GET YOUR SHARE OF SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC: How To Optimize Your B2B Website

GET YOUR SHARE OF SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC
How To Optimize Your B2B Website

by Barry Brown

A few days ago I participated in a webinar hosted by the Internet marketing firm Hubspot (http://www.hubspot.com/), which quoted some very interesting and somewhat alarming studies. The subject of the presentation was Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it really brought into focus the challenges of getting traffic to your website. If you have invested in building a website for your business and visitors are not magically appearing the way you expected, these statistics hold some of the keys to unlocking traffic for your site. I will try to present these in an order that makes sense to illustrate the hurdles you face when you market your wares or services to other businesses through the web… so let’s get to it.

98% of B2B (Business to Business) purchasers who source on the web start with a search on Google (http://www.google.com/).
75% of the sites visited by purchasers during a search are listed in the Organic search results. In other words, they are not paid listings but appear on the page based on their relevance to your search term as determined by Google.
The remaining 25% of site visits are generated through clicking the sponsored or PPC (pay per click) ads on the search return page, predominately page one of the search listings.
From the Organic listings that were clicked; #1 listing received 25% of the traffic, #2 got 12%, #3 hung in there with 8%, and #s 4 through 10 split another 24% of the click-throughs. That is 69% of the Organic traffic (meaning you need to be on the first page and as close to number one as possible).
Remembering that Sponsored PPC ads only get 25% of the total click-throughs; 7% of these went to the ad on top, 4% to #2, and down from there (meaning you may pay a premium for a small share of the total clicks, but you can get some traffic even if you’re bidding cheap and are not the top ad on the first page).
Most surprising of all, the more educated the shopper; the less they clicked on paid ads. Only 2% of searchers with a college level education clicked PPC ads.

So what does all this mean to your website if you want to expand sales through the web. You have spent the money to develop the website, you have tried everything to get traffic to it, but it has become no more than an expensive business card for your sales staff up to now. What do you do to make it pay? Assuming the studies quoted in the webinar are reasonably accurate, how do we interpret this ball of string into something useful? Let’s just start at the top and work our way down.

The idea that Google is the weapon of choice for Business to Business sourcing shows a true dominance in the preference of the purchaser for B2B sourcing. What that means to your website traffic is that you need to rank well on Google’s search engine to get a meaningful exposure to your market for Organic search click-through. The trust by purchasers for Organic search results shows the same mistrust for advertising that you battle in your media ads can be overcome by the comfort of getting information about your products from a trusted source. You gain instant credibility by chinning the bar for Google’s ranking criteria and the searcher expects not only good information on the website, but also an established supplier. This is good to know if you plan on investing in Search Optimization for your website. If you do well on Google you own a good share of traffic without complicating things by trying to rank well on all the Search Engines; you rank on the one that counts for B2B websites.

Next, do the less than exciting numbers on PPC (25% of total clicks) and the affinity for Organic Search by the more educated shopper mean you should not invest in Pay Per Click advertising? I don’t think so. First, based on the number of searches conducted daily, 25% of that number is still very significant. Further, if you commit the time and money to Optimize for organic search today, it will take anywhere from three to six months to get to the first page on Google. Even though “content is king” on the web, 75% of your ranking on Google is calculated on inbound links from other well ranked websites, blogs, web directories and so on. Link building takes time and whether you hire someone or do it yourself, this is where you should concentrate your efforts if you want your ranking to last. A lot of companies who try doing it themselves give up because they rely too heavily on content and may succeed for a time, only to fall out of favor without ever knowing why. Content may be king on the web but relevant inbound links are “conquering kings” on Google.

Reason number two to invest in PPC is that while you are optimizing, well-written text ads on Google will get traffic to your site. Even though it is still perceived as advertising and thereby somewhat less trustworthy to a potential customer, it is still thought of as relevant by Searchers. Google doesn’t make money until someone clicks an ad and they are very good at putting the right ad in front of the right eyeballs. Text ads are the fastest growing segment of advertising on the web even as growth in Display Advertising revenue continues to decline. Google’s formula for contextual text ads may just mean that the number of clicks will be lower, but they will be high quality visitors.

