CEOs  •  CMOs  •  VPs and Directors  •  Managers  •  Young Professionals

Content — The Real SEO
What Makes A Great B2B Website?  Part 3 of 4

Arturo Perez, CEO - Kluge Interactive

In Part 1 of this four-part series we defined our three pillars of an effective B2B website: Brand, Content, and User Experience (UX).  Part 2 focused on Brand, highlighting the importance of visual storytelling and the utilization of photography, iconography, videos, and super graphics to effectively communicate your messaging. In this part three of the series, our focus turns to Content.

When building a website, the copy is often thought of as the last part to be placed inside the “shell.” This is never good practice. Marketers must first develop a clear content strategy for their website that best displays both visual aids and copy. With a content-first approach to building a website, the results marketers seek will be stronger, not just visually but also in regards to their SEO.

To further demonstrate the power of a visually rich, content-first approach, I’ve included some key examples from three of our clients' website programs, where we were able to take complex data and showcase in a visually aesthetic way.

In 2014, Deloitte came to us to create Government 2020, a site geared to help leaders from private and public sectors understand rapidly changing demographic, societal, economic and technological trends that will be occurring in the future.  Deloitte’s content for this site was culminated data that was gathered from research, discussions, contributions and interviews conducted over a multi-year period.  

This data was their site content – supplied to us in dozens of Word documents and a database in one massive Excel document -- very difficult information to represent, visually. But by altering their content structure, we were able to build a simple visual relationship between trends and drivers in a way that changed their whole conception of their digital story.

A Whole New Taxonomy

Copy Builds a Visual Story

Images often can say much more than words. ScaleFunder told us a clear narrative and empowered us as an agency to write the content, allowing our content and design teams to work collaboratively. The result was a simple narrative design making it possible to cut the word count by more than 200%.
 

Clear Hierarchy in Text

A good content-first approach does not have to lead to many visuals. In the case of Altpoint Ventures, we used different typography sizes and boxes to highlight different parts of their copy, resulting in a clear and simple message.

Our own Kluge website is another example. Keep in mind that making something simple only comes after initially writing longer copy.

Performing a Content Audit:  Understanding your Content Production Abilities

There is a tendency to get really ambitious with visual design, only to then forget all the work that goes into the production of good content. Performing a content audit is how we make sure our clients have the content they say they have.

In building the Department of Cultural Affairs website, we first took a deep dive into an audit of their content, allowing us to understand all of their existing key assets

The audit included interviews with all principal stakeholders, and a thorough understanding of individual department capabilities.

After analyzing all of the data collected from the content audit, we were able to create flow charts around their content-creation process. These charts enabled us to understand what their content could truly look like in a dynamic website.

A Content Marketing Strategy — the Real SEO

At the end of the day, beyond standard SEO best practices such as 301 redirects, alternative text for images, and a clear navigable sitemap, nothing makes better SEO than an ongoing content strategy. This means anywhere from having a dedicated content creation team that is tasked with building valuable free content for your target users, to creating a content calendar for your team to make sure to publish a blog piece every week, or every month. What is important is building a consistent value-infused strategy based around hot topics surrounding your business.

If you are in need of content, check out CMO.com -- Adobe's online magazine focusing on current digital marketing. Adobe believes in content strategy so much that it created the site as a resource to deliver tons of free content to its core target buyer and user.

In Part 4, the final part of this series, we talk about how well-designed UX can make your B2B website infinitely better than most others, in User Experience — The Key to All Good Design.

I welcome your comments, and invite you to share this information.

Arturo Perez, CEO Kluge Interactive

Events Calendar