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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

As many of you know, I’m a columnist at Search Engine Land regarding B2B search marketing. In my column today, I focus on the issue of creating the proper site architecture for B2B sites.

To be found for a specific search term, there needs to be an optimized landing page on the website that revolves around that search term. And because of the lack of shared lexicons in most B2B verticals (i.e., there are several different words regular used to describe the same thing), this creates the need for content-rich B2B sites with expanded site architecture. That means more pages, organized in an intuitive, easily navigable architecture.

Here’s an excerpt from today’s article at Search Engine Land:

Five Steps To Successful Site Architecture For B2B SEO

A couple months ago, I noted that one of the 6 mistakes B2B marketers continue to make with organic search was inadequate site architecture-the fact that many B2B sites don’t have sufficient content to respond to desired search terms. The solution, however, isn’t simply adding more content. Proper site architecture is also critical. Here are five steps to success.

1. Identify potential keywords

Keyword strategy in B2B SEO is downright difficult. I talked about many of the reasons why in a previous Search Engine Land article about navigating B2B keyword strategy. Erik-Jan Bulthuis had a great post on Joost de Valk’s site in which he also describes some of the challenges and proposes a good approach to B2B keyword research. Your goal is this first step is not to make keyword choices or judgments, but rather to create the gross list, being as inclusive as possible of the potential terms actual prospects might use.

Focus on generic keywords; don’t get caught up in proprietary brand lingo. Think of the types of products and services you sell. What are your revenue streams? What do customers and prospects call things? Will their search string express the product/service sought, the problem they’re experiencing, or the type of company potentially offering solutions? Does geography play a role in the search string?

2. Determine relative popularity

Once you’ve created the gross list of potential keywords, you need to determine the relative popularity of those search terms. Often paid search keyword research tools (such as Google’s Traffic Estimator) won’t have data because traffic for these terms is low. In some cases, there will be data, but it will show very low activity. That’s okay. Don’t pay too much attention to that. Rather, use tools like Keyword Discovery to determine relative historical popularity of your keywords. This will give you some idea of which search terms are used more often than others on your list. The actual raw number of searches for a given search term really doesn’t matter much.

When you’re doing this work, remember to enter the root word(s) or root phrase, letting your research tool return permutations and long-tail options. Not only will this give you a larger list to consider, but the results will often lead you down a path you hadn’t previously considered.

3. Make your draft picks

Now determine for which search terms your site will be optimized. In B2B keyword research, usually there will not be clear-cut winners. Instead, for each B2B product or service, there will be one or two relevant search terms that rank highly, three to five more that place as strong “seconds”, and a host of others that have good potential. Click here to continue reading the article at Search Engine Land

The B2B world is wrestling with how to effectively harness “word of blog” marketing—let alone the glittery new world of social media marketing. How can we use social media sites to create that viral buzz that sends awareness and sales soaring? We see what occasionally happens in the consumer market, and we want some of that.

Let’s be real, though. While that’s a great objective, the B2B world is still struggling with basic blogging, let alone creating something that goes viral on some social media site. Last year, Forrester Research found that only 29 of the Fortune 500 firms sponsored business-oriented blogs.

B2B blogging brings up a bunch of questions. Who’s going to write for the blog? Do we have enough content to support it? Will we continue to support the blog after a couple months? How do we control the brand in that environment? Will we publish negative blog comments? Who’s responsible for the blog? Public relations? Marketing?

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Local search results are great for B2B if your physical location is in the middle of the city you serve—and your prospects actually use search terms that include the name of your city. But what if you serve a broader region (e.g., Northern California)? Or what if your office is in a smaller town and serves the B2B needs of a larger city nearby (e.g., located in Gary, Indiana, but primarily serving Chicago)? With either, chances are you’re not going to show up in local search results because the geographical search term your prospect enters won’t match the physical location of your business.

Many B2B companies are business service companies and professional service firms that largely operate on a regional basis. Also, many manufacturers and distributors serve a limited geographical region because transportation costs prohibit economically shipping their products to locations further away. For many of these regional B2B companies, the majority of their revenues come from part of a state or from a multi-state area. How do you capture geo-specific search when local search won’t work for you?

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Many B2B companies are business service companies and professional service firms that largely operate on a regional basis. Also, many manufacturers and distributors serve a limited geographical region because transportation costs prohibit economically shipping their products to locations further away.

So how do you capture geo-specific B2B search traffic? You know, search phrases for what you sell that also contain some geographical term, like a city, state, or region. You can use some other methods, but SEO seems to be the best alternative.

Google Local and other local search tools work great, but you typically have to have a physical location in the stated geography. You won’t show up in the local results for a search phrase that includes “Chicago” if you don’t have a physical location in Chicago. That makes it tough if Chicago is one of your key markets, but your business is in a nearby city.

You could use geographical terms in your PPC campaign, but research shows B2B purchasers overwhelmingly first look at (and first click on) organic results. So while you may show up, your chances of getting click-through are not as strong as if you ranked highly in the organic results.

In my most recent article in the Strictly Business section of Search Engine Land, I give some practical tips on how B2B companies can best use SEO to capture more traffic and leads from geographically based searches.

If you’re not in sync with how your potential prospects look for your type of products and services via the search engines, it can absolutely kill your chances of getting found in the organic searches results. There are two key factors B2B marketers must consider when developing keyword search strategies for optimized websites.

