OK! You are into a B2B business and you are in the end of your wits to know how SEO can help you get more conversions and conversations. Then you have to read this article.

It’s not as easy as optimizing a salon or a restaurant for your business. You can’t just go and bid for high ranking keywords and expect conversions soon. There is much ground work to cover before you can plunge into the SEO Ocean. Don’t worry you are not alone. There is lot of people trying different things, and also I must point out that there are lots of companies who are successful in it.

Understand the Business Cycle

Let’s just imagine that your business cycle is 4 months. From prospecting to closing you need to cover these four months carefully. So as with your SEO. There is a period called SEO cycle. Just like you can’t expect your prospect to sign the contract when you show up in his office, you cannot expect SEO consultant to bring in traffic as soon as you bid for the high ranking keyword. B2B keywords work slowly but effectively. Know what your customers are looking for and what is your specialty. Create a killer landing page with appropriate content. After a period of time with that particular keyword you will be ranking number one and then it will be tougher time for any of your competitors to get that place. Patience pays.

Experiment with Keywords

Mix your keywords with your brand, the highly searched and highly ranked keywords. Test and measure what brings more visitors to which page? By carefully analyzing the bounce rate and dynamic content management you are sure to become most reliable sight in search engines point of view and also the visitors will not feel cheated as they get lot more to learn from you and the advantages of your offering. You sure don’t want to miss those people who look for you as well as look for your service.

Take Offline to Online

There is lot of things marketers, especially b2b marketers do offline. From cock tail parties to trade shows they shake hands and exchange business cards. Take them online. Put those cards in your CRM. Make sure you reach them soon enough with a personalized message. A page for events of your industry or domain in your website and the information about any events may get you more people from those attendees and they will know you much before you enter a trade show.

We spend a lot on tradeshows, so why not take them online. Put the pictures in your Facebook page. Tweet about the event. Share videos in your YouTube Channel. You will get much more visitors than you imagine.

Or alternatively you can hire people who had done such ground work specifically for so many industries and have a good research background. We, SEO Company can help you out. To know more about our B2B offerings, you can visit our SEO Services and SEO packages page.

The business listing landscape is noisier than ever. In addition, consumer local search activity is skyrocketing. In fact, recent studies show that nearly 20% of searches are local (also reported by Google), and 40-50% of mobile searches are local, according to Google and Microsoft.

With the added pressure to increase visibility online, business owners are being tempted in a variety of ways to boost their local search presence via advertising vehicles that can water down their core anchor identities—i.e., their business listings. In some cases, advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) opportunities can tamper with a business’s online identity, unbeknownst to the business owner.

What is an anchor identity?

A business’s anchor identity is its online local search business listing, primarily consisting of its name, address, and phone number—its NAP information. Think of your anchor identity as your digital storefront or the glue that holds your online reputation together and ensures that customers can find you online when they want to call or visit your business to make a purchase.

Since online business listings are the starting point for consumer buying research, business owners need to closely monitor the accuracy and consistency of their NAP information.

Listings are sometimes created with or without a business owner’s knowledge by sites that pull advertising details from a variety of sources that do not always include correct NAP details. Business owners therefore need to take control of their listings now.

What rules should you follow when managing your online business listing?

1. Don’t alter your business name

It is important to keep your NAP information consistent and accurate throughout your business listing and to ensure it is representative of your true identity. If your business name is changed in a local listing for marketing purposes even one time, multiple identities may be created online for your business.

2. Maintain your brick-and-mortar address

Always include your physical address within your business listing, and avoid post office box addresses when possible. Also, don’t ever change your business address to appear local in a location where you do not have a physical presence.

3. Use your primary phone number

Pay-per-call phone numbers are great for advertising purposes, but not for local search business listings. Maintaining consistent phone number signals that your business listing information is reliable, and it gives you a better chance to rank high on search engines, directories, and social media sites. It also enables search platforms to aggregate more descriptive content about your business, which ultimately helps consumers choose your business.

4. Preserve your anchor identity for mobile searches

The sanctity of business listings is growing more important with the explosion of GPS-enabled mobile devices and on-the-go searching. With local searches increasing, it is crucial that business owners claim, manage, and monitor their online local search business listings across many platforms and keep advertising mechanisms separate.

Click here to get more information about how we, SEO Company Melbourne doing our online business listing with Google Places Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing Services.

