Keyword Research

People who are making a consumer purchase are emotionally involved in the purchase. Those making a B2B purchase are making a purchase that is a part of their job. The purchase becomes a rational decision rather than an emotional one. As a search marketer this means that the basepurchaser is further removed from brands and bases their decision on the real needs and benefits the product provides. Because of this, search marketers must focus more attention on pain based keywords. Words must be chosen to reach the buyer at different stages of the sales cycle and reflect the solution or the pain they are experiencing. For example, to the seller of CRM solutions this means being found under words that appeal to both the pain based keywords: organize sales leads and the brand name for the person who has a better understanding of what exists: Salesforce customer relationship management.

The traffic your site attracts is directly controlled by your keyword selection and the ad copy written for pay per click campaigns. Frequently B2B companies are content with top rankings in the search engine results pages for words that are not converting to leads. More clicks increases costs and does not necessarily mean success in generating quality leads. Keep in mind that the best words are the words that are being used by prospects and customers when they describe your product/service and the solutions it provides.

• Compile a list of keyword phrases people search for.
• Compile a list of how many competing pages use those keyword phrases.
• Identify keyword combinations that are related to your business, service or product - many of which you might never have considered.

Server Issues

Even if you have the perfect site perfectly optimized for search engines, if they can't get into the server because it has been banned or set up incorrectly, your site will never get ranked well in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

• Analysis of header tags that are being returned to the search engines.
• Testing for redirects and the effects they have on the server.
• Testing of the speed your site loads
• Investigation of meta cache and follow/no follow tags.
• Essential file research that advises the search engines what pages not to index such as private files and forms.
• Testing for files loaded onto the server that assist the search engines in finding every page that should be found.
• Study of hosting server.
• Test for sessions
• Test for internet cookie requirements

Competitive Research

The most successful search engine optimization method is to analyze on-site and off-site characteristics of top ranking pages for the keywords you want to be found under.  Not to copy what they are doing but to understand what it takes to get superior results.

• Analysis of the top ten sites for each keyword/phrase
• Identification of Keyword/phrase location in page elements for top ten sites
• Research number of inbound links for top ten sites
• Identify Hub and Authority Ssites for top ten sites

Site Construction

Most corporate websites are created to look good and make updating as easy as possible.  Unfortunately, many of these sites have elements such as flash, databases and frames that hinder the engines ability to crawl, read and index the pages of the site.  Every language including HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax.  If a page does not follow these rules, the search engines are restricted from parsing the code of your site to find the relevant content.  If your code contains errors, search engines may not be able to find everything on your page or site

• Verify conformance to the  WC3 HTML and XHTML recommendations
• Identify broken internal links
• Identify potential content management issues
• Identify problem on-page elements
• Test for