Trying to handle Search Engine Optimization in-house can be a challenge for many B2B marketers.  I handle all of the web design/content/SEO here at ReachForce with zero formal training on the subject (granted I do have a wonderful developer but he basically just executes on my plans).  I recently came across an article I had earmarked a while back that I wanted to share with anyone out there who is also trying there best to get this whole SEO thing right.  In “Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue To Make With Organic Search,” Galen DeYoung outlines where many B2B marketers are falling down:

Inadequate site architecture

To be found for a specific keyword, there needs to be an optimized landing page on the website that revolves around that search term. Simply put, this means you need to review your business and ensure your site has at least one page that promotes each specific revenue stream. However, the complexities of B2B keyword strategy—which include the lack of shared lexicons in most B2B verticals—mean that you may have to create and incorporate several landing pages for each revenue stream. For instance, an accounting firm promoting litigation support services may have a page on expert witness services, but it may do well to also consider having a page on forensic accounting.

Simply put, most B2B websites need more content, both to respond to likely organic search and to be seen as being by the search engines as an authoritative site on a given topic.

If you are having difficulties creating this content, try looking for it other place.  Take a look at your whitepapers, past articles, press releases, and blog posts.  You might find content that just needs a little tweaking to work for the website.

Lousy meta descriptions

When B2B marketers actually specify the meta descriptions for site pages, they often write from an internal standpoint, using corporate and internal lingo that doesn’t speak to the searcher. (Unfortunately this is often true for the actual content as well. ) Typically, B2C marketers are much better at writing meta descriptions that promote click-through. When you write meta descriptions for B2B, think about what will entice the searcher (your prospect) to click on your search result versus all the others on the page. While you can write as much as you want, Google will only display about 165 characters. Make sure you use those characters wisely to create a keyword-rich, compelling message. You’ve only got a few seconds before searchers decide on which results they will click.

Not analyzing organic landing pages

Many B2B marketers don’t bother to evaluate, let alone manage, organic landing pages. Test your organic landing pages for all significant, ranking keywords. You may rank highly in the search results for a given search phrase. You may even have a meta description that drives click-through. But is the page searchers land on the page you want them to land on? If not, optimize a different landing page or make changes to the content at the current landing page.

Not monitoring analytics

The analytics associated with PPC landing pages are often scrutinized in great detail. Bounce rates are analyzed. Alternate landing page versions are tested. Ad copy is tweaked. Yet organic landing pages rarely see the same rigor, despite the fact that B2B purchasers tend to first look at and click on organic results almost twice as often as they do paid search results. So, dive into your analytics and do the same for your organic visitors. Isolate your organic traffic. Look at the organic landing pages. Analyze the bounce rates. Adjust landing page content. Tweak meta descriptions. You’ll be glad you did.

Failing to optimize printed marketing assets before converting them to the web

B2B marketers are frequently guilty of mindlessly posting lots of print marketing communications to their websites, often in lieu of html content. Hundreds of hours and great sums of money have been spent creating these pieces, yet most people won’t spend even an hour to optimize these pieces before posting them to the web. These often include PDFs of brochures, case studies, technical or white papers, and product and spec sheets. While these represent valuable, influential information, if you don’t optimize them, they won’t show up in the search results; the only people that will find them are those who actually visit your site. Why not make sure searchers can find them, too.

Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions

B2B sites are often rife with duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions. In addition to decreasing the chances that more of your site’s pages will rank well, this practice will likely lead to less of your site’s pages being indexed by the search engine. Moreover, it’s a clear sign that you haven’t optimized your site for searchers. Title tags and meta descriptions help determine whether a searcher is actually going to click on your search result. Today, there’s really no excuse for this. You can easily check for duplicate title tags and meta descriptions using Diagnostics>Content Analysis in Google Webmaster Tools.

Be sure to check out the full article for all of Galen’s tips.

Looking for more Online Marketing Tips? Download 30 Online Marketing Tips from The B2B Lead

We launched our new search optimized website yesterday.  Thank you Leigh Anne for all your hard work!  After many months of research and lots of copywriting, we are all set and ready for the inbound leads to start pouring in.

As part of the new website launch we are also doing a PR blast.  Anyone that knows me well knows I’m not a PR person.  I get that it has its place but PR has always been very difficult to measure.  So instead of perfecting my PR skills, I’ve almost always outsourced this function.