This quality versus quantity formula should not to be ignored for lot of reasons. If you can spend less on ads and get the same number of sales as higher traffic programs, you win. This is why web businesses advertise their sites on TV, radio and in print media even if they have no physical store a customer can walk into. The number of visitors may be smaller, but if someone visits the website they are doing so for a reason, much like someone searching the web. Quality traffic to your site trumps number of visitors and I believe in buying clicks just as much as optimizing the site for volume of traffic. Most companies keep buying clicks even after they secure high organic traffic to their websites.

So what we come away with is this, PPC ads are a valuable way to create both incremental and long term website traffic. There are lots of good blogs, books, clubs, white papers and paid memberships out there to help you learn how to get started. By all means place more trust in the Organic listings when you search for help and beware of anyone promising massive traffic overnight. This is a quality visitor game, not a high traffic game. You will learn this when you have to pay for all those clicks by people who were looking for something other than what you sell. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Start slow, measure often, and don’t run your ads to cast a wide net. Be specific about what you offer and experiment a lot to tune your ads for the customer you can convert to a sale. Google allows you to state how much you want to spend a day and removes your ad when your budget is met, reducing your risk during the startup.

If you set out to Optimize your website, remember that “content is king” but its true value is in engaging the potential customer once you get them to your site. Google gives your content 25% of the weight in ranking your site against all your competitors. The other 75% of your rank comes from the value lent to you by websites, directories, blogs and such that link to you from the outside. This is how you keep your rank on the search page after you get it. It is like a recommendation from someone who is considered important, or is regarded as an expert. So don’t just start soliciting links from anyone with a website. Think of it like this, the more prominent the site that the inbound link comes from, the better for you. If the content of a credible website calls you an expert and links to your site, that’s good. If a top CEO in your industry calls you an expert, quotes you, then links to your site, that’s great. You become a trusted site and maintain your rank for the long term. This is why it takes time to do, but is well worth the effort.

Here are a few tips for the journey if you pursue SEO for your website.

Start a blog and link back to your site. Also link to helpful and interesting content on your website from the text in your blog entries. Register your blog on the popular blog directories like Technorati (http://technorati.com/) to help people find it.
SEO isn’t rocket science and can be done yourself if you know what to do and can take the time to build relevant inbound links. Start by reading blogs and signing up for newsletters on the subject. Evaluate your site by using some of the great free tools out there like http://www.websitegrader.com/ from Hubspot and follow their directions to improve your content.
Invest the time and a little money in getting listed on web Directories like DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org/), Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/), or ZoomInfo (http://www.zoominfo.com/). These types of directories usually link back to your site and are credibly ranked. It’s a great way to get started link building and the networking opportunities will net you some other valuable links over time.
If you decide to hire an SEO firm, don’t hire anyone who calls you first (the good ones are busy and don’t do this), promises results tomorrow (good links take time to build), doesn’t feel that inbound links are important, or says that they don’t do the link building for you. That is the heavy lifting in most cases, so if they don’t do it, you don’t need them. You can expect to pay $2000 to $3000 a month for these services and depending on the quality of your site, a term of 3 to 6 months is common.
If appropriate, advertise your website on everything your company prints or publishes. Put it on all print media advertising, and build it into your email templates and newsletters. This may be small traffic, but it is always the right traffic.

As you can see, this is not magic and not that difficult, but it is exacting and requires some time if you are going to rank well on the Google search engine. There are no shortcuts that last because those guys at Google sit around all day figuring out ways to defeat the tricks in order to keep the trust of the people who use the Search and the advertisers who pay for all those ad clicks. Maybe this will help you understand why your competitor’s lousy website is on the first page of search returns while your beautiful site floats between page 30 and 50…And how you can move in on them in the next three to six months and take your place at the top. That was bad, just do it for the extra business. See you on the web.

Barry is Director of Marketing/New Business Development
at Trades Publishing, leader of the askMANDO.com
Development team and has over 25 years of experience in the
Resort Timeshare Industry and Resort Development and
Operations. To visit his blog on MANDOplaza, click on this
link (http://community.askmando.com/tienda/view/barrybrown).