The New B2B SEO Trifecta: Blogging, Tools, and Segmentation

 

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers. If this is your first time, welcome. If you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to hear a Bonus Huddle where experts share their insights into topics of critical importance to the CMO Huddles community. We call them Huddlers. This time we’re talking with Tom Shapiro, the CEO of Stratabeat, who joined us to share the results of a comprehensive SEO study of 250 B2B SaaS websites. You’ll learn why blogging frequency is the low-hanging fruit you can’t afford to ignore, how online tools can unexpectedly boost your SEO, and why audience segmentation just might be your secret weapon. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B Marketing podcast. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello Huddlers. Welcome to our Bonus Huddle on SEO with Tom Shapiro, CEO of Stratabeat. Tom has some exciting news from a recent study Stratabeat conducted on the SEO performance of several hundred websites, and given the critical importance of optimizing search engine performance, I know you’ll appreciate these findings. So with that, hello, Tom. How are you and where are you this amazing day?

Tom: Hey, Drew, I’m good. Thank you so much. I’m in Boston.

Drew: Alright. Beantown. It’s kind of a funky day, right? It’s kind of sunny, but after a few days of warmth, it kind of chilled back down. But not here in CMO Huddles, we are bright and shining and ready to go. So big study, lots of things that you’ve done in this, you’re going to get to the methodology and so forth. But before we get to the background and all of that, let’s cut to the chase and let’s give three big takeaways from the study.

Tom: Sure. So if we just want to look at three very quick takeaways from the study, one thing came through crystal clear, which is blogging frequency really matters. And we’re going to go into a lot of depth on that. We’re going to look at it from many different angles of SEO. Another takeaway from the study was that online tools and various types of long-form reports like original research, or white papers, or things like that make a difference. And we’ll go into the details on each of those different types of content as well. The third main takeaway that I’d like to share with you is that segmenting your audience is gold. You know, if you’re trying to address your entire audience generically on your website, that actually does not help your SEO, whereas audience segmentation really does give you a boost.

Drew: Okay, so we’ve got blogging frequency matters, you’re going to talk about exactly what that frequency is, online tools and things that you would know you need to make it easier for the customer to buy, long-form reports. Wait, we heard the term white paper, they’re not dead yet, I guess. And then segmentation, which we all talk about, you’ll get into how that really does impact it. Alright. So now let’s go back. And let’s just talk about the study, your methodology so that folks will realize why this is such a significant report. And this is the world premiere of this, by the way. So let’s get into that.

Tom: This is the world premiere. So this is a study of 250 different B2B SaaS websites. And you know, I want to thank everyone for attending and you are the first in the world to see these results. What I would love for you to take away from today is to understand what the most successful B2B SaaS companies are doing, the ones that are growing the most organically, you know, what are they doing? What are those things that can move the needle that are excellent levers for you? Keep in mind that we are looking at B2B SaaS specifically. So there are lots of different verticals out there, Google treats different verticals differently. And so we are just going to look at the data, right? We’re just looking at the data and specifically to SaaS. So understand that this should be highly relevant if you’re a B2B SaaS and finally, you know, what specific activities should you be doing that correlate typically with really positive results? So we’ll be going into all that.

Drew: Got it. And so before we get too far into this, I think it’s important that we do, and thanks for this question, that we define what we mean by blog. And what we mean by long reports since we’ve already highlighted that as important. So what’s a blog post?

Tom: We were not incorporating different types of long-form content into this. It’s just if the company had a quote-unquote, blog, in the website, then we would go in and look at the individual blog posts. That was what we were calling a blog. And then in terms of the different types of content, so we looked at online tools. And these are free online tools. So it’s not your product, right? These are free online tools, mostly for marketing purposes. We can get into specific examples of those as well. We’re looking at original research. So just like what we’re looking at here, right, like, this is original research, and then we’re turning that into content. And so looking at that, and then looking at, you know, the very, very, very old white paper as well.

Drew: Got it. Okay. And we’re talking about SaaS, I have no doubt the implications go beyond SaaS, we’re not at this moment in time looking at any other industries, right, this is a focus on SaaS. So if you’re not SaaS, and you don’t think there’s anything relevant, this would be a good time to sort of, it’s like when they say on the plane, if you’re not going to Chicago, this is probably not the flight you want to be on. Okay, let’s keep going. You can keep going after that. We got the 250 folks there, okay.

