Brand

Marketing

Grant Hendricks

<p>In the United States, it’s another big election year. It has me thinking about gaffes. Remember gaffes? Remember when politicians could do something incredibly stupid, and it would, ya know, end their careers?</p>
<p>I remember Howard Dean in 2004 and his infamous “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6i-gYRAwM0">Dean Scream.</a>”</p>
<p>From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binders_full_of_women">binders full of women</a> to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables">baskets of deplorables</a>, sometimes all it takes to lose an election is a stupid turn of phrase. It’s perception in action. Even if it’s meaningless in the grander scheme of things, a gaffe can infect a candidate with negative public perceptions, dooming them to irrelevancy.</p>
<p></p>
<h2>How the sausage gets made</h2>
<p>Consider the humble hot dog.</p>
<p>The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (because, <em>of course,</em> that’s a thing) maintains a <a href="https://www.hot-dog.org/resources/Hot-Dog-Ingredients-Guide">glossary of hot dog ingredients</a> on its website. Many people love the taste of a good dog, but we’re all pretty aware of the fact that they’re gross.</p>
<p>Lips and assholes, they say. That’s what’s in your hot dog. The NHDSC begs to differ. It describes the types of meat used quite clearly. For beef dogs, it claims that the meat used is “most commonly pieces of meat cut away from steaks or roasts.” It clarifies that “organ meats are not typically used in hot dogs or sausages, and if organs are used, the specific organ will be included in the ingredients statement.”</p>
<p>Looking into it some more, I see that it is indeed true. Most hot dogs aren’t made from lips or assholes or anything else grotesque. At least, nothing more grotesque than trimmings from an animal carcass.</p>
<p>You know what <em>is</em> made from lips and assholes? Chorizo sausage.</p>
<p>Ok, maybe not assholes. But traditional chorizo is made from lymph nodes, salivary glands, and pieces of pig head. You can look it up. Or don’t; just check the ingredients list on this package:</p>
<p></p>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-3299 aligncenter" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/chorizo.jpg" alt="" width="895" height="416" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/chorizo.jpg 895w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/chorizo-300x139.jpg 300w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/chorizo-768x357.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 895px) 100vw, 895px" />
<p>The intention here is not to make you eat more hot dogs, nor is it to stop you from eating chorizo tacos. It’s an exercise in branding—in perception. Hot dogs have a reputation for cheapness and low quality. Chorizo is seen as something gourmet. So hot dogs get the old lip/asshole treatment, while we turn a blind eye to chorizo.</p>
<p>If this section was a bit much, here’s a palate cleanser. A photo of former U.S. presidential candidate Rick Perry getting frisky with a corn dog:</p>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-3300 aligncenter" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/perry.jpg" alt="" width="758" height="426" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/perry.jpg 758w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/perry-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 758px) 100vw, 758px" />
<p>Howard Dean gets lampooned for getting a little too enthusiastic during a speech, but year after year we not only permit but encourage presidential candidates get intimate with corn dogs. Make it make sense.</p>
<p>Anyway, let’s get back to it.</p>
<h3>Isn’t it offal? Rebranding “gross” meat products</h3>
<p>Particularly in our sanitary (and sanitized) western world, there aren’t that many die-hard fans of organ meat. Elsewhere in the world, palates lean a bit more adventuresome. But North Americans are a squeamish sort. We like our chops, our steaks, our chicken wings. Hearts, feet, gizzards? That’s dog food, right?</p>
<p>Over the past decade, some epicureans have tried to challenge that perception. There’s a bit of a culinary resurgence focused on the overlooked cuts, the organs, the offal. The so-called “snout to tail” movement advocates for processing and enjoying the entire animal.</p>
<p>It’s presented as a boon across several dimensions that speak to different concerns among consumers:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Efficiency.</strong> For those who bemoan the horrific resource inefficiencies of meat production, it makes good sense to maximize the value we get from each harvested animal.</li>
<li><strong>Flavour.</strong> Those with adventurous culinary leanings may appreciate the novelty of “exotic” cuts.</li>
<li><strong>Nutrition and health fads.</strong> It’s been said that there’s a sucker born every minute. On a probably unrelated note, there seems to be a new health fad born every minute. Some of those fads rely on unconventional sources of nutrition like I dunno, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_King">liver.</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In the end, “snout to tail” reframes a disgusting product like organ meat and connective tissue and makes it…I was going to say <em>sexy</em>, but that’s just wrong. Palatable. Let’s say palatable.</p>
<p>It elevates lips and assholes beyond their station. Hot dogs continue to catch strays for a crime they aren’t even guilty of, while the same hipsters that dismiss them line up at butcher shops to get their hands on fresh <a href="https://castandspear.com/nose-to-tail-cooking/">lamb brains.</a></p>
<p></p>
<h2>Coffee breaks and Kleenex: context and messaging matter</h2>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-3301 aligncenter" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/covfefe-1.jpg" alt="" width="454" height="576" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/covfefe-1.jpg 454w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/covfefe-1-236x300.jpg 236w" sizes="(max-width: 454px) 100vw, 454px" />
<p>If you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance you’re doing it on your coffee break.</p>
<p>If you were a time traveller from 1940 reading the previous line, you might ask yourself (among many other questions), “What is a coffee break?”</p>
<p>Workers have always had breaks in their day, but the notion of a coffee break is inorganic. Before the 1950s, Americans perceived coffee as a treat to accompany a meal. You had a cup of coffee for breakfast. Maybe a pick-me-up with supper if you were so inclined.</p>
<p>A concerted effort by the <a href="https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/sep-keyword/pan-american-coffee/">Pan-American Coffee Bureau</a> in the early 1950s created the coffee break. Citing improved productivity and worker happiness, they ran a $2 million ad campaign to encourage workplaces to adopt a coffee break. Coffee’s popularity exploded as a result. To this day, it’s found in break rooms and offices around the world.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleenex">Kleenex</a> was initially sold in the 1920s as a product for removing cold cream and makeup. Over the next decade, Kleenex manufacturer Kimberly-Clark realized that consumers preferred using Kleenex as a disposable handkerchief. They rebuilt their brand around this concept, and the rest is history. A moderately popular cold cream remover became the broadly accepted colloquial term for an entire category of products.</p>
<p>In the case of both coffee and Kleenex, the product itself didn’t change. The message did.</p>
<h2>Are you in an ugly industry?</h2>
<p>No matter what you do, there’s someone out there who hates you for it.</p>
<p>Chemical? Check. Manufacturing? Yep. Mining? Affirmative.</p>
<p>What it comes down to is that everyone wants to drive their car over to paradise, but they get angry when we put up parking lots. It’s having your cake and eating it, too. All sunshine, no rain.</p>
<p><strong>The harsh reality is that an ugly industry allows for the existence of clean industries.</strong> The powerful magnets used in renewable energy turbines rely on minerals like dysprosium. There is no replacement for it; it’s not terribly abundant, and mining it is rather dirty. But if we want to “electrify America,” as many people do, we have to keep mining it. Those open pit mines and leaching pools that environmentalists so despise are absolute necessities for their brighter, greener future.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean dirty industries cannot do better, but there are limits. A mine is a deep chasm carved into the earth. That’s simply how it has to be. No amount of legislation, commitment to environmental standards, or corporate social responsibility policy will make mining clean and green.</p>
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<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-3302 aligncenter" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1.jpg" alt="" width="1254" height="836" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1.jpg 1254w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1254px) 100vw, 1254px" />
<h2>The unique challenge of marketing in the industrial sector</h2>
<p>The further removed people are from something, the less consideration they give it and the less they tend to understand it. Industrial processes are out of sight and out of mind for the majority of people. Not without reason: the industry is indeed polluting. It can be disruptive to local communities. In some cases, it can be dangerous.</p>
<p>None of this takes away from its necessity. Lack of visibility of industry is part of the broader context of marketing primary and industrial sector goods and services.</p>
<p>Fundamentally, marketing for industry deals with three major challenges:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Small addressable markets.</strong> There’s great benefit in gaining traction with the general public (more on that later), but most industrial businesses have a niche, highly specialized target market. Contrast that with typical B2C goods and services. Everyone needs shoes or pants. Only a select few need industrial chemical blending services by comparison.</li>
<li><strong>Commoditization and industry consolidation.</strong> Many industrial companies operate in a highly commodified, highly consolidated vertical. Chemical suppliers compete against Dow and DuPont to sell products with tight margins and difficult-to-parse unique selling propositions—if there are any. Other industries like oil and gas and mining deal with commodities quite literally. There’s no way to sell premium copper by the ton or bespoke barrels of crude.</li>
<li><strong>Negative reputation and social/political opposition.</strong> Industrial companies rarely get spotlighted in a positive way. Visibility in the primary and manufacturing sectors often centres around protests, job losses, strike action, environmental impact, and other negative stories. Generally, negative perceptions toward industry can result in onerous regulatory environments, smaller hiring pools, and even workplace disruption due to politically motivated protests or acts of sabotage.</li>
</ol>
<p>It should be made clear that there’s a big difference between advocating for a fair regulatory environment and free market absolutism. Industrial companies that operate in bad faith, lie to and mislead the public, or hide their environmental impact contribute to the negative perceptions that affect industry at large. Honesty and transparency are pillars of ethical marketing. Companies that make a good-faith effort to meet or exceed social and environmental best practices can actually help their industry avoid sledgehammer legislation that eats into profitability.</p>
<p></p>
<h3>Messaging: your secret weapon in B2B industrial marketing</h3>
<p>When the products are commodities, the directly addressable market size is small, and the marketing landscape is tilted against you, what’s left for industrial companies to grow their influence?</p>
<p>In many cases, the answer is messaging. Even in commodified industries, someone wins public bids, gets first dibs on mineral rights, or gets their new facility fast-tracked for development. Sure, that’s a lot of personal network at play. Growing and leveraging that network will always matter. But there’s more to every deal than just who you know.</p>
<p>B2B deals, particularly those with a public component, get approved by committee. Everyone knows that things done by committee are always great and more than the sum of their parts, but I digress.</p>
<p>You might have an in with the primary decision-maker, or you might not. It’s unlikely you have a personal connection to everyone involved in a complex B2B deal. It’s also probable that effective strategies like gift-giving are regulated in your industry, either by government or by corporate policy. This is where your marketing steps up to help grease the wheels.</p>
<p>In B2B marketing, the pitch never stops. Your message continues to work for you after the proposal is submitted for review. Messaging is how you show your customers who you are and why they should choose you over your competitor.</p>
<p>Consider the three major challenges faced by many in the industrial sector:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>You may deal in a commodified market.</strong> You can compete on price, but is that the best idea? It’s a race to the bottom, sacrificing margin to close deals. Companies run themselves out of business chasing competitive pricing. Isn’t it better to compete on, well, <em>anything else?</em></li>
<li><strong>Your market size is small, which also makes it distinct.</strong> With a solid understanding of target market <strong>characteristics, you know what they value and how to communicate those values back to them.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Many industrial business deals hinge on political support across one or more levels of government.</strong> This creates a broad audience of tertiary stakeholders—voters, local residents, politicians, and city staff—that can either be friends or foes, depending on what they believe about your project.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>Sales teams are a critical component of communicating the message, but they’re targeted to your prospects. A salesperson can’t pitch to every stakeholder at once, especially if we consider broader political support and all the tertiary stakeholders involved in political processes. It’s your marketing material, your messaging, your <span class="notion-enable-hover" data-token-index="1">brand experience</span> that can influence a broad range of stakeholders. In a more limited marketing environment, these elements matter more, not less.</p>
<h2>Change your fortunes by changing perceptions.</h2>
<p>Perception management in industry gets a bad rep. Dishonest messaging results in accusations of greenwashing and propaganda. These criticisms actually highlight the effectiveness of perception management via brand and messaging. Such tactics would not be derided as they are if they weren’t effective. There’s no need to lie or deceive to receive benefits from messaging-based marketing, either. As we’ve discussed, industrial goods and services are absolutely necessary. Whether it occurs in our communities or gets offshored to the developing world, we rely on heavy industry and manufacturing to live our modern lives.</p>
<p>It’s all about selecting the right angles. Building a new pulp mill might result in a serious and unavoidable increase in local air and water pollution. What if it adds a hundred well-paying, stable jobs to a struggling small town? Calculate the broader impact of that job creation—all the money that flows into that local economy, in turn creating more jobs in unrelated industries, improving tax revenue for the municipality, and potentially funding a community revitalization.</p>
<p>Selling heavy equipment with high carbon emissions may run counter to decarbonizing the economy, but what if that heavy equipment gets used to protect communities from floods and wildfires? Tell <em>that</em> story. Make it human and relatable.</p>
<p>Industrial marketing is the discipline of finding silver linings in every cloud. Industry is at a disadvantage in the messaging battle; its benefits are underappreciated, and its necessity is misunderstood. Many of your competitors don’t care.</p>
<p>That’s why <em>you</em> should.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>

