Hey all, imagine spending 2 or 3 hours writing a single blog piece. That’s the price to pay in my experience when it comes to well written content that is punchy, fun, grammatically correct, and otherwise interesting. It may even have an original thought – something exceedingly rare in the world of content. So my question is: why in the world would anyone write such a piece for a B2B website?
Small to midsize B2B websites, surely visited by no more than 10 or 50 people per day are not huge drivers of eyeballs or engagement. And let’s be honest, ‘mid-size paper slitter machine’ content is never going to excite the world. Want to try something fun and unique that isn’t directly about what your company does? Good luck with that.
Let me give you an example – I write silly/dumb newsletters and at the outset of Sharp Guys Web Design nearly a decade ago, I was writing them monthly. I wrote one that was equal parts dumb and true called – I Wrote You a Story About 6th Grade. But you see my friends, despite that being an original piece of content and my knowledge of the SEO and the web design world, that article has constantly been de-indexed (not be able to be searched for or found) on Google for countless years. Why? Because it wasn’t about web design or some other keyword phrase that Google thinks this particular website should be about.
What happened there is what happens everywhere across the web. Few small to midsize companies have the ability to write unique or creative content for their website and have it found via search because Google has gravitated all of their attention towards the lowest common denominator drivel that is spewed out for search engine results As you can probably tell right now based on my teenagey angst, this is not an AI based article. In fact, I didn’t even run it through AI for grammar (which you can also probably tell). Why should I? I know that by and large this thought piece on the dreadful state of online content is not going to be sucked up by the Google machine no more than my silly newsletter was years earlier (despite multiple manual submissions).
You’ll hear from some that you just need to write better content – that the content needs to be original and that will suffice to build your brand. No, my dreadfully naive friend, it won’t. That’s because if your article is well written, well researched, and well respected – it will simply have all of the content sucked up by multitudinous AI bots and they will steal word for word bits and pieces to answer people’s queries on statistical questions without ever sending a drop of traffic your way. After all, if they can do it to the New York Times, what chance does Sharp Guys Web Design have?
So what’s the answer for B2B websites? Social? Video? No.
The answer is to write “acceptable content” – stuff that fills a need or plugs a hole in the Google machine’s ever-growing appetite to spit out answers without using actual websites. If you do that, you might even get a link from Google or ChatGPT when someone asks, “How much does the HAL-Machine Model 2001 cost?” If you don’t publish that number, someone else will – and they’ll get the business.
Answer questions you used to only get on sales calls. Things like: “How many years will this part last?” or “What’s the best-selling model, and what are its weaknesses?” Basically, write the kind of content you’d feel comfortable asking the answer machine that is GPT. If you do that – and your competitors don’t, you’ll win the battle for the answer machine. Do these things and the answer machine will have to link to you, because only you answered the question. And they don’t sell HAL…yet.
Think I’m wrong or that you shouldn’t put out that information for public consumption? That’s okay – just remember: if you don’t do it, your competitors eventually will.
Do you still have a hankering to write quality content not fit for the Google machines?
Save your ‘well-crafted’ content (or in my case, simply ‘crafted’) for email newsletters. Despite running a B2B business, I irregularly send one out to nearly 1,000 people and I still have a 50%+ open rate and consistent engagement. You can too. Build your list, start creating a direct connection between you and your contacts and forget how well it shares online – you’ll be surprised how much you’ll enjoy it.