As a marketer, you surely own customer data. But is it actionable? In huge, raw files, data can overwhelm you. However, when handled adeptly, data can be a marketer’s most reliable weapon for driving to the core of customers’ buying intentions—and meeting them there to make the sale. It’s the secret sauce for achieving authentic customer-centric marketing.

But it’s surprising how many organizations struggle with marketing data tools, including the people in their IT departments, who may not have the time or database management expertise to help.

Here are five ways to build a data-driven marketing culture and turn data into customer-centric results.

1. Mine your own business

Some time data will be right in front of our eyes and we will have labled them obsolete. Dig those data and try to co-relate with your user behavior. Then you will see how amazing everything falls into place where you can make your customer to have his second purchase with you.

2. Pump life into the data

This is going to be more important and toughest step. When you have sourced the data, you will have to make some sense with it. You can understand the customer behavior and then you should also analyze the month of purchase, the situation of the organization, economic climate and demographic information as well. Because any of these things might have influenced a buying decision.

3. Listen up

Data will talk to you if you’re willing to listen to it. You can access incredible insight into a customer’s frame of mind and readiness to buy.

For example, you can feed customer interactions into your database, refresh model scores, apply segmentation algorithms, and execute decision trees to deliver well-timed and relevant communication to the customer or prospect.

Alerts and triggers can be “red flags” or “green flags.” When a normally active customer goes silent for an extended period, she may be an attrition risk. That’s a red flag. So build an alert that will trigger a communication after a period of inactivity to check in with the customer, re-establish your value proposition, and solidify the relationship.

4. Measure up

What is effort if you are not able to measure it? Measure your success rate. Check with the sale before the data driven model and now. You will get to know that a pattern has set up and  there is no need to blind hit the market because you know how to hit, where to hit and how to hit. You will be very sure and confident of what you are doing. That is which the success of data driven marketing.

5. Kaizen

The beauty of data-driven marketing is that it drives you directly to the customer. From there, every tweak of the creative elements or comparison of communication channels will be guided by what the customer is telling you. Understanding that cause-and-effect relationship is the first step to continual improvement because you have control over the inputs—the offer, the creative, and the audience you select.

Click here to get more information about how professional SEO Company handles the Data-Driven Marketing with their SEO Services.

When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web: organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site’s profile.

However, budgetary constraints often make that impossible and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results. In this case, it’s usually better to focus on one or the other.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

Organic search engine optimization campaigns offer several distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising campaigns, as many recent studies have shown.

What follows is a brief listing of some of the findings:

• Propensity to click. Studies indicate that people are less likely to click on paid search ads rather than on results from organic search engine optimization. For example, one study found that search users are up to six times more likely to click on the first few organic results than they are to choose any of the paid results, while an eye-tracking study showed that 50% of users begin their search by scanning the top organic results.
• Trust. Studies are beginning to indicate that the trust level for organic results is much higher than that of paid results, and that paid results are looked upon as a nuisance by some searchers. One study found that only 14% of searchers trust paid listings, and 29% report being “annoyed” by them. Another study found that 66% of customers distrust paid ads. Clearly, it’s not generally a good idea to upset potential customers before they even click on your link.
• Value of visitors. Organic search engine results tend to be seen as non-biased, and they therefore are able to provide visitors that are more valuable. The overall conversion rate, or the rate at which searchers take a desired action on a site, is 17% higher for unpaid search results than the rate for paid (4.2% vs. 3.6%). Trends also have shown that more of the sales that result from search engines originated in organic search listings.
• Visitors becoming more aware of pay-per-click as advertising. As more and more people turn to the Internet for research and information, more searchers are becoming aware of paid results as a marketing tool. One study showed that not only are 38% of searchers aware of the distinction between paid and unpaid results, 54% are aware of the distinction on Google, which is widely recognized as the most popular search engine.
• Pay-per-click costs rising. Meanwhile, pay-per-click costs are rising steadily. Between October 2004 and December 2005, average keyword prices rose from around $25 to just under $55. And the cost of keywords can increase by as much as 100% during the holiday season. These costs aren’t going unnoticed either; one study of problems experienced by US companies found that 57% of respondents felt that their desired keywords were “too expensive,” while 51% expressed concern that they are overpaying for certain keywords. On the other hand, when you outsource to an organic search engine optimization firm, your costs will likely remain more stable than the prices for pay per click advertising.
• Long-term results. While a pay-per-click campaign may produce results more quickly than an organic search engine optimization campaign, organic search engine optimization campaigns can give you results that last. When the budget runs out for a pay-per-click campaign, or when your company decides that the pay-per-click campaign should be terminated, the results end as well. With organic search engine optimization, the optimized site content and other changes made to your site can have an impact on your search results until the next change in a search engine’s algorithm, or possibly even beyond.
• Relevance. Users also have rated organic search engine results as more relevant than paid results. On Google, 72.3% felt that organic results were more relevant, while only 27.7% rated paid results as more relevant. Yahoo offered similar results, with 60.8 calling organic results relevant compared to 39.2% for paid.