From Hot Dogs to Heavy Industry: The Power of Public Perception

The “Privacy Sandbox:” breaking down upcoming changes to analytics tracking

Development

<p>On May 27, 2024, SEO experts <a href="https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak">Mike King</a> and <a href="https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/">Rand Fishkin</a>, among others, revealed that Google’s search ranking API documentation had leaked. An automated system published the documentation to a public code repository under an open source license in March. Although the leak has since been removed, copies of it have been distributed around the internet.</p>
<p>The leaked content is dense, highly technical, and limited in important ways. While we have more visibility on which factors Google uses to determine search rankings—some of which are surprising—we don’t know the weighting of these factors. It’s like having a recipe that lists every ingredient but doesn’t provide the quantities or method to complete the dish.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, we’ve gained new and unexpected insight into Google’s ranking system. Let’s look at some of the more surprising insights gleaned from this leak, and how they might impact your B2B SEO strategy going forward.</p>
<h2>Clicks and sessions inform performance: user behaviour as a primary ranking signal</h2>
<p>It’s long been suspected that clicks impact search rankings. It’s something of a feedback loop that can cement top results. A website ranks highly, gets clicked on, the number of “good clicks” improves their performance, it ranks higher, it gets more clicks…</p>
<p>This leak (as well information exposed during the ongoing Google antitrust case) proved that clicks aren’t just a signal, but a major one.</p>
<p>I’ll reiterate that we don’t know the precise weighting of clicks, but clicks, users, and sessions <em>come up a lot</em> in the docs. We can infer that the number of references to these topics mean they’re particularly important when it comes to assigning rankings.</p>
<h3>Insights from the leak</h3>
<ul>
<li>Clicks definitely get used to evaluate search rankings, despite some official statements from Google to the contrary</li>
<li>Not all clicks are created equal. Google’s docs show ranking factors such as “bad clicks,” “good clicks,” and mysterious “Unicorn clicks.” We can guess that bad clicks hurt rankings, while good and “Unicorn” clicks likely help them.</li>
<li>What users do <em>after</em> the click matters as well. SEOs have claimed that metrics like “dwell time”—how long users actually spend on-page after clicking a result—may be a factor in ranking. While dwell time isn’t explicitly described in the report, other factors related to session duration are.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Our analysis</h3>
<p>This is something of a worst-kept secret in SEO, but getting confirmation is always good. What intrigues us most is the way clicks get defined. What entails a bad click? A “Unicorn” click?</p>
<p>Bad clicks might be easier to define. If a user clicks your listing but immediately bounces, it suggests they didn’t get what they wanted. That might be a bad click. Given that Google <em>also</em> appears to define good, bad, and Unicorn <em>users</em>, it could be that “badness” follows you around the internet like a bad odour. For instance, known bots and malicious users might be permanently designated as “bad” to prevent them from manipulating search results.</p>
<p>Unicorns are more intriguing. In sales, a unicorn is a prospect that checks off every single box. They’re best-fit clients that are so rare, they’re unicorns. What makes for a unicorn user?</p>
<p>At this point this is just idle speculation, but what if a unicorn user is one that “plays ball” with Google to the greatest extent possible? Someone who never uses an ad blocker, always stays signed in, and otherwise acts as a model citizen within Google’s tracking ecosystem?</p>
<p>This user would provide Google with the most complete picture of their online behaviour. Perhaps this is what Google means by unicorns?</p>
<h3>Next steps for B2B SEO</h3>
<p>Confirming the importance of clicks and on-page behaviour might refocus your SEO strategy away from content creation and toward <em>experience optimization.</em> SEO should never be about producing low-value content—we’ve always wanted to engage and delight audiences. Sometimes this user-first focus gets lost in the mix of content calendars and technical tweaks. In a click-focused SEO paradigm, we need to grab users with effective headlines, then convince them to stick around once they’ve clicked. For some SEOs, this might be an inverted way of thinking about the challenge.</p>
<p></p>
<h2>Browser-based user tracking and Privacy Sandbox: Chrome is king?</h2>
<p>Google Chrome is the number one (desktop) web browser in the world. In fact, its underlying framework—Chromium—powers most competing browsers, from Edge to Opera.</p>
<p>It’s a good thing for Google that they have such browser supremacy. As we approach the death of third-party trackers in 2025, the <a href="https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/the-privacy-sandbox-and-its-impact-on-b2b-marketing">Google-led Privacy Sandbox initiative</a> aims to provide advertisers with tools to target users in a more privacy-friendly way, such as the “Topics API.” Some of these methods depend on tracking tools embedded in Google Chrome. A user in a different browser may not be assigned any topics based on their browsing behaviour, making them less visible to advertisers reliant on the new Topics API.</p>
<p>Within the leaked documents, we see reference to Chrome-specific signals like the total number of views for a page from Chrome users. It’s unclear what the significance of Chrome usage is, but in the context of Privacy Sandbox, it seems like Chrome users may provide higher-quality data to Google. Is it possible that a Chrome user is worth more to your website than users from other browsers, all else being equal?</p>
<h3>Insights from the leak</h3>
<ul>
<li>Google explicitly analyzes Chrome users differently than they do users on other browsers.</li>
<li>The emerging Privacy Sandbox initiative depends on Chrome usage for some tracking and targeting features.</li>
<li>Chrome users may therefore be perceived as higher-value from Google’s perspective as they have a clearer picture of their behaviour and interests.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Our analysis</h3>
<p>Privacy Sandbox will strictly limit the amount of cross-site tracking that advertisers are capable of. Given Google’s interest in user behaviour when assigning organic rankings and their separate tracking of Chrome users, it raises questions about the importance of Chrome users across all forms of search marketing.</p>
<p>Are Chrome users weighted more heavily? It seems plausible. The separation of Chrome users from others suggests there’s something important about them from Google’s point of view, and I doubt it’s pure brand vanity.</p>
<p>When we discussed user quality in the previous segment, it may be the case that user behaviour across sessions informs their quality. On-device processing like the Topics API is one of the methods Google proposes to balance privacy and trackability, but it <em>only works</em> if browsers support it.</p>
<p>So the question becomes, which browsers will support it and why? Microsoft and smaller browser publishers like Mozilla really don’t have a reason to add Google’s tracking tools to their software. For many, not having these trackers might be a reason to switch! Apple and its Safari browser may have some incentive, as Google pays Apple billions to ensure it’s the default web search for Apple devices.</p>
<p>Watch for a flare-up in the browser wars in 2025. Google will push hard for Chrome usage, while other browsers may push back, suggesting a higher degree of privacy and security as a major selling feature.</p>
<h3>Next steps for B2B SEO</h3>
<p>Consider exploring browser and device splits. At this point we simply don’t know enough to verify whether there’s something different about Chrome traffic and its impact on SEO. We also can’t really assign particular behaviours or user attributes to Chrome users specifically, making it hard to optimize content and experiences for Chrome. However, knowing is always half the battle. As Chrome usage becomes more significant for digital marketers in the year ahead, tracking Chrome usage is a good first step to understanding what’s to come.</p>
<p></p>
<h2>All pages are equal, but some are more equal than others</h2>
<p>Fairness, or at least perceived fairness, is crucial to the SEO industry. We want to know that if we do better work than another company in our niche, we’ll reap the reward. Equally, we want to know that others can’t cheat their way to the top and expect to stay there. The whole idea of a search engine is merit-based. The cream must rise to the top!</p>
