iskandarX Society SEO - Business-To-Business Marketing Using Natural Search Engine Optimization

Even those familiar with search engine marketing have common misconceptions about the value of so-called “natural” SEO in business-to-business marketing. I often encounter prospects who understand that achieving high rankings on a search engine is a valuable marketing tool that can have a positive impact on the bottom line of a business, but they don’t really understand the difference between a natural search engine ranking and a “sponsored” or “paid” one.  What’s more, they think they need to actually sell something online to see a true bottom-line benefit. This is a common and unfortunate misconception.





While e-commerce companies can and do benefit tremendously from search engine optimization as a marketing tool, there are many factors in the discipline that actually favor B2B companies in terms of overall ROI. Also, many would be surprised to find there are many factors which favor small to mid-sized B2B companies over the larger B2B corporations.

Natural Search Results vs. Sponsored Search Results

For those who aren’t quite clear what the term means, “natural” search describes the “editorial” search results on any particular engine.  These results are purported to be completely non-biased - meaning that the engine will not accept any amount of money to influence the rankings of individual sites.  This method is quite different from the paid advertising that appears in the “sponsored” or “featured” results, where higher positions are rewarded to the companies willing to pay the most per visitor.

Natural search is important to any company with a website because studies show that savvy searchers who understand the difference between paid and natural results are more likely to hold the natural results in a higher regard, much like a person reading a magazine would probably be more positively influenced by an article about a particular company than by a paid advertisement from the company. Natural SEO can also be more cost effective over the long run: your company will reap the rewards of a natural search investment for years to come rather than losing all of your rankings whenever you stop paying, as you do in pay-per-click search marketing.

SEO: B2B vs. E-commerce

B2B companies typically have a higher average dollar sale than e-commerce websites, which makes it much easier to justify the cost of a natural search engine optimization campaign.  While a visitor to an e-commerce site might garner $12 in revenue from the purchase of a coffee mug, a visitor to a high-end B2B website is potentially worth millions.  It does not take Alan Greenspan to crunch the numbers—the higher the average dollar sale, the fewer visitors you need to actually justify the cost of SEO as a business to business marketing tool (provided, of course, that a certain number of visitors actually lead to a sale).

The people that run large e-commerce sites such as Amazon know that almost all of the products that they sell online are highly commoditized.  This is why they devote so much effort toward enhancing the visitor experience on their websites with tools like personalization and one-click shopping.  They are trying to develop lifetime buyers.  B2B companies don’t have this problem.  By utilizing a successful business-to-business marketing campaign, any one visitor you attract to your site with natural SEO marketing could be more valuable over a lifetime than thousands of e-commerce buyers.

When a new customer finds your site organically at the top of the natural search engine results, the customer feels more proactive in the relationship, having found you, as opposed to having your web site “pushed” onto them via a sponsored search engine result, which some studies have demonstrated that a majority of searchers regard as untrustworthy. Establishing such a relationship at the outset is incredibly valuable. Offline sales require offline relationships, and personal relationships are easier to maintain, no matter how many bells and whistles an e-commerce company might add to its site.

When it comes to building business-to-business sales, marketing is crucial. In a world where prices are rarely listed online, a B2B company almost always has the opportunity to differentiate itself on its own terms after the initial contact is made. With the right marketing tool, such as an effective natural SEO campaign, a B2B company can easily stand out from the crowd.

B2B SEO – Smaller Can Be Better

Believe it or not, smaller to mid-sized companies actually have the upper hand in a lot of ways when it comes to using natural SEO, especially when outsourcing to an expert SEO company. While a good SEO firm will spend more time on the marketing aspects of a B2B campaign (the overall goals of the initiative and the keyphrases that will bring the right kind of visitors to the site), the actual implementation of the elements necessary for SEO success is much simpler for these smaller companies because they have less red tape to deal with when making changes to their respective websites.

Also, larger companies are less likely to outsource this specialized service to someone with proven experience because they feel an obligation to utilize the in-house resources at their disposal, regardless of their level of expertise.  Very often, search engine optimization is dumped on an IT person who has too much to do already and will approach the problem from a purely technical, rather than marketing, standpoint.  Newcomers to organic search engine optimization frequently make fundamental mistakes that do not generate results, or worse, put sites at risk of penalization.
Conclusion

E-commerce companies are more readily embracing search marketing as a business-to-business marketing tool because they are technologically savvy, because they often have the financial resources to afford a firm to garner them high search engine rankings, and because their businesses depend on the Internet to survive.

However, e-commerce companies only make up a small fraction of the number of companies that actually maintain a presence on the Web, many of which specialize in areas with narrow but deep sales channels.  There are many B2B industries where there is currently little or no competition on the search engines, and the ones to move first and use natural SEO as a key marketing tool will reap the greatest rewards.  The ability of smaller B2B companies to more quickly embrace the channel and to implement an organic SEO campaign can give them a distinct advantage.