As a B2B advertiser, the Yahoo!-Microsoft transition should be on your horizon as something fairly disruptive and as a good opportunity to direct some attention to your web properties.
The upcoming changes will affect both your site’s organic rank (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEM), so you’ll need to have a pretty sound strategy about dealing with all the shifts you’ll notice.
If you had Yahoo! ads running, moving those into the Microsoft adCenter will take some additional work re-writing them to the new character count and adherence to new editorial rules. A bigger impact will be directed straight at your advertising budget: minimum bids on Yahoo! are 1 cent, while on Microsoft’s adCenter, the minimum is 5 cents.
Tactical Advice
Do at least these few basic things, if you have to choose…
Expand your keyword lists & re-work ad content (singular and plural count as different keywords in adCenter; adCenter title is 25 characters, ad description is 70 characters).
Check your regional targeting – learn about the differences between how Yahoo deals with regions/countries.
Brainstorm ways to take advantage of real-time reporting available to you in the adCenter – you may be able to run some pretty keyed-in campaigns because you can see results as they happen, whereas Google still does not offer this.
Check Yahoo and Bing ranking in the next few months – figure out if you’ll compensate for low organic position with paid search and be fluid about your approach.
Experiment: If nothing else, schedule and plan to give your team time to experiment. As this transition proceeds, you will likely need to test and re-test until you find the sweet spot in targeting, creative, and offering.
Keep an eye out for blog posts on how other advertisers prepare and what they test. It may or may not be applicable to your case, but it may give you a fresh perspective on something to try.
Think Differently
The challenge in B2B paid search is that your buyers do not have the typical transactional mentality of a retail customers. You may need to do some lateral thinking to adjust what works best in paid search for retail to the B2B world – my two cents here is to think about smaller steps & paths to purchase through which you can funnel your audience.
For example, you may want to experiment with ads for:
whitepapers that are of greatest value (check your analytics reports and offer the most downloaded materials)
your webinars – recorded or live events
your online communities (grow these communities by encouraging participation)
etc.
Mindset of Search
The reason why your audience uses Google over Bing/Yahoo! is often overlooked. You may wish to spend some time characterizing your prospects, including where most of them enter your site and what they search for – on your site and in search engines. Learn their mindset and figure out the best ways to key into what they need, either by changing your site or by ramping up your paid search.
Would love to hear how you are preparing. Please share your best practices and advice with the rest of the community!
About the B2Bblogger: Rodica Buzescu (@rodica) is amarketing manager at Amazon Web Services. She enjoys combining interdisciplinary knowledge and various agency & B2B experience in digital marketing to solve larger marketing challenges. Rodica sometimes blogs on various marketing, management, and bigger strategy ideas at http://morphingthrough.blogspot.com.
The nutrition label lists the ingredients based on volume per package. Items appearing first on the ingredients list are most abundant in each serving. So if you’re looking for cereal that’s low in sugar, then you’ll want to make sure that sugar is low on the ingredient list or that it doesn’t appear at all.
This is where the nutrition label is like SEO copywriting. The keywords on which you’re optimizing your page should be the first few keywords in the meta title and description, as well as in alt image tags and on-page body copy… think up and to the left. This helps search engines determine relevancy of the search query to your web page. (There’s more to relevance than SEO copywriting, but it’s a necessary part of SEO.)
Take a step back, look at your copywriting and ask yourself the following questions:
For what 3-5 keywords are you optimizing the page?
Are those keywords located up and to the left on the page?
Are those keywords located in a headline or subhead?
Are some of those keywords in a hyperlink?
Do your images have keyword-rich captions?
Your SEO copywriting is like the cereal box. Think of the ingredients list as the meta data, which tells search engines what to look for. Make sure that your “ingredients” include the top 3-5 keywords on which you’re optimizing the page. The on-page content is like the front and back of the cereal box; make sure the on-page copy includes those same keywords in the places noted above.
Like a nutrition label, which tells you the percentage of fat and other things you probably shouldn’t have, keyword density tells you the percentage of copy that your keywords should comprise. It basically lets search engines know that you’re actually writing real thoughts in sentences and not simply stuffing a bunch of keywords on a page to trick the search engine into thinking your content is relevant.
You can use tools such as keyworddensity.com and googlerankings.com, which scan your
page content and assign a density number. Most search marketers recommend a density of 3%-5% and some as high as 7% on a page of about 300-500 words.
When it comes to SEO copywriting, your on-page copywriting should connect with the meta data. You don’t want to be the box of cereal that boasts low sugar when it’s the first ingredient on the nutrition label.
About The B2Bblogger: Joan is a B2B marcom consultant and copywriter with more than 15 years experience helping high tech and industrial companies generate leads and sales through integrated marketing communications including SEO copywriting, social media and website content. She can be reached at www.jdamico.net or through her blog www.integratedmarcom.blogspot.com.
