Contributing to your Web site's traffic

Sometimes the right search engine can make all the difference

Industrial Distribution - June 1, 2005

Julie Mason

At some point, every company looks at its Web site with frustration and disappointment, wondering why the site isn't delivering the traffic they expected. You know what your site should be doing—generating leads, educating the market, promoting your products/services, or a combination of each—but the traffic just isn't there to generate the effect you're looking for.

E-mail blasts and advertising are traditional answers for driving traffic, but these marketing tools often leave a sizable hole in a company's marketing budget and are often difficult to evaluate in terms of ROI. While these tools are certainly effective and should not be disregarded, leveraging search engines in your marketing plans are one of the quickest and most cost-effective ways to drive traffic to your site. E-marketing should create a funnel effect, driving traffic to your site and letting the site do the selling or educating.

Industry-specific search engines offer the most value, particularly if you're working with a fixed budget. These focused search engines do the pre-qualifying work for you, so right off the bat, you can anticipate a much higher quality of click throughs, rather than the tire kickers you may get from the large, general purpose search engines. Some industry-to-industry search engines have pay-per-click packages with the Google's and Yahoo!'s to drive additional, qualified traffic to their sites. Listing with such an engine gives your site the qualified traffic expected from an industry specific engine as well as pre-qualified traffic culled from the huge reach of a mainstream search engine.

Once you've decided which engine to work with, take a look at how they list companies. Are they free listings, sponsorship packages or strictly advertisers? A few of the larger industrial search engines offer the initial listing of your company, product categories and demographic region free of charge. Once you've listed your company details, some specialized engines allow you to post company profiles and create mini splash pages, or create customized product categories (often referred to as priority listings) for low cost. If you'd like to test the waters, try before you buy—most search engines will let you have a no-obligation trial period for a very low cost.

Converting your physical catalog into an online, keyword-searchable file is another service select search engines provide. There is a cost involved here, as well. However, once the catalog is electronic, it can be seen by visitors to that search engine which will take them directly to the right page of your catalog.

Long before tactics and dollars enter into the equation, however, a clear understanding of what you want your site to do should be decided. Should it generate leads, educate, promote, or a combination of all three? If prospective buyers are being driven to the Web site but the sales information pages are buried, hard to find, or difficult to understand, they'll leave the site.

Your Web site can be a great tool to generate sales leads, educate an existing market or help build a new one. The key to how useful and, ultimately, how successful your site is depends on how visible it is to your audience.