Tom: We actually looked at closer to 350 websites, but we excluded some. And the final list that we analyzed was 250. Some of the websites that we excluded simply didn’t have enough traffic, right, there just wasn’t a sufficient sample size. And so it would have skewed the data. And then the other extreme was if websites had more than 10 million organic visits a month, then we would exclude those as well, because as you can imagine, you know, there’s massive mega sites, and what they do oftentimes can be impacted quite heavily, just simply by the brand itself by the brand marketing. And because they are so massive, they can skew the data, if you only have say, 50,000 or 100,000, or even a million uniques in a month. And so we just felt like that was a different category. That was a different study so that we don’t skew the results.

Drew: Got it. Okay, that’s really helpful. Okay, so we’ll keep going.

Tom: Okay, so interpreting the data. What I’d like to make clear with everyone is this is a correlation study, not a causation study. So no one has access to the Google algorithm. And, you know, you might be hearing lots and lots of recommendations online or from your SEO people or people, you know, we are looking exactly at the data and what the data reveals to us. But what that reveals is all 100% correlation, right? Causation would be that we are 100% confirmed that if you do this, then this definitely happens. That’s not the case here. Right? If we’re making a recommendation, it’s because the data is revealing that works, but we’re simply interpreting the data as we’re seeing it. And so I just want to make that clear that this is a correlation study.

Drew: Which is about as good as it gets. 

Tom: So shall we jump into blogging frequency?

Drew: Let’s do it.

Tom: Alright. So with blogging frequency, this is one of the biggest takeaways that I would love for you to walk away with and start acting upon, right? Like this is very, very actionable for you, if you have a blog, and I’m imagining that most of you do. You know, you are blogging at a certain frequency, whether that’s once a month, whether that is five times a month, whether that’s 20 times a month, you have a blog frequency, and that really matters. We found in the study that your blog frequency really matters, that there was a drastic, drastic difference between blogging once to four times a month, versus five to eight times a month. And here are the specifics, right. So let’s say that you blog once to four times a month. So on average, those B2B SaaS websites that we looked at. And just to be clear, we looked at the results from last January, so January 2023, to January of 2024, so a one-year period of growth. And what we found was that those companies that were blogging one to four times a month, on average, had an average increase in Google top 10 keywords of 10%, you know, 10 to 11%, right? So that’s okay, right? It’s okay, but it’s not knocking it out of the park. Whereas, if all you do is you double down, right, and you invest a little bit more, and you’re blogging five to eight times instead, all of a sudden, your Google top 10 rankings jump, and the growth rate that we saw for those companies blogging five to eight times a month, was close to 50%. So it was 47.9%. But you know, a massive difference.

Drew: Yeah. And that’s weighted before you go on to that. I just want to spot because five to eight times a month, that’s like, maybe twice a week. That’s just not a killer frequency and that alone seemed to be—Now we could probably get into and this study doesn’t cover length of posts and quality and whether these are AI-generated, we don’t have any of that information. It is simply that the act of blogging among the 251, the ones that did have a frequency of—and do you think it matters after eight times a month to keep going?

Tom: It can help. But what we didn’t find was definitive data that there was a drastic difference. And so I think it depends on the company, it depends on what you’re doing. For example, you know, if we were to jump out of these 250 companies, and instead look at the mega companies, the ones with more than 10 million in monthly organic visitors. So I’ll give you an example. SEMrush. So they blog 93 times a month, 93 times. And they increased their organic traffic this past year by 471%. So if you’re gonna ask me, does it help to blog more? Yes, yes, it does. But we’re trying to make this very actionable. We’re trying to look for the sweet spot, right? And also, what is low-hanging fruit for you, what’s very actionable with low-hanging fruit? And, as Drew said, if you’re already blogging a bit, all you need to do is just double down or invest a little bit more, just increase your cadence a little bit. And the ROI is massive, where else can you get a 4.5x ROI simply by increasing your frequency? Very rare, right?

Drew: And so as I’m thinking about this for the folks, so we’re going from once a week, to twice a week. And obviously behind the scenes for these folks, there’s SEO analysis or writing to keywords that matter. It can’t be just random posts. I mean, obviously, there’s an SEO strategy behind these posts, that is helping these folks get ranked for the keywords that they want to get ranked on, right? I mean, this can’t be just random.

Tom: Right? Quality really does matter. Yeah, it’s not just blogging for blogging’s sake. Quality matters.

Drew: Okay. So alright, keep going.