“I don’t know how anyone can do competitive SEO without growing their social network experience.” This was a quote from Lee Odden(@leeodden), CEO of TopRankMarketing, at a PRWeb webinar. It got me thinking about B2B SEO and real-time search. B2B companies who aren’t active in social media could have what may become a gaping hole in their SEO program.
Google now displays social media content in its search engine results pages (SERP). Failure to make social media participation part of your integrated marcom program could reduce your visibility to the extent that your competitors are participating in social media. (To see if your competitors are participating, set up listening posts. Integrated Marcom Minute Sept. 2009.) If you’re not commenting on other relevant blogs or actively posting to your own blog, then you could be missing key opportunities to build your digital influence, which in turn influences search. I’m not just talking about blogs and comments, this includes Facebook posts, Twitter Tweets, social bookmarks… everything social.
Does real-time search trump PPC?
If you think real-time search doesn’t matter because you’ve already bought various keywords in your pay-per-click programs, you may want to rethink. Real time search is what’s happening right now. For once, it doesn’t matter if you or your competitors own a popular keyword or phrase. If people are talking about that keyword or term in the social sphere, the content containing the keyword or phrase will appear in the results.
Does this mean you don’t need to continue your PPC program on a given keyword? No, because you’re still getting 24/7 exposure to the keyword you buy. However, it does raise an interesting issue. The more active you are on the social sphere for a given keyword or phrase, the greater the likelihood you’ll show up favorably in the SERP.
Where is your B2B marcom program when it comes to real-time search?
Here are a few more resources on real-time search:
Google Real Time Search (Puts real time search into perspective relative to all the social media that B2B companies are beginning to explore such as Facebook and Twitter)
About The B2Bblogger: Joan is a B2B marcom consultant and copywriter with more than 15 years experience helping high tech and industrial companies generate leads and sales through integrated marketing communications including SEO copywriting, social media and website content. She can be reached at www.jdamico.net or through her blog www.integratedmarcom.blogspot.com.
Your customers are human. This one shouldn’t be new, but social networks (enabling direct conversations with buyers) help us to remember it.
Social media might not be a strategy…but neither is ignoring it.
Relationships: it’s still “who you know”.
Unfortunately, you can’t ignore your customers anymore. If you don’t manage your brand and customer experience, be assured your customers will (and with tools that can spread their message farther and faster than ever before).
Reputation with the right small audience is more important than merely building the largest possible audience.
Winning at SEO remains rooted in relevance (not keyword stuffing or SEO snake oil).
Nurture, nurture, nurture. Every lead should be nurtured with the goal of delivering winnable opportunities to sales. (Quality far outweighs quantity.)
Content has moved from messaging to conversation.
You can’t control the message, but you need to be part of the conversation. Be sure to listen as much as (or more than) you talk.
Learn your customer’s online habits … you don’t have to be everywhere … just where they are.
…and a final bonus idea, Get a Google Wave invite, it makes for great real-time collaboration. (We used it for this post, it rocked!)
Go ahead, tell us your favorites and share a few of your ideas for 2010.
At a very high level, SEO is comprised of linking, on page/meta data content and other website mechanics (e.g. redirects, trusted URL, etc.). This post speaks to the page content element that B2B copywriters need to know.
Start by examining your keywords… Many B2B companies underestimate the importance of this exercise. From a marketing standpoint, nailing your keywords and phrases is the foundation for your online marketing communications and content strategy. If you need to coach your marcom team on how to develop effective keywords, here’s a link to one of my newsletters on keyword selection, where you can download a worksheet to help you decide on the most effective keywords. Make sure you vet your keywords and phrases through a keyword tool such as Google or Wordtracker.
On-page SEO copywriting… Optimize your website pages for the keywords and phrases—and not all on one page. Group your keywords and phrases so that any given page is optimized for 3-5 keywords. Make sure that your meta title tags and description include the 3-5 keywords/phrases for which you’re optimizing a given page. For more about on-page SEO copywriting, see my article on boosting natural page rank.
Natural SEO works for blogs too… Apply these same rules to your B2B blog and watch page visits increase. Include keywords in your blog titles for two reasons… one, it’s good for on-page SEO; and two, the keywords in the title usually become part of the URL (especially if the keywords come at the beginning of the title). That means another boost for natural search.
Then, make sure the keywords in the title are also in the body of the blog. And if your blog post is lengthier (500+ words) break it up with H2 or H3 header tags that include a keyword if possible. But remember, keep it natural. Don’t force keywords in at the expense of good copywriting flow and tone. Start with good content and then see if you can work in a few keywords while keeping the tone and flow natural.
Connect with SEO experts…
Follow them on Twitter and subscribe to their blog posts. I’ve started a Twitter list of SEO folks, so go to @copywriter4u/B2B-SEO-pros to follow the list (it’s not comprehensive by any means, but it gives you a good start). The following websites have SEO news and information to which you can subscribe:
Again, there are many more resources on SEO. I culled the list above as I was learning SEO copywriting and thought you might find it helpful for starters. If you have other resources, feel free to add them here.
