B2B SEM | B2B Search Engine Marketing and the Long Tail
It’s hard to dispute that the Long Tail is an important concept in Search. A lot of times, though, we tend to think of the long tail as being a B2C concept by relating it to specific product names in ecommerce situations. But, it’s just as relevant in the B2B world. One-word phrases bring businesses up against a lot of competition, but the benefit of increased traffic may outweigh the expense of ranking. On the flip side, credibility-building site assets like case studies can be optimized with longer-tail phrases in order to boost the probability of conversion. Where does your SEM campaign fit into the curve?
Source: B2B Long tail SEO
This is a very interesting take on how B2B searches are conducted. However, more than an SEO challenge, this is an information architecture challenge for savvy B2B marketers. It is an IA challenge in the sense that many non-tech savvy B2B players have legacy CMS systems that need to be “optimized for search engines”. The example above makes the assumption that the B2B search market cares about the top level keywords where competition is heavy and costs are high.
I would argue that the competition is fierce not at the 1-word terms but at the 2-3 words terms in SEM and natural. The top level terms are a great way to get noticed in topics that are new to the market. For instance, to learn what’s new in the world of outsourcing someone might type in the work outsourcing. But is there a real advantage in covering that term with SEM or are you better off piggybacking on other related deeper terms that are more targeted and serving new and fresh ad copy?
The thought leadership search market is a tricky one. If you spot a trend before any of your competitors, you would have a huge first-mover advantage in the search market. The possibilities of creating and owning a brand new concept online can make your search campaigns highly successful. But keep in mind that grabbing awareness and mind share is tricky, especially in a new content/idea search market and if the idea you are selling does not catch on you might find yourself holding on to a lot of valuable yet unusable content.
The truth is that many of the SEO-driven efforts could be solved with a sound information architecture strategy that would make key content easier to access. Here are a few things that you should look for that will help your search engine rank and will make it easier for humans to find your content:
Here is a guide on how to optimize by using common sense and a good information architecture strategy:
1. Have a clean root URL - top level directory (i.e. http://www.example.com should return a fast loading, lean front page)
2. Avoid flash for navigation. As of today, search engines have a hard time indexing flash-based links and content
3. Avoid drop downs. If you must have them, make sure they don’t have submenus within
Information Architecture:
1. Lay down the top level topics in your main navigation [aka. sections].
2. Define categories within those sections - if necessary.
3. Set the content pages within the categories or sections.
3. Define tag sets to structure otherwise unstructured data.
The tags will create a URL such as: http://www.example.com/tag that will group all pieces of content that are relevant to the tag.
4. Home page should be always 1 click away.
5. URLs should read as if reading a sentence. For instance if the topic is “logistics management” your URL should be something like:
http://www.example.com/logistics/management.html
or
http://www.example.com/logistics-management.html
Your URLs at the end should look like this:
With categories:
http://www.example.com/[section_name]/[category_name]/[content_title].html
Without categories:
http://www.example.com/[section_name]/[content_title].html
6. Use subdomains to make breakdown your topics even further and gain a bigger presence in the front page of SERPs.
i.e. http://service.example.com
Rule of thumb: Visitors should get to the content they are looking for in 3 clicks or less.
4 Comments
pkennedy on February 20th, 2008
Fantastic article. The only point I disagree with is the sub-domains — I think this is only good advice for very powerful sites that have a ton of link equity which they can afford to slice up. Otherwise, you’re splitting your power among > 1 domains, rather than sharing link equity across the pages of 1 site.
[Reply]
antonio on February 21st, 2008
@pete I agree with your point of view, however it seems that overtime as your site grows the subdirectories will also grow since this is the easiest way to structure data thus creating a messy infrastructure that us hard to digest for users and search engines alike.
For smaller sites, the advantage lays in the possibility of reaching other engines such as blog engines with a subdomain tailored to that market audience. For sure larger sites would benefit more from this information breakdown.
[Reply]
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pkennedy on February 20th, 2008
Fantastic article. The only point I disagree with is the sub-domains — I think this is only good advice for very power sites have a ton of link equity which they can afford to slice up. Otherwise, you’re splitting your power among > 1 domains, rather than sharing link equity across the pages of 1 site.
[Reply]