Does your business content strategy include whitepaper marketing? If not, you should definitely consider indulging in producing one. Whitepaper marketing can make a great impact on the amount of traffic you generate for your website and the amount of leads you capture. Your whitepaper must be approached from a perspective of it being helpful to readers and not just being pitchy to try and get leads. An informative and resourceful one can do wonders to add value to your marketing efforts. Your main goal is to understand your consumer and design your whitepaper with the sole aim of providing something they find useful. This can’t be stressed enough, your primary priority needs to be to make the whitepaper as good as it can be and then focus your efforts towards SEO. It’s a two-way street when it comes to whitepaper SEO, including SEO tactics in your whitepaper will boost your reach and vice-versa having detailed whitepapers will help your overall website rankings, it’s a win-win situation if done rightly!
Blog Posts
Use social media and newsletters to promote your blogs along with your whitepaper and make sure they get enough traction. Homepage real estate should be used optimally to provide visibility to the content you want to promote. Also, a good SEO practice always includes some form of call-to-action in your headers. Here is an example how Oracle does their white paper landing page promotion:
Use Infographics
Convert the more complex aspects of your whitepaper into infographics for a better reader experience. Infographics done right can improve your viewership by over 95%. Tweet This! Search engines have given preference to more user-friendly infographics; Google Trends data shows an increase in visitor engagement for content that includes infographics. A great way to promote your whitepaper would be to include your infographics as the advertisement template to garner more clicks and downloads. Here are some examples of infographics that can increase the visibility of your website.
Landing Pages
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Create gripping and user-friendly landing pages with customized texts including targeted keywords. Use these pages to understand your reader. Have simple not intrusive forms to ask for general information. Based on the data collected you can then analyze your keyword lists to cater to your niche audience. Make sure the internal linking of these landing pages are properly mapped out for better indexing and include external links like other relevant industry whitepapers and social media share buttons to improve authority. Here is how Deck 7 does landing pages.
Optimize the Titles and Text
Identify keywords that rank well on Google relating to the topic and add them to the titles and text. Make sure to not overdo it as too much will be considered as spamming and might negatively affect ranking. Images used also need to be optimized, this includes reducing file sizes, giving appropriate names, and also making sure their captions include keywords for better indexing by search engines.
Have a Crisp Executive Summary
Include a keyword-rich executive summary for your whitepaper and use this on your landing page, social media posts, or newsletters as a preview for your whitepaper. An authoritative and persuasive summary will not only get your readers more interested but also help SEO by increasing the relevance of your website for the topics you’re aiming for.
Mobile Friendly
If your whitepaper is only optimized for PC-based viewing it can be a huge let down in terms of your mobile viewers. The text will appear misaligned and the fonts and images will not be in sync. A 2015 update from Google explicitly specified that their algorithm will give preference to mobile-optimized sites and penalize the ones which are not. Making your website mobile friendly is an absolute priority.
Keep in mind, making your readers a priority first with a few SEO tweaks will automatically translate to good search engine ranking. Your SEO tactics can only take you as far as the quality and value that your whitepaper can provide. Quality will encourage more shares on social media websites alike which in turn will make search engines value your whitepapers. Keep your content ready for search engines to index and cache and see your results get compounded as time goes by.