<p>In practice, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not a completely rigged system, but there are thumbs pressing on scales. Google doesn’t weight every page according to the same rules.</p>
<p>For example, homepages are exceptional in Google’s eyes. They see a homepage as a logical “front door” to your website, a declaration of precisely what you are. Google appears to temporarily apply its ranking score for website homepages to newly published pages on the website until the page ranks on its own merit.</p>
<p>There are also broader content classifications that get handled differently. You may be familiar with “YMYL,” or “Your Money or Your Life.” Google attempts to identify particularly sensitive or risky content, like content that advises on medical treatments or financial advice, handling it with more care and attention than general informational or entertainment content.</p>
<p>YMYL pages (as identified by Google) get subjected to more scrutiny. It’s an attempt to prevent Google from serving dangerous information—a problem they’re dealing with right now as their AI results have been telling users to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o">eat glue</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.html">jump off bridges.</a></p>
<p>In bygone eras, SEOs harped about content and title lengths as though they were legitimate ranking signals. What we see in this leak is that longer content gets truncated, prioritizing the first few paragraphs of an article. Shorter content gets evaluated for uniqueness. Even elements like font size and weight may be ranking factors, albeit likely minor ones.</p>
<p>The leak shows that Google has quite a number of specific categories that contribute to their rankings. Small personal websites are one such category, but we don’t know to what end. Is Google punishing small websites in favour of big and noteworthy brands? Are they trying to make it easier for small websites to grow, creating a more dynamic results page? Whatever the case may be, they track these websites in a separate category. They’re treating pages differently according to each page’s context. That’s meaningful.</p>
<h3>Insights from the leak</h3>
<ul>
<li>Google prioritizes your homepage. Your homepage’s score appears to be a stand-in for newly published content until it ranks on its own merit.</li>
<li>Small websites, websites featuring “risky” content, and other specialized website categories get classified separately. It is not known how these categories affect rankings.</li>
<li>Google summarizes long pages, using the first segment of the page to determine its topic.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Next steps for B2B SEO</h3>
<p>Work on your homepage. Make sure it’s a great entry point for your website, imbued with relevant context. Consider how you can grow brand awareness—and try to track the SEO impact of any new brand awareness campaigns you try.</p>
<p>When producing long-form content, focus on your introduction. Make sure the first paragraph or three provide enough context for Google to understand your article, because after that it stops reading!</p>
<p>It may be a good idea to classify your own website and frame future competitive analysis by website category, knowing how distinctly Google views each type of website.</p>
<h3>Our analysis</h3>
<p>Homepages seem to serve as something like a benchmark for your overall search visibility. It’s interesting to consider the implications of the high value of clicks and on-page behaviour combined with the high volume of branded search clicks received by homepages. Clicks seem to matter quite a lot to page rankings, and homepage rankings matter quite a lot to overall visibility.</p>
<p>If we connect the dots, it puts branding and brand awareness front-and-centre. Brand keywords have high CTR and tend to have good engagement. We see the potential for other marketing disciplines to contribute meaningfully to SEO performance by boosting brand awareness.</p>
<p>If you’re looking for a focus area to work on, consider improving your homepage experience. Ensure it’s perfectly relevant to your niche. Create easy-to-navigate pathways from your homepage to key converting content so that users and search engine crawlers alike understand what your site is and how to navigate it.</p>
<p>Long articles are great, but SEOs can’t afford to bury the lede. Consider blog and article formats that up-front useful information so both Google and your users can quickly verify what it’s about.</p>
<p></p>
<h2>Content freshness and author profiles</h2>
<p>Another finding from the leak is the likely importance of content freshness and author attribution. Both are considered best practice for SEO anyway, but the scope of their import became clearer.</p>
<p>For instance, an article’s date property gets inspected in three ways, comparing the returned value for each. Google checks for a date value in the article, compares it against date values in the URL, and derives further date information from metadata and other sources. This could mean that ensuring alignment across all potential date values will impact page rank.</p>
<p>SEOs are well familiar with a concept Google calls E-E-A-T: Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust. Until now, it’s been unclear how such a thing could be gleaned. With insights from the leak, it seems that Google really does care about authorship and may use author metadata as a major E-E-A-T signal.</p>
<h3>Insights from the leak</h3>
<ul>
<li>Dates seem to matter quite a lot, as Google verifies article dates via three separate techniques.</li>
<li>Authorship is a tracked signal, pointing to the importance of maintaining good attribution and schema</li>
</ul>
<h3>Our analysis</h3>
<p>We don’t really know how deep this authorship and content freshness rabbit hole goes. If properly structured, authorship attribution might be able to follow you around the internet. Can Google understand that your social media posts are part of your E-E-A-T profile, contributing to the value of your authorship page? It’s an intriguing thought.</p>
<p>To be frank, authorship and content freshness are signals we’ve been lazy about, and we plan to change that. It’s easy to become complacent about tagging and structured data that often feels ineffective in terms of moving the meter. If nothing else, this report shows that at least some of that schema directly impacts search rankings.</p>
<h3>Next steps for B2B</h3>
<p>If you aren’t already, get serious about author schema, author pages, and attribution. Move from publishing articles by [Company Name] or “Contributed” and toward publishing articles by thought leaders at your business, tagged in such a way that Google and your users both know who wrote what. As with any SEO update, take note of what upgrades you made and when. Compare YoY and month-over-month data to see whether it’s made an impact.</p>
<h2>Conclusion: SEO is all around us</h2>
<p>If we learn anything more about SEO from this huge leak, it will be through the hard work of the industry’s leading analysts and thinkers. Given that we’re missing so much context, all we have today is a list of what-ifs and maybes. In time, and with a commitment to research and testing, the industry may be able to uncover novel, specific, and prescriptive methods for growing search visibility.</p>
<p>For now, we’re left with questions. Leading questions, but questions nonetheless.</p>
<p>One truth that seems evident already is that Google’s ranking factors go well beyond what they’ve publicly disclosed in the past. The official line from Google has always been—and continues to be—to produce good content and the results will follow. Bear in mind that most of the exposed metrics involve identifying quality content. Factors like authorship, content relevance when compared to the rest of your website, and user engagement all speak to better quality making for better SEO results.</p>
<p>As of writing, our leading hypothesis—and our suggested advice to fellow B2B SEOs—is that SEO happens everywhere. It’s not just your website, your backlink profile, and the thoroughness of your content. Offline brand awareness ought to improve SEO performance. In the near future, events that occur in your users’ browser might inform your results, independent of anything you can control directly from your WordPress admin dashboard.</p>
<p>So listen, watch, test, and analyze. Wait for Google’s response to the leak, then take their words with a massive grain of salt. If this API documentation has indeed exposed Google’s “secret sauce,” the SEO world ought to get very interesting through the remainder of 2024.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>

