B2B SEO

Recently, there was an article on MarketingSherpa (membership required) in which Martin Edic set forth 10 tips for optimizing PDFs for search. While access to the article requires membership, there was a posting on SearchNewz by Navneet Kaushal that summarized the ten tips presented, and the author appears to have posted a screenshot of the full article here.

While the tips mentioned in the MarketingSherpa article are mostly accurate (there are some inaccuracies regarding duplicate content, and stuffing meta keywords has been irrelevant for years), the article clearly missed some crucial factors in terms of optimizing pdfs for search. Among other things, the article failed to mention tagging content, specifying the reading order of PDFs, and how to influence meta descriptions.

Sure, it’s great if you can get PDFs indexed and perhaps rank well, but if you don’t know how to specify the reading order and influence meta descriptions, there’s little likelihood that anyone is every going to click on the PDF in the search results. If that’s the case, what good is a high-ranking PDF?

For a much more in-depth and illustrated article, read What you don’t know about optimizing PDFs can hurt you. It’s a substantial article that contains 17 tips regarding how to optimize PDFs and several screen captures to help you understand the issues.

I wrote about how B2B marketers can influence geo-specific search in a recent Search Engine Land article. Although Local search results are generally not as important for many B2B marketers as they are for a retail enterprise, some B2B companies serve a defined market and can benefit greatly from Local search.

In the recent months, there have been several changes in the Local search results. In January, Google started displaying 10 Local results instead of three, and it started embedding its Local search results into web search results (see Blended Search: Implications for B2B Search Marketing.) Yahoo has made changes as well. Recently, Matt McGee posted a great interview he had with Yahoo’s Brian Gil regarding Local search on Yahoo. Check it out.

A few weeks ago, there was a lively exchange on Search Engine Land about using the “nofollow” link attribute to sculpt PageRank. Shari Thurow, in her article You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice, essentially railed on SEO practitioners for employing this practice, which respected expert Stephan Spencer describes and advocates in his article Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact.

If you do not believe that a page’s content is important, then don’t link to it. Better yet, remove the content. If you believe a web page’s content is important, then link to it and do it in a way that makes sense to your end users, your site’s visitors. I think it is very odd to put a nofollow attribute on pages within your own site. Essentially, you are saying that you cannot validate your own content…you advocate giving users one information architecture and search engines a different one?

Shari’s comments regarding the use of nofollow seem to imply some sort of bait and switch tactic that would not only fly in the face of search engines, but would be deceitful in some way to site visitors. So many people have cited Matt Cutts’ position that there is no problem with this practice that I won’t bother citing more. However, for those fearful of employing the practice, Matt indicated that employing such practice in no way even serves as a red flag to Google. Secondly, how could such a practice be deceitful in some way to site visitors? When the visitor is on the site, they have no idea which links have the nofollow attribute; they can go anywhere the navigation allows.

While it would be great if every page had the same high value to search engines and site visitors alike, that’s simply not reality for the vast majority of sites—even if it has been optimized for human usability. There are many pages that have real value to site visitors but marginal value to site owners in terms of PageRank or being included in search engine indices.

So what links should you nofollow? (more…)

I recently got back from SMX West in Silicon Valley, one of the premier events in search marketing. While there I attended many great sessions and also spoke as part of the session on B2B search marketing. Also speaking were Ben Hanna, Vice President of Marketing for the B2B search engine, Business.com, and Patricia Hursh, president of SmartSearch Marketing.

Many of the sessions on the first day focused on the implications of blended search on search marketers. Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal has a good wrap-up of the first session re blended search content at SMX West. Blended search (also called “Universal Search” by Google) refers to the practice of web search results including other types of search results, such as local, blogs, news, video, images, etc. We’re already beginning to see this in Google search results. The search engine Ask has multiple types of results on the search results page, but these results are clearly segmented into their respective sections on the page. On Google, however, you can see more images, news, video, local and the like actually embedded within the typical web search results.

No longer will the top ten Google search results always be ten links to the typical web page. If Google deems a video to be of strong importance and relevance to your search term, you may find a link to that video showing up as perhaps the third search result when doing a web search.

This represents both increased marketing competition and opportunity for B2B companies. Nothing really changes for PPC, or paid search. However, blended search results have significant implications for organic search. On the one hand, often there may not be 10 organic search results for web pages. It may no longer be good enough to be in the top 10 web search results. You may have to be in the top 8 to get on the first page, because you may also be competing with news items or video.

On the other hand, this creates opportunity for smart B2B search marketers. If you’re having trouble getting high rankings in Google for web search results, you may have far less competition creating highly relevant and authoritative content via video, images, or news that could get embedded in the top search results for your keywords.

This isn’t to say that just creating a B2B video geared to a specific keyword will get you a top result in web search. If only marketing were that simple. Google’s goal is to deliver relevant and authoritative content for a given search term. Therefore, the content needs to be good, and it will help if other respected, authoritative sites link to that content. Finally, you’re also going to need to optimize this alternate content properly. For instance, unless you encode and optimize a video asset for search, Google won’t be able to tell exactly what that content is.