About The BtoBblogger: Joan is a B2B marcom consultant and copywriter with more than 15 years experience helping high tech and industrial companies generate leads and sales through integrated marketing communications including SEO copywriting, social media and website content. She can be reached at www.jdamico.net or through her blog www.integratedmarcom.blogspot.com.
By Tom Pick | Online Marketing Executive | KC Associates
With a lingering recession, the U.S. unemployment rate still near 10%, and uncertain prospects for a quick recovery, marketers need to keep two things in mind. First, that it’s important to continue investing in marketing through the downturn. And second, that funds will be limited and must be spent very carefully. So how should your prioritize spending for next year?
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – this is the ultimate no-brainer. Virtually every b2b buying decision involves some level of research on the web. Based on my own anecdotal research, natural search typically drives at least 40% and average more than half of all unpaid traffic to b2b websites. Buyers won’t buy from you if they can’t find you. Create helpful and link-worthy content, optimize your pages, and get other sites linking to yours in order to improve your site’s position in the search engines. There are lots of excellent articles on SEO that provide guidance and tips. If you don’t have in-house SEO resources, hire an agency or consultant, but either way, make SEO an ongoing priority.
2. Social Media – according to a study early this year by Forrester Research, 91% of technology b2b decision makers use social media in some form (blogs, video, customer reviews, social networking sites, Twitter, etc.). ROI may take time, and can be challenging to measure accurately, but your prospects are using these sites and talking about your industry, your competitors, quite possibly even your company. You can’t afford not to be part of that conversation. What’s more, social media supports SEO and even branding activities.
Start by listening to the conversations already happening, using a social media monitoring tool like Radian6 or Techrigy SM2. Keep up with the leading b2b bloggers by subscribing to the B2B Marketing Zone and regularly visiting this new site, B2Bbloggers.com. Get your company listed with b2b-focused social media site FYIndOut.com, and encourage your best customers to contribute reviews. Create content on a blog or produce videos, and promote using Digg, Twitter, and other social bookmarking and social networking sites.
3. It Depends – do you absolutely, positively need leads NOW or can you take advantage of the downturn to build your brand for the longer term? If you need immediate opportunities, search engine marketing (SEM) programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing provide a competitive ROI, make it easy to control spending, and can start generating results as soon as they’re flipped live. However, they are as “instant off” as they are “instant on”—the moment you pause or delete a campaign, the lead flow stops. These programs provide very little if any lasting branding benefit.
Public relations (PR) is pretty much the opposite—it produces limited immediate and direct results, but builds your brand in the eyes of prospects, the media, analysts and other influencers over the long term.
Ideally, do both.
So how do these different activities affect your visibility on the web? Consider the two broad categories of search types, “generic” searches (e.g. facilities management software) and branded searches (e.g. Acme Software Inc.).
For generic term searches, SEO helps get your site in the top results. Social media and PR support this by providing both more links to your website and more places, other than your site, where information about your company and products can be found. SEM gets you on the front page for any keywords you bid on, but only in the paid search results.
For branded searches, you shouldn’t need SEO or SEM—unless your site is truly horribly coded, it should show up well anyway. But this is where social media activities and PR can really help, because they can increase brand awareness and image leading to more searches for your branded terms.
The bottom line is that it’s critical to continue marketing through economic downturns. Online visibility, lead generation and brand-building are all important. By carefully spending scarce marketing funds on the activities above, you can continue generating leads in the short term while building brand equity for the long term, even in the midst of a stubborn recession.
About the BtoBblogger: Tom Pick is an online marketing executive with KC Associates (http://www.kc-associates.com), a marketing and PR firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, focused on b2b technology clients. He helps clients improve business results through search engine optimization (SEO), search marketing, interactive PR and social media programs. Tom also writes the award-winning WebMarketCentral blog (http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com), a blog about B2B lead generation, social media, interactive PR, SEO and search engine marketing.
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As a B2B advertiser, the Yahoo!-Microsoft transition should be on your horizon as something fairly disruptive and as a good opportunity to direct some attention to your web properties.
About the B2Bblogger: Rodica Buzescu (@rodica) is amarketing manager at Amazon Web Services. She enjoys combining interdisciplinary knowledge and various agency & B2B experience in digital marketing to solve larger marketing challenges. Rodica sometimes blogs on various marketing, management, and bigger strategy ideas at http://morphingthrough.blogspot.com.
About The B2Bblogger: Joan is a B2B marcom consultant and copywriter with more than 15 years experience helping high tech and industrial companies generate leads and sales through integrated marketing communications including SEO copywriting, social media and website content. She can be reached at 
he BtoBblogger: Tom Pick is an online marketing executive with KC Associates (
