Business-to-Business Search Engine Marketing: A Largely Untapped Marketing Tool

I’m in the search engine marketing business, so sometimes it’s easy to forget that most people don’t really know the industry exists, how useful it is in business-to-business marketing, and what a valuable marketing tool it is. can offer SEO. be generally. However, the fact is that a disturbing number of business executives couldn’t tell the difference between SEO Outsourcing and REO Speedwagon (although most would probably agree that neither sounds particularly good*). In fact, when I explain that I work at a search engine optimization company that focuses in part on business-to-business marketing, most people instantly assume that I have a search engine of my own and am somehow trying to to compete with Google. I’m flattered until I see the pity in his eyes.

Even those familiar with search engine optimization have common misconceptions about the value of SEO in business-to-business marketing. I often come across prospects who understand that achieving a high search engine ranking is a valuable marketing tool that can impact a business’ bottom line, but mistakenly believe this is true only if that business actually sells. something online. Could not be farther from the truth.

While eCommerce businesses can greatly benefit from SEO as a marketing tool, there are many factors in search engine optimization that actually favor B2B businesses in terms of overall channel benefit.

The technology

Large e-commerce sites have thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, of individual product pages. While performing SEO on such sites does not (thank goodness) involve manipulating each individual page, each page element to be used for SEO benefit (titles, headings, text, and meta tags) should enter thoroughly. a database It is very rare to find that the existing database that a company has for each of its products contains all the necessary elements to use SEO as a successful marketing tool.

Once all of these items have been added to the database, you need to make sure that the server is working as it should. Then you need to make sure that the search engine spider can crawl each of the pages, so the link structure often has to be manipulated.

Using SEO as a marketing tool in business-to-business marketing is usually much easier, since a standard B2B site is usually built using simpler technology and the individual pages physically exist on the server. In this case, each page is optimized for some terms relevant to the business. While a good SEO company will spend more time on the marketing aspects of a B2B campaign (the overall goals of the initiative and the key phrases that will attract the right type of visitors to your site), the actual implementation of the necessary elements for the SEO success is usually much simpler.

average sale in dollars

There is a practical price limit, which varies from industry to industry, beyond which people feel uncomfortable buying online. B2B businesses typically have a higher dollar average sale than eCommerce websites, making it much easier to justify the cost of any effective business-to-business marketing tool. While a visitor to an e-commerce site can earn $12 in revenue from buying a cup of coffee, a visitor to a high-end B2B website can be worth millions. No need for Alan Greenspan to do any number crunching: the higher the dollar average sale, the fewer visitors you need to justify the cost of SEO as a business-to-business marketing tool (as long as a certain amount of visitors actually leads to a dirty ).

relationship value

The people who run e-commerce sites like Amazon are incredibly smart, and they know that almost every product they sell online is highly commoditized. That’s why they put so much effort into improving the visitor experience on their websites with tools like personalization and one-click shopping. They are trying to develop buyers for life. B2B companies do not have this problem. By using a successful business-to-business marketing campaign, the visitor you attract to your site with this marketing tool could be more valuable in their lifetime than thousands of e-commerce buyers. Offline sales require offline relationships, and personal relationships are easier to maintain, no matter how many bells and whistles an ecommerce company may add to its site.

differentiators

There is another reason why SEO is often even more effective for business-to-business marketing than it is for e-commerce sites: no matter how beautiful the website, how secure the checkout, and how big the name. of the company, the price will always be the main factor. differentiator when items are purchased online. How else to explain the popularity of online shopping comparison sites like Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag and Shopping.com (to name just a few)? When it comes to business to business, marketing is crucial. In a world where prices are rarely listed online, a B2B company almost always has the opportunity to differentiate itself on its own terms after initial contact is made. With the right marketing tool like SEO, a B2B business can easily stand out from the crowd.

Using SEO as a key marketing tool

Ecommerce companies are more easily adopting SEO as a business-to-business marketing tool because they are technologically savvy and because their businesses already depend on the Internet for survival. However, e-commerce companies only represent a small fraction of the number of companies that actually exist. There are many B2B industries where there is currently little to no search engine competition, and those that move first and use SEO as a key marketing tool will reap the greatest rewards.

*This annoys me as both a search engine marketing company owner and a fan of REO Speedwagon.