Table of Contents
After Reading This Guide, You’ll Understand 🡭
- Internal linking strategies
- Planning service pages for a B2B brand
- Optimizing BOFU pages for conversion
About The Business 🡭
Sciencesoft is a software development company based in the US. The brand has expertise in multiple technologies such as app development, CRM, Big Data, AI, blockchain, and more.
Results Achieved 🡭
Currently, the site is getting roughly around 125k organic visits per month and has more than 100k+ backlinks from around 10k different domains.
On the surface level, you’ll notice that Sciencesoft has doubled their organic monthly traffic in the last year.
But here’s the thing:
Doubling the traffic is one thing and doubling the qualified organic visits is another thing.
That means Sciencesoft has focused more on the pages that are more likely to bring business value to them.
This can be understood by looking at the traffic value (the amount you’d spend if you were getting the same amount of traffic) of the site.
Here, for ScienceSoft the traffic value is $580k.
Let’s find out the key strategies of the brand that you too can implement for a B2B business.
Content Strategy Breakdown 🡭
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1/ Content Categorization and Building Service Page For Most Relevant Queries
First thing to notice is that ScnSoft has created a landing page for almost every possible relevant search queries related to their service.
Here’s an example:
If you’re into the same industry then you might have created one landing page for salesforce professional services.
But here, ScnSoft have created multiple versions of the salesforce service such as:
- Salesforce managed services (search volume – 200/month)
- Salesforce implementation services (search volume – 150/month)
- Salesforce consulting services (search volume – 400/month), etc.
By doing so, ScnSoft is getting near about 1.8k monthly search visits to salesforce-related pages only.
Now, this number might not seem big enough.
But when you look at the bigger picture of where Sciencesoft has used this strategy for other services, you’ll find a big difference.
Content categorization is a way of organizing your content inventory to help users to navigate the site and find the needed information faster.
In the case of ScienceSoft, they have categorized their service and solutions pages in such a way that helps anyone to understand various services and technology expertise.
Let me show you the different business offerings of ScnSoft and how they have categorized their pages:
As you can see, the brand has many landing pages related to business offerings. If not categorized in such a manner, it would be hard for any user to know various offerings.
Most of all, we need to have a look at the URL structure of this strategy too.
I have created a sample URL structure below (similar to ScnSoft) to help you understand the url structure for different content categories.
You’ll notice that all these service/ landing pages are first divided into parent categories such as:
- Technologies (domain/technologies/)
- Angular (domain/technologies/angular)
- Angular (domain/technologies/php)
- Node.js (domain/technologies/node–js)
- So on…
- Industries (domain/industries/)
- Manufacturing (domain/industries/manufacturing)
- Health (domain/industries/health)
- Education (domain/industries/education)
Key reasons for organizing the URL structure of landing pages:
1/ SEO Benefits
A clear URL structure helps the crawler to understand more about the relevance between pages. Also, since the content categories are divided into different sub-folders, it will be easier for Google to understand the site structure as well.
Also, having a clear and organized URL structure will help you cluster your service pages.
For an industry where you’ll have to create a lot of service pages in the long run, this strategy will work for you.
Take the example of ScnSoft:
As a software development company, there are dozens of services or solutions that you can target.
And, when you don’t have an organized URL structure (by using sub-folder), you’ll find it difficult to manage the pages once you scale the process.
2/ User Experience
First, by looking at the URL structure any user can easily understand the page topic and business offerings.
2/ Internal Linking Strategy
Internal linking of ScnSoft is one of the best strategies a B2B brand can consider executing. Let me show you the breakdown →
1/ Homepage and navigation
Homepage is generally one of the most authority pages of your site. Therefore adding important pages of your sites close to the home page will increase the page rank of those pages too.
This is what ScnSoft have done specifically. From the home page, they have strategically linked to most of the important pages (services, industries, solutions, etc.):
For the similar reason, the navigation structure of the website is also similar to the homepage structure which is making important pages close to the home page (under 3-4 clicks).
To understand the URL structure of the site, let me show you the crawl diagram of the site:
You’ll notice that most of these pages are just one or two clicks away from the home page.
And, this is also one of the reasons why the overall site is working so well in this competitive niche.
Note: This type of internal linking strategy is not only helpful for only B2B businesses but can make a significant impact on eCommerce sites.
One of the challenges of eCommerce sites is adding category and product pages as close to the home page as possible.
2/ Service page structure
Service pages are strategically internally linked with its related services pages. Let me cite an example:
There are around 10 service pages related to salesforce solutions. Now, imagine all of these 10 pages are internally linked with each other – similar to content hub structure.
This is normally seen on the content hub structure where the pillar page and cluster articles are internally linked to each other.
This helps in:
- Passing pagerank from one to another
- Telling Google about the page structure and its relevance
- Increasing dwell time
- Reducing crawl depth and having pages under 3 clicks away from the home page
Something similar can be seen on Zerodha varsity’s content hub structure:
Now, you get the idea of doing the same for service pages too. This can work well in terms of organizing a large number of service pages.
One thing to keep in mind while executing this strategy is the conversion as we know that adding multiple CTAs or links for the user might lower the conversion rate.
4/ Case Studies and Testimonials
One of the most important content types for B2B businesses is case studies or customer testimonials.
Reasons?
The buyers’ journey in the B2B business involves various decision makers. And, the journey is much more complex and lengthier as compared to a B2C brand.
And, this helps to reduce the friction for the buyers and build brand credibility.
This is why you’ll find case studies on almost every service page.
Note: when you’re building case studies or testimonials pages, make sure you categorize them by service type. This way, a user can quickly find case studies or customer stories related to their service requirement.
An example is here:
Do This Now 🡭
Following are the key takeaways from the content marketing breakdown of ScienceSoft.
TAKEAWAY 1. Think Long-Term For Content Planning
If you’re planning a content strategy for a B2B brand from the beginning then have a long term vision. For example, a software development company may have dozens of services to offer.
Therefore it is important to consider the long term vision and start planning the URL structure for the pages.
Having a clear and organized URL structure will not give you massive SEO benefits but it will help you make a clear structure for different service categories.
Example →
This is a similar sitemap sitemap that we considered for one of our clients. This will help us to plan the content strategy, URL structure, site structure, navigation, etc.
TAKEAWAY 2. Choose Strategy Internal Linking Over Random Internal Links
When it comes to internal linking, many people think of just adding internal links to similar key phrases or related articles.
Instead, you can plan a lot more. For example, ScnSoft have built a content cluster for most of their service pages. They didn’t add random internal links to service pages.
Instead, they focused on connecting each other to service pages that belong to one key category.
Key points to remember regarding internal linking:
- Funnel high authority page to low authority page to pass pagerank
- Keep your important pages as close as possible.
- Internal links in the main content have more value than sidebar or footer.
- Breadcrumb is a good way to build a site structure and internal link strategically.
- Consider relevancy when linking out to other pages.
- Avoid using generic anchor text such as ‘contact us’, ‘learn more,’ etc.
TAKEAWAY 3. Create Content That Helps In Conversion
Creating organized service pages and high quality articles are good. But when it comes to the B2B industry, you shouldn’t avoid focusing on case studies or customer stories.
When you have case studies for different service categories, you can use them as social proof in landing pages, CTAs within the article, and many more.
Optional Assignment 🡭
Pick any B2B business that has 6+ service/ product page categories. Next, perform research to find out:
- Scope of improvement in internal linking (you may use screaming frog)
- What can be improved in the service page structure
- Whether they have enough content that helps in conversion?
