How We Grow Our B2B Platform for Amazon Sellers by Creating Industry-Specific Content

This Case is not about a client’s website, it’s about one of our own businesses! We could share many lessons that we’ve learned starting and growing sermondo.com – the global directory platform for Amazon seller services (B2B).

Since this is a B2B Marketing blog, we’d like to focus on our learning regarding the iterations and realizations that we had to go through.

The Initial Situation - How We Started Out By Defining Our SEO Growth Strategy

Sermondo.com is an international directory platform helping Amazon sellers find the best service providers for their business.

Service providers get their own listing where they can describe their business to get more exposure. The listings also contain a review feature. Listings rank in Google for the service providers’ names and thus get traffic from people who either google the company name or google their company name plus the word “reviews” or “experiences” such as “xyz services reviews”. 

Sermondo sells listings to these companies that can then showcase their business and get exposure. After launching the platform and having onboarded the first +100 listings, we noticed that the traffic (clicks from Google) for these listing increased but we did not achieve the growth that we were looking for.

Content Strategy Review After One Year & Coming Up With Industry-Specific Content

We noticed that it’s not sufficient to only get clicks from users who were initially searching for a specific service provider.

We’d much rather get website visitors who do not yet know which service they were looking for. When starting out this project we wanted to have listing-traffic as our main marketing channel – but it did not take us too long to figure out that this strategy won’t work.

At this point, one year after reaching the first milestone to onboard +100 service provider listings, we realized that our corporate blog/magazine will be our main source of fresh visitors and leads. Sermondo.com provides service providers from 20 different categories such as product photography, Amazon marketing agencies, fulfillment/logistics services, sourcing agents and so on. So we knew we had to equally generate traffic for all of these categories. These service categories helped us to find a structure of topics such as “how to find a sourcing agent in China” and “optimizing your product photos for Amazon”.

Scaling Content Output is Hard - Without Structured Workflows It's Even Impossible

Having these 20 categories that we list service providers in helped us come up with many topic ideas – too many! Thats why we developed a system to structure our ideas so we could easily plan it and later on also better understand how we should build our internal linking.

Our Content Structure that we follow is:

  • Category-Level Posts – Posts that attract Amazon sellers who are directly searching for a service provider within one of our 20 categories such as “product photographer” or “Amazon full service agency” or “Amazon Fulfillment Center” – posts on this level describe topics such as “how to find the best product photographer for your Amazon products” or “The Top 9 best product photographers”
  • Niche Posts on Category-Level – On the same category level we also create niche posts that might not directly have anything to do with the main-category such as “How to prep your products for sending them to the Amazon warehouse” – the main-category in this case would be “Amazon Fulfillment Center” or “Amazon Logistics”.
  • Marketplace-Level Posts – These posts are all about selling to different marketplaces/countries and aim to attract Amazon sellers who are planning to expand or generally start selling on any specific country marketplaces such as Amazon Germany or  Amazon Japan.

Now you might think “okay these are three clusters of content topics but there could be so many more other topics that would not fit under this category-umbrella” and you are right! But following an 80/20 approach means to get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. We intentionally skip this potential because when it comes to building a foundation, you need to focus on the 80%! Sticking to this philosophy helps us to generate new topics and ideas much faster and to always provide fresh and relevant ideas for our contenet plan.

We Tripled Our Organic Reach within One Year but also 10X'd Leads and Sales

Google Search Console - Impressions & Clicks within 12 Months

We actually started out building this directory because we figured out there was a need for a directory of service providers in the Amazon seller industry. There are many different ways to driving traffic to a directory website. One of the most common ones is to let users generate content within the directory listings that will eventually lead to visibility and rankings. 

In our case we also figured out that we want to reach users who need to be educated first and later be converted into leads. Hence we started to create content like we do for all our other projects too. Creating industry specific content such as “ultimate guides” or “niche posts” is one of the most powerful ways to generate B2B leads not only because it’s a very cost-effective and sustainable way to drive traffic but also because it proves that your service and your website are a true authority!

Sharing the guides that we created within our networks and email list enhanced these benefits too. After all, B2B prospects are looking to build trust first and we did a great job gaining our audience’s trust!

As a result, within one year we did not only triple our organic google traffic but also increased our brand visibility and trust within the industry which lead to a huge spike of new leads, requests for collaborations, backlinks and other opportunities for us!

This experience has proven to us that every business should leverage the potential of a content marketing strategy – because it does not only provide a sustainable stream of traffic and inbound leads, but it also increases your trust and hence the conversion rate for new clients! If you’d like to learn more about content marketing we recommend you to read our ultimate guide on B2B content marketing!

Toby Fischer, MBA

Toby Fischer, MBA

We help B2B companies sustainably build a brand and increase their sales through content marketing & SEO. Benefit from our proven methods that we successfully use to grow our own as well as our clients websites. Book your free strategy session now to find out how we can help you grow!

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