May 2010 Archives

Last week we shared 5 SEO tips that can help increase traffic to your site and thus create new leads. This week, our SEO guru wants to share 5 SEO No-No's - tactics that will actually hurt your site and your chances to acquire new customers.

No-No 1: Hiding Text
Placing relevant keywords on your web pages is important for on-page SEO optimization, however, hiding your text so only the search engines can read it is a major black hat* tactic.

Do not:

• Put white text on a white background
• Shrink your text so it's barely legible
• Use CSS to hide the text on your page (unless done for usability purposes)

No-No 2: Duplicate Content
Content is an important part of an SEO strategy and without it, your site will not do as well in the search engines. However, this fact has encouraged some websites to duplicate relevant content found on other sites and post it on their own sites. This tactic is very easy to implement, but will almost always fail. If search engines find that your site or parts of your site contains the same words as another site that is already in their index, they will not index or show your site in the search engine results. After all, why would Google want to clutter their results with multiple copies of the same information? The lesson: writing unique content is the only way to go (and mad-libbing won't work either).

No-No 3: Buying Links
Building links to your website is one of the best ways to boost your search engine rankings. There are link brokers and SEO professionals who are hired to do this very job. Be very careful when hiring anyone to build links for you. Google makes it quite clear that they do not approve of buying links for the purpose of manipulating their algorithm and boosting search engine rankings. Obviously, search engines prefer that sites obtain links based on merit and relevancy. While it is hard for Google to tell if a link has been given or bought, it's not worth the risk of your site getting penalized. (We'll cover how to get links another time).

No-No 4: Keyword Stuffing
It's very tempting to stuff a ton of relevant keywords into your title tags, description tags and throughout your page. Don't go overboard. If you have a lot of keywords to target, build a lot of pages. In general, a page should only target 3 head keywords.

For example, if you have a site that sells shoes, your title tag should look like this:

• Good: Buy Men's and Women's Shoes Online - Find Cheap Shoes at our Online Store
• Bad: Men's Shoes, Women's Shoes, Cheap Shoes, Online Shoe Store, Shoes, Running Shoes, Kid's Shoes, Tennis Shoes

No-No 5: Dirty URLs
With so much focus spent on on-page SEO optimization for keywords and content - the actual URL structure of the page is often overlooked. Creating clean and clear URLs is also extremely important for a number of reasons. For one, search engines tend to have a hard time indexing and reading URLs that have long query strings. Secondly, keyword visibility in the URL helps to reinforce what your page is about. And lastly, visitors are more likely to click on and link to a clean URL - since it seems more legitimate.

Here's an example of why you should also focus on clean URLs:
 

• Bad: http://www.shoes.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=runningshoes
• Good: http://www.shoes.com/4/running-shoes.html
• Best: http://www.shoes.com/running-shoes/

*If you're curious about White Hat versus Black Hat SEO tactics - read a little more.
 

The lessons from the Boston session of B2B Marketing University continue to intrigue me. One that really struck a chord was Jay Hidalgo's opening presentation about the changing face of B2B marketing, so I wanted to expand on it a bit.

The driver of change is really the changing B2B buyer. New technologies and new means of interaction have really altered the way B2B buyers investigate, compare, and decide on major purchases.

Here's Jay's summary:

• Buyers are more educated and look to sales much further down the buying cycle
• Buyers are turning to online and social media as sources for decision making
• More than one buyer - buying units
• Looking to each other as sources of information

To those of us who operate in online purchasing circles, none of this is really breaking news. The problem is that even among businesses that should know better, many salespeople and marketers are still addressing buyers as if it's 2001. "You can go online and read our product spec sheets!" -- big deal.

Yes, Web-based research is important - Hubspot points to a study showing that 97% of business purchases are influenced to one degree or another by web sites. But if you're just recycling existing handouts and print content, you're missing a big opportunity to prove your value to potential clients.

How to adapt your marketing and sales approaches for today's buyers

1. Provide more valuable content through interviews, checklists, charts, videos -- content that you create just for your web site. Put the emphasis on education: helping prospects learn more about their upcoming purchase, what questions they need to ask, and how to compare their options. If your content is pure advertising, you can expect today's B2B buyer to ignore it - and potentially take you off their short list.
2. Change the tone of your conversation. Just because you have a prospect on the phone interested in a $20,000 piece of machinery doesn't mean you can get them to commit today. The bigger the planned purchase, the more you have to back off and help the prospect along their evaluation instead of pushing for an immediate close.
3. Instead of pushing for an immediate close, start gathering more information about the prospect's specific situation. Who else is involved in the purchasing decision? You should be ready to provide specific pieces of collateral geared towards key roles: IT, finance, legal.
4. Finally you need to pay attention to online and social channels where your buyers are communicating. Don't try to infiltrate every product forum or discussion board - but be aware of where they are and what people are saying there. Pick a social media point person to regularly monitor Twitter and blog posts for conversations about your business or industry. 

