A B2B content marketing strategy needs to be well thought out and planned. A content marketing strategy needs to set out the topics and keywords it intends to target in each piece of content. It should focus on amplification through distribution, i.e., social media platforms. The marketing strategy also needs to be well thought out so you target the right keywords and bring in the right customers.

This can help to draw in more leads through careful audience research. Top marketing companies, such as our team will then create what are known as “topic clusters”, which are a series of content marketing pieces all aimed at targeting a particular type of keywords or set of customers.

 

The process we undertake is as follows:

• Where is the website ranking currently organically?
• Which keywords are the quality SEO tools, such as SEM-Rush saying we should be concentrating on
• Where are we ranking for those keywords?
• Do we have the resources and marketing budget to go after those keywords?
• Create a content calendar
• Create pillar pages
• Create a content cluster
• Review performance each month, can improvements be made?

 

Measurement systems

It’s important to set up measurement systems from the outset; for example, how will you monitor performance? Will you be focused on increasing organic traffic? Will it be simply on reducing bounce rates and dwell times? Will it be on how many customers decide to sign up to a monthly newsletter?

Do we need a content marketing plan, or can we freestyle it?

97% of B2B organisations have now said that they have a formal content marketing strategy in place. The main reason is simple: for some businesses, digital marketing is the only way they attract new business. This means it’s crucial to have a solid plan to attract the right customers through a detailed content marketing strategy. The reason is content marketing is the main component of organic search engine optimisation. Without it, a whole SEO strategy will fall apart, because, well how do you implement on-page SEO and build links without it?
At the same time, well-researched content marketing takes large volumes of time to write and publish; therefore, without a strategic approach, you could be wasting large amounts of time, money and energy on work that doesn’t, well, work.

 

Don’t contribute to the noise.

Content marketing, when done right, can help draw in more visitors and sales via organic traffic. However, new marketing channels now exist, such as AI-powered search through, say, ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. So it’s more important than ever to understand Google EEAT, understand what publishing helpful content marketing really means, and then tap into the huge market out there.
Get this process wrong, and you are simply contributing and adding to the noise that is already out there. Google has already most likely crawled and indexed millions of pieces of content marketing around the topic you are writing about. Therefore, by writing content that is thin, or just a weak answer, you are doing nothing more than just contributing to the vast noise and amount of pages that are already published.

 

Therefore, you do have to be different; you have to stand out from the crowd.

To achieve this, to write stellar content marketing, you have to:

Understand Google EEAT and implement this

• You have to offer the best or one of the best answers out there
• You have to make the work truly useful and helpful
• You often have to publish less and focus on quality more
• You have to be the “expert”; you have to be seen as the brand that’s worth listening to

 

Investment is only getting greater into content marketing 

The IPA Bellwether Report for Q4 2025 confirms UK digital marketing budgets are holding firm, despite the economic uncertainty surrounding the economy at the moment.

This makes sense: imagine a large office block filled with solicitors and related staff. Imagine how those businesses generate more leads and sales globally. Sure, a strong reputation and standing in the industry can generate business on its own. However, a winning content marketing strategy helps you answer the questions customers have. By doing this, you are helping customers and businesses solve problems.

By being the solution or answering a customer question, you often become the business customers want to hire.

Run an audit on how well your current content marketing performs

Use tools such as Google Analytics to understand which pages perform best. For example, through this analysis, you need to understand which pages are generating traffic to your business. You also need to understand which pages aren’t generating any traffic.

This is where the strategic element comes into play; you may want to improve further pages that are already performing well. Or you may want to focus your efforts on pages that aren’t generating any business.

This way, you can start to form a plan of action. For example, with an expert eye on your website and quality marketing tools, you can often find pages that might be cannibalising each other. This happens when too many pages or blog posts try to attract customers for the same keyword.

Buyer personas

Some businesses may not want to dive too deeply into this, as sometimes who the buyer is is as clear as day. However, it can still be useful to do this exercise, even briefly, if you only sell a very limited product range.

Creating buyer personas lets you visualise and understand who your buyers are now and the type of buyers you want to attract in the near future. This allows you to understand what marketing professionals refer to as their “pain points” or, basically, in simple terms, the questions that customers are frequently asking.

Let’s provide a real-life example: an air conditioning company may have the majority of its customers from the B2B / commercial markets. The company may want to expand its sales in the domestic market; to do so, it often means addressing a completely different set of questions that commercial businesses would ask. For example, domestic customers may be more concerned about monthly running costs over the summer. In contrast, commercial businesses care less because they need air conditioning across their premises.

Understanding these “pain points” and FAQs can mean the difference between a piece of content marketing drawing in thousands of customers and work that draws in no new sales.

 

Topic clusters and creating pillar pages

A key aspect of Google EEAT is authoritativeness; this is absolutely key. To improve your business’s chances of being considered an expert in that niche, you have to build topical authority. To do so, you need to build a content-led SEO strategy by creating central pillar pages that should capture the vast majority of organic traffic for that set of keywords. Supporting topic clusters should offer further guidance by answering related questions, while linking to and feeding traffic to the central pillar page.

This isn’t something you can achieve in a matter of days; it takes thought, time, and implementation. The overall aim is to drive organic traffic and visitors to a page with superb information, designed to convert those visitors into customers.

 

Video

When businesses think of content marketing, they often think of the written word. However, arguably, people’s attention spans are now shorter than ever. So sometimes it’s better to use video. We recommend combining video with text by embedding, say, a YouTube video into the page.