Tom: Alrighty, we just talked about the impact on Google rankings, and obviously fantastic, right? But there are more benefits for blogging five to eight times a month. So let’s look at organic traffic. So not just the number of ranking keywords that you have in the top 10, but your actual organic traffic from Google. And so what we found was, if you’re blogging one to four times a month, on average, you can see maybe a 12% increase over the course of the year in monthly organic traffic. That’s nice, right? However, if you just invest a little bit more, and you’re blogging five to eight times a month, that jumps all the way up to 103%. So, you know, it’s just a massive, massive difference in terms of ROI. So you’re talking about an 8.5x increase in the growth rate of your organic traffic simply by increasing your cadence a little bit.

Drew: Okay, so we have some questions related to this. But it’s clear that increasing your frequency, you’re sending a message that this is a vibrant site, and only twice a week, is not crazy. But by doing that you’re signaling to Google, oh, this site is constantly being refreshed, and therefore somebody is paying attention. Speaking of refreshing, do you think is it about new original content or does it matter if let’s say you had a post from two years ago, and you refresh it? Is there anything in your study that helps us understand that?

Tom: Yes, so refreshing really works. And you should be doing it. So in what we were seeing, and also just through the years, what we have seen for ourselves, for clients is that refreshing content is some of the lowest hanging fruit, some of the highest ROI for the effort that you can achieve. It is easier to update and refresh and augment what you have or you might want to galvanize what you’re doing. You might have four blog posts that kind of all talk about the same thing over the course of three years. And you merge them into one mega very powerful authoritative blog post and that can achieve better results than all four. So we are huge fans of refreshing and in everything that we’ve seen it works.

Drew: Okay, so in terms of the blog posts, so just before we wrap up in this area, how polished should they be and this is a question that we have from a Huddler and talking about a professional blog versus a more Holden Caulfield stream of conversation or stream of thought and I guess in neither these are just necessarily poor quality in terms of the thought, but maybe in terms of the structure does it matter?

Tom: So in everything that we see, the more professional the blog, you tend to do better. This is because it’s a little bit more structured and Google loves structure, right? If you’re targeting a specific topic, and you’re targeting specific subtopics that are contextually related that Google wants to see, to know that it’s an authoritative piece, then you need to be highly structured. Whereas if you are going to be a little bit more on the personal side, or maybe it’s more opinionated, you know, that’s not as structured and it’s a little bit harder to be on-topic to gain the same type of authoritativeness. And so we would say, it’s strictly from an SEO perspective, I’m not talking about a branding perspective, because maybe a more opinionated or more relaxed, more casual, free-flowing type of blog, it’s better from a branding perspective in certain cases. But for SEO, if you want to win in SEO, we argue go professional go structured.

Drew: Right and so if it is a case where a listicle of five things that you could do to solve this problem, that that’s probably going to from an SEO standpoint may not be the one that’s going to because it answers the question that the person might be searching for.

Tom: That’s exactly right. The most important thing with blogging and it’s not talked about enough, is what we call SERP analysis, which is the search engine results page analysis. So a lot of people do keyword research, they do topic research. But what you need to spend just as much time on is SERP analysis, analyzing what Google thinks is relevant what Google thinks is contextually needs to be included in order to prove that it is a comprehensive enough piece to exactly as Drew said, answer the query, answer what’s going on in their mind.

Drew: And so in that context, a 100-word post that answers a question is probably fine. If it’s a more complicated subject, you might need more. So just from a rule of thumb, from a length standpoint, it’s about answering the question, not necessarily 500 words versus 1000 words versus 2000 words.

Tom: It is all based on the specific keyword, and then length does matter. And I’ll explain how. So for instance, for a certain keyword, what you want to do is SERP analysis, like I just explained. You’re looking at what Google’s actually listing for the top 10, for the top 20. And you’re analyzing the data. And if everything in the top 20 is at least 3000 words, guess what? If you do a 500-word piece, it might be Shakespearean, you might be the best writer in the world. It doesn’t matter from an SEO perspective, it’s not going to rank typically. And in other cases, you might see a mishmash, you might see 500 words next to 3000 words and then 500 words and 3000 words. That’s indicating that Google doesn’t know what the search intent is, it’s testing to see what the search intent is. And so it’s all about the SERP analysis, and that will dictate to you, that will guide you towards what length of copy is going to be appropriate and give you an edge.

Drew: Got it. alright, well, let’s keep moving because I know we have a lot of ground to cover. 

Tom: Okay, so we’re still talking about blogging frequency and we’re still talking about the benefits of blogging five to eight times a month, there’s more. So it’s not just about your rankings. It’s not just about the organic traffic. We’re also talking about growth in backlinks. And so what we found was those who were blogging five to eight times a month experienced a backlink growth rate that was 33.2% higher than those websites that were blogging only one to four times a month, just a massive difference.