But now, with social media and some pretty simple analytics we can see where we our visitors are coming from so we’ve built a PR program around the new launch.  To get over my dislike of writing news releases I’ve convinced myself that we’re doing these to support our SEO efforts as well as our overall awareness goals.

Here’s a few tips we used when drafting these announcements:

• Writing for our audience – we want to be sure that our audience understands our news and sees the value in what we are announcing, this is key to supporting out SEO efforts.  Important thing to remember here is the news comes first, SEO 2nd.  You have to make sure you don’t confuse or dilute your news by trying to overuse keywords or keyword phrases.

• Decide on your keywords before your start writing – this will help you make sure you are writing with these in mind.  Here, Leigh Anne keeps an updated list of our top keywords and keyword phrases on our white board, this way we’re looking at them every time we go to write something.  Trying to plug in your keywords afterwards will cause problems like I mentioned above.

• Links, links, links – be sure to link keywords in your press release back to pages on your website.  Best strategy includes already having optimized these pages with the same keywords.

• Optimize the important stuff – Be sure you are including your keywords in the most important places – your headline, your subhead, your boilerplate and your first paragraph.

• Press Release Grader – once again, a cool free tool from the folks at HubSpot.  Just copy and paste your press release in and it will grade the release based on language, content and SEO.  Don’t worry if you score a little low at first, it will give you tips for improvement.

• PRWeb – it’s what we use here – it’s worth it to upgrade (we use SEO visibility package).  You will be able to:
  • add links
  • add images
  • include in your own RSS feed
  • add Technorati tags
  • use SEO tools and statistics

We have seen some really great results since we started optimizing our releases.  From one release alone, we got over 100 new leads in a day.  It definitely makes the extra effort worth it.

Now that you have researched your keywords and have a nice long list, it is time to optimize the pages of your website.  You want to optimize each page for up to 5 keywords.  I use HubSpot’s Keyword Grader to keep me on track to use keywords that have a good number of monthly searches and are not so competitive that I will never have a shot at ranking well.  For some of your interior pages, a long tail keyword strategy will work well to reach a targeted audience (but that is a post for another day).

I recommend making a list of each page on your site and then choosing what keywords you are going to optimize for on each.  Using a spreadsheet will help you keep track of all the changes you need to make.  Here is a list of all of the columns I would create:

• Page Description (optional) – this is only for you to describe the page you are optimizing
• Existing URL – the current URL
• New URL – Here is your first opportunity to tell the search engine the most important keywords.  company.com/productname is not as powerful as company.com/your-keyword-here.  Dashes help the search engine know when to break the words up.  Note: if your product name is something that is searched often then you may want to leave it in the URL but for most SMB’s this is not the case.  Be sure to keep it short, this is definitely not the place to keyword stuff.
• Page Title – This is the text that appears in the (typically) blue bar of your browser window (and in the tab for that page).  Here is another place to add keywords rather than just list your company anme and products.  Keep in mind, the fewer the keywords the more strength each has and Google gives more weight to the first keywords than to the last.  Also, remember that humans will be reading these too.This is also the bold text that appears on the search engine results page.  Make it compelling to click on and unique for each page on your site.
• <h1> tag – These will show up on the page as your heading but in the html need to be properly tagged as <h1>.  Again the fewer the words, the more weight each receives.  Use target keywords to tell the search engines and humans what the page is about.
• Meta Keywords – these are not seen on the web page itself, only in the html.  You can list 8-10 keywords separated by commas.You may consider including your target keywords plus common misspellings of those keywords.  Meta keywords are not of much importance to Google but are more important for Yahoo and Ask. I find this is also a good place to keep track of the keywords I want to use as I update the content on the page.
• Meta Description – This is a 1-2 sentence description of the content present on the page.It is also hidden on the page and only seen in the html.  However, this is the description under the page title used in search engine results.  Be sure to include target keywords because the keywords searched on will be bolded in the description.  There is a 150 character limit on what the search engines will show.

I cannot makes changes to my site on my own, so my web developer was extremely grateful that I had laid out all of my changes in a spreadsheet.  It really helped him as we redesigned the entire site.  You can also implement these strategies as small changes one by one especially if you have a content management system at your fingertips.  Be sure to resubmit your sitemap to Google as you may changes so it knows to crawl your site.

Special thanks to Karen Rubin at HubSpot for helping me with my own website optimization.  It goes live next week!

