Juniper, Eric held B2B marketing positions at Qwest, AT&T, TeleChoice (a niche consulting firm), and started his tech career as an Internet access product manager. Well-versed in networking, security, and cloud, Eric has a BS from University of Colorado and MBA from Indiana University. And he loves the quote: Strategy without execution is hallucination.