A Lack of Website Content May Kill Your B2B Company

Your technical website “content” is the difference between showing up in the search results or fading into obscurity.

The “content” on a website, simply put, is the textual and visual information that conveys a message to your customer.  At its most basic, it is a description of the product or service.  At its best, it educates or solves the reader’s problem, helping to convert them into a lifetime customer. Content is rapidly becoming critical to helping your potential customers find you through a search engine.  It is critical that you build useful content on your company’s website.

While companies that sell to the consumer market are very good at creating content for their websites, traditional industrial B2B companies are, for the most part, failing miserably. Content for such a business tends to be more technical in nature, requiring more than general marketing knowledge to create.  As a result, many industrial companies ignore it altogether.  The underlying reason for a lack of content creation seems to be this:

Your marketing professionals don’t fully understand your technology and your technical people are not well versed in marketing.

Is it hard for you to explain what your company does, to someone who is not in the business? That’s not unusual in the Industrial Business-to-Business world because these products often require specific technical knowledge to be understood.  As a result, many companies operate under the assumption that their business is too technical to take advantage of online marketing techniques. However, many businesses that formerly ranked at the top of the search results are now disappearing from the first page, due to a lack of CONTENT on their website.  Doing nothing is a path to obscurity, as younger generations rely almost entirely on search engines to discover new companies.

If you suspect your organization suffers from a lack of content, we can help.  Six Foot Lever LLC specializes in teaching your team to create beneficial Technical Content.  Our people have the technical experience and education to understand your technology, along with the marketing knowledge to get your message out.  However, there is a lot you can learn just by reading the rest of this article.  By the way, this article is essentially content marketing for our own company (whoa, meta!).

A more detailed explanation of what is meant by “content” is in order, along with why it’s important.  Have you ever read a “blog” or an online review?  When the author is genuine in their intent (not just trying to rank for keywords) they try to help the reader solve a problem or teach them something useful.  Search engines (especially Google) recognize this and try to take into account the “content” on a web page or site when displaying results.  This is why you often see consumer reviews, lists, or how-to articles in the results.  Someone has taken the time to write valuable (we hope) content for their reader and the search engine attempts to provide that information to their user.  At the same time, this content helps the search engine to figure out what your website is about.

For example, if you (as a Google user) search “how to apply sunscreen”, Google will attempt to find results that will be useful to YOU (try it!).  Those results appear right under any ads (hint, “how-to” searches tend to show fewer ads for some reason).  Because this is a consumer product that everyone uses, competition would be stiff to get your content on page one of the search results.  There will likely be a LOT of content out there for any consumer product searches as people try to lead you to their review or e-commerce website.

Now let’s search for a more technical subject, like “how to measure roundness” (roundness being one of the technical terms in metrology).  There are a LOT of companies out there that make metrology equipment to measure this feature.  But look at the results and how many metrology companies do you see?  On the day I did this (7/12/17), exactly one metrology company showed up on the first page, Taylor Hobson (link to article).  Every other result was a definition of roundness or a methodology.  This gives a sizable publicity edge to Taylor Hobson, as they were the only company SELLING A PRODUCT to show up in the results.  So how did Taylor Hobson do this?  By writing TECHNICAL CONTENT that was USEFUL TO THE READER. Whether it was a conscious effort or not, I do not know.  But, in their efforts to provide useful content on their website, they ranked for the search term “how to measure roundness”.  That may not be the exact term that YOU would use to find a roundness gage, but it can be assumed that many people looking for a way to measure roundness, may need a roundness gage.

All of this will come as no surprise to a content marketer, but many industrial companies are missing the boat because they aren’t even aware that content matters. Anyone familiar with SEO (search engine optimization) would also point out that context matters, but this subject falls outside the scope of this article.

Google, in particular, has become more content-driven over time. This means that Google is ranking sites based on how useful they are to their own users.  Prior to Google addressing this in their algorithm, search results might have shown the site with more backlinks or the website with the most relevant keywords.  Of course, no one outside of Google knows the WHOLE story of what they are ranking sites for.  The point here is that GOOD CONTENT, in context, improves your chances of being found by your potential customer.  So, if you sell a technical product or service and don’t have good technical content, you may not even show up in the results.  Worse, much of the effort your marketing team did in the past may now be irrelevant.

You can hire marketing people or contractors, but unless they have the capability to understand your field, the best they can do is run ads based on keywords that you provided.  It is wise to supplement this by creating USEFUL content around the same keywords.  Unfortunately, your marketing people may not be able to create this content on their own.  Having your engineer create content can also present a problem as they may fail at capturing the reader’s interest, or at conveying the marketing message.

The Six Foot Lever team can assess your current capabilities and can usually train the people you already have to become more effective.  For smaller companies that do not have a dedicated marketing team, we can handle all of your content creation needs, for a very reasonable cost.  Sometimes a single presentation to key people is all that is needed to kick off your content creation efforts.  Email us to learn more, or use the contact form below: info@sixfootlever.com

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Note: This article is meant as an introduction for business owners who may not be aware of the importance of content creation.  It is not intended to be a definitive guide to content writing.  Many details were left out in the interest of brevity.

 

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