B2B SEO

Today, I read an article about a Michigan firm trying to launch yet another SEO software aimed at boosting rankings of sites. The software’s apparent purpose is to drive an automated link exchange system.

It’s been common knowledge for some time now among SEO professionals that link exchange programs, link farms, and FFA’s (free for all links) are among the practices discouraged by the major search engines. There are countless posts in numerous blogs about site owners who employed link farms, FFA’s, and link exchange programs only to watch their sites disappear from the search engine results. Matt Cutts, Google spokesperson for everything SEO, clearly warns people about automated programs to get links, citing it as one of the first things to look for in terms of bad practices that result in poor rankings or exclusion from Google’s index.

To be sure, the number and value of links pointing to your site is one of about 100 things that Google looks at to determine the value of a site and where it should rank in comparison to others. However, if everything else is not optimized as well, linking is not going to suddenly rocket you to the top of the search engine results.
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As Told by a Lonely, Un-optimized Website

The frustrating thing is, I’m such a darned nice looking site. But it feels so helpless, buried by so many pages in those all-important Google results. Will ANYONE ever FIND me here? I’ve seen some research that says it’s not very likely. If most people won’t scan more than three pages, what chance do those of us on page 13 have?
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Most B2B companies aren’t e-commerce driven. Obviously, SEO is very important to e-commerce companies; getting found means getting more sales. And good SEO results are quickly seen in the form of increased revenue. The vast majority of B2B companies, however, don’t offer products and services you can order on the web, place in a shopping cart, and pay for with your bankcard.

So why should B2B companies bother with SEO? For a business-to-business company, ranking highly in the search engine results won’t drive immediate sales, but I would argue that SEO for B2B is just as important, perhaps even more so. You have to remember the role of search in a B2B purchase. The average purchase cycle in the business-to-business transaction is several months, sometimes a year or two, depending on the nature of the purchase. That’s because the risks are higher and the implications (good and bad) of the decision of what to buy and from whom to buy it can last many years. Therefore, purchase decisions are highly researched and scrutinized.

Also, the typical behavior of a B2B buyer is not to broadcast the buyer’s intent to purchase and invite countless suppliers to pitch for the business. Once the intent to possibly make a purchase is formed, the research begins. Who sells what we need? Who else has bought from them? Do they seem like a potential fit? Who should we be talking to? Search engines are the first place potential buyers go to begin to find answers to these questions, long before they tell anyone that they’re in the market to make a purchase. And that’s when you want to be sure they find your company.
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