B2B Goes Web-Centric

Where You’ll Find Me

There’s another consideration in getting buyer eyeballs to a B2B site: making it appear high in search-engine search results—a process called search engine optimization (SEO).

“If [your company’s site] is just a virtual brochure, and you’re not doing anything to help the search engines to find your site, then you’re doing yourself a huge disservice,” says Joe Hendershot, president of St. Paul–based marketing firm B2B, Inc.

A B2B company that’s serious about maximizing its Web site’s sales potential needs to become familiar with how a site’s page title, page description, and keywords can help lure potential customers to the site’s pages—and to the specific content of each.

Then there’s social media—sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Some B2B companies have embraced it; some are ignoring it. But it may be at least worth a cautious dip of the toe—it’s free to sign up, and it can be a way for companies to follow what customers and would-be customers are saying about products, and joining in on the conversation. It can also provide another arrow pointing to the Web site.

For instance, Schermer says, Datalink is supporting efficiencycentral.com “with traditional direct mail and e-mail. Then we’re also promoting it on all sorts of different social media sites. So we’re hoping to get picked up, we’re doing Twitter, we’ve used Facebook, we’ve used LinkedIn. We’re trying to get bloggers to write about it. And once they do that, now you get linking strategies that go straight into Google. And then getting picked up—that’s how you drive up traffic to your site.”

And one factor that keeps customers (and search engines) interested is a site that’s kept fresh and up to date. Compellent is now planning to update its site in 2010, in part to reach out to customers and potential customers in new ways, sharpening its marketing message. If a company commits to making its Web site more central to its selling strategy, it has to be dynamic—responsive to what customers are looking for, to their concerns, and making adjustments accordingly.

“A Web site,” Spaude notes, “is always a work in progress.”