Google algorithm leak: What it means for your B2B SEO strategy

Increase your website conversions and generate more qualified leads for your sales team.

Laura Norup-Boyer

From Insight to Action: A B2B Conversion Rate Success Story

<p>One of the tricky parts about conducting research is knowing where to start. Market research projects can be open-ended. Insights aren’t always forthcoming. How do researchers know they’re on the right track? How do they avoid overcommitting resources to what may end up being a dead end?</p>
<p>Let’s look at common ways that B2B market researchers tackle projects. This article will describe two classifications of data collected during market research and outline some popular approaches and techniques used in market research projects, including pros and cons for each and expert insights into challenges that new researchers may face.</p>
<p>If you need expert B2B market research services, consider connecting with our team. We help industrial companies throughout North America understand their market position and plan for future success.</p>
<p>Without any further ado, let’s get started.</p>
<h2>Differences Between Quantitative and Qualitative Data</h2>
<p>There are two broad categories of market research: quantitative and qualitative. Most research projects will include elements of each, though there are cases where a business may request one or the other.</p>
<p>Quantitative research is “stuff you can count.” That is, hard facts and figures with opinions and emotions removed from the equation. Examples of quantitative research include technical competitor analysis of online presence such as comparisons of follower count and growth rate between brands on various social platforms, or customer behaviour analysis based on website metrics. Note that even “opinionated” data like survey responses <em>may</em> be quantitative. If survey questions are close-ended and may be boiled down to numbers, it could be considered quantitative data.</p>
<p>Qualitative data is “the soft stuff.” This is data that cannot be directly quantified, like interviews with customers and business partners, long-form text responses to open-ended survey questions, and other forms of subjective analysis. Qualitative data is sometimes considered weaker or less-than when compared to hard facts and figures, but it’s just as crucial to understanding the big picture as quantitative data. It guides researchers and analysts toward the correct story, offering human context to otherwise impersonal quantitative data. Where quantitative data provides the rigor and backbone, qualitative data fills in gaps and uncovers hypotheses that guide further research and analysis.</p>
<h2>Qualitative analysis: the power of thought experiments</h2>
<p>When we think of scientific discovery, it’s easy to believe that it’s all hard facts and figures. Scientific rigor demands such data, right?</p>
<p>The truth is, any scientific innovation begins with ideation—qualitative analysis. Let’s consider some examples.</p>
<p>Albert Einstein is widely celebrated as the most important physicist of his age. His most famous innovation may be his theory of general relativity, which began as an idle thought experiment: what if a person could run at the speed of light? What would they see? How would they experience reality around them?</p>
<p>Einstein built upon this early ideation to develop the theory of general relativity. Without this theory, technology like GPS would not be possible.</p>
<p>Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Prior to its discovery, bacterial infections like scarlet fever that we now consider easily treatable were deadly threats. His discovery occurred due to a mix of happenstance and ideation. He noticed that one of his petri dishes of cultured bactiera had been contaminated with mold. Instead of immediately replacing the sample, he inspected it further, noting that bacterial growth seemed to slow or even recede around the mold-contaminated regions.</p>
<p>Further exploration would lead to the discovery of the first antibiotic treatments. By the time of Fleming’s death in 1955, it was estimated that his innovation saved up to 200 million lives worldwide.</p>
<h2>Building a quantitative foundation</h2>
<p>Qualitative information may serve as a guide for uncovering deeper insight, but it’s just the first step.</p>
<p>Einstein and Fleming didn’t leap from hypothesis to formal conclusion. Their postulations required confirmation that could only come through quantitative research and analysis.</p>
<p>In both of our examples, experiments had to be devised, tested, and repeated. Peers from the scientific community needed to challenge and test assumptions. Consensus required a volume of reliable, accurate, and unbiased data.</p>
<p>Consider that Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but its first widespread use as a medical treatment wouldn’t occur until the second world war over a decade later. Qualitative analysis produces ideas, but only quantitative data can confirm those ideas as fact—or at least, widely accepted theory.</p>
<h2>Qualitative research and ideation methods</h2>
<h3>In-depth interviews</h3>
<p>Contrasted with surveys and questionnaires, in-depth interviews tend to provide more qualitative data. An interview may be done remotely (phone or video call, or even via correspondence like email) or in person. It typically consists of a series of open-ended questions, with the interviewer expanding on suggested topics and following up on answers as needed.</p>
<p>When conducting in-depth interviews, don’t stubbornly stick to the game plan. While the interview must certainly be done with intention and structure, remember the role of qualitative research. Allowing an interview to “wander” like a natural conversation can unearth exciting and unexpected insights. Interviews don’t offer final confirmation. They help shape the research and strategy to come.</p>
<h3>Focus groups and panels</h3>
<p>Focus groups capture diverse perspectives and offer in-depth feedback on products or services. Compared to interviews, focus groups include a level of collaboration or groupthink. It can be valuable to see what a group of people feel (or express) about a product as compared to what similar people may say in a one-on-one interview setting.</p>
<p>When conducting focus groups, understand that no small sample will be perfectly representative of a wider audience. Use focus group data to establish context and strengthen assumptions but be mindful not to overcommit to findings.</p>
<p>Be mindful of warnings about “design by committee.” Products and services designed to satisfy a focus group can and often do miss their mark if other angles of analysis are not also considered.</p>
<p>An interesting example of this “design by committee” challenge is the release of New Coke in the ‘80s. Although New Coke performed well in blind taste tests—beating out both Pepsi and “Classic” Coke—its launch caused outcry from Coke fans across the world, who demanded a return to the formula they knew and loved. It’s possible that the market testing conducting by Coca Cola was flawed, as sweeter beverages tend to score higher when sampled in small quantities but aren’t enjoyed as much in larger quantities, like a full can or bottle. The heart of the problem was a lack of respect and deference to brand identity and customer loyalty as opposed to quantitative data from taste tests. This is a good example of the importance of interdisciplinary analysis and qualitative data.</p>
<h3>Observational research</h3>
<p>Some say that marketing is equal parts science and art. Observational research may be one area where market research skews toward artistry. Artists are, after all, observers first. Observational research entails recording and analysis of behaviours and interactions in normal settings. For example, shadowing a sales team to understand the practicalities of selling an industrial product may be one form of observational research.</p>
<p>You may be familiar with the diary of Samuel Pepys, a decade-long account of life in 17th century London, including the most thorough and accurate first-hand account of the 1666 Great Fire of London. While this certainly isn’t a good example of market research, it’s an excellent example of observation, and the recording of observations.</p>
<p>During qualitative research, we’re concerned with storytelling and ideation. When conducting observational research, be a diligent scribe. Look for patterns in what you observe, but don’t be afraid to record seemingly trivial details and interactions. You may benefit from such observations later in your research project!</p>
<p>Also note that there are many ways to observe and record information. You are not confined to Pepys’ shorthand. Video and voice recordings, photographs, and even illustrations and sketches may all play a part in observational research. Do be sure to clear any recordings—particularly voice, photograph, and video recordings—with all parties involved to ensure ethical and legal standards are upheld.</p>
<h2>Quantitative approaches to research</h2>
<h3>Surveys and questionnaires</h3>
<p>Surveys and questionnaires overlap significantly with interviews. Though in-depth interviews tend to skew more toward qualitative analysis, they may also provide quantitative data in some cases. The reverse is true for surveys and questionnaires, as they may include open-ended questions to provide qualitative insight.</p>
<p>A survey typically involves a set list of questions that may accept short form responses, multiple choice answers, or a ranking or score like a satisfaction ranking from one to five. The purpose is to turn a normally subjective thing—customer’s perceptions of a product or service, for instance, into a measurable and consistent dataset.</p>
<h3>Competitor Analysis</h3>
<p>Competitor analysis certainly involves subjective information-collecting, but at its heart it is a quantitative research activity. The best way to make fair comparisons between companies is to use a scoring system that turns subjective analysis into objective numbers. Additionally, many attributes analyzed among competitors are hard figures like total sales, market share, and other financial or operational data.</p>
<h3>Industry Analysis</h3>
<p>Competitor analysis typically focuses on the most direct and relevant competitors rather than the overall market. Industry analysis provides the wider view by focusing on numerical comparisons and metrics that characterize the industry as a whole. Evaluation of data like the number of relevant establishments within a geographic market, the average number of employees per establishment, or other general industry information fall into this category.</p>
<h3>Demographics research/market segmentation</h3>
<p>Tools like focus groups help collect opinions and qualitative input from a range of stakeholders. Demographics research involves analyzing the overall customer base, finding ways to categorize it into useful subsets. For example, identifying the age, gender, and location combinations that result in higher conversion rates and better closing prices on average. Conversely, identifying underperforming demographics can provide value as well. Once market segments have been established, clients can use this research to tailor experiences to each.</p>
<h3>Secondary research</h3>
<p>Research doesn’t need to rely solely on first party data. A good researcher will tap into existing sources of relevant data. Perhaps studies have already been conducted on your target market, or a special census report accurately reflects a particular customer segment. Using existing data to supplement first-party findings is a great way to flesh out your report. Third party data from trusted sources can make your report more compelling, backing up qualitative suggestions and assumptions.</p>
<h2>B2B market research example: go-to-market strategy for equipment supplier</h2>
<p>Trying to enter a new market can be daunting. In fact, it can be rather risky. Consider the case of Target Canada. The popular American retailer attempted to enter the Canadian market, purchasing retail space from struggling Canadian department store Zellers. They launched over 100 locations across the country in March 2013. By April 2015, Target pulled out of Canada, abandoning its plans for expansion in what analysts deemed a “<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/target-admits-it-missed-the-mark-but-what-does-it-mean-for-canadian-retail-1.2906830">spectacular failure.</a>”</p>
<p>The issues at play with Target’s expansion seem obvious in retrospect. The American brand focused on good value offerings. The Canadian stores were significantly more expensive, failing to compete with other budget stores like Wal Mart and Superstore. Target’s rapid expansion across a massive country resulted in supply chain issues. Eager shoppers arrived to find empty shelves.</p>
<p>B2B businesses are equally vulnerable to risk when they choose to expand. We recently worked with a Canadian heavy equipment supplier looking to break into the US market. Before they committed their resources to expansion, they wanted to know how to do it safely and effectively.</p>
<p>We helped uncover economic and demographic insights about their existing markets, find best-fit markets in the United States for early expansion, and reveal intriguing opportunities and threats impacting the future of heavy equipment sales in the United States.</p>
<p>Combined with partner research that uncovered qualitative insights directly from equipment dealers and end users, we helped the client enter a new market with confidence.</p>
<h2>Tips for new researchers</h2>
<h3>Begin with an open focus</h3>
<p>In research and analysis, it’s easy to jump the gun. Begin your research journey with as wide a focus as possible. Take note of interesting narratives that emerge, but don’t head too far down one path too quickly. A researcher must see both the forest and the trees. This isn’t easy! Take time at the outset of the project to ensure you’ve explored adequately. Realizing you’ve missed something crucial once you’re deep into a project is a bad feeling, and can result in backtracking and blown budgets.</p>
<h3>Presentation matters as much as data</h3>
<p>Market research should be driven by data, but merely collecting and interpreting the data is only half the job. Every market research project has an intended audience. The audience must be persuaded, intrigued, and ultimately convinced by your findings. Without proper presentation, this will not happen.</p>
<p>Consider the data literacy of your audience; their personal communication style; their interests and the things that excite them. Each market report should be tailored to suit each client.</p>
<h3>Assume there’s no correlation</h3>
<p>The human brain is a wonderful pattern recognition engine. It’s how we learn so effectively. Humans seek out patterns in everything they perceive, whether said patterns exist or not. Did you know that a blank screen is more mentally stimulating than a simple, familiar pattern or shape? The brain wants to perceive a pattern, even if none exists.</p>
<p>This is why we must be diligent as researchers. Not every data point or finding is significant. Completely random or circumstantial information can lead us down fruitless rabbit holes if we let it. Instead, default to a null hypothesis. Until you can confirm your suspicions, assume every pattern is insignificant. In research, if not in life or love, a suspicious mind is a very good thing to have.</p>
<h2>Get the most out of your marketing spend</h2>
<p>Businesses want more from their marketing than ever. Gone are the days of unattributed marketing money pits. The increased expectation of attributed marketing performance in the B2B sector makes preparation and planning crucial. Without a solid foundation of knowledge, your campaigns may be based on faulty assumptions. Expert market research can help B2B marketers reach their performance goals by deepening their understanding of their customers, competitors, and overall market.</p>
<p></p>