I am sure most of you have heard of HubSpot’s Website Grader.  If you have not, it is one of the best free tools out there to help you figure out where to start your website redesign.  The basic principle behind website grader is to rate your website on a number of attributes, mostly relating to SEO, and give you ways to improve your rating. It is very easy to get started.  First, go to website.grader.com then simply enter your website, any competitor websites (this is optional) and your email.  Click generate report and you will have a full report of your website in minutes.  (Be patient; trust me it’s worth it.)

The report shows you how your website is doing in six major areas:

1. On-Page SEO
2. Off-Page SEO
3. Blogosphere
4. Social Mediasphere
5. Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads
6. Competitive Intelligence

Each category is broken down further and the report gives you a rating in each as well as advice on how to improve.  Some items are quick fixes like shortening your meta descriptions or adding your company to the Yahoo Directory.  Some things may take longer and require involvement from others in your company, like starting a blog, if you have not already.

This report may also show you that a full overhaul of your website is not necessary.  You may just need to tweak a few things.  And if you do decide a full overhaul is the way to go, make sure you know what your website is already doing well so you don’t loose it.  You never want to loose good inbound links or high keyword rankings.

Keep in mind that this is a free tool and cannot take the place of a good SEO consultant.  However, it is a great starting point to help you decide where to begin first if you are planning an overhaul of your existing site.  The great thing is you can keep coming back to see if your score is improving.

A website redesign/overhaul can be a daunting task but, for some, a necessary one.  One of the first steps, from an SEO perspective, is to define your target list of keywords to use when optimizing your site for search.  I have heard recommendations of having anywhere from 300 to 500 keyword on your list.  Keep in mind you will optimize each page of your site for only 2-5 keywords.

Here is a list of the top keyword research tools you may want to use:

Keyword Discovery – According to their web site, Keyword Discovery has a database that tracks over 36 billion searches from 200 search engines worldwide over the last 12 months, including seasonal trends over this time period.  This tool is useful in building keyword lists, overall campaign planning and competitive research.

Price: Standard – $69.95 monthly/$599.40 annually; Enterprise – $495 monthly/$4455 annually.  They offer a free trial with limited functionality.

Wordtracker – Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client’s business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.  Marketers can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.  Wordtracker periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis. All search terms are collected from the major metacrawlers – Dogpile and Metacrawler.

Price: $59 monthly/ $329 annually.  They offer a 7-day free trial.

Wordze – With a database of about 552 million keywords and 68 million unique search terms, Wordze is a great tool for building keyword lists.  But it is also valuable as a tool to assist in creating SEO strategies, as it provides analysis on competing sites on specific search terms.

Price: $38.98 monthly, $7.95 1-day trial

Google AdWords Keyword Tool – If you are running (or plan on running) a Google Adwords campaign, then this tool is critical to your sucess. One can only guess the size of the database (all of Google?) and how frequently it is updated, but it is excellent at showing you what a site looks like according to the Google spiders.  While a free tool, it does not lack in features.

Price: Free

KeywordSpy – KeywordSpy offers analytics to study competitors’ tactics as well as monitor their online search campaigns.  According to their website, their database includes over one billion keywords.  Best used for competitive research.

Price: monthly subscription from $89.95 – $139.95.  They offer a free trial with limited functionality.

SEMRush – SEMRush uses 25 million of the most popular and expensive keywords to collect Google search results. SEMRush can show you keywords for any domain ranked high enough to be in top 20 search results results or that purchases AdWords.  It helps you to keep track of your competitors, uncover your competitors’ organic and AdWords’ keywords, find their landing pages, discover your own long-tail keywords, and check Google rankings of any site.

Price: monthly subscriptions from $19.95 – $499.95.  Free version available with limited functionality and only 10 queries per day.

SEO Book’s Keyword Tool – This keyword tool is powered by Wordtracker’s API. You can explore more keywords by subscribing to their powerful keyword research tools.  Offers rough suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.  Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords.  Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.  Is driven off the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic keyword tool.

Price: Free

SpyFu – The SpyFu database can point to which sites and advertisers rank highly for any given keyword phrase.  They can also indicate advertising trends, including Top 500 Advertisers, Top 500 Organically Ranked Domains, Top 500 Most Clicked Terms, Top 1000 Most Expensive Keywords.  Best for competitive research.

Price: $38.50 monthly.  Free registration for basic features.

Google Insights for Search – Insights can help you determine which messages resonate best, determine seasonality, create brand associations, and determine a new market.  Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. It then shows you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.  Keep in mind it was created for advertisers.

