B2B SEO

There are a number of shared platforms for B2B marketers that promise increased traffic and search visibility for their members. Before you subscribe to a shared platform, be sure you understand whether it will really help you and how to best use it to drive increased visibility in the search results. This article looks at an example of one of those platforms and how to best use it. You can use the information to evaluate other shared platforms relevant to your business. (more…)

Analytics are great. They provide us with loads of good information. The danger is what we do with that information and in the assumptions we make.

Here are three faulty assumptions I see regularly. Please share yours, too.
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In early May, I led the Hot Seat Lab on Better Blogging for Business at MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum in Boston. In it, three brave B2B marketers volunteered to have their corporate blogs critiqued in front of a room full of peers. While the blogs obviously differed in design and content, their shortcomings from an SEO standpoint were surprisingly similar—and substantial. Here’s a summary of the problems they shared and what to do about them. (more…)

Recently, Google enhanced several features of its Local Business Center and rebranded it Google Places. Among the new features is an ability to specify the regions a business serves. But will the new changes help B2B marketers serving a larger region get found? (more…)

A dragon is a good thing to have. Everyone knows dragons have magical powers. They are wise, although sometimes also vain. Dragons can be fierce protectors, too. The magic of the content marketing dragon is lead generation, lead nurturing, and SEO (especially if your dragon has a long tail.) But if you’re going to own a dragon, you have to feed it. Otherwise, no more fire. No more magic.

Here are a few tips on the proper care and feeding of your dragon: (more…)

B2B brands are often reliant on channel partners to sell products and services to end users. And while manufacturers and others offer traditional co-branding marketing tools, they often fail miserably at driving traffic to distributors, dealers, and other channel partners through B2B search marketing. Optimized channel partner landing pages, bulk uploads of locations to Google Maps, and geo-based sitemaps are three good ways to do this. Here are some strategies to help you succeed.

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Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools for B2B marketers, most of whom likely have content development as a substantial part of their 2010 marketing plans. But before you get started with developing more content marketing assets, take a step back to assess your efforts to date. Below are six steps to help you do that. While the list is not exhaustive, my hope is that these steps will help you improve the performance of existing assets and develop strong future content marketing efforts.

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Lately, when we talk to prospective B2B clients, I see increasingly divergent views on B2B blogging. On the one hand, there are those who lust after success stories involving other social media (e.g., Twitter) used to drive high amounts of immediate, short-term traffic to a business blog. Many times, these people are so eager to jump into the promise and immediacy of Twitter, LinkedIn groups, and Facebook to drive traffic to a blog, that they give little consideration to developing the meaningful, valuable content required to attract interest in the first place.

On the other hand, there are those that tend to lump B2B blogging in with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, social-bookmarking sites, and the like. Many of these people are in niche B2B industries where the pace of adoption of social media vehicles is slow and the potential “crowd” is thin. When they consider blogging as a part of their marketing strategy, they see little promise. Sure, they say, maybe we’ll get 20 subscribers to our blog, but what good is that? We’re not going to get large amounts of followers on Twitter. We’re not going to get large amounts of subscribers to our blog. Social media just isn’t a good fit, whatever form it comes in.

Both groups seem overly focused on the short-term, either somewhat crazed by the potential of short-term gains or convinced that such gains aren’t possible, and as a result, dismissing the very idea of B2B blogging. Both groups tend to ignore the long-term, most valuable benefits of B2B blogging—search visibility and thought leadership positioning. (more…)

I’m just back from speaking at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summits in San Francisco and Boston, where I was giving a joint presentation with a client on SEO. As part of that presentation, we talked about the role and impact of corporate blogging.

The client is a professional services firm operating solely in the B2B space. Theirs is a complex sale with an average sales cycle of 2-3 months from first contact to the time work begins. There are typically multiple people from different parties involved in or influencing the buying process, and the average engagement is in the low-to-mid five-figure range.

We had already optimized the professional service firm’s website. Early last year, however, we recommended the client also start a blog, both for purposes of positioning via thought leadership and fulfilling the rest of the SEO keyword strategy we had previously identified. The company is now about 15 months into blogging. They post once each week, and there are seven professional staff members who contribute to the blog.

We made sure the blog was integrated with the client’s site, not a separate domain or hosted blog. We chose WordPress and made sure to integrate plug-ins that would give us the proper optimization options. Then we worked with the client to develop topics, B2B blogging guidelines, and help educate those who would be contributing.

The ongoing work is largely handled in-house, by the client. On a periodic basis, we review the posts and make or recommend changes, both in terms of editing content for readers and better optimizing individual posts for search.

The results have been far beyond expectations. Today, while the blog accounts for 32% of the landing pages on the site, it accounts for more than 53% of the client’s organic traffic. The number of unique keywords for which the firm’s site is found has nearly tripled since the start of blogging. The firm’s website is responsible for more than 50% of its new business. They no longer have need for full-time people dedicated to finding new business; the firm’s new business activity is essentially responding to requests for work, not identifying and nurturing leads.

It should be noted, though, while the business results are good, it’s clear the results aren’t just about search; the quality and quantity of B2B content plays an equal, if not larger, role in positioning the firm and generating leads.