Approaches and techniques for B2B market research

AI in B2B Marketing: The History of Automation & Its Disruptive Impact

<p>It’s been a month since Google’s major algorithm update shook up search rankings. How has the B2B world fared? What attributes lead to success in a post-update world, and what causes websites to lose performance?</p>
<p>While it’s early to make any definitive judgements about the update and its impact, we can start looking at emerging trends.</p>
<p>We performed an analysis of 18 managed websites across several business categories to understand where we’re at and where we need to go to continue fostering success for our clients. Here’s what we found.</p>
<h2>Context of the March Update</h2>
<p>Rolled out at the beginning of March, Google’s latest core update takes aim at AI-generated and low value content. It purports to reduce spammy and low value results by 40%, though how they measure this improvement is not clear.</p>
<p>The update explicitly mentions punitive measures against generated content and spammy linking and domain exploitation practices.</p>
<p>Google updates “roll out” rather than “dropping.” That is to say, it’s a gradual process that may take weeks or months to complete rather than an immediate impact on the day the update is announced. After a month, the update has certainly had an effect, but its full impact may not be seen for a month or more.</p>
<h2>Haves and have-nots: post-update performance is mixed</h2>
<p>Across eighteen web properties, ten saw their clicks decline and nine saw their impressions decline month-over-month since March 1. Overall click volume slightly improved (1.6% gain) while overall impressions declined by just 0.08%. Average search position declined by 0.08%.</p>
<p>In most cases, losers lost by slim margins while winners saw significant boosts. The biggest search traffic loser saw a click decline of 12.7%. The biggest winner grew by 43%. In many cases, traffic declines and improvements were within the margin of error, indicating no significant impact—at least so far.</p>
<h2>Technical factors contribute to performance changes, but their impact is limited</h2>
<p>Though there are exceptions in each case, better technical performance remains a differentiator between winners and losers. We used Google PageSpeed scores to analyze website speed, finding that websites that grew their search traffic considerably averaged a PageSpeed score of 60/100, while websites that saw significant traffic losses averaged a score of 49/100.</p>
<p>The picture for more specific technical metrics like text:HTML ratio is fuzzier. There’s weak evidence that page structure and code quality impact search performance, but a number of outliers in our data make it difficult to draw any conclusions.</p>
<h2>Winners focused on timely and informative content</h2>
<p>Traffic winners attracted nearly twice as many clicks from unbranded search terms per page than traffic losers. Top performing websites saw significant traffic to informational blog posts and thorough services pages. The best-performing website post-update focused on generating quality industry news articles, analyzing stories ripped from the headlines for their customers.</p>
<p>Traffic losers often lacked up-to-date and timely information in their content, focusing on broad topics or neglecting content marketing altogether. Generally speaking, companies that deal in goods like equipment or chemical products performed worse than service-based companies.</p>
<p>We know that Google prioritizes content that demonstrates Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EAT). Staying on top of industry news, responding to current trends, and presenting clear and factual information all contribute to success. It seems that these signals are only growing more important with the latest update.</p>
<h2>Size matters: more pages, more words per page correlate to increased success</h2>
<p>This surely comes as no surprise. Bigger websites with broader content ranked better before the update and seem to be growing at a faster rate post-update. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. For example, one analyzed website is for a company that hires consistently and at volume. Their website is quite small, but they are a top traffic winner since March 1, due in part to a high demand for jobs in their industry. Their top performing page by far is their careers page.</p>
<p>Note that the quality and relevance of these pages matter more than their length or total count. Top performers analyzed don’t produce generic content <em>en masse</em>; they focus on topics that intrigue their audience and demonstrate their industry knowledge. The stated purpose of the March algorithm update is to reduce or eliminate spam content from search, including AI content. Increasing the volume of <em>unique</em> content on your website is the winning formula.</p>
<h2>How to improve SEO performance after the March update</h2>
<p>While there are no silver bullets to SEO success post-update, there are strategies that seem to work better than others.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Focus on creating timely and unique content.</strong> There was a time where SEOs could re-word content from their competitors, publish unoriginal blog posts, and potentially outrank the competitor they ripped off. It seems that Google’s efforts to prioritize uniqueness have paid off. We’re seeing generic or low-value content drop off in search, while hand-written and independently researched content performs better than ever. Mine the headlines for content ideas. Use your industry insights and expert opinions to turn news stories into thinkpieces that will resonate with your audience.</li>
<li><strong>Run a lean, efficient website.</strong> We’ve always believed that good technical performance improves SEO outcomes. A wealth of data supports this position. While technical performance doesn’t necessarily lead to traffic growth, it seems that good technical websites are more likely to weather the storm. Websites with poor or inconsistent performance tended to lose more traffic, though a couple outliers with poor technical performance but great content muddy the waters.</li>
<li><strong>Fresh is best.</strong> Several websites whose traffic saw growth had recently published or optimized blog posts drive their growth in March. Never be afraid to refresh and update content with new information or more context. If Google’s working hard to prioritize quality, they’ll notice and appreciate your efforts.</li>
<li><strong>Break away from branded search.</strong> The ratio of branded to unbranded search for each website proved to have a strong correlation to overall search performance. Websites with less diversified (read: more branded) content tended to see significant dips in performance. Google wants top performers to demonstrate expertise in their niche. Ensure that your content speaks to your expertise and authority, and that you’re working on ranking for unbranded terms.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>

How can you win at B2B SEO after Google’s March update?

