3 B2B Blog Content Tools To Drive Success

Updated July 2022

Blogging is a critical part of any B2B organization’s content marketing and lead generation efforts. In fact, 76 percent of B2B marketers say they use blogs to distribute content to their audience.

According to the Content Marketing Institute research, blogs are the second most used type of content marketing in B2B, coming in ahead of newsletters, email marketing, and mobile apps.

To create effective B2B blog content, B2B marketers need to develop content that addresses the interests of their audience while being backed by an effective SEO strategy. In short, you need to create more data-backed, relevant content.

To help you do that, this post will highlight three tools the KoMarketing team regularly uses to create blog topics that engage target audiences, improve content visibility, and make the B2B content writing process both efficient and effective.

1. Google Search Console: B2B Content Tool to Find Content Opportunities

A solid keyword strategy is the backbone of any successful content marketing strategy. If you want to increase the visibility of your site and content ROI, you need to know what search terms you’re already ranking for and which terms need improvement.

With this in mind, Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools) is a great starting point to jumpstart blog topic creation. Here are a few of the ways we use Search Console for this purpose:

Understand The Keywords that Drive Engagement to Your Site

As we’ve discussed before, Google Search Console provides a number of actionable insights to optimize your search marketing efforts. For this post, however, we’re concerned with the metrics that indicate published content is deemed relevant in the eyes (or at least the ones and zeros) of search engines.

With Search Analytics, marketers can look at individual keyword rankings that drive traffic to the site as a whole or to an individual landing page by clicking on “Performance” then “Search Results.” Additionally, metrics like clicks, click-through rates, impressions, and SERP rankings can help content marketers understand which search queries their audience finds most valuable, while also highlighting the related keywords that will provide the best visibility for their chosen topic.

Find Opportunities to Boost Rankings for Underperforming Keywords

One of the greatest benefits of consistent, quality blogging is the impact on SEO rankings. With this in mind, Search Console provides great insights into potential blog topics that can boost rankings for underperforming keywords. For example, say a particular keyword is ranking on the third page of results but generates decent click-through rates (CTRs) and impressions. There’s an opportunity there to optimize or create a targeted blog post to boost performance. In any event, a deeper look into the particular keyword landscape is warranted.

2. SEMrush: All-Around B2B Blog Writing Tool

Creating quality blog content requires time, effort, and most importantly… research. Developing content that demonstrates thought-leadership and, more notably, relevancy to the reader, is paramount to a successful content marketing strategy.

SEMrush is a jack-of-all-trades platform that can help you do just that. The tool offers various capabilities marketers can use to optimize their efforts, like brand mention auditing, keyword position tracking, organic keyword research, social media tracking, and more.“

For the sake of this post, however, we’ll focus on the elements that benefit blog topic ideation. Specifically, the Topic Research Tool.

This tool helps you better understand the current search landscape surrounding a particular keyword or keyword theme. Simply enter your keyword, and SEMrush scours the web and displays the top-ranking content topics for your keyword, and finds related search queries.

Take the image above for example. For the term, “content marketing,” SEMrush shows an overview of all the different topics related to content marketing. From there, I can look at which areas match my audience’s interests (social media marketing, for example), then see the highest-ranking headlines. By looking at those related posts, I can better understand the topics, longtail keywords, and questions my target audience may find valuable.

If you’re anything like me, the time saved on clicking on scores of different articles to organize your thoughts and decide on key themes can drastically improve your efficiency. It’s also simple, fast, and easy to use and limits the time you spend on research–without sacrificing quality. You can spend a few minutes reading other content on the topic and then create an outline that provides more information, and better examples to, hopefully, rank higher than the competition.

While the tool is a bit pricey (at just over $100 per month), it also provides a number of other tools you can use for content marketing, including their on-page SEO checker tool, site audit, content marketing analytics, and rank tracking.

3. BuzzSumo: See How Users Engage With Blog Content On Social Media

Content marketing and social media go hand-in-hand, but how often do you look at engagement before ideating your content? Probably not that often. However, understanding how audiences engage with keyword-specific content can help influence the topics you incorporate into your content marketing strategy.

Enter BuzzSumo.

This platform provides marketers with deep insights into the keyword-related content that is driving engagement across social media.

When developing blog topic ideas, these insights can come in handy in a couple of different ways. Specifically, they can help:

Match topic ideas to specific influencers

With content promoted by key influencers delivering a staggering 11 times greater ROI than content promoted through traditional digital marketing channels alone, it makes sense to maximize the likelihood influencers will engage and hopefully share your content.

With BuzzSumo’s Influencers Tool, marketers can understand the authority rankings, followers, reply ratio, and average tweets per day made by specific influencers. From there, you can develop topics that cater to the unique engagement patterns of specific influencers.

Understand the content driving engagement

In the platform overview, BuzzSumo offers several unique insights that make the overall B2B content writing process simpler. Specifically, they help marketers filter their insights into content engagement, covering:

• Content length
• Specific domains
• Publisher size
• Content-type

These insights can help you better understand your audience, and give B2B blog writers a framework for posts that drive the highest social engagement. From there, you can use the in-depth search options to understand what content is shared, published, and linked to in relation to your target keyword—increasing the likelihood of higher engagement rates.

When developing new blog topic ideas, paying attention to audience engagement across related content can help steer your content writing in the right direction by showing you what formats and sub-topics get the most engagement.

Final Thoughts on B2B Blog Content Tools

It’s no secret that blogging is an essential part of any content marketing strategy, so why not get the most out of it? By understanding the search landscape and the topics your audience finds useful and interesting, your B2B blog content can go a long way toward increasing engagement, boosting visibility, and helping meet your marketing goals.

The three tools mentioned above can provide some great insights into B2B blog ideas you can use to maximize the impact of your writing, pique your audience’s curiosity, and stand out from the crowd.

What tools do you use to develop blog topics? Let us know on Twitter!