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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 Of course this is a couple of years out of date, but our strong suspicion is that these numbers are only going to go up, not down.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: Is Google Trends a Good Keyword…

October 6, 2006
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: How do you feel about using Google Trends as a tool for search term relevance and popularity?

A: Google Trends is a tool that allows you to compare the popularity for up to five keywords or phrases over a period of time. I think it’s a great idea, and I have played around with it during keyword reseach, but I haven’t yet found a way to make it useful in that way. There’s nothing wrong with Google Trends – it just isn’t trying to be a keyword research tool. It might seem premature to pick apart something that’s in early beta, because it may change at any time. But Google Trends is free, so I’m guessing that if you and I have thought of using it as a keyword research tool, then other folks are considering the same thing. Let’s see how it measures up.

The first thing to note is that, at this time, Google is only using a portion of its search results in the calculation of its trend data. So, it’s important not to put too much stock in the results you get.

Now, let’s look at some sample results. Here, I looked for a correlation between the words “halloween” and “candy” by entering the query: “Halloween, candy”:

My first impression is that Google Trends keeps too much important data hidden to be meaningful in keyword research. A keyword research tool has to give you some hard data so that you can make an educated guess about what’s worth your time and energy to target on your site. Google Trends displays a vague timeline, and gives you no indication of the number of searches that you’re looking at. The lowest point is labeled “0”, but what’s the top? 100? 100,000? Without that information I can’t act on what I see.

This is most confusing when you’re looking at two words with significantly different search volumes. In my “Halloween, Candy” example, I see the spike I expect around the same time of every year displayed for the word “Halloween” but not for “candy.” So I searched both words separately. The graph for “Halloween” looked about the same, but the graph for “candy” looked much different when viewed by itself. It was much easier to see separate peaks and valleys, presumably because the scale had been altered when this term was displayed on its own.

Another strike against Google Trends as a serious keyword research tool is that it doesn’t offer any keyword suggestions. For example, I queried: “Halloween, horror DVD”. Again, the spike for “Halloween” was clearly seen. But there was no corresponding spike for “horror dvd.” Because I’d already done keyword research elsewhere, I knew that the term “horror movie” is more popular than “horror dvd,” so I changed my search to “Halloween, horror movie.” There, I saw a nice correlation. Without built-in help from Google Trends, I had to rely on my own knowledge and prior research to find the significant trend.

And one more problem: Google Trends isn’t clear enough about how it’s filtering the terms you enter. Is it looking for exact matches of your terms? Is it returning data on broader terms that contain the phrase you entered? I played around by refining my query, for example, searching for variations on “emmy, red carpet”, using various configurations of quotes and plurals, and I was able to get different results. Google Trends also offers some helpful advice on advanced functionality, which includes some non-standard operators, such as the vertical bar. This is fun, but still I have the distinct feeling that I’m playing “guess the algorithm.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with that; it just isn’t great for serious keyword research!

It remains to be seen whether Google will continue its slow takeover of the world by making Google Trends into a robust free keyword research tool. But what can you use it for now? Well, Google Trends could be useful when you’re trying to nail down the timeframe of a seasonal word (i.e. should I start my Christmas promotion in October or December?). At this point in time, I think the best use of Google Trends for SEO purposes – other than fun – is to confirm a trend that you were pretty sure about in the first place.

Ask the Experts: Does SEO Work for B2Bs?

Ask the Experts: Is Google Trends a Good Keyword…

Q: How do you feel about using Google Trends as a tool for search term relevance and popularity?

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