SEO for climate tech marketers
How we create SEO strategies for climate tech clients
Hello friends,
Should B2B climate tech marketers be thinking about keywords in their content strategies?
It depends.
Let’s dive in.
Does organic search matter?
There’s only one reason we might consider keywords in my content strategy, and that’s if organic search, as a traffic source, matters to the company.
What would make organic search matter?
It comes down to search volume now and predicted search volume in the future. If you’ve taken a look at search volume data for any relevant keywords then you probably already know that the appetite for niche B2B climate tech searches is, well… low.
But many companies are taking the long-term view that these searches eventually will become popular, or at least generate enough relevant readers to warrant the effort, and this is probably smart thinking. SEO is a long-term game, and it makes sense to start claiming some territory now.
If you’ve decided it does matter…
Then we’ll take our content plan (see last week’s newsletter) and break it down even further: we’ll have one plan for ‘SEO content’ and another for thought leadership.
For the SEO content, we’ll identify a list o fkeywords, informed by:
Current search data (which terms generate the most search volumes) (be aware of statistical significance here – a term that generates 50 monthly searches according to your tool of choice may be in reality no more popular than one that purports to generate zero)
Queries in your Google Console (which terms people are currently finding you through, or where you have a high view rate but low click-through rate – this could mean it’s time to optimize some existing titles/content)
Your ideal future positioning (the way you’ve decided to brand your solution, even if it’s not currently popular terminology)
With keywords in hand…
We’ll put the robots to work. (For real.) The only goal of SEO content should be to improve search rankings, so this doesn’t need to be where most of your content resources go. SEO-optimized content is, by nature, pretty bland. SEO is a volume game. To squeeze keywords in all the right places and hit the often-exhausting length requirements to please Google, you’re better off leveraging the help of tools like ChatGPT and Surfer SEO, which can write and then optimize content for you.
(You’ll still need humans in this process, but you’ll get far more mileage from them. DON’T skip the humans here — the worst outcome is an article so unclear and embarrassing that a potential reader finds it, shakes their head, links up ‘poor quality article’ to ‘your brand name’, and leaves.)
The quality of this content needs to be high enough that a potential internet user is not entirely turned off or confused when they stumble across it, but not so high that it takes too much time and money to get it out there. Modern SEO is a balancing act between quality and volume, and volume should probably be more heavily weighted.
Do whatever you can here to avoid having to put these SEO articles through leadership reviews. There’s no greater bottleneck to a content machine than reviews, and though they’re important for thought leadership content, you shouldn’t need them for basic SEO content.
But I care about quality content!
So do we. Google doesn’t care quite so much. Here’s what we recommend doing to get the most out of Google without distracting from your ultra-high-quality thought leadership content:
Backdate your posts.
Set the publication date on your SEO content to several months in the past – not so far back that any critical information is out of date, but far enough that what people see when they first navigate to your blog page is only your best, highest-quality thought leadership content.You’ll still capture potential traffic from search engines, without sacrificing the experience of those who come wandering in from other sources.
Wrapping up…
Well marketers, that’s our approach to thought leadership and SEO content. The two can absolutely co-exist, but they require very different strategies. And if you’ve only got capacity for one, choose thought leadership every time.
(And great writers to pull it off.)