You'll never know if you don't ask
Knowing how your buyers are approaching their decisions can really help you adapt your sales process to today's purchasing climate. So one final piece of advise: ask them! Each month, try to talk to a couple of successful sales and -- if possible -- a couple of prospects who ultimately choose another vendor. Find out what sources of information they turned to, what they heard (good and bad) about your company during their research, and how they made their final decision.


This post draws on a great presentation by Annuitas' Jay Hidalgo - you can download the full presentation here (PDF).

Price is a critical factor in any purchase, even more the case when uncertain economic times lead to shrinking budgets, delayed decisions and competitors resorting to discounting to win deals.

When your prospect tells you that your product or service is too expensive, do not reiterate your sales pitch. Instead, ask your prospect to clarify. It's imperative that you understand why the prospect is objecting to the price.

There are several reasons why prospects voice price objections, each requiring a slightly different strategy. Some of the most common price objections are below.

Your prospect doesn't understand the value.
Price becomes an issue when your prospect doesn't fully understand the value that your solution can provide to their company. The cost appears to be far larger than the benefits.  Your focus should not be on your product or service but on the ROI your prospect will gain by buying it.

Frame the discussion around value and returns, rather than price. By focusing on the benefits that are most valuable to your prospect you will help them realize that your product or service will help solve their most pressing business issues. For example, ROI is a much better foundation for a sale than price. A 30% return on $1,000 product is better than a 5% loss on a comparable product priced at $700.

Other product benefits to focus on could be ease of use, customer support, shorter lead time, delivery, reduced hours, elimination of paperwork and efficiency. It is a simple formula:
value > price = sale.

Silverpop's B2B Marketing University was a great source information for anyone involved in marketing or managing a sales and marketing organization. (Or as Joe Moloney pointed out during the roundtable discussion -- "marketing and sales" -- marketing comes first in practice, it should come first in titles, too.) Here are some of the themes we picked up on -- we'll be covering them in more detail over the coming weeks.

B2B buyers are changing.
Presenters were united in saying that today's buyers demand a different type of interaction from the companies they purchase from. Jay Hidalgo from Annuitas quoted a DemandGen report that showed 83% of B2B purchases taking place without a traditional budget/set criteria/request RFP process.They're doing more research on their own, talking to other buyers, and generally learning far more about their purchase before they ever reach out to vendors.

As buyers engage sales people much later in their buying process, the marketer's focus needs to be on those buyers, not the corporation doing the selling. Complicating this is the fact that most significant purchasing decisions are made by committees or informal groups -- the days of the single decision maker are long gone.

Our own Jeremy Sacco and Liz McInnis are attending Silverpop's B2B Marketing University in Boston today. We'll have a full recap tomorrow, but for now, here are some learnings directly from the team:

• B2B buyers are changing: they're more informed than ever and turning to direct contact with salespeople much later in the process.
• MarketingSherpa says 70% of B2B pipeline leads are long term/nurturing candidates - but only 12% are sales ready.
• Focus of marketers needs to change; tools need to change; mindset needs to change -- adapt or die! (yikes!)
• Change mindset away from quantity to quality.
• Sales and marketing teams need better relationships and shared definitions of important terms.
• Your monthly newsletter is not a nurturing program!
• Buyer-centric marketing requires content that's specific, targeted - and of course, valuable.

That's it for now...more coming tomorrow!

Last week we shared a brief video about how an SEO optimized site (in this case, ours) can help you generate leads for your business. As promised, we talked to our in-house SEO guru in search of some quick tips to help your business generate leads through smart SEO tactics.

Here is what we learned:

1. Keyword research. You need to know what keywords your potential customers are searching on when they are looking for your product or service on a search engine like Google or Bing. Keyword tools from Wordstream and Google help you do the necessary research and give you keyword search volume estimates to help you understand which keywords are the most important to target.
2. Optimize your homepage for your best keyword and create additional landing pages that are optimized for the rest of your target keywords. For example, if you own a landscaping company, you'll probably end up with a landing page devoted to lawn mowing, tree removal, mulching, tree and shrub trimming and whatever other services people are searching for when looking for a landscaper. Be sure to use your target keywords in the page title tag, h1 tag and throughout your page copy.
3. Sign up for search engine local listings. Google, Bing and Yahoo all have local map listings that display local companies for searches. These are free and can show up at the top of the results - so make sure you submit your business.
4. Get Links! Links from other websites can boost the SEO power of your site. Submit your site to local business websites, directories and ask friends or colleagues to link to you from their websites.
5. Go local. If your company serves a specific geographic area, put your coverage area on your website. Your top coverage area should be in the title tag and a list of your coverage areas should be listed across your site in the footer or right navigation. Don't forget to include relevant zip codes since buyers often use zip codes - as well as cities and states - when searching.

