When making an organizational purchase, you have two types of personas involved: doers and buyers. Doers are the people who typically first recognize the need for your product. They will be the ones using your product. The question they are asking is “What does this product do?”. Their concern is not just what your product can do for their company, but for themselves personally. They need to know the features and benefits of your product.

The second persona who can be using your website during the B2B purchasing process are the buyers. These are the people who make the purchasing decisions and control the purse strings. They are concerned not only with the cost of your product, but also in eliminating the risk from the purchase. Buyers need to know who your company is, your company size and your financial stability. A buyer needs to know your company is established, dependable and reliable.

And this leads to your on-site content development strategy. Both doers and buyers need to alleviate risk and your website can help allay their concerns. Doers are looking for product information. Think of all the features and benefits your product can offer and if applicable, consider offering a free trial. You can build trust with doers by building your reputation as an industry thought leader through downloadable white papers or webinars. Buyers need to know you are a trustworthy vendor. They will be swayed by company information, references, case studies of success stories and testimonials.

The B2B buying process can be a long one, particularly the riskier and higher the cost of your product. But your website can be a key to removing friction points during this process – if you remember the types of people you need to serve up content to.

One great B2B content development strategy can be publishing transcripts of webinars, podcasts or conference calls. These transcripts can easily run into thousands of words, and pagination can be a good choice for readability, however it quickly becomes a duplicate content issue. One client recently had a webinar transcribed which ran into 14 pages. To start with, that potentially creates 14 sets of Meta Data to be written, and 14 different places where people could link. While the content is broken into pages around the themes within the webinar, it’s all around a topic which is quite niche to begin with.

This is a classic case where existing best practices would have tried to focus the authority on the first page, and attempted to reduce the duplicate potential of the other pages by using a combination of links, 301 redirects and the Robots Exclusion Protocol. Now we can use a much more straightforward solution in the canonical link tag.

In the example I mentioned before, you would implement the tag across all 14 pages. The tag has the effect of telling the search engines "this is the preferred version, and the one we like the most". It also transfers signals like PageRank to the canonical (preferred) URL. The tag would look like this:

 <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/first-page.html" />

This will help focus link juice and authority, as well as help deal with possible duplicate content issues.