Content is an important component of an Enterprise SEO strategy but content on its own is not SEO. Content doesn’t market itself. Content needs to be written for the user but it needs to be served by a search engine. There’s a common myth created by content writers that says “content is king’ – but there is the unfortunate reality that every time you search and see 100 million results, you only click on one page.
In a nutshell – Content doesn’t market itself
Most Enterprise SEO Content goes unread
Companies keep pushing content, doing what they think is thought leadership. But are followers even reading it – why would they trust a brand they’ve never heard of? It’s not a case of which came first – the chicken or the egg, the reader or the content – its a case of which ranks first.
In Enterprise SEO, its Context, not Content, that is King
As a leading SEO Agency, we are constantly led by data and innovation, not by faith and beliefs. One of the most important metrics of blogging for mid-market companies in Cybersecurity, SaaS, and B2B is the Content Efficiency Index or CEI. This rough but reliable formula will tell you if your content is King, Queen or even on the content chessboard.
Content Efficiency Index
Using GSC (Google Search Console), search for all pages with “/blog/”. Then take the number of clicks and divide it by the number of pages returned. Then take the top blog post and see how high that is compared to the average visits per post. See how many posts are above average and what % is below.
The 10-90 CEI Rule
Most midmarket blogs that we audit follow the “10-90 rule”. The “10-90” rule says that the top 10 posts get 90% of the clicks. in some cases this can be as much as 5-95. This means that if you have 300, 500, or 700 blog posts, you have a CEI of 0.7%.
More Content means more traffic is a big Myth in Content Marketing
Looking at these ratios, and the number of results in a search, 90% of content is wasted – never read, never consumed, leading or leaving 0 thoughts. Yet, most marketers claim to be data driven. Both can’t be right though. That’s because marketing is looking at the wrong metrics – things like likes and shares are vanity. Clicks and rank positions are sanity. And leads are reality.
Keyword Intent and Enterprise Keyword Research
There are some primary differences about selling to enterprise but there are bigger differences when it comes to research. The customer journey is much more complex and the sales cycle can be as long as the research phase.
Having the right keywords is critical in Enterprise
As it is in PPC, the wrong keywords will bring the wrong the wrong person. Enteprise searches often contain the word “enterprise” but that’s where the easy road ends. Keyword volume data available to most research tools is often inaccurate or just plain wrong. Because there aren’t as many buyers, most data isn’t kept and this makes the market look smaller than it is.
Getting The Right Enterprise Personas
In Enterprise SEO, the person with the need isn’t always the customer. The buyer is often a committee and people from different parts of the same organization will tackle searches differently – from their perspectives.
Other popular but Dangerous Enterprise Content Myths
There are, unfortunately, many more content and SEO myths about content.
Publishing Frequency
An anachronism from the age-old days of the print and tv news world is that for some reason Google expects content to be produced on time or frequently or regularly. Thes stem from the days when news would have to be ready for a certain time and no doubt it suits content producers to have a reason for a regular stream of work. But it makes no sense – events don’t follow schedules, and readers don’t solve problems based on clocks.
Good Content ranks itself
It doesn’t. If it did, Google wouldn’t need so many results – the first one would just be the right answer. But Google is a search engine, not a research team based in real-time. Google doesn’t have an opinion on CRM systems or Slogans or which golf course is best or which printer. These are subjective decisions that as humans we think can be made objectively.
Google loves “Meaty Content”
Another frequently eschewed myth is that Google loves long-form content but word count and length have nothing to do with ranking and therefore getting read. This was one of the most surprising (for some) outcomes of the recent Google algorithm leak
What to do next?
Keyword Research and SEO for content publishing is going to be a key strategic plan that needs to be built into your SEO marketing to ensure that content is republished so that it gets to its audience.