Price: Free, need to have a Google account

HubSpot Inbound Marketing System’s Keyword Grader – This is what I use.  You import your list of keywords (or type them in one by one) and it shows you how many monthly searches that term gets, how difficult it is to rank for that term, your website’s current rank and the cost per click.  Once you have had your tracking scripts on your website it will also show you how many visits you are getting from each keyword.  There is also a competitors view to see how you compare on each term vs. each competitor.  HubSpot actually does A LOT more than this so I didn’t originally include them in the list but since it is what I use I thought I should add them on.

Price: $250 monthly subscription (mostly for business owners) or $500 monthly subscription for closed loop marketing analytics and salesforce.com integration

Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more website redesign tips.

Hope you enjoyed this quarter’s Book Club series.  Just in case you missed an eBook or whitepaper we read and discussed, below are the links to them and what we had to say about each of them.

• Dianna Huff’s Five B2B MarCom Strategies to Increase Sales Now
• What we had to say…

• Brian Carroll’s Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation
• What we had to say…

• HubSpots’s Get Found Online
• What we had to say…

• Marketo’s Best Practices in Lead Nurturing
• What we had to say…

• David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Viral Marketing
• What we had to say…

• ConnectDirect’s How to Choose your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers
• What we had to say…

Happy Reading.  We look forward to sharing even more B2B Marketing and Sales tips with you in 2009.

HubSpot’s ebook, Get Found Online, is right on the money. Today’s marketing is changing from outbound to inbound, and “consumers are going to the Internet to start their purchasing process.” For businesses to remain competitive, their websites need to be found online through search engines, the blogosphere and social media sites.

Luckily, this eBook gives detailed steps on how to be found on each of these inbound marketing techniques. Here is a short outline which should entice you to read the eBook for all the great how to tips (pages 5-9) to get found online.

How to get found on search engines:

1. Find Keywords – choose keywords that your target market is using
2. On-Page SEO – place keywords in the page title, URL, headings and page text
3. Off-Page SEO – build more links
4. Measure & Analyze

How to get found on blogs:

1. Read – other industry blogs
2. Comment – join in on the conversation (even link back to your own blog)
3. Write – find the right blog software, blog weekly and promote your blog
4. Measure & Analyze

How to get found on social media:

1. Guidelines for Engagement – join communities and provide useful information, don’t just sell your company
2. Publish, Share, and Network – everyone can publish and share anything, everyone can network with anyone (through content placement sites, linking to others an online communities)
3. Measure & Analysis

I manage all the online media for ReachForce, and found these tips extremely useful. It is really cool to see how many people go to our website from our blog and social media sites. Think of any other useful tips while reading Get Found Online? Please share!

HubSpot is an inbound marketing system that helps your small or medium sized business get found on the Internet by the right prospects and convert more of them into leads and customers.

No book club next week for Thanksgiving (you have an extra week to read)! Look for us on Thursday, December 4th talking about Marketo’s Best Practices in Lead Nurturing…enjoy!

As I was working on my FREE list last week I noticed I seemed to also be building a list of things that we as B2B Marketers can do that require minimal cost, like less than $100.

• StumbleUpon advertising – be very targeted with your ad and your landing page.  Each click only costs  you $.05.  I’ve only heard good stuff about this, we’ll be trying this one immediately.
• Long Tail PPC keywords – think niche, pick words or phrases people would use to search for your EXACT solution.  The landing page is just as important as your ad.  You’re goal is to convert unknown visitors into known leads.  Remember you can track companies visiting your landing pages using ReachForce Convert.
• Survey Monkey or Zoomerang – both have free versions or subscription pricing (for more features) of about $20/per month.  Create a survey and use it for lead generation, thought leadership or PR.  People are interested in what their peers think and are doing, share your results with the participants.
• PRWeb – write a news release and link it up.  Add an offer to the news release or offer additional content on a landing page with the full announcement.
• Start a blog – you can do this for free but you might consider investing in your own look (vs. stock templates and photos).   Regularly updated content helps your SEO too.
• Video/Podcast Series – you can add them to your website and use them for lead generation programs.  Get a FLiP camera and set up your YouTube account and you’re ready to go.  Remember to keep your videos and podcasts short and to the point.
• Email campaign – If you don’t already use an email or marketing automation system, check out VerticalResponse.  Emails start at less than $.02 a piece.

I’m sure my short list is only a beginning of things you can do for about $100, please feel free to add to the list if you’ve got more.