Drew: You’re giving more content for people to backlink to, but so—why do you—this may be obvious to most, but why do backlinks matter?

Tom: So backlinks indicate credibility. So in Google’s eyes, they’re trying to understand your credibility. And the easiest way to do that is to understand how others perceive you. The more that third-party websites and bloggers and publications are linking to your website and to your content and to your blog posts, right? That’s an indication that your content is highly valuable. And so there’s something called Google EEAT, which is becoming more and more important, especially in this age where you’re seeing so much AI-generated crap content out there. And Google EEAT is all about quality. It’s all about quality and expertise and experience. So EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. And when you’re talking about authoritativeness, that is largely derived from the number and the quality of backlinks that you’re getting. And whenever we talk about backlinks, just know that it isn’t always about the number of backlinks that you have, a lot of it is the quality of backlinks that you have.

Drew: It’s about the referring—if it’s a high-quality blog that’s referring to your blog, life is good. Okay, so what happens now? Were blogging five to eight times a month at least, what happens when you stop?

Tom: Oh, please don’t stop. Bad things happen when you stop. So remember, we were looking at January to January, and then we looked at, okay, well, who stopped in January of 2024, who had zero posts in January of 2024. So we’re not talking about like stopping over a six-month period or six-year period, we’re talking about just stopping in January. Those blogs experienced a 15% decline on average. So if you’re blogging, keep going, keep doing it. The cadence really matters, is what we’re finding.

Drew: Got it. Okay, so we got to blog five to eight times a month, at least. It’s got to be smart, the content, ideally, is good enough that someone would want to link to it. Don’t stop. Okay, so let’s keep going to the next big takeaway.

Tom: Excellent. Let’s look at online tools. And what we found was that online tools do boost SEO results, but not quite in the way that we were envisioning. So it was a surprise. 

Drew: So let’s just make sure we define what online tools are, just in case people are wondering.

Tom: Yeah, sure. So those are things—and in terms of our study, what we define them as was really marketing tools, right? So ROI calculators or TCO calculators, or cost savings calculators. You know, you look at HubSpot, and they have a website grader tool. It’s free, right? It’s just free for marketing purposes, for lead gen purposes. They have a build-your-persona tool. Again, it’s just for lead gen purposes. CoSchedule, another SaaS, they have a headline analyzer, an email subject line tester, social message optimizer. One of the things that Stratabeat has blogged about through the years is ROI of this and ROI of that. So we’ve talked about the ROI of SEO and the ROI of content marketing, the ROI of UX. And one of the things that we just decided literally just last month was, hey, let’s add calculators to all of our ROI blog posts. And so a calculator can be anything—in our study, it’s for marketing purposes.

Drew: Got it. alright. So online tools. So talk about what was it that wasn’t expected that happened?

Tom: So typically, you would create online tools thinking that you’re going to benefit by getting a lot of referring domains and backlinks pointing at your tools, right? Because they’re unique, they cut through all the noise out there. What we found was, yes, you did increase your backlinks and your referring domains. However, there really wasn’t that much of a difference between those websites that were offering online tools and those who were not. And so really, what we found the difference was, there was a substantial lift in your Google top 10 keyword rankings. And so if you were offering online tools, you on average experienced a 40.8% increase in the number of top 10 rankings that you had, for those who did increase their rankings. For those who offer tools and increase their rankings, the average lift was actually closer to 46%. So even better. For those websites that were not offering online tools—not so good. They did see a little lift, but it was only 16%. So, you know, you could expect a 2.5x difference if you are offering online tools.

Drew: And I wonder—I mean, again, with this causation correlation question at the beginning—that just the notion of providing tools, which is very sort of customer-helpful and centric, I wonder if that just sort of trickles to everything else. That there’s a certain awareness, oh, we’re going to help our help the visitor solve their problems, and that it sort of collectively is enhancing their appeal to Google?

Tom: Yeah, they really are helpful. And we really do see utilization. So one thing that you can use, and we recommend it very strongly, is using behavioral analytics, where you can see exactly what they’re doing on your page. So it’s not just about SEO, right? It’s about once they land on the page, then what are they doing? And behavioral analytics is a fantastic way for you to do heat mapping and click mapping and scroll mapping and attention mapping and also record. So it’s a video recording of every single visitor on your site. And you can slice and dice the data any which way makes sense. And then see for that particular segment of your audience, how are they behaving on the page? Is it a fluid experience, is it a great experience, or is there a lot of friction involved? So I don’t want to get too sidetracked there but there’s a lot that we could dive into

Drew: And it feels like, I mean, obviously, if you have a tool that nobody uses, that’s probably pretty useless. The assumption with these tools is that you’ve created something that someone would actually want to use, and once they did use it, Google would sort of notice that, and it would have a cumulative effect. 

