In this report:
Search Engine Marketing: An Overview
Three related areas of search engine marketing
exist in the B2B marketplace today:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) for keyword
phrases (also known as website optimization)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) keyword textbox advertising
- Keyword sponsorship text links
These online search engine marketing resources are proving to be some of the
most cost-effective and measurable means today of generating
qualified leads. Many Internet fads have come and gone in the last
decade, but the one constant has been the desire of Internet users
to quickly and efficiently find relevant and important information.
In the early days of the World Wide Web when only a few
thousand websites existed, hand-edited directories, like
Yahoo.com, which began in 1994 as the first website of its kind, provided a
concise listing and categorization of practically every website
online.
As the Internet grew exponentially in the late-1990’s, robotic
search engines, such as Alta Vista, Excite and Lycos, began to
gain popularity because they were able to visit and index many
more websites than was humanly possible. Then Google.com came online
in September 1999 and everything changed.
Google’s founding engineers developed software robots (known as
"bots" or "spiders" that "crawl" the Web looking for sites) and
algorithms that accurately determined the relevancy of many more
web pages than any other engine. As word spread about Google’s
quality and quantity of listings, the Internet populace flocked to
its site to access the most up-to-date and relevant database of
websites that existed. Through its own website and its
partnerships, Google now delivers results for approximately 45% of
all Internet searches.
The Google Economy and the Big 3
The importance of Google in today’s business environment should
not be underestimated. In the Information Age (referred to as the
‘Google economy' by the New York Times in December 2002), the
single source for the most important global information wields a
great deal of power. BtoB Magazine named Google the $1
business-to-business website and the $5 B2B ad property in any
medium, online or off. The trademarked Google brand has become so
pervasive in our society that it is now facing the prospect of
becoming a generic term for Internet search. The pronoun Google is
now also used as a verb, as in "Did you Google it yet?"
Google and its main competitors for supplying search results, Yahoo! and MSN, have
leveraged the power of their multi-million daily users by selling
highly targeted keyword sponsorships and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
to help businesses reach their best markets.Google, Yahoo and
Microsoft's very popular MSN.com website are
commonly referred to as the "Big 3" search sites.
Website Optimization: No Tricks or Secrets - Just Acquired Knowledge
Website optimization is an art and science that has been
misrepresented during the last few years. Though many people who
make their living optimizing websites would tell you that they
know all of the tricks to obtaining high rankings on Google and
the other major search engines, no tricks exist to help you obtain
the best rankings for your company’s most important keywords.
Tricks will only get you permanently blacklisted by Google.
Successful optimization combines known methods of coding a web page (science)
with a writing style (art) that integrates the results of
extensive research (science) to determine the best keywords and
phrases to target along with a compelling story about your
expertise. Several other factors, including the number of other websites
residing on your host server and the number of external links to your
site can contribute to higher search engine rankings.
However, the most important, and frequently overlooked, aspect of
successful search engine rankings is the contents of your website.
One of the most amazing aspects of the algorithms devised by
Google and others is the ability to decipher the contents of a web
page and determine its relevancy to a particular keyword search.
Another artful aspect of optimization is knowing what type of
content is well-received by both the spiders and your site
visitors. Likewise, knowing how to entice site visitors to
complete and submit an RFQ is an important ability when writing
and designing a website.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Vs. Keyword Sponsorship
Targeted keyword sponsorship allows a business to buy an important
keyword or keyword phrase. Every time someone searches for that
word or phrase, the sponsor’s listing appears as a highlighted
text link at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This type of
marketing can be very expensive - thousands of dollars a month for the
most popular phrases - because you pay to be listed whether or not
your listing is clicked.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a less-expensive means of selectively
targeting an audience, but it requires bidding in an open auction
to secure the top listings, which appear as highlight textboxes on
the side or the top of a search results page. This type of advertising
is fairly cost-effective because you only pay when someone clicks
on your ad to view your website and you can set monthly
expenditure maximums to fit your budget. You
can also easily calculate your ROI with this program.
However, to maintain the top positions for your pay-per-click
keyword or phrase, you need to constantly monitor the current
auction prices and adjust your bid as necessary, which can be very
time-consuming. Also, with the rapidly rising popularity of this
program, the bidding price for popular keywords and phrases can go
as high as several dollars per click, whether or not that click
turns into a qualified lead or sale. In addition, a pay-per-click
ad is subject to abuse by unscrupulous searchers and your
competitors, which can be costly.
Sponsorship and pay-per-click programs have, in many cases, proven
they are effective means of generating targeted website traffic.
However, statistical and anecdotal evidence indicates that traffic
generated by sponsored listings and pay-per-click text ads is a
small percentage of the traffic produced by being well-ranked in
the organic, free search listings - usually as a result of website
optimization.
Whether To Optimize, Sponsor or Advertise - That is the
Question
As a first step in developing a search engine marketing program,
we usually suggest optimizing a company's website to
obtain high search site rankings for their most important keyword phrases. This
is the most logical first step because, if you later decided to
participate in either a sponsorship or pay-per-click program, the
site will be ready to deliver very specific messages to the
tightly targeted viewers that click through the paid links to
visit. The pages of an optimized website are developed with the
intent of getting the viewer to take action - to make contact with
you - before leaving the site.Another reason we recommend
optimization first is that the click-through rate for sponsored
and pay-per-click listings is only about 10% of that for the top
organic listings obtained through optimization (or by sheer
luck based on its highly-relevant contents).
Because many B2B companies have several lines of products and
services, and each line has many associated keywords and
phrases, optimizing your website could eventually become a very
large project. However, building the ultimate website does not
need to be completed immediately in one phase. Research will
determine the most potent keywords for your company, so your website can be optimized for the
most popular keyword phrases first, followed by an
incremental process of adding other potent keywords while maintaining and
improving the initial optimization.
The Benefits of Website Optimization
The benefits of website optimization are both immediate and
long-term. The immediate benefit is that your company will have a
website that is a much better reflection of who you are and what
you do. With the input of your sales team, the site will serve as
a valuable selling tool for both the audience that finds the site
via a search engine or the audience driven to the site via your
other integrated marketing communications and lead generation
tactics.
The next benefit that will result from optimization is that your
site should, approximately four to ten weeks from posting, begin
to achieve high rankings on the major search engines for your
designated keywords. These high rankings allow you to occupy some
of the most valuable real estate in the global B2B world – the
first few pages of Big 3’s search results. Having achieved this
goal, you should shortly thereafter begin to receive a stream of
phone calls and emails requesting further information and quotes
for your products and services.
The two main long-term benefits of optimization are: First and
foremost, you will increase your site traffic and your responses
from site visitors, which should lead to increased sales. Second,
through increased site exposure and traffic, you will increase the
awareness of your company and products within your targeted
markets.
An additional benefit is that – because effective optimization
requires a little continual maintenance – your website will be
kept up-to-date and will grow to be an extensive and valuable
resource for your prospects, customers and staff. An extensive
website that establishes your company as the foremost experts in
your industry, combined with top
search engine rankings, will help your company attain a position as a leader and innovator
within the industries you serve and amongst your peers.
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