Let’s say your page is selling American-style fridge freezers and you want to promote a particular Samsung product you are selling.

You can include a text product description and combine it with an embedded YouTube video. You can therefore benefit from the following:

• Higher page dwell times
• Lower bounce rates
• More visitors who then visit more pages
• More sales

 

Long-form written content marketing

One of the best ways to improve your business’s organic rankings is by consistently publishing high-quality long-form content. Thin content and spam pages will hurt your business’s quality score and won’t help improve it. Therefore, create quality pillar pages, and don’t fall into the trap of creating content regularly that doesn’t generate organic traffic.

 

Should we be using AI to write our content marketing?

For us, we would not recommend using AI to write your content. We say this because Google’s EEAT guidance makes it clear that the page should communicate clear expertise and experience related to what you are writing about.

For example, who do you consider better qualified to write an article relating to dentistry, an AI platform or a dentist with 25 years of experience?

The article written by the expert often makes it clear they have real-world experience with what they are talking about. AI platforms often cite generic facts and advice that get reworded and then written into thousands of articles that may sound familiar, even if they are reworded.
However, an article written by a real dentist is often 100% unique and therefore offers advice and insights that AI often can’t.

 

Where could AI be useful when creating content marketing?

AI can help accelerate research; for example, when writing a guide, if you need quick advice, you could turn to an AI platform. However, we would stop there; we would not let the AI platform write the text, or even have too much input. The reason is simple here at Walsh & Partners: for the last 10 years, we have followed Google’s latest and best advice, which now means following Google EEAT.
We therefore do not currently see how the “experience” aspect of Google EEAT, in particular, could be satisfied by an AI platform such as ChatGPT.

 

Decrease in content quality.

From our research, we’ve found that marketers have reported a decrease in content quality when they have embraced AI options for AI-written content. This is why we strongly believe that, to satisfy Google EEAT, you can’t let AI platforms write the text entirely.

 

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

Answer engine optimisation, or AEO for short, is a new and emerging marketing discipline. Basically, if you want your business mentioned and displayed in more Google AI Overviews and Perplexity answers, your content needs to answer commonly asked questions. The authority of the pages also needs to be improved, plus the on-page SEO must be so good and clear that it makes it crystal clear what answers that page is answering.

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Can you tell us the difference between content marketing and content marketing strategy?

Without a clear strategy, you may end up creating content that keeps covering the same topics. This can cause the issue we mentioned earlier: keyword cannibalisation, which happens when you target the same keyword too much. You could end up with many pages in Google’s index actively competing with each other. This also appears to Google as an “over-optimisation issue”. Instead of focusing on one page that offers super clear advice, you’re layering and publishing too many pages that all offer similar advice. This can look spammy and suggest you are focusing too much on search engine optimisation gains and not enough on offering solid, quality advice to the customer.

 

How long does B2B content marketing take to show results?

Organic search engine optimisation in general takes a long time to generate results; it’s not a fast process by any stretch of the imagination. The reason is that, although new AI systems to optimise for exist, such as Perplexity and ChatGPT, the vast majority of visitors still come from Google.

Google will never place a business on page one for any keyword unless you offer the best answer for that query. Even if you do offer the best answer, you can still be outranked by businesses which have more authority- for example, pages with much stronger backlink profiles as well as stronger semantic seo through brand mentions on authoritative pages. So, it’s not a fast process; it involves building trust with Google’s algorithms, and when we say this takes many months of work, we mean it.

Naturally, clients want results straightaway and as quickly as possible, but their wishes and hopes don’t change how Google’s algorithm works. Google wants to reward quality answers, but the rest of the Google ranking factors must align, which means, for example, the page and website must have strong supporting backlinks.

 

How much time, effort, and money should we spend on content marketing?

This is a very basic example, but imagine, say, an e-commerce business based in an industrial estate somewhere in the UK. When the business looks at where its customers come from, it often boils down to organic traffic, paid traffic, and social media traffic.

However, for some businesses, organic traffic is the biggest slice of the cake. When you dissect that further, you often find the only way to draw those visitors in is through content marketing. That means writing helpful guides and designing the main sales pages to be as helpful as possible.

So, in terms of marketing budgets assigned to content marketing, that’s a decision only the business itself can make. However, the point is that some e-commerce businesses can’t exist without good-quality content marketing in place.

 

Is content marketing still effective with AI search changing everything?

Some marketing businesses like to infer that AI is changing the marketing landscape beyond recognition. However, in reality, there are strong parallels between optimising your business for organic search engine optimisation and AI search. So, while businesses will naturally want to appear as responses on, say, ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, that only happens when organic SEO is super strong. That’s why we say there’s strong overlap between optimising a website organically and optimising for AI models.

To achieve more visibility in AI models and organic search, here’s what you should do:

• Optimise for E-E-A-T signals
• Make sure that there are clear questions and answers
• Improve the authority of the page through link building

Should we concentrate on creating new content or updating existing content?

Sometimes you might find, after analysis of your business’s Google Search Console account, that some pages are quite near the first page of organic results. By nudging those keywords onto the first page, you can then draw in more organic traffic. From there, dwell time and bounce rates could decrease. The business could also naturally build new backlinks contributing to an uplift in rankings for even more pages. The point is that sometimes it’s better to improve and refresh old pages than to start creating brand-new content.

By analysing current website performance, you can therefore learn that there is a set of pages that you could further improve. This could help drive more sales by letting you focus your efforts on targeting keywords you currently don’t rank for.