This show is brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only marketing community dedicated to B2B greatness, and that donates 1% of revenue to the Global Penguin Society. Why? Well, it turns out that B2B CMOs and penguins have a lot in common. Both are highly curious and remarkable problem solvers. Both prevail in harsh environments by working together with peers, and both are remarkably mediagenic. And just as a group of penguins is called a Huddle, our community of over 300 B2B marketing leaders huddle together to gain confidence, colleagues, and coverage. If you’re a B2B CMO, why not dive into CMO Huddles by registering for our free starter program on CMOhuddles.com? I hope to see you in a Huddle soon.

Okay, so keep going on the benefits here.

Tom: We talked about Google top 10 keyword benefits, also, just as we saw with blogging five to eight times a month, there is an organic traffic benefit as well. So for those websites that were offering online tools, we saw a 20% improvement in their organic traffic over the course of the year on average, right? And for those that did offer online tools, and did increase their traffic, the average increase was 35.7%. So a very substantial lift in organic traffic. Those who are not offering tools only saw a 6.4% lift in their traffic throughout the year. So relatively flat. Just pointing out, you know, that’s a 3.1x difference, you know, so the ROI there is very substantial. And we talked about backlinks and referring domains, right? So if you offer online tools, we did see an average lift in referring domains of 31% over the course of the year, which is massive, right? 31% lift in your referring domains. The thing is, we also saw a substantial lift in referring domains from others as well. And so there just was nothing really definitive that we could point to there. And so that’s why we held off on including that data.

Drew: Got it. Alright. So the next big takeaway is about original research, which of course, this study is an example of so clearly you, as CEO of Stratabeat are drinking your own champagne here. Talk a little bit about what the impact of original research and what that looks like.

Tom: Yes, so we absolutely love original research, encourage all of you to engage in it. We think that it’s so beneficial for SEO, but it’s also so beneficial for adding value to your audience, adding a unique perspective and unique insights for your audience, which is invaluable. We find that it really cuts through a lot of the noise out there. And from an SEO perspective, we can confirm yes, it does help you generate more Google top 10 rankings.

Drew: Yeah and before you get to that, when Renegade was an agency, this was just a standard part of our playbook. We would really, really encourage our clients to not only do original research, but do research that obviously provokes interesting headlines, and often presents a problem that your customers may or may not be thinking about. And if any of you are thinking about original research and don’t know how to get started, we have another partner and we’re happy to connect you with them. It’s Becky over at Redpoint and happy to connect you because you can do these studies now very cost-effectively. So I just want to point that out. Okay. So results of research.

Tom: Yeah, so what we found with the results of doing original research is that it has an impact on your Google top 10 ranking keywords. Specifically, what we found was that on average, those companies that were offering original research did see a lift in the number of top 10 keywords of 25%. So pretty substantial, and then those who were offering original research who did see a lift, so just looking at that segment, the average lift was 36%. So again, very, very substantial. And it’s not to say that they didn’t increase the referring domains and backlinks – they did. The average increase in referring domains was 28%. But again, you know, we weren’t seeing that delta between those offering original research and those not offering original research in terms of referring domains. And so that’s something that we need to dig into a little further. So white papers, they still have value. 

Drew: Wait, wait, wait, I just love the fact that we’re mentioning this term that was like used when I first got into the business. I remember working at IBM, it’s like, “Oh, we got to get another white paper out.” And you know, it just feels so old school. Maybe you could put a new school definition on this so it doesn’t feel like that thing that nobody reads.

Tom: Yeah, I mean, hopefully, you’re making it much more timely and much more relevant and something with a topic that resonates much more than just a bland, you know, technical walkthrough that, as Drew was saying, yeah, you know, really no one’s gonna get into, take a look at. So it’s all about high-quality content. And what we did find was there actually is an SEO boost. We were surprised, we were surprised to see it because you know, white papers are kind of old school, but there was a boost in SEO results. So specifically, not as crazy a boost as, say, blogging five to eight times a month, certainly not like that, not like online tools. But you did see a boost. So if you offered white papers, the average improvement through the course of the year was 23.2% in an increase in Google top 10 keywords. If you didn’t offer white papers, you know, it was only 4.9%. The thing is, you know, most of the sites were offering some type of white paper. You can see up in the paragraph above, so 77.6% of the sites that we were looking at were offering white papers.