Many B2B Marketers, along with most Americans, are wondering what is going on with our economy.  Now that we have elected a new President, will that help?  How long will this slump last?  How is this going to affect budgets and jobs and new sales opportunities?  While wondering all of the same things and how it will affect ReachForce, I decided to make a list of FREE things that we as Marketers can do in a recession.  Some lead generating tools and some awareness building tactics, but all things you can do at no cost.  Here’s what I came up with, please feel free to help add to the list.

Twitter – free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (AKA tweets), these text-based posts can contain up to 140 characters.  Feel free to share links to other good content in these micro posts too.
Here’s 10 tips for building a following a Twitter.

Commenting on other industry thought leader’s blog or other blogs related to your business – Get in on the conversation and get your view point out there.

Submit your best practice content to free sites – The content will be indexed by the search engines allowing people to find your article when searching for something related. Some examples are Scribd, Docstoc and WhitePapers.org.

Website Grader – Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

Email signatures – Set up a standard email signature for all company emails and include things like your blog, or events you’re attending or a customer testimonial video.  Easy to do and everyone that gets an email from someone at your company will also get your mini marketing message.

ReachForce Insight Lite -  Do you know your best customers? Can you easily identify your target market sweet spots – markets that you sell the most or the fastest? Are there other business buyers in your sweet spot that you should be targeting with your Marketing campaigns?  Download ReachForce Insight Lite on the Appexchange and see.

Re-purpose content you already have – or create a Top 10 list or a list of Top 5 things to Avoid.  People love lists and you probably already have all of this information at your finger tips.  At ReachForce, we’ve recently turned our best 101 blog posts into an eBook series.  We didn’t have to create anything new, we just pulled the best posts and put them together in an eBook format.  We’re currently using them for lead generation campaigns and getting GREAT results and feedback.  Also, it has increased our daily blog traffic.

LinkedIn – just sign up and start linking up.  LinkedIn is rolling out new applications and group features all the time, take advantage of these free networking tools.
Once you’ve set your profile up, check out LinkedIn Answers.

Facebook – Facebook is somewhat of a new thing for B2B Marketers, here at ReachForce we are still figuring out our strategy but know their endless opportunity out there.  Here’s a few tips on getting started and promoting your business via Facebook.

Google Analytics – why wouldn’t you use this?  Here’s a few more ideas on Tracking Tools.

ReachForce Convert 30 Day Trial – You are probably tracking web site visitors and your best PPC keywords, but are you capturing those visitors and turning them into actionable leads? Only 3% of web visitors fill out a form or announce themselves; what happens to the other 97%? ReachForce Convert, a software-as-a-service application, empowers Marketers to proactively target lead generation efforts at passive web visitors.  Why not try it, it’s free.

Press Release Grader –   “Press Release Grader rates a press release based on a checklist of criteria – from content and structure, to search optimization and link analysis. The free tool is designed to optimize a press release so it can be found more easily by media, bloggers, customers and prospects. Press Release Grader provides an analysis and recommendations that will help you improve the way your press release is structured.” It only takes a second and the recommendations for improvement are typically easy fixes.  Again, why wouldn’t you use this tool?

What FREE stuff are you using out there?  Please share with the rest of us.  Who knows, it could save your fellow Marketer’s job.

A few months ago I spoke at a Marketing Profs conference and had the good fortune to meet and listen to Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, discuss the paradoxical choices consumers often make.

Recently, Ariely spoke with the Marketing Subgroup of the Bootstrap Network on the topic of consumer behavior. Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences captured and posted a Podcast of the discussion. If you can suffer through the first few minutes of boring introductions, you’ll be treated to a very interesting discussion on the value of “free” and how it influences behavior.

Ariely claims that “free” is the Kryptonite that cripples our decision-making no matter how rational we think we are. He claims the “freemium” models that Web 2.0 sites use to lure audiences are not as effective as a discounted service. He argues that once free is introduced, that’s its perceived value.

Perhaps, but in the B2B world, there’s nothing like a free widget or product trial to capture visitors and contact information. It all depends on how you structure the offer. A wonderful example of this is HubSpot and their Website Grader tool. The allure of using the free Website Grader tool was enough to get me to give them my contact information. Once I used it to identify problems that needed solving, I was all too eager to buy the product to help me fix the problems.  Oh, and there’s also the issue of how I found Website Grader…giving away a free tool is great link bait – the most powerful SEO tactic I know.

For more predictably irrational fun, check out the Predictably Irrational Blog.