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Ask the Experts: Does SEO Work for B2Bs?

February 10, 2007
by Jennifer Grappone

Q: I’m a professional SEO. I have a potential B2B client who keeps saying: “Sure, online marketing works for B2C or just selling stuff on the Internet, but it doesn’t work well with B2B.” Is that true? And do you know of any studies that I can quote to show whether SEO works for B2Bs or not?

A: There are some very good reasons that SEO works for B2B (business-to-business) websites. The main reason is that targeting is the key to B2B website success. The total traffic for a B2B can be very small, as long as it’s well targeted. You don’t have to bring in thousands of users per day; you just need to bring in the right people. By contrast, with their bigger audiences, large B2C (business-to-consumer) sites often find pay-per-click advertising prohibitively expensive. Websites with a very focused niche are actually perfect candidates for SEO. As a bonus, SEO will help your B2B clients think about their users – what categories do they fall into and what are they looking for – so it can be a great part of a holistic web usability effort.

Of course, if you’re promoting a B2B site, your SEO strategy should be tailored for a B2B site. You won’t want to focus on general keywords; instead you may want to focus on more specific keywords like product names and descriptions.

In some cases, it will be harder to track SEO success for a B2B than for a B2C. This is because your conversions are not likely to be straight sales or any other quantitative value, but rather leads off the website, phone calls, or something even less tangible like branding. Further, the total number of people visiting your site is smaller than a typical consumer site, so you’ll have fewer opportunities to experiment with your SEO strategy through variations on landing pages or navigation.

We do know of one B2B study, which we quoted in our book, which states that “A 2004 survey found that in business-to-business (B2B) purchasing decisions, 63.9% of respondents stated that a search engine would be the first place they would go to research a product or service.(Source: Enquiro/MarketingSherpa).” Of course this is a couple of years out of date, but our strong suspicion is that these numbers are only going to go up, not down. One important takeaway is this: Visitors to B2B sites are using the Web for background research, not necessarily direct goal seeking as you’d see in B2C. Since this is the case, you as the SEO provider need to work hard up front to figure out how you are going to measure and track gains, and tie them to your SEO efforts.

One last thought: have you looked up any of this client’s competitors? In some cases, if your competition is using SEO in their marketing efforts, that’s reason enough for you to do it, too. You would hate for a competitor’s name to come up in a search for your product. (Ask your client whether they’d like to come up in a search for the term “myProduct vs theirProduct” and we have a feeling they are going to say yes!)

And lastly, think about how SEO can play into a company’s branding efforts and overall reputation. All companies, but probably B2Bs especially, should pay some attention to their online reputation and make sure that searches aren’t bringing up anything embarrassing or discrediting.

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Ask the Experts: Yahoo!/MSN Groups for Link Building?

January 15, 2007
by Jennifer Grappone

Q: Do you know if it’s valuable to post links on Yahoo/MSN Group sites? From what I can see, the home pages of the various groups are indexed, but the links pages typically aren’t. Have you heard of people doing this to assist in link building?

A: There are a couple of ways to think about the value of this technique.

First, if you’re thinking about a straightforward participation marketing approach, in which you set out in good faith to join in on discussions, give advice based on your expertise, and position yourself as a “person of authority” on a relevant subject, then there can be great value in posting links within group discussion. The chief value, of course, is that you are creating a positive awareness of your company for a targeted audience. Added to your thoughtfully written and useful information, a link in your signature might just entice some of those targeted folks to click through and visit your site. Participation marketing is time consuming, requires good writing skills and a thorough knowledge of the topic at hand. Incidentally, “thorough knowledge” is the reason that this kind of marketing is best done by a representative of the company itself, and is hard to farm out to a professional SEO.

Secondly, you might be wondering about the ranking boost you might gain from links posted to groups such as Yahoo and MSN. As you may be aware from reading our book, we are not the kind of searchies who follow the algorithmic importance of various linking techniques, because we are much more preoccupied with how these things affect the user. But, your question piqued our curiosity, so we took a few minutes to look. In the five minutes we spent looking at public and members-only Yahoo groups, we were drowning in spam postings and/or announcements from moderators talking about the proliferation of spam postings. Ick. Are the links indexed? Well, in the 15 minutes we looked into this, we couldn’t find hard evidence either way, but we suspect they aren’t. Not surprisingly, it appears that a group’s introductory page is likely to be indexed while the pages containing the actual postings are not.

What does this say to us? Well, it says that spam on forums is a huge problem, and if we realized that after looking for 5 minutes, then the search engines have already noticed it and have probably chosen to devalue or ignore links posted on these pages. It also means that the average group member is up to his or her ears in spam and won’t give the time of day to anything that’s not 100% appropriate and related to the topic of the group.

So, yes, there can be great value in being a useful and active member of a forum in your site’s topical community. But, in case you were thinking of tossing out random links (and we’re not saying you are!), don’t bother.

Ask the Experts: Does SEO Work for B2Bs?

Ask the Experts: Yahoo!/MSN Groups for Link Building?

Q: Do you know if it’s valuable to post links on Yahoo/MSN Group sites? From what I can see, the home pages of the various groups are indexed, but the links pages typically aren’t. Have you heard of people doing this to assist in link building?

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