Drew: Okay, so before we get to this, I want to just talk about this. So research, original research, and white papers are which are often sometimes the output of original research are much more time-consuming, work-intensive, resource-intensive. And if you’re, as all CMOs are, time-constrained, you know, do you have a sense of the ROI value of these more expensive things, just from, you know, time and energy, and sometimes out of pocket for when it comes to original research whether or not like, you gotta get the blogging, that’s probably the most cost-effective. But what about these others, in your sense, in terms of the payback, relative to work?

Tom: Yeah, so with things like online tools, and things like original research, there’s a massive payback. And it’s not just SEO, we’re talking about SEO today. But there’s a massive benefit in terms of cutting through the noise, in terms of expanding your reach, in terms of attracting new audiences to your website and to your content, to your brand. And it’s a way to differentiate yourself from others in your space. And so it’s all about the quality of the insights and also the creativity that you have. One thing which we unfortunately didn’t study this time, it would be a massive, massive effort to even try to do it, is content promotion, right? So what are all the different ways that you’re trying to promote your content because that can factor into your results as well. And there are those out there who are very, very sophisticated and very active and very proactive in terms of content promotion. And we see many, many SaaS out there that are just pumping out content, and they do not know how to promote it. And so the content might be fantastic, might be wonderful, might be high value, yet, if they’re not promoting, and we’ve seen this time and time again, companies that don’t promote their content effectively, that do not see a big ROI from it, they might see some ranking improvements. But you know, they’re not seeing the ROI that they really should.

Drew: For the white papers in particular, and maybe even these tools, gated or ungated?

Tom: So we would definitely test it, we would definitely—So I know that a lot of websites now are on the bandwagon of ungated, we still see a tremendous amount of value in securing emails through gated content. And so I think it depends on the type of content it is, right? Let’s say that you have some original research that it’s lightweight, very easy for you to generate. And let’s say it’s on a monthly cadence or weekly cadence, something that maybe you know, go ungated, right? But something that, you know, is a much more substantial effort, where you know it’s a differentiator, you know, that your competition doesn’t have anything like it, let’s say it’s proprietary data, and it took you six months to put this together. Definitely gate it, we would say.

Drew: Interesting. My feeling is if it’s good enough to charge for it, you ought to gate it. You know, like a book, it’s gated, okay, because you have to go and pay for it. Most of this content, the point of it is to get them to read it, enjoy it, share it, use it as part of the research thing. So I am definitely a fan of ungated. And I’d love to see the studies on that because it’s, you know, the leads that you get from someone downloading are often garbage. You know, they gave you the email because they wanted the report, and then they read the report and they don’t take an action. So be really careful on the gating/ungating decision. Okay, when we talked about white papers, didn’t matter that this was a document that you could download, like a PDF, or if it was just a long-form report?

Tom: We did not differentiate between the two of those. So as long as it was a white paper and advertised or promoted as a white paper, it could be a web page, it could be a PDF, it could be an interactive experience. We didn’t differentiate.

Drew: Got it. Okay. Let’s talk about audience segmentation and what are we really talking about before you show results, what’s that look like?

Tom: So audience segmentation can take different forms. What we most often saw in this sample size was industry segmentation. So are you targeting healthcare? Are you targeting government? Are you targeting manufacturing or technology? So we saw that type of audience segmentation a lot. For certain companies, that might be, you know, a single page for each industry. For others, they would have an entire hub of content for each industry. So it was a unique experience per industry. And yeah, we were very curious, does this help SEO or does it not? We love it as a marketing strategy. Right? We think it’s very effective as a marketing strategy, but how about an SEO strategy?

Drew: So how about an SEO strategy?

Tom: So we found that it was actually pretty awesome as an SEO strategy as well. But let me explain what I mean here. So we saw a boost in rankings, right? Like if you were engaged in segmenting your audience and website, you did see more Google top 10 rankings, you know, pretty substantial difference. If you did it, you saw a lift of 31.7%, on average. And if you did not segment your audience, then you saw a lift of 12.4%. And so you’re talking about a 2.6x difference in your growth rate. So right there, you know, it helps you with your rankings. For those who did see an increase, you know, that average increase was close to 50%. And so that is massive, right? That’s pretty substantial. For that alone, we felt really strongly that audience segmentation is a strategy that works.