First, remember you’re usually not talking to one buyer. A typical B2B purchase involves four, five, or more different people who ultimately influence the purchase decision. Sure, they share common organizational objectives—but they have unique perspectives, interests, agendas, and needs. The “technology” buyer may base their search on product and performance attributes, while influential “end-users” considers ease of operation, and the “economic buyer” looks at ROI. All use the web to research, evaluate, or vet business purchase decisions, and yet they may use completely different search terms relevant to their individual interests and concerns. An effective B2B keyword strategy considers varying search strategies.

The second force (more…)

When someone visits an online retailer to buy a book or a Polo shirt, he or she is probably pretty far along the path to a buying decision. Two, maybe three sites are checked for the price on the book, or the colors available for the shirt. But chances are, there’s not a lot of searching going on. The buyer simply wants to find that particular item, buy it, and get delivery as soon as possible.

In the B2B realm, the situation couldn’t be more different, for several very good reasons.

It’s a matter of time.

First, the vast majority of B2B purchases are not snap decisions. For major supplies and capital investments in particular, the factors influencing the decision unfold over time, and in many cases can ebb and flow with business realities. In the B2B buying cycle, it can be a year to 18 months or more from the time the possible need is first acknowledge to the time the “trigger is pulled” for purchase.

Throughout the entire process, starting at the very earliest speculation, information is being gathered and preliminary decisions are being made, at least informally. These prospects—prospects tiptoeing around the rim of your sales funnel—need to know about you early to put you in their consideration set. That’s what B2B SEO does. And why it matters.

It’s a complex issue, with more people involved in it.

Not too many things to think about when you’re buying a blue Polo shirt. And only your opinion matters. That’s not true for B2B purchases. The very nature of many B2B purchases requires significant knowledge and research in order to make the best purchase decision.
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The SEO purist may argue why anyone would ever want to use PDF content on a website for search purposes. The reality, however, is that many businesses have a lot of PDF assets. These may include sell sheets, brochures, white papers, technical briefs, etc. The purist simply says why not convert these to html? In the real world, not everyone has the time, budget, and expertise to do that. There may also be other “marketing” reasons. Perhaps a company wants its prospects to experience the content along with all the other brand elements inherent in its print materials. Whatever the reason, there are lots of PDFs available on the web, and you can optimize PDFs to get high-ranking search results. Here are some tips on the right way to do it.
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Perhaps nowhere is keyword strategy more complex than in B2B SEO. The lack of shared lexicons, the obscurity of most B2B brand names, the multiple parties involved in the purchase decision, and the extended nature of the buying cycle present unique challenges for B2B marketers. Here are some tips to keep you on course. (more…)

Although corporate brands are vitally important in driving B2B sales, 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.

Channel partners often face the heat of companies whose lines they represent. Why aren’t you selling more of our stuff? What did you do with all the leads we gave you? What’s our return on the co-op dollars we gave you? What are you doing to market our products?

Channel partners, on the other hand, often complain about the lack of support. We need more co-op dollars. Why don’t you give us more leads? The leads you give us aren’t qualified. What are you doing to help promote us?

Both sides are generally justified in their stance. The root issue, however, lies not in the money spent promoting channel partners, but in the effectiveness of channel partner initiatives. With all the evidence that search plays a huge role in B2B purchases, few B2B brands have made the investment to properly optimize their own sites for search, let alone optimize their sites to promote channel partners or help channel partners with search marketing. Yet B2B search marketing can be one of the most effective, cost-efficient ways to drive traffic to channel partners and generate leads and sales.

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Despite the key role it plays in B2B purchasing, branding seems to move further and further down the list of corporate priorities. In the drive to generate revenue in today’s ROI-driven world, don’t ignore the influence of corporate branding on B2B sales or focus search marketing solely on product offerings. In B2B, corporate branding drives customer acquisition, and search can be branding’s best friend.

Despite this, SEMPO’s State of Search Marketing, shows direct sales edging out branding as the primary objective of search marketers. In BtoB Magazine’s survey, 2007 Marketing Plans and Priorities, marketers were asked to indicate their top priority for 2007. Sixty-two percent cited customer acquisition, followed by brand awareness (20%) and customer retention (11%). Why the discrepancies?

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Obviously, getting your site to rank highly in the search engine results and getting searchers to click through to your site is one of the first objectives of B2B search engine optimization. But that’s just the beginning. You still have to turn the visitor into a customer or client.

In the B2C world, conversion (turning a site visitor into a customer) can happen in a matter of minutes. In the business-to-business realm, however, conversion can take months or even years—and it typically doesn’t occur online. So how should you think about conversion in the B2B SEO environment, and what can you do both to accelerate and measure it?

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Site visitors like content-rich sites. So do search engines.

It is surprising how often we run across companies that expect their existing sites to be found in the organic search results for a wide range of search terms their sites fail to adequately address. Sure, these companies may have products or services related to those search terms, but they haven’t created organic landing pages for those search terms. They don’t have content-rich sites. To be found for a specific search term, there needs to be an optimized landing page on the website that revolves around that search term. A landing page is the website page to which you want people to click through when they click on a search result for a specific search term.

Effective search engine optimization requires each significant page in a website have its own song, i.e., each page is optimized to specific search terms. 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. Even when terms appear to be related, for instance “healthcare consulting” and “healthcare consultant”, given the amount of individual competition in the search engines for these terms, each term will likely need its own landing page.

Suddenly, the task of creating a content-rich optimized website seems daunting; you may need to double or triple the amount of content on your site simply to have appropriate organic landing pages for your desired keywords.

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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.

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.