Trends

<p>Since the ‘90s, the professional world has been rocked by technical innovation. From email and personal computers to Blackberries and eventually iPhones, each decade introduced a radical new tool to make work easier and more efficient. <strong>The latest in this string of office work innovations is generative AI.</strong></p>
<p>From drafting email templates to generating images, video, and music, the rate at which generative AI is evolving is breathtaking—and a little scary. Within weeks of OpenAI’s public release of ChatGPT in 2022, the marketing world was inundated with AI tools focused on content creation. These tools made bold claims about their ability to beat checks for generated content, deliver SEO results, and generally revolutionize the world of content marketing.</p>
<p><strong>It’s been almost 18 months since then. How’s the revolution going? According to the latest SEO research, not great.</strong></p>
<p>Let’s take a look at AI-generated content, its impact on content marketing over the past year, and why AI may have just killed hundreds of websites. But first, a history lesson…</p>
<h2>When the cure becomes the culprit</h2>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2834" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/aspern_doc_min.png" alt="" width="1352" height="557" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/aspern_doc_min.png 1352w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/aspern_doc_min-300x124.png 300w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/aspern_doc_min-1024x422.png 1024w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/aspern_doc_min-768x316.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1352px) 100vw, 1352px" />
<p>Aspirin was the miracle drug of the early twentieth century.</p>
<p>More tolerable and effective than previous painkillers, Bayer’s wonder drug became a cure applied to many illnesses and conditions. It reduced fevers, eased aches and pains, and caused fewer and less harmful side effects than pain medicines that came before it. Similarly to today’s opioid epidemic, doctors prescribed aspirin without fully understanding its effects and pharmacology. In the early twentieth century, It was not uncommon for patients to be prescribed grams of aspirin daily—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/health/13aspirin.html">up to a gram every three hours</a>, or over twice the maximum daily dose now considered safe.</p>
<p>It’s been <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091002132346.htm?utm_source=hs_email&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9cvV3ZaEZ_xz9u_Z7gktbdmANFtH3orCdPcfCZ1JG8qXuEK5OVuMvTcFjecUDtLqxt1jos">implicated as a cause</a> for high mortality rates during the 1918-19 Spanish Flu. High doses of aspirin can cause respiratory complications. Add a vicious flu virus to the mix and this pain-killing fever-reducing wonder drug may have resulted in thousands of excess deaths.</p>
<p><strong>Today, AI is like an overprescribed medicine killing patients across the world. In this case, the patients are websites</strong>.</p>
<h2>An AI Overdose: How AI Blog Content Kills Websites</h2>
<p>We warned of the dangers of AI content over a year ago in our article “<a href="https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/why-chat-gpt-is-bad-for-seo-content-generation?utm_source=hs_email&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9cvV3ZaEZ_xz9u_Z7gktbdmANFtH3orCdPcfCZ1JG8qXuEK5OVuMvTcFjecUDtLqxt1jos">Why Chat GPT is bad for SEO content generation.</a>” AI content generation is appealing to marketers and business owners alike. Content writers are expensive; AI like ChatGPT can produce serviceable content for free.</p>
<p>ChatGPT is just one tool of many. While it’s the most commonly known, it’s not the primary culprit for this AI overdose crisis. More specialized tools exist that generate content at scale. Configure topics, select keywords, develop a prompt, and hit “go.” Within a day, an AI content architect could spin up hundreds of posts.</p>
<p>There’s compelling evidence that some publishers employ AI tools that scrape the web—particularly sites like Reddit and Twitter—to generate articles on trending topics without any human input. The results can sometimes be laughable, like when <a href="https://www.engadget.com/redditors-troll-an-ai-content-farm-into-covering-a-fake-wow-feature-145006066.html">World of Warcraft players trolled publishers</a> by talking up a fictional new feature called “Glorbo” on Reddit. The trolling worked; AI content farms mistakenly produced articles hyping up Glorbo, an ill-defined feature that does not and will never exist.</p>
<h3>AI is a like a toddler</h3>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2832" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/happy_baby.png" alt="" width="2500" height="1184" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/happy_baby.png 2500w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/happy_baby-300x142.png 300w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/happy_baby-1024x485.png 1024w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/happy_baby-768x364.png 768w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/happy_baby-1536x727.png 1536w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/happy_baby-2048x970.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 2500px) 100vw, 2500px" />
<p>Young children learn through mimicry. Monkey see, monkey do. The understanding part comes later. <strong>In this way, AI is like a perpetual toddler. Fundamentally unable to understand what it produces, or the prompts it’s given, generative AI mimics whatever it’s been fed as closely as possible.</strong> In our previous article on AI content generation, we highlighted how AI cannot produce unique ideas or perspectives, arguing this would be one way that AI content would fail to produce SEO results. Google cares about Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Toddlers typically lack in all three areas.</p>
<h3>Google knows AI content is a problem</h3>
<p>In the SEO world, there have been rumblings of a major shift in how Google handles AI content for some time. Right now, Google benefits from being perceived as the only game in town. Its internet search market share percentage is in the high 90s. But Google—and every other search engine—has a problem. Their primary product is getting shittier.</p>
<p>It’s debatable when “peak Google” occurred—the high-water mark in search results quality. Early Google Search was excellent compared to the mediocre offers on the market, but it was rudimentary compared to today’s index. We can be certain that today is not “peak Google.” <a href="https://gizmodo.com/google-search-results-are-getting-worse-study-finds-1851172943">Dozens</a> of <a href="https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research">articles</a> across the <a href="https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/is-google-search-deteriorating-measuring-search-quality-in-2022">web</a> highlight how Google search quality is in decline. You’ve probably experienced that decline yourself. How often do you search for something only to be met with a first page full of affiliate link spammers and annoyingly insincere top 10 lists? Why does <em>Forbes</em> rank on the first page for everything from medical advice to “best bluetooth headphones for 2024?”</p>
<p>The reasons for Google’s search quality woes are complex. SEOs are to blame (sorry) for over-optimizing website content until it satisfies search engines over readers. The biggest brands and most profitable websites are the ones with the budget to run SEO campaigns to maintain or improve their rankings, but these giant websites aren’t always the ones that offer the best result.</p>
<p>AI sure hasn’t helped. A powerful and effective search engine cuts through the noise to find quality results. AI content generates exponentially more noise than ever before. One of Google’s major issues over the past year is that <em>AI content generation for SEO worked</em>. In too many cases, clearly templated or generated articles outrank legitimate, human written content.</p>
<p>Google knows it, so they’re doing something about it.</p>
<h2>The March Algorithm Update: A Killing Blow for AI SEO?</h2>