Now, I want to explain that, you know, we did see benefits with organic traffic, we saw benefits with referring domains as well. With referring domains, for example, again, pretty consistent with other things that we were looking at, there’s a 29% lift for those that were engaged in audience segmentation. However, let’s go back to organic traffic, right? We were not seeing a huge delta for those who were engaged in audience segmentation versus those who were not. So what gives? How can that possibly be the case that, you know, we’re racking up all these rankings, and we’re not seeing the corresponding traffic? Here’s why. If you are engaged in audience segmentation, and if you’re crushing it with audience segmentation, what does that mean? It means you’re crushing it with industry-specific terms. Well, those are necessarily what we call long-tail keywords. Right? Like CRM software is very, very broad. But CRM software for banking is very narrow and has very little search volume comparatively. And so what you find is with these industry-specific terms, the volume is very low, however, the intent is very high, and the likelihood to convert is very high. And so we find that these industry-specific pages tend to convert at a much higher rate, and are much more valuable from a bottom-of-the-funnel perspective. Whereas if you’re just going generically, yes, you’re going to experience much more traffic, but not all of it is as relevant or as qualified.

Drew: So before we move on, so when we’re looking at things like blog and say, tools and research, does it matter from an architecture standpoint? I mean, CMOhuddles.com/blog. I mean, that says we have a blog, does that matter? And then so therefore, we’d say CMO Huddles slash SaaS, right, in that case, does the architecture at a high level matter to demonstrate to Google that you know, this is important enough to you that you’re treating it that way? As a high-level architecture.

Tom: So information architecture does matter. It really matters a lot, because your website needs to be very efficiently crawled. We call it crawl efficiency, right? And if you have high crawl efficiency, then it’s easier for Google to understand your website and understand the value of it. Whereas the more complicated you make it, the more convoluted, the more you make it vague or hard to understand, you’re only hurting your SEO results. In terms of whether it needs to be labeled blog, or hub, or Knowledge Hub, or whatever it is, the specific term doesn’t matter. However, having everything organized does.

So one of the things that we do, and there’s a tool out there that you can easily do this yourself if you want. The tool is called Screaming Frog. Really, that’s what it’s called. But use Screaming Frog, and you can see the mapping of your clusters of topics, right? And you can see that throughout your website. And sometimes these clusters are so convoluted and so hard to understand and pick apart. It’s really hard to see where you’re topically focused, and that hurts you. Where you have a very, very clean architecture, you have folders very clearly labeled and it’s very easy for Google to understand exactly where you are authoritative in at even some sub-topics and sub-sub-topics and how it all interconnects. If you have topic clusters like that, it is incredibly powerful.

Drew: Awesome. Okay, let’s keep moving because we’re going to run out of time.

Tom: So we’ll go quickly through this one. We were curious, you know, the internet has been overwhelmed with stock photography, right? And a lot of even the same competitors will be using the same industry photos that you see time and time again. There’s a lack of differentiation, lack of creativity, a lack of impact, right? And so we were curious, with Google looking to prioritize, quote-unquote, “helpful content” and also prioritizing Google EEAT, what we described before. Does custom graphics make a difference? So we looked at blogging in particular. Do custom graphics in your blog help? And what we did find was a little bit, a little bit – not as much as focusing on something like blogging five to eight times a month, or launching online tools, or launching original research. That’s where you should put your big bets, that’s where you should invest your money. That’s where you put your chips in the middle of the table, not with custom graphics.

Personally, I love custom graphics, we love them. But if you look at the lift here, you know, we were looking at these other categories, there was like a 5x or, you know, a 2.5x difference. Here, we’re just seeing a 60% delta between those who were using custom graphics and those who were not. Now, what is our prediction for the future? We believe that this number is going to change. So when we do this report and its analysis next year, we do believe that custom graphics are going to matter, probably twice as much, three times as much as now. Why? Because Google is moving in the direction of wanting uniqueness, unique value, right? Custom graphics are unique; they are a way for you to provide unique value and a unique experience. And so we can only expect that this is going to increase in value over time. It just hasn’t hit yet.

You know, we looked at a lot of different things. And probably the biggest surprise that we saw was when you’re creating online tools, when you’re creating original research or white papers, again, what we were expecting was a massive difference between the companies that were doing this, generating lots and lots of referring domains. So having backlinks pointing at them, and those who are not offering online tools and this long-form research. And what we found was everyone was doing a good job in terms of increasing the referring domains. And so that was not where the main delta was, which surprised us because if you looked at this study three years ago, five years ago, there was a massive delta between those offering online tools and original research. There was a massive delta in the number of referring domains that you could expect.

