The Foundations for E-E-A-T in B2B Content Marketing

1. Experience: Use verifiable stats and facts to make your points. It’s better if you own the data. Provide in-depth and multi-perspective coverage of the central topics around your brand via multiple long-form articles.

2. Expertise: Ensure your content’s accuracy and relevance around the topic being discussed. Let the audience know about your knowledge and skills to show that you know what you are talking about.

3. Authoritativeness: For on-site content, leverage citations and share your professional credentials in the author’s byline. For the website, earn contextually relevant backlinks from reputed domains via guest posts and digital PR.

4. Trustworthiness: Maintain a professional look on your website through clear and unambiguous content. Place strong technical SEO foundations for protecting your visitors’ online privacy.

In the rest of the chapter, I’ve explained how you can get the aforementioned outcomes to improve your B2B content’s visibility through EEAT.

Back everything you say

Every statement on your website is a claim until proven otherwise. This is more true for B2B because the AOV is typically higher. 

Furthermore, trust is two-pronged. You need to earn the faith of your potential customers and the search bots (of traditional search engines and AI-powered search tools).

First, use statistics and numbers. These are often infallible because of their straightforward nature. If possible, interpret the numbers for your audience in your context to boost engagement and persuasive capacity.

Second, mention facts. These are incidents that happened, events that transpired, outcomes that are widely known or accepted, and truths that are objectively acknowledged. It’s better if these statements are quotes from respectable sources, such as SMEs and business leaders.

Third, cover the topic from multiple angles and tackle every subtopic appropriately. It shows that you aren’t a beginner who is writing surface-level content for SEO. You can leverage the pillar-cluster model to organize your content effectively.

Following the above three tips when planning content marketing campaigns and producing drafts for your audience demonstrates that you’ve done your homework.

Speak confidently, but keep it real

Over the years, I’ve read plenty of pieces that generously use modals. While it may give the content a formal look, it definitely reduces its persuasive power. Modals explicitly relay ambiguity and create room for plausible deniability.

This makes you look like a noob who is unsure of what he is saying. 

Another mistake that folks make, especially in the B2B realm, is to speak like a PR-trained corporate robot. Mate, if you can say something in a couple of lines, you don’t need a paragraph of foreplay!

These modal-filled word salads simply decrease the knowledge density of the article. Your readers perceive you as an absolute beginner who has a long way to go before marketing a product or a service to others.

Therefore, it’s essential that you get straight to the point and speak like someone who knows what they are talking about. Be confident and clear because that will persuade your audience to open their wallets.

At the same time, don’t overpromise and underdeliver. Plenty of brands position their products or services as if they will make them millions overnight, which is certainly unethical. The same holds true for the capabilities of the offerings.

Additionally, when explaining concepts or providing justification behind your suggestions, ensure that the reasoning is coherent and logical. It should make sense to the rational mind. If it’s a whole bunch of nothing, it depletes your perceived expertise faster than a corrupt leader depletes the country’s financial reserves.

Finally, your author’s byline should enhance the credibility of the articles. Make sure it mentions your educational background, industry experience, and professional achievements. Your potential customers don’t need to know whether you loved the final season of Game of Thrones or if you are a cat person.

Build links and be more social

Link building is unavoidable. Your domain needs to be listed on other reputable websites in a contextually relevant manner to boost authority. The best method is guest posting because it gives you full control over the narrative.

Alternatively, you can consider link insertion, where you tweak a paragraph or a section in an existing article to embed your link. This is typically quicker and more affordable than guest posting, but there are limited good opportunities in this area.

Finally, you can pay media publications and whatnot to publish dedicated PR pieces around your brand and offerings. These digital assets do increase your company’s perceived value, but aren’t that effective in persuading your audience due to their sponsored nature.

Apart from that, get mentioned in every third-party listicle you can. You have to manually reach out to webmasters and editors for this. In fact, every effort mentioned above is a tedious activity because of the iota of manual effort needed. 

Then, a thing that most B2B brands ignore: social presence. I am not just talking about your company’s social handles on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. I am also talking about the social handles of senior executives and decision-makers of the company on those platforms.

A simple rule of thumb: post every day. You never know which audience segment is watching when, and ramping up the content volume is the most effective way to maximize reach. Most of your competitors are happy with 2-3 posts per week. Double that.

And it’s also not that difficult. If you are consistently producing one or two long-form articles on your website, you can certainly repurpose them into 5-6 posts, with and without visuals. It’s better to avoid AI-generated visuals, unless you are quite confident that they will perform.

Technical SEO is a one-time investment

Technical SEO is the simplest, easiest thing to get right. However, content managers and webmasters cut too many corners and ignore the best practices for momentary convenience.

I’ve seen plenty of business websites that are trash because the most basic rules were thrown out of the window when uploading content or designing new pages.

Anyway, if your website is too complicated due to the nature of your organization or the preferences of your target audience, then hire a developer. You don’t need them full-time. Just once in a while, book them for a couple of hours and have them fix whatever issues of the moment.

Else, leverage an easy-to-use website builder. My website (this one) is hosted on Wix, which is quite intuitive. It took me a while to get the hang of it because I am dumber than I look. Such builders are simple, affordable, and most importantly, can be managed by one person.

It surfaces the issues you need to highlight and fix, which makes your job significantly easier. Apart from a few core pages, managing content is as easy as A-B-C.

Furthermore, when uploading content, follow all the best practices. Add the meta details, ensure the URL is short and unique, compress images, and everything else. Ask ChatGPT to create an actionable checklist for you. Or you can take one from a reputable online source. I am not providing one because it’s already a widely discussed topic on the web.

Conclusion: E-E-A-T is straightforward

Google’s guidelines on what makes a content piece ‘helpful’ could not be more cognitively palatable. At the same time, it does require sincere and consistent work, particularly if you want to be competitive. And that’s where everybody fails.

Instead of doing, they get stuck in an endless loop of overthinking and strategizing, which never yields any result. 

As always, taking action is the most challenging part, and it shows. 

Look, the majority of the things to make E-E-A-T work for your B2B site are one-time. Things like technical SEO, author’s byline, etc., fall in this category. The only element that requires constant pushing is content, whether it is on or off-site.

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Next Chapter: Coming Soon

Previous Chapter: Content Topics That Move the Marketing Needle

Index (with Prologue): Content Marketing 101: For Lean and Agile Teams