Pay-Per-Click

While the above statistics may make organic search engine optimization seem the clear choice in all cases, in certain situations it actually can make more sense to do pay-per-click advertising. For those looking for fast results on a small budget, pay-per-click Search Engine Marketing may be the answer.

• Results. As previously stated, the results from pay-per-click advertising are immediate. On the other hand, an organic search engine optimization campaign may take up to three months or more for results to be apparent. In this case, pay-per-click is advantageous for those who are looking to promote an initiative that will go live in a short period of time, or for businesses that seasonal in nature and only do promotion during certain months of the year.
• Budget. Small businesses with extremely tight budgets may find that pay-per-click is a better investment than organic search engine optimization, because a pay-per-click campaign will almost always cost less (good SEO Company simply do not work for $100 per month). By limiting a campaign’s key phrases to highly specific terms relevant to a company’s business, a company will not receive large amounts of traffic, but the traffic that is generated will be specific to the desired result. Plus, choosing such specific phrases can make them less expensive on a per-click basis. Moreover, in niche markets with a high average dollar sale, where there’s not a great amount of search activity because the prospect pool is limited, it may not make sense to engage an organic search engine optimization firm at several thousand dollars per month when you can instead buy varying niche-specific key phrases and generate traffic in that way.

Conclusion

Clearly, organic search engine optimization has some distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising. However, there are undoubtedly certain situations for which pay-per-click advertising makes more sense fiscally and strategically.

With a high-enough budgets, you would be able to have an effective organic search engine optimization campaign running in tandem with an effective pay-per-click campaign. But if you have to choose one, look into your unique situation before you decide.

PPC advertising is the biggest lead generation tool that has been available for medium and small sized business. Thanks to its ability to narrowly target the prospects, tightly manage spending and precisely measure results PPC is one of the most efficient tools available for lead generation these days.

However, Even the best of the bestest tools will have pitfalls, if we don’t know how to use it. It’s easy to start and run and a business owner will easily would have burnt thousands of dollars before he knew it. Here is the list of pitfalls on how to fail in Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing.

Don’t use your Home Page as Landing Page:

Everybody thinks that the Homepage is their company’s virtual reception. But some people have put so many sales associates in their reception making it hard for the visitor to make a decision. A home page may have lot of options and full array of your products and services. Asking the visitor to make a choice is like guaranteeing your bounce rate. So take them to well crafted landing page relevant to their search. They’ll love it.

Bid enough to secure top spot:

PPC or paid search engine marketing works on Auction model. You are deciding to pay what you are going to pay for your ad. The higher you pay the high in the listings you will appear. But you have to have some statistic in mind because more than 85% appear in the top and other 15% are licking the scrap. You may not lose money because nobody is going to click it. But you will continue to remain unnoticed. Choose search terms and manage bids in such a way that you appear in top three spots for your keywords.

Make your ad copy specific and unique

Google just allows 70 characters for your ads. No company logo, no pictures nothing. Most of the marketers waste this by putting vague terms like quality tea shop, economical hiking or general statements that will not clearly explain the offering. What happens in one case is the searchers won’t click your ad. This is bad but at least you will not lose money. The worse thing is wrong searches repeatedly click your ads which will make you lose money too. Be specific and unique to your ad copy.

Align your landing pages with keywords:

A searcher goes to Google and types Sports shoes, your ad pops up and term sports shoes is in the headline and ad body. He clicks it and lands on a page which specifically talks about sports shoes and check out cart in your website.

No confusion or complications right. But still so many miss it. Make your landing pages aligned with your keywords and don’t forget to measure the traffic of your landing pages.

Test.. Test.. Test

It’s easy to do and with bit of much focused attention, you can improve your results dramatically.

It takes time and effort to learn these things, that’s why it’s advisable to hire a professional SEO consultant who has experience in handling this kind of campaigns. Click here to know more about Search Engine Marketing and our SEO services.