Customers find business software through multiple avenues: a software developer might confront specific technical hurdles, a Chief Technical Officer may read about a new category in Gartner, or an industry newcomer may seek introductory level education. Addressing top-of-funnel educational needs, delving into technical queries, and targeting high-intent keywords are essential. Yet, attempting to accommodate these diverse content categories solely with a blog has inherent structural limitations.

To maximize the effectiveness of your B2B SEO efforts across different solution and educational queries, the team at Obility recommends you utilize a few different distinct sections of your site:

1. A mixed-content resource section

2. An education section

3. A technical documentation section

4. A glossary section

In developing content for each of these sections, you can establish a site hierarchy and page template structures that are beneficial for SEO. Each section can be directly linked to from the home page, and each section’s user interface can be customized for the content type. For example, topic clusters can be created quickly in a well-structured education section.

Noticeably absent from the list of content sections are product and solution pages. Product and solution pages should be seen as tangential to SEO. Product and solution pages can be used by marketers to build trust and credibility and ultimately convert site visitors to a product walkthrough or free trial.

Sidenote: Limiting SEO focus on product pages also eases tensions with product marketers. Let them have their fancy descriptive headers and sleep easier, knowing that product marketing decisions aren’t going to crush your rankings overnight.

Even without optimizing product and solution pages for SEO, there are plenty of opportunities to create content for all relevant queries.

Content: Blog posts, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, webinars, industry reports, etc.

Structure: Tagged by type, solution, audience, author, industry, topic, etc.

A catch-all resource section of product news, blog posts, podcasts, case studies, press releases, videos, guides, and white papers has become the norm for B2B software websites. A major advantage to these resource hubs is that visitors can readily filter the content by type, category, solution, audience, etc.

From an SEO perspective, a mixed content section has huge benefits. It provides an area of the site to house one-off content such as webinars and white papers, as well as video content. It can also be home to the blog.

At this point, the benefits of a blog for SEO are well documented. For B2B marketers, blog posts are a straightforward method of answering solutions to customer pain points or publishing listicles to rank for solution/software/vendor queries. Blog posts are a solid approach to ranking for comparison keywords such as [competitor] alternative/competitor or [competitor1] vs. [competitor2].

Some companies even go further with competitor comparison content and a section to house it. For example, Vendasta has a benefits by competitor section of their site that highlights the difference between Vendasta vs. Upwork, Vendasta vs. HubSpot, etc.

Ultimately, blog posts can be written with SEO in mind, targeting specific keyword searches, but they are not ideal for creating SEO pillars. A series of blog posts or interlinking anchor text is not the best option for creating topical content. SEOs are better off with a section of the site structurally built for topics.

Enter the education section.

Content: Lengthy educational content broken into topics and subtopics

Structure: Topics include drill-down links to subtopics and related topics

Unlike the product and solutions pages, the educational section of the site needs to be SEO-focused, such as Moz’s SEO Learning Center. “Giving back” product pages to product marketing hopefully generates the goodwill necessary for SEOs to gain control of educational content.

As mentioned previously, the benefit of multiple sections of the site is that B2B marketers can create different structures based on need. The education section of the site should be arranged by topics and subtopics.

By effectively building a pillar of pillars structure into the education section, SEOs have the opportunity to fully build out topic hubs and target strings of relevant queries (e.g., what is a CDN, how to measure CDN performance, measure CDN reliability, etc.).

They can also structure educational pages to link to sections within the content or subtopic content.

Again, structure is hugely important.

Usability is also important, and having high-level educational content next to explicit technical solutions doesn’t make a ton of sense. Marketers are better off creating a section dedicated to documentation, use cases, and playbooks.

Content: Lengthy technical content broken into solutions to problems

Structure: Solutions by category with drill-down links to other relevant documentation

Many B2B companies rely on community sections of their sites to answer highly technical questions, but betting solely on customers to create relevant SEO content is a mistake. B2B software companies should create a dedicated documentation section, such as Moz’s Help Hub.

You can benefit from a documentation section by creating content that directly addresses deep technical queries from your target customers. The structure of documentation sections can be similar to the multi-content resource section, where content can be filtered by category or grouped by topic, like the education section. Structure is less important since the content in the documentation section will typically be answering one-off questions as opposed to creating pillar content.

With a mixed content resource hub, an education section, and a documentation section, B2B SEOs should be covered for all relevant queries. However, the content created in the education or documentation sections may not be best suited for Google’s answer box. If SEOs want to go directly to the answer box, they should consider a glossary section.

Content: Shorter educational content directly addressing ‘what is’ questions

Structure: Glossary links to individual glossary pages

A glossary section is similar to the educational section but more brief. Glossary pages should directly address the “what is” question with the goal of ranking for Google’s answer box. Term definitions should be explained near the top of the page, and the question should be posed and answered directly in the content.

Creating a bunch of different sections on the site isn’t a small task. The benefits of multiple structured sections could be feasibly achieved with just a blog.

Few sites create multiple content structures for their blog, but you could establish multiple blog templates to enable your blog to create one-off thought leadership content and topically organized solution and technical content. This would allow you to create pillars of related content with built-in links to subtopics.

For example, this blog post on Stripe could readily work as a pillar page on SaaS payments with a structure that enabled links to subtopic pages (e.g., a widget that linked to subtopic pages). Currently, the page only has links to sections of the blog post and internal links to other areas of the site.

Conceivably, Stripe could set up different blog templates for educational pillar content, technical content, and standard blog content.

However, a blog-only approach adds complexity to managing the blog and deciphering which content should use which template. Clear, distinct sections of the site avoid the need for clear rules.

While each of these sections is important to holistically target relevant B2B keywords, the naming of these sections is an opportunity to get creative. An education section can be a “learning center” or a “topic” section. A documentation section can be “playbooks,” or a “university,” or an “academy.” The main takeaway is not to have specific named sections but to structure different sections based on how best to optimize the content for SEO and filter the content for site visitors.

If you are going to have a pillar-of-pillars strategy with topics and subtopics to target top-of-funnel content, the section housing that content needs to align with a topical structure. If your goal is to rank in the answer box, your content should be structured for quickly answering questions.

Segmenting these areas on your site creates inherent advantages to ranking for your target terms.