Search engine optimization continues to evolve. It’s on to a Search 3.0 world. And there’s plenty of opportunity in that world for B2B marketers.

Sometimes you just have to wonder, what were they thinking?

All of us who write articles and blog postings have had our work stolen by others who pass it off as their own. But the brilliance of this thief is stunning. So dumb, it’s funny. Nothing like leaving your business card at the scene.

A pingback came through on an article on this blog entitled, “B2B Search Marketing: Loose the Lingo, Remember the Buyer.” You can see the comment on the article by clicking here.

The pinkback was a verbatim excerpt from the article to which the comment related. Of course, there’s the link to the website of the person who commented on the article.

When I clicked on the link, I was taken to the person’s blog where my blog posting appeared verbatim, in its entirety, with just a few words added. Of course, there was no attribution or reference, and the link to my posting was buried in body copy with anchor text of “b2b marketers.” Below is a screen capture.

Of course I wondered whose blog this was, so I click on the “About”,

that told me it was a blog run by Dinkum Interactive, a Philadelphia search marketing company.

I really got a kick out of their tagline, “Genuine Search Engine Marketing”. I never new what “dinkum” meant (actually never heard of the word), but their website points out that it’s Australian, meaning genuine, real.

I think not.

In the pursuit of boosting traffic, B2B marketers often search for the most popular keywords, those that will drive a large number of visitors to the site. In doing so, one often fails to recognize (and optimize) obscure, high-value keywords that can lead to a long-lasting stream of ongoing business from customers. Many of these keywords may not be available for PPC, due to their low search volume. However, they potentially represent millions of dollars to be captured via B2B search engine optimization. (more…)

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…)

B2B marketers use paid and organic search to get visitors to their sites. Once a visitor is on the site, the objective is to capture and evaluate lead information. This lead information is often generated through registrations for white papers, case studies, newsletters, free trials, research data, etc.

But what happens if there aren’t many registrations? You need to look at your web analytics to determine whether the cause is lack of traffic or lack of conversion. You may find that you have lots of visitors who are interested in downloading something from your site (they go to the download page), but few people complete the registration form. Perhaps you’re asking for too much information too soon. Perhaps the perceived value of the download information isn’t commensurate with visitors’ willingness to provide registration information. If this is the case, you need to ask for less information or increase the perceived value of the information being offered to the visitor.

But what if you’ve already done this? You may need to strip it down to the minimum. Perhaps only name and email address. However, here are a couple things to keep in mind.
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Business.com recently released 2008 B2B Search Marketing Strategy Guide: Advice from the Pros, a white paper that cites industry stats and advice from those in the search marketing business who also serve B2B clients. The white paper is free with registration.

Distilled from survey responses from 144 search marketing agencies currently managing B2B client campaigns and insights from Business.com, the Guide includes the following:

How B2B search marketing differs from B2C (also see our article on the subject)
Top 10 tips for improving B2B paid search campaigns
Top 10 tips for B2B SEO
B2B search marketing strategy checklist

The Guide also includes a B2B search marketing agency directory, including agency services, location and contact information.

In the United States, finding a supplier is relatively easy. There are trade shows, industry pubs, numerous good general and vertical search engines. But as any company trying to set up operations in China knows, getting things done there can be a little more difficult than in the western world. If something goes wrong with one of your offshore suppliers, finding an adequate replacement can be difficult. Far less companies there have their own websites and the overall business information infrastructure is not as robust.

One of China’s solutions is Alibaba.com. Described as the “online dating service for global business,” Alibaba boasts nearly 25 million members, field sales and marketing offices in more than 30 countries, and more than 4,400 employees. On the site, you can search for just about anything, in any country. And while you may not have heard of it, it’s one of the most popular B2B sites in the world. Currently, it has an Alexa traffic rank of 167, meaning that, per Alexa, only 166 sites on the web have more traffic.

Last week, Alibaba.com went public raising nearly $1.5 billion for the company. Google raised $1.9 billion in its IPO.

On the initial day of trading, Alibaba’s stock price tripled. And while some of the initial exuberance has subsided, the stock currently is double its initial offering price.

If you’re doing B2B globally, whether you’re buying or selling, Alibaba is another search engine you need to consider.

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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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.

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.

So many search engine optimization efforts (and SEO practitioners for that matter) seem to be focused solely on ranking. Companies and practitioners alike seem to be happy with good ranking in the search results. But that’s just the beginning. Searchers don’t click every search result. They choose which ones offer the most promise…and only a portion of those links clicked on will ultimately be considered as a potential source for a B2B purchase.

Good B2B search engine optimization has vital components beyond ranking. First, getting the searcher to click on your search result. And second, making sure you deliver on the expectations of the searcher after they click through to your site.
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