Have SEO tips you want to share with our readers? Comment below!

Update (6/1/2010): We've posted 5 SEO Must Don'ts for your business - check it out!

Boston area marketers: Liz and I are both going be at B2B University on Tuesday to see what some of the smartest people in B2B marketing have to say about our industry. It's a free half-day seminar and looks like it'll be a great event. Come say hello -- and let us know what we can help you with.

*****
We talked about this recently, but web analytics powerhouse Omniture just released still more startling statistics about web marketers and ROI. In their recent study, 55% of respondents say they can't effectively measure marketing ROI. That's not a number online marketers should be proud of.

More quotes and info at ebizQ, including numbers on on social, video, and mobile marketing.

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Want to build up your arsenal of trade show tips? Check out Mike Thimmesch's list of 100 trade show lead generation ideas.

They range from very targeted - "32. Email invitations to a pre-show microsite with targeted messages and offers" - to basic but accurate: "8. Get a bigger booth." My favorite is 88: smile. Simply making sure your booth staffers are engaged and friendly can go a long way towards turning booth visitors into real leads.

Via Brian Carroll's B2B Lead Gen blog - he has some tips of his own to add.

*****

We're as green as the next guy, but this is a new concept for me: LeadCritic has an interesting guest post on recycling leads. We'll look into this as a future topic here, as well.

SEO is an incredibly important tactic to generate leads for your business. If you can optimize your site in the eyes of the search engines, you'll benefit greatly by showing up in the natural search results when a potential customer is searching for you.

Stay tuned for an upcoming post about SEO tips later this week!

In the meantime, we put together this quick video showing you how our SEO expertise helps us generate leads for our customers:

One of the fun things about generating over 60,000 leads per month is that we tend to get some requests that are hard to believe, and our storage containers requests have some of the best. Not content with using containers for, you know, storage, these buyers have come up with some unexpected applications.

These are all actual BuyerZone quote requests, edited only for clarity.

That entrepreneurial spirit
The costs of setting up shop can be a huge barrier to new businesses, so a little creativity goes a long way. These folks may have gone a little too far, though.

We are looking to construct a container hotel in New York. We are seeking quotes for empty containers that are from transatlantic freight ships. I believe these are the 40' x 8' variety.     

Because the cardboard box hotel is booked for months, this would be the next best thing.

Hope to use this as a glorified french fry/snack spot, with stove/oven/fridges, freezer, cap/esp machine, counters, cupboards, one double, and one regular sink, and storage space underneath. Any chance of a sliding glass door(to deck)?

Hard to imagine the word "glorified" being a good description of this little store.

I'm looking for a container to sell retail fireworks out of. Container must have double doors on one end and a single or double door on the other end. Container must have lights, electric, and phone connections.

Container must have prominent no smoking signs.

Today's prospects and customers want meaningful, valuable relationships with their vendors. Interactions that are thought-provoking, interactive and memorable will help you stand out from the competition and are critical in developing strong relationships. There's been an evolution from the 'expert for hire' to a trusted advisor.

Opportunities are won or lost based on the strength of your relationships and how well you demonstrate that you understand their business and the issues they are facing. Too often, sales people are focused on telling a prospect why their company is so great rather than really getting to know the client and listening to what their challenges are.

Remember, companies don't buy - people do.  Even in a high tech world, human touch can give you an edge.  Here are a few other reasons to focus on building relationships:

• Profitability. It costs less to sell to an existing customer than it does to find a new one.  Investing in relationships will increase the likelihood that new customers become repeat customers.
• Consistency. Repeat customers often purchase at predictable intervals, providing your business a steady cash flow. The ability to accurately forecast and count on revenue is critical to a business.  
• Referrals. The stronger your relationship is with your customer, the more likely they will be to refer you business. This is basically free advertising.
  
• Competitive edge. Building strong relationships with your customers creates loyalty, giving you a leg up on your competition. By taking your customers for granted you risk losing them to the competition.

Your customers are the foundation of your business. By building your relationship with them, you are making a long term investment in the success of your business. 

Let's face it - getting consistent, quality leads for your sales team isn't easy - but it's always at the top of the list in terms of need.

Here's a chart from MarketingSherpa which shows B2B marketers' greatest challenges:

Do your challenges echo this data? Have things changed for you since last year? Share your feedback in the comments below.