Attending a Trade Show Can Improve B2B SEO
B2B marketing can be quite complex. In order to be found, and remembered, by business decision makers it requires many touchpoints. Trade shows have always been a main staple of a B2B marketing program. Presenting or speaking at a trade show provides businesses with the opportunity to network with others in the industry and to present their products or services to attendees that are interested in what they have to offer. While these are the primary benefits of attending a trade show, a trade show appearance can be leveraged to help other marketing efforts as well, SEO in particular.
When a company engages in any activity, they always need to be thinking, “how can I gain SEO traction from this?” Relevant inbound links to a company website remain a very important part of SEO. They help to convey trust to the search engines. The most straightforward way that a trade show appearance can help an SEO campaign is by getting a link from the trade show website. It’s likely that the trade show website includes a list of the companies presenting and sponsoring the event. If your company is listed but there isn’t a link to the website, don’t be afraid to speak up and ask for one.
A trade show appearance is also beneficial for SEO because it allows for many content opportunities, and as we know, content is a critical component of a B2B SEO campaign. Without content, it’s difficult to get any attention from the search engine spiders, and ultimately from search engine users. By posting new content on other web properties you are able to generate inbound links back to your site which improves search engine trust and by posting new content on your own site or blog it gets the search engine spiders back to the site frequently to index it. Sometimes content creation can be difficult, but if you are attending a trade show you will have plenty of material to use.
Presenting at or speaking at an industry B2B trade show is news, so the first step is to write a press release that gives information about the event, your business, and why your business is attending. Submit it through a paid PR service in order to improve the chances that it will get picked up by online media outlets. You can also write a blog post about the event prior to attending and promote it in social media. Include relevant trade show keywords and hashtags (#). While a press release itself doesn’t have high SEO value, it can raise awareness and if the right audience sees it, it can result in natural links on other sites.
During the trade show you should take the opportunity to live blog and post in social media about the event. Not everyone that reads your blog or follows you in social media will be able to attend the trade show, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t interested. This will help to keep these target audience members in the loop throughout the event. Using trade show hashtags you will be able to find others attending the trade show and connect with them in social media. Attending a trade show also provides an opportunity to enhance your video marketing by filming some footage of the event, especially if someone from your business is speaking. After some simple editing you have a useful video to share on video sharing sites, in blog content, and throughout social media. Once the event is over, you can write a follow up blog post that provides an overview and recap for those that weren’t able to attend. In addition, you can write some great content that is based on all of the new information that you picked up at the trade show.
Trade shows are also great for making connections, which can be valuable over the long term for SEO purposes. Every connection is a possible link opportunity if that person decides to link to your website as a resource. Connections can also result in partnerships or sponsorships or guest blog posting opportunities.
As you can see, it’s important to integrate all marketing efforts, online and off. While trade show marketing might seem to be very separate from SEO, it’s important to be creative and think of ways to gain SEO traction with every marketing activity initiated.
Categorized in: B2B Digital Marketing
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