 |
|||||
| Thoughts on optimizing sites, traffic, and revenues | |||||
November 13, 2004
SEM for B2B
Is search marketing an important aspect of online marketing for a company that is B2B? Of course it is. But in my experience more than a few B2B marketers don't think so.
They believe that high-ticket, long-cycle sales are the exclusive territory of their outbound sales staff. Apparently this was well proven at a recent NYC event for B2B Marketers. As MediaPost points out the panelists treated their audience to numerous myths and misperceptions, including this one:
MYTH: "People don't do searches for big ticket B2B products and services."REALITY: Let's go to Overture's Keyword Selector Tool. Below are tallies of searches conducted in Overture in September 2004:
*Enterprise asset management - 1,341 *Supply chain management software - 1,692 *Telecommunication infrastructure - 1,052 *Security management - 5,290 *Product life cycle management - 6,294 *Wireless solution - 3,409 *Document management services - 1,644
Okay, so these don't match the volume of searches for Ashlee Simpson. They do, however, represent qualified leads. Note that this is just for one search engine too.
The truth is that when people need to buy something - or learn about something (which they often do before they try to buy it) - they turn to search very early in the process. This is just as true for a Sarbanes Oxley compliance software as it is for a new digital camera.
Posted by Craig Danuloff at November 13, 2004 6:49 PMIf you look at the difference in traffic between google and overture, you can reasonably guess that those numbers should be multiplied by 14 to get the number of searches on google.
And that doesn't even scratch the surface of keyword permutations. I use this tool to create PPC keyword lists:
http://www.keyword-helper.com/
The tool takes separate lists of keywords and compiles them into thousands of possible permutations, and then I feed those keywords into my PPC ad campaigns.
I frequently find unexpected versions of the keywords are popular search queries in real life. "Product life cycle management" might become "life cycle products software", for instance (searched 119 times on Google last month). Complex keywords (3 words or more) have very large fringe tails like this. There are literally hundreds of permutations like that that are getting hundreds or thousands of searches per month.
Posted by: dilvie at January 9, 2005 5:45 AMThanks for the thoughts. I didn't know the multiplier was 14 - I always assumed 2 or 3. Your comments on longer search phrases is very good, and because few companies take the time to discover and manage these their not only richer but less competitive. - Craig
Posted by: Craig Danuloff at January 9, 2005 11:28 AMThakns, I too did not know about the 14 multiplication, though it was like 7.
Don;t forget that there is alos another really good keyword generation tool out there that also shows you a sampling of search activity.
http://www.wordtracker.com