Well, our theory here is that content marketing has absolutely exploded over the past five years. And there’s so much more content online that it is harder and harder to differentiate and to cut through the noise. Therefore, you’re going to see less linking, less backlinking, less mentions, things of that nature. So that was our biggest takeaway and biggest surprise from the study.

Drew: Yeah, and God knows what happens when everybody is using LLMs to just crank out so much content. I mean, and I could just see it, and I would really discourage folks from thinking that, “Oh, I’m only doing one a week, I’m gonna go to two and I’m just simply going to use LLM to crank out the content.” I don’t think we have evidence to suggest that that’s going to work.

Tom: Right, right. I do want to remind everyone that we did see a lift in referring domains on these different types of content, like online tools, the lift was 31%, original research 28%. So we did see a lift, it’s just, you know, we need to think more holistically of the value of these things. Drew, you brought it up, right? The value that these are very helpful to a potential buyer, that these help you convert, they help you at the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, you know, if we’re talking about ROI calculators, if we’re talking about online research that’s very unique and differentiated, provides a lot of value. So we don’t want to only look at this from the perspective of SEO.

Drew: Quick question. So we talked about segmentation, like you’re targeting government versus say manufacturing. We look at sort of, hey, we’re targeting CMOs versus CEOs versus CROs and so forth. Was there any segmentation that way? Did it matter?

Tom: So far fewer websites target that way. And so it was much more difficult getting a substantial sample size of data.

Drew: You know, you can build it and they may not come. So the question, I guess, on the online tools is are people actually using those? And I imagine it depends.

Tom: Yeah, it totally depends. And I’ll just tell you that, you know, this was several years ago. When I was writing my first book, and I was interviewing a number of CMOs at various SaaS, and I talked to the CMO at Tableau Software, and, you know, my question was, “Hey, you know, what was the one thing that surprised you the most that had like the biggest impact on your leads that increased your leads the most?” And without hesitation, it was their online tool, their free online tool. Leads exploded, and not only leads, but qualified leads, leads that converted in the end, and that helped them grow where, you know, ultimately, they blew past the billion-dollar mark in revenue. And so, you know, online tools definitely help from many different aspects, including just business building.

Drew: Got it. Okay. Let’s bring it home. Let’s wrap all this up in some neat little bundles on action steps for everybody. I think we have another summary slide perhaps.

Tom: Yeah, so some takeaways. So here’s what I would recommend, I would say it’s low-hanging fruit, you should absolutely do this very actionable blog at least five to eight times a month. And if you are one of the supersized websites, where you’re getting over 10 million organic uniques in a month, that’s where you know, you want to be going much higher, you know, I mentioned SEMrush is blogging 100 times a month and saw a lift of 471% in organic traffic over the past year, massive, massive, right? But if you’re under 10 million in monthly uniques, organically, then you know, you can look to blog five to eight times a month, and you should see a very substantial ROI.

So if you’re only blogging four times a month today, or maybe twice a month, or it’s erratic, sometimes it’s twice a month, sometimes it’s eight a month, try and get on a regular cadence because that really helps. And it is low-hanging fruit, put your chips in the middle of the table with this one because it helps your rankings and helps your organic traffic and it helps your backlinks.

Now beyond that, you know, we saw the benefits with online tools, you should absolutely be doing online tools, because as we’ve repeatedly said, it’s not only about the SEO benefits, which clearly there are lots of SEO benefits, and they’re massive. But it’s also because it helps you convert, it helps you with your bottom of the funnel. It’s fantastic for driving SQLs and SQOs. And then online research, as we said, another big one, push your chips in the middle of the table, as Drew was saying, you know, you don’t have to gate everything, right? And so you can have lighter-weight research that you can pump out more frequently, you can benefit from it. And also you don’t have to worry about the gating. But if you are doing more substantial investments in original research, something that say it takes three to six months. You know, it’s my personal recommendation that I would say test gating it because we think that you would still drive massive demand. Just like, you know, I was telling you about Tableau Software, you know, they gated everything right and they still saw, you know, over a million backlinks from what they were doing.

Drew: Amazing. Tom Shapiro, thank you so much for this report, this exclusive world premiere of your annual SEO study. We appreciate you and all the things that you’re doing to support the community. And thank you Huddles for staying with us. 

If you’re a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at CMOhuddles.com.

Show Credits
Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!