While the site optimization and corporate blogging has been successful, there were three key lessons learned along the way. (more…)

If you have a content-rich, optimized site, you’re likely getting a substantial amount of organic traffic from channels you didn’t plan on – visitors searching for something related to your business who briefly land at your site and move on. Rather than ignore this extra traffic, you should engage them as potential ambassadors and influencers. (more…)

By all measures, business use of Twitter continues to expand. Twitter can be a great tool used to follow others in your industry, keep track of what’s being said regarding issues relevant to your customers, as well as identify and learn more about potential prospects. Yet finding relevant Twitter users to follow (and making it easy for them to find you) can be time consuming and sometimes frustrating – especially in the B2B space, where the industry lexicons are often very diverse. Here are a few tips to help you in that process. (more…)

Click on one of your shortened URLs in Twitter, and your analytics may show a referral from Twitter. But if you click on that same shortened URL in a Twitter client like TweetDeck, the click-through will probably show up as a direct visit, because TweetDeck doesn’t pass along the referrer string in the URL. How many other sources of your traffic are like this? Probably more than you think.

Content marketing is very effective for B2B marketers. Think about all of the case studies, white papers, brochures, technical papers, newsletters you have. Likely, many of these assets are in pdf form. They took a lot of time and money to create. When it comes to analytics, you may know how many people download these assets, but you probably have no idea whether these assets help drive people back into your site. (more…)

In the last couple years, I’ve written that risk is a primary motivator in B2B purchase decisions, and that fear of making the wrong decision strongly influences B2B supplier selection. And rightly so. The wrong choice can have long-lasting business and career implications.

This week, Enquiro, released a white paper entitled Mapping the BuyerSphere (registration required). The white paper presents findings of Enquiro’s recent research into B2B buyer behavior; illustrates risk as the common, dominant factor in B2B purchasing; and explores an alternative model for targeting and mapping markets and prospects. Gord Hotchkiss and his team have done a great job, and the paper is well worth downloading.

If you haven’t thought about B2B purchasing in these terms before, it can really make you question and rethink your approach to the market. If risk is the primary motivator, how do you need to adjust your tactics, your messaging, your positioning? (more…)

Most web analytics tools, including Google Analytics, attribute online conversions to the most recent visit. Sure, you can define the funnel and see how many people enter the funnel, the visitors who abandon the funnel, and how many people ultimately convert, but only if all of these events happen in a single visit. Conversion in the B2B world doesn’t necessarily happen that way. There may have been many previous visits to your site via other channels that influenced a visitor to finally take the desired action. If you’re not capturing this information, you may not be making good decisions.

In March 2009, Business.com completed an analytics study of more than 27,000 B2B web sites. It’s a great study and well worth downloading. Here are some of the findings:

• 93% of sites can’t see the influence that multiple campaigns/keywords have on conversions
• 49% use a third-party web analytics program that only provides basic site traffic data or which, by default, use the “last click” method for connecting a prospect action (e.g., clicking on a banner ad or link in an email newsletter) with a conversion, such as a purchase or registration. (82% of these B2B sites used Google Analytics or Urchin software by Google)
• 44% use no web analytics or, in rare cases, use a custom in-house solution

Most analytics programs attribute conversion to the last trackable link clicked before conversion, the “last click” method. In some cases, this may be just fine; perhaps conversion actually did happen in a single visit. But with lengthening sales cycles and the significant amount of purchase research that happens in the B2B world, prospects may have visited your site several times through various means before they returned once more to ultimately take action.

Business.com’s study cites the following example:
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There are multiple parties involved in the B2B purchase decision. While several parties have the ability to influence the purchase decision (e.g., purchasing personnel), those with the ability to make the decision are typically very busy, often spending significant time on the road, in airports, in meetings. They may not be tethered to their laptop, but most are inseparable from an iPhone or BlackBerry.

While these decision-makers may not initiate purchase research, they often receive purchase recommendations of others via email, and these emails contain links to sellers’ sites. What could be easier than clearing some emails or doing a couple quick searches with Google Mobile while waiting for the next plane? In the next 10 minutes, an executive could form her initial perceptions of your firm based on what she sees on her iPhone. Are you happy with what she’ll find? Do you even know what she’ll find?

Years ago, we were finishing the build of a new, optimized site for a client. The client wanted the site’s primary navigation to be in Flash. So we incorporated other ways for search engines to get to the site’s content from the home page. We also had plenty of html-based intra-site linking within the copy of the site’s pages. One night, I wanted to check the team’s progress on the site. I grabbed my BlackBerry. I quickly found that the only way a mobile user could actually get into the site from the home page was through html links for things like the site map and privacy policy. While I could get to all the content, it wasn’t a pleasant experience, to say the least. The next day, we began to make changes to speak to the mobile user.

Last spring, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study on the use of mobile devices. As of December 2007, 19% of respondents had used their mobile device to access the internet; 7% said they did so regularly, on a typical day. Certainly, these numbers have gone up dramatically since then, and they’ll continue to do so.

