I'm in the business of search engine marketing, so it's sometimes
easy to forget that a majority of people don't really know that the
industry exists, how useful it is in business to business marketing, and
what a valuable marketing tool SEO can be in general. However, the
fact is that a disturbing number of business executives could not 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 that I am
somehow trying to compete with Google. I'm flattered until I see the
pity in their eyes.
Even those familiar with search engine
optimization have common misconceptions about the value of SEO in
business to business marketing. Frequently, I encounter prospects who
understand that achieving a high ranking on a search engine is a
valuable marketing tool that can make an impact on the bottom line of a
business, but mistakenly believe that this is true only if that business
actually sells something online. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
While e-commerce companies can and do benefit tremendously
from SEO as a marketing tool, there are many factors in search engine
optimization that actually favor B2B companies in terms of overall
benefit from the channel.
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
involve (thank goodness) manipulation of each of the individual pages,
each of the page elements that will be used for SEO benefit (titles,
headers, text, and meta tags) have to be painstakingly entered into a
database. It is very rare to find that the existing database a company
has for each of its products contains all the elements necessary to use
SEO as a successful marketing tool.
Once all of these elements
have been added to the database, it is then necessary to make certain
that the server is performing as it should. Then, you must ensure that
each of the pages can be crawled by the search engine spider, so the
linking structure often must be manipulated.
Using SEO as a
marketing tool in business to business marketing is typically much
easier, as 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 a few terms relevant to the
business. While a good SEO firm will spend more time on the marketing
aspects of a B2B campaign (the overall goals of the initiative and the
keyphrases that will bring the right kind of visitors to the site), the
actual implementation of the elements necessary for SEO success is
usually much simpler.
Average Dollar Sale
There is a
practical price limit, which varies from industry to industry, beyond
which people become uncomfortable buying online. B2B companies
typically have a higher average dollar sale than e-commerce websites,
which makes it much easier to justify the cost of any effective business
to business marketing tool. While a visitor to an e-commerce site
might garner $12 in revenue from the purchase of a coffee mug, a visitor
to a high-end B2B website is potentially worth millions. It does not
take Alan Greenspan to crunch the numbers--the higher the average dollar
sale, the fewer visitors you need to actually justify the cost of SEO
as a business to business marketing tool (provided that a certain number
of visitors actually lead to a sale).
Value of Relationship
The
people that run e-commerce sites such as Amazon are incredibly smart,
and they know that almost all of the products that they sell online are
highly commoditized. This is why they devote so much effort toward
enhancing the visitor experience on their websites with tools like
personalization and one-click shopping. They are trying to develop
lifetime buyers. B2B companies don&t have this problem. By utilizing a
successful business to business marketing campaign, the visitor you
attract to your site with this marketing tool could be more valuable
over a 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 e-commerce company
might add to its site.
Differentiators
There is
another reason that SEO is often even more effective for business to
business marketing than for e-commerce sites--no matter how beautiful
the website, how secure the checkout process, and how big the company
name, price will always be the primary differentiator when items are
purchased online. How else to explain the popularity of online shopping
comparison sites such as Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag, and Shopping.com (to
name but 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 the initial contact is made. With the right marketing tool,
such as SEO, a B2B company can easily stand out from the crowd.
Using SEO as a Key Marketing Tool
E-commerce
companies are more readily embracing SEO as a business to business
marketing tool because they are technologically savvy and because their
businesses already depend on the Internet to survive. However,
e-commerce companies only make up a small fraction of the number of
companies that are actually out there. There are many B2B industries
where there is currently little or no competition on the search engines,
and the ones to move first and use SEO as a key marketing tool will
reap the highest rewards.