<p>In March 2024, Google dropped a major update. Some SEO experts believe it’s the biggest and most disruptive update in five years, on par with Google’s biggest updates ever. The update targets websites that employ a few low-quality or spammy tactics. While Google’s official release about the March update doesn’t exclusively focus on AI content—in fact, the phrase “AI” never appears in their <a href="https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-update-march-2024/">consumer-facing blog post</a> about it—it’s alluded to with references to content automation and low-quality experiences.</p>
<p>It can take months for the full picture to emerge after a major update like this one. What’s already clear is that the worst abusers of AI content generation felt the brunt of this update.</p>
<p>Early results point to catastrophic changes for websites over-reliant on AI content. <a href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-march-2024-core-update-impact-hundreds-of-websites-deindexed/510981/?utm_source=hs_email&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9cvV3ZaEZ_xz9u_Z7gktbdmANFtH3orCdPcfCZ1JG8qXuEK5OVuMvTcFjecUDtLqxt1jos">A study by Originality.AI</a> found that hundreds of business websites have been delisted from Google since March 1. <strong>Of them, 100% used AI content. 50% used AI content for 90-100% of their posts and pages.</strong></p>
<p>There are many thousands if not millions of websites still employing spammy AI tactics whose listings have not been removed. Hopefully, their webmasters are quaking in their boots. Google’s March update puts AI tricksters on notice: deliver value with your content or expect to face the consequences.</p>
<h2>Should you be worried about your B2B website?</h2>
<p>Fortunately, most people—including those who may have used AI content for some of their blog posts or pages—shouldn’t panic. The websites bearing the brunt of the blow are those with egregious content issues. Some of the delisted websites posted hundreds of articles a day, all of them AI generated. If your small business website has a few AI blog posts, it’s likely you won’t be significantly impacted.</p>
<p>With that said, it may be a good idea to remove AI content from your website. Despite our reservations, we’ve dabbled with AI content generation ourselves. The outcome, in most cases, was an article that didn’t perform. Even if it got clicks, it didn’t get engagement. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to verify how your AI content performs. If it’s not performing exceptionally well, consider heavily revising or even deleting the post. Why expose yourself to risk if there’s no associated reward?</p>
<h2>Will this update make Google un-shitty?</h2>
<p>This is the burning question for both Google and its users. Google’s usefulness as a search engine is a primary revenue driver. While it’s hard to imagine another search engine dethroning Google any time soon, they can’t ignore the rising tide of bad content polluting their results.</p>
<p>In its blog post concerning the update, Google claims they will see a 40% reduction in low quality content in their results—kind of. Here’s the exact quote:</p>
<p><em>Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.</em></p>
<p>When we break it down, they’re saying that the March update <em>plus</em> an unspecified number of previous updates over an unspecified amount of time will, combined, remove 40% of low quality or unoriginal results. So it’s a 40% improvement compared to when? How are they defining “low quality, unoriginal content,” and would their users agree with the definition?</p>
<p>A net decrease in the amount of spam content on Google can only be a good thing, but this algorithm update also isn’t a silver bullet. Many of the spam issues in Google results started long before AI content became an issue. So far, signs point to this being a general improvement compared to, say, six months ago. It’s not (yet) a return to Google’s golden age, whenever that may have been.</p>
<h2>How Can AI be Used Safely for SEO?</h2>
<p>Some bells can never be unrung. This is the case for generative AI. We live in the AI era; can it be used safely to create content or otherwise aid our SEO efforts? Or is it better to shelve it altogether when it comes to content?</p>
<p>There is a way to safely use AI to speed up content generation for your website. Rather than using AI as a writer, use it as a writing assistant. For example, here’s my process for writing blog posts with an AI helper:</p>
<ol>
<li>Pre-plan my content. Combine keyword research with industry knowledge and customer research to identify topics that can rank well while providing value to readers. Generate a list of headlines to work from.</li>
<li>Turn those headlines into outlines. Create a bullet point outline of each article including potential subheadings and key points to hit on. At this stage, you may start using AI like ChatGPT as a sounding board. Maybe you need one more example for a list in your blog post; ask AI for a suggestion. Perhaps there’s a concept you need to write about that you’re not 100% clear on. Get a summary from AI to help you draft your outline—but be sure to do your own research using trusted sources to confirm! AI doesn’t <em>know</em> anything; while the information provided is generally “ballpark accurate,” AI can hallucinate (read: <em>lie</em>) very convincingly.</li>
<li>At this stage I have outlined documents for several blog posts. Time to get to writing! If your outlines are detailed enough, you only need to stitch together each bullet point to create an easy-to-read article. For this part of the process, AI becomes my writer’s block lifeline. Can’t come up with the right word? Paste the relevant bullet point into ChatGPT and ask it to generate some options. You’re probably not going to use its (often incredibly lame) suggestions, but you’ll probably get enough inspiration to get unstuck.</li>
<li>When I have a draft completed, I’ll have AI review it. It’s important to know the limits of AI; it’s not going to be a proper human review. It will tell you what you want to hear. Still, asking AI to identify areas of weakness in your article can lead to identifying more topics to include. It’s a nice way to double-check that you haven’t missed anything. As with using AI for basic research, be sure to verify its suggestions against reputable sources.</li>
</ol>
<p>At no point in this process do I recommend wholesale copying and pasting of AI-generated text. While a single AI sentence, headline, or even paragraph within a human-written article is going to see your SEO penalized, it’s best and safest to commit to human writing with AI assistance.</p>
<h2>Conclusion: AI’s frontier is almost settled</h2>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2831" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/storm_sunset.png" alt="" width="1921" height="848" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/storm_sunset.png 1921w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/storm_sunset-300x132.png 300w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/storm_sunset-1024x452.png 1024w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/storm_sunset-768x339.png 768w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/storm_sunset-1536x678.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1921px) 100vw, 1921px" />
<p>The Wild West earned its name fair and square. Chaotic and often lawless, European settlement of the western frontier was a time of unregulated expansion. Like all things good and bad, it came to an end. Hectic frontier towns either vanished or expanded into civilized cities. The long arm of the law took some time to reach as far as the Pacific, but reach it did.</p>
<p>Today, the AI frontier is in the midst of its settlement. After a lawless first year, AI tools face more scrutiny from users, businesses, and governments alike. The awe that tools like ChatGPT were met with upon initial release is settling down. They say that in the Gold Rush, the people who sold picks and shovels were the only ones to make any money. As some early adopters of AI content creation are finding out, life on the frontier can prove perilous.</p>
<p>Over the coming months and years, the online world will find its equilibrium. The role of AI in our day-to-day lives is a certainty, but the extent of that role is still up for debate. For marketers, AI may not be the cure-all many hoped it would be in 2022.</p>
<p></p>

