4 Tips for Making Sure Your Thought Leadership Gets Found

In B2B marketing, thought leadership like case studies, white papers and technical articles are the basis for success. If you’re like many B2B companies, you offer technical and complex products and services, and you need a way to differentiate yourself from the competition. Thought leadership is perfect for this and can improve lead generation and help you earn the trust and credibility you want in your industry. But just creating thought leadership content isn’t enough on its own. It takes promotion and distribution of that content to make sure its full value is achieved. And one of the simplest and most important ways to do that is to make sure that the thought leadership you create is searchable.

Here are a few tips to make sure your thought leadership will get found by the search engines:

1. Optimize your content

During the content creation process, follow SEO best practices. Conduct a keyword search (using Google’s Keyword Tool) and select the best primary and secondary keywords for your company and industry. Choose those keywords which have a high search volume, but that are not too competitive where it would be impossible to gain any traction with those words. Make sure to include these keywords in your document when writing.

2. Create text-based PDFs

PDFs are the most popular type of file for thought leadership. They are perfect for content-heavy documents - but only if they’re searchable. If your PDF documents are text-based they can be found in the search engines. If you’ve created your PDF using text-based software like Microsoft word for example, this is not an issue. InDesign and Quark also have the ability to create text-based PDF’s, but those created with Adobe Photoshop will be image based.

How can you tell if your PDF is text-based? Open your PDF document and hit ‘CTRL+F’ and type a word. If this works, you’re all done! Your PDF is searchable. If not, simply open your PDF in Adobe Acrobat and choose ‘Paper Capture’ from the ‘Tools ‘ menu. Select ‘All Pages’ and click ok. Select ‘Save’ from the file menu. All done!

3. Fill in your document properties

When creating a PDF you have the opportunity to complete information such as title, author, subject and keywords. The title is the most important part to fill out because it will appear in the search engines. If your page is not relevant in search engines, web surfers won’t click and you’ll lose traction.

4. Naming your PDF

Use best practices to name your file. The general rule of thumb is to use letters, numbers and dashes. Never use spaces or underscores. Dashes between words have been proven to be better for SEO than underscores.

A good example:

Company-White-Paper-Title-August-2011.pdf

A bad example:

Company_White Paper_Title_August-2011.pdf

And finally, once you’ve created your thought leadership content you’ve got to get it out there. Make sure to send it to prominent industry publications, promote it in optimized press releases and post it to your website.