If you don’t know what mobile users will experience when they visit your site, you should take the next five minutes to find out. How does your site display? Are there features of your site that don’t even load? Is your site’s primary content easily accessible to mobile users?
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It seems like professional services firms really struggle with search engine optimization. Few do it well. In the audits we do for clients, perhaps the most common issue is inadequate site architecture. That is, not having enough pages in the site to respond to the diverse range of potential search terms. But there are other common problems, too. Here are some of the issues and what you can do about them.
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Articles and blog postings on B2B search marketing are often hard to find. But during the year, I’ve found a lot of other great content, too. I chose 30 of my favorite B2B search and internet marketing posts from 2009. To that I added three of my own articles that were especially popular or helpful to people. I know I’ve missed some great content. If you know of others, please add them via comments.
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Business-to-business (B2B) blogging is be a great way to forge relationships, talk with customers and prospects, demonstrate thought leadership, and dramatically increase visibility in natural search results for targeted search terms. Done right, it ultimately drives substantial traffic when others in the media and blogosphere link to compelling or noteworthy content. Yet the Fortune 500, many of which are B2B companies, has been slow to embrace blogging.

Last year, Forrester Research reported that only 29 of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging. While the number of large companies blogging is still relatively small, that number more than doubled in 2008.

If you’re looking for insight into big business blogging, both for B2B and B2C companies, check out the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, a directory of Fortune 500 companies with business blogs. The wiki, started as collaborative project between Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson and Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield, is a compilation following active public blogs by company employees blogging about their companies and/or products. Easton Ellsworth of We Know Media and John Cass of PR Communications joined the effort to expand the project.

As of November 15, 2008, the site indicates 12.8% of Fortune 500 companies (64 of them) are blogging. That’s up from 54 companies in May 2008. Initial findings at the start of 2006 found just under 4%, or 18 Fortune 500 companies, had corporate blogs.

Included on the site are lists and links of blogging Fortune 500 companies, example blogs for each (many have multiple blogs), examples of other social media in use (such as Twitter), and reviews.
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Many people have a “set it and forget it” approach when it comes to SEO. But if you have a good site (in terms of organic search), you should be taking advantage of it—especially during these tough economic times.

SEO remains one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, especially over the long haul. If your site and the pages on it have historically responded well to desired search terms, you should be tweaking your site to speak to the changing market. Here are seven inexpensive strategies to help you win during these challenging times.

Understand the changing landscape

Have the needs of your prospects and customers changed during the downturn? Are there products or a segment of you business more suited to these times than before? Do you need to change how you position some of your offerings? Are the keywords used by your prospects changing? What words are your prospects including now including in their searches that they didn’t include before? The primary words used in queries may be the same, but the long tail of those queries may be different. Does your site speak to the changing long tail?

Tweak existing content

Likely, there are many pages on your site that should be modified to speak to these tough economic times and the changing long tail. Adjust and expand the copy to ensure it resonates well with your prospects’ concerns, and also with search engines when those prospects search for solutions using long-tail terms that reflect those concerns. For some hints on optimizing page content, see Copywriting Tips for B2B SEO.

Beef up relevant content

In addition to tweaking existing pages, you should consider adding more optimized pages to your site’s architecture. Perhaps there are products or services you haven’t strongly promoted but now are in strong demand. There may be some offerings you previously only mentioned in a passing sentence or two that now deserve an organic landing page or perhaps several pages. There are a lot of ways you can quickly add more optimized content to your B2B website, including product/service pages, case studies, white papers, etc.

Manage your landing pages

What would happen if you increased your site’s traffic by 10% or converted just 5% more of your site’s traffic? Chances are you have a lot of potential traffic that isn’t converting, both on your site and in the SERPs. Make sure you understand and manage your site’s landing pages. First, know what your search engine results look like for each desired search term.
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B2B copywriting is tough stuff. Instead of, “Wipes clean with a damp cloth,” you may find yourself trying to simultaneously explain and extol the virtues of some complex mechanical system while being creative and persuasive at the same time. Copywriting for B2B SEO is even tougher. Here are ten tips to help you succeed.

Watch the Lingo Make sure to use generic terms on the page. In most cases, B2B searchers are more likely to use generic terms than brand names. Proprietary brand names tend to be unusual, so searchers Googling for one of your brand names will likely find your site quite easily. Go ahead and use the brand name in copy, but make sure you also include the generic terms just as much, if not more.

Keep Page Copy Focused. Search engines attempt to discern the topical focus of the page. Don’t confuse them. Keep the content of a given page focused on the page’s keyword strategy. If you have multiple topics, better to put them on multiple pages. Don’t try to use a single page to go after numerous unrelated keywords.

Remember the Long Tail. Before you even start to write copy for a given page, you better know the likely long-tail words B2B searchers may also include in their queries. While the keyword focus of the page may be “conveyor systems,” your target prospect for that page may also be entering words like “distribution”, “sortation”, and “full-case” when they’re searching for a solution to their problems. Good B2B SEO copyrighting seamlessly includes these long-tail words.

Watch the Word Order. In some cases, word order doesn’t matter for PPC. In SEO, however, word order matters a lot. Obviously, you don’t want to create stilted copy…
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