Hundreds of businesses just killed their websites with AI

<p>As we’ve preached in the past, there’s no singular silver bullet when it comes to SEO.</p>
<p>Your content is king, but what about your website speed? Accessibility scores? Backlinks?</p>
<p>One factor we’ve rarely discussed in the context of SEO is your brand. Branding is sometimes perceived as the softest discipline within the already-soft science of marketing. For many, it boils down to mere logo design or font selection. How can something as broad and ill-defined as a branding impact SEO?</p>
<h2>The interplay between branding, click rate, and SEO</h2>
<p>Google is an answer delivery system. For better and worse, and to varying degrees of success, Google prioritizes content that people <em>want</em> to see. How do they determine whether users want to see something?</p>
<p>A huge component of their calculation is click rate.</p>
<p>Click rate, or click through rate, or CTR, is a metric calculated by dividing impressions (views of your search listing) by clicks. If you receive 10 clicks on 100 impressions, your CTR is 10%.</p>
<p>Google uses this metric as a ranking factor. The search results page feels like a one-way street to users, but for Google data flows both ways. A page with a high click rate is a page that users <em>want to see, </em>at least in the eyes of Google. In fact, users can “game” their SEO in the short-term by artificially inflating their click rate—sending people to click on their listings obsessively. This is a bad idea—the boost won’t last as Google can determine when clicks are unnatural. But it proves the point that Google does care about whether people click on a result.</p>
<p>This is where branding impacts SEO. Recognizable brands experience significantly higher click rates than less recognized or unknown brands. As they receive more clicks relative to their position on the search page, they begin to climb the rankings. Popular brands also start generating their own traffic. Apple doesn’t just rank for keywords like “smart phones” and “laptops”. They generate about half their total traffic from terms like “iphone” and “macbook”—terms for which they have outstanding click rates.</p>
<p>It’s a feedback loop that results in big brands like Amazon and Best Buy dominating the top of the search page for millions of consumer search terms.</p>
<p>Conversely, lack of brand awareness has a significant cooling effect on SEO for small businesses. If you’re a small fish in a big pond, you must overcome a great deal of SEO inertia to outrank top brands in your industry—or find a keyword niche that they don’t dominate and claim it for yourself.</p>
<h2>How to grow brand awareness</h2>
<p>Growing your brand awareness can feel like an impossible task. It’s crucial to remember that for industrial brands, you need not become a household name. You’re not Coca Cola. In most cases, your target audience is relatively small and clearly defined. You need to create awareness among that specific audience. Here are a few ideas to grow brand awareness:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Collaboration and partnership with established brands.</strong> It’s never a bad idea to make friends. If you can find an established business in a related sector and publicly partner with them, you can leverage their strong brand to grow awareness for your own.</li>
<li><strong>Community involvement.</strong> Particularly valuable for businesses with defined service areas, community involvement both increases local brand visibility and improves brand perception. Be targeted, aim for high visibility opportunities, and do your research. Align with community causes that your customers care most about.</li>
<li><strong>Content marketing</strong>. Many businesses squeeze some content marketing into their marketing budget. This won’t move the meter. Go beyond monthly blog posts and work on publishing cool, informative, and highly valuable content. Especially in the AI age, blog posts are a dime a dozen. What about thorough industry reports, independent research, engaging videos and podcasts, and guest appearances on popular radio shows and web series? This is the kind of content marketing that grows brand awareness.</li>
<li><strong>SEO</strong>. Ironic, isn’t it? Non-branded SEO can grow your website traffic, which puts your brand in front of more eyes. If your content is excellent, people will begin to perceive you as an authority. If they perceive you as an authority, their trust in you begins to extend to your brand in general.</li>
<li><strong>Advertising</strong>. Whether online or in print, ads can get your brand in front of millions of eyes very quickly. Not all ads are created equal: find placements that work for your audience. Aim to inform or even entertain—you want to engage an audience, not bore or annoy them.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Tracking brand awareness</h2>
<p>If you’re committed to growing your brand awareness, you’re going to want to track brand awareness!</p>
<p>There are a few ways you can do this. Monitor your website traffic and SEO performance. Create a metric like “branded search term rate” calculating the percentage of branded vs non-branded search terms each month. If your traffic grows and your share of branded search improves, it’s a good sign that more and more people recognize your brand. Look for an increase in direct traffic to your website as well. Direct traffic may imply greater brand recognition.</p>
<p>Watch for mentions in social media and the news. Set up Google Alerts to notify you when your brand gets mentioned across major news outlets. Use social media monitoring tools to track organic engagement and shares.</p>
<p>Finally, do some research! If you have the time or budget to do so, perform studies and polls of your target audience. See if they know your brand, and if so, what they think of it. There’s no replacement for first-party data, after all.</p>
<h2>Make your brand work for you</h2>
<p>Your brand should be an asset to your business. For too many companies in the industrial sector, it’s more of a distraction. A liability, in some cases! One of BlackBean’s fundamental beliefs about sales and marketing is that people buy from people they like. Your brand is an extension of you and your team. Make sure it represents you well.</p>
<p>In an industry that often discounts the value of branding, remember that its ability to impact your business is real and tangible. As more and more business in our sector gets done online, the importance of branding only continues to grow.</p>


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From Hot Dogs to Heavy Industry: The Power of Public Perception

The “Privacy Sandbox:” breaking down upcoming changes to analytics tracking

Google algorithm leak: What it means for your B2B SEO strategy

From Insight to Action: A B2B Conversion Rate Success Story

Approaches and techniques for B2B market research

AI in B2B Marketing: The History of Automation & Its Disruptive Impact

How can you win at B2B SEO after Google’s March update?

Hundreds of businesses just killed their websites with AI

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