B2B SEO

In Lee Odden’s recent post, The Lowdown on Web Designers and SEO, he does a nice job of pointing out the often-found real world conflicts that often arise between web designers and SEO professionals because of their respective areas of expertise. In response to a comment, Lee points out that it may not be reasonable to expect web designers to stay on top of both their trade AND the knowledge and expertise necessary for SEO. Although I agree with this, his post and subsequent response to comments is focused largely on the shortcomings of web designers with respect to SEO.

I’m not faulting Lee here; I’m sure this was merely the focus of the post. I’m sure, however, that he’d agree with me that the vast majority of SEOs are going to need to speak to shortcomings also. For years, SEOs have been focused largely on ranking: keyword research, attempting to decipher search engine algorithms to get and maintain rankings for key search terms, researching competitor sites, and mining analytics data. To be sure, this alone can be a challenging area in which to develop proven expertise. However, in order to flourish, today’s SEO professionals, are going to have to get much better at understanding the buyer, the sales cycle and how search changes over the buying cycle, desired actions of prospects and how to effect them…in short, getting inside the mind of the prospect and using SEO to create and drive business results and relationships with prospects. Some SEOs are good at this; others are simply too technically focused. The truly effective SEO professional will be just as much an expert at business and marketing as she is at the “traditional” SEO responsibilities.

Recently, Lee Odden posted a large listing of blogs related to search marketing as well as the OPML file with these blog addresses.

In response, Jon Miller at Modern B2B Marketing posted a similar listing of blogs related to B2B marketing.

Thanks to both of you for researching and compiling these listings!

Although creating web content is cheaper than print communications, creating a large amount of new, original, persuasive web content is still time-consuming and expensive, especially with the complex nature of technical writing that is often required in B2B marketing. Effective search engine optimization requires a unique landing page for each desired search term. You may be able to get two or three closely related search terms to point to the same landing page, but, typically, if the search terms aren’t very closely related, they should have different landing pages. Add to this the fact that often there is no universally agreed-upon lexicon for most B2B products and services (i.e., people call things by different names) and the number of landing pages your site requires grows significantly—one of the key issues that makes B2B search engine optimization especially complex.

B2B companies seeking for the first time to optimize their sites for search engines are faced with the daunting task of creating a significant amount of new content to serve as landing pages for key search terms.

On the Francis SEO site, we recently added to the series of white papers on B2B search engine optimization strategies. The next white paper in the series, How to Quickly Create B2B Content Optimized for Search Engines, focuses on how to efficiently leverage what you may already have to build high-ranking optimized landing pages for organic search.

Reed Business Information recently launched Zibb, a B2B search engine. In addition its focus on B2B, Zibb aspires to be a top-notch search engine in a variety of more focused verticals. The site, currently available in beta form, presently lists 26 verticals within which users can search to narrow their search results. Folio Magazine has an article with additional information on Reed’s intent and approach to Zibb.

On the Francis SEO site, we recently started a series of white papers on B2B search engine optimization strategies.

The first white paper, Differences Between B2C and B2B SEO, covers some of the unique issues relating to business-to-business search engine optimization and their implication for B2B companies. The second white paper, Driving Conversion in B2B SEO, focuses on how to approach and accelerate conversion in the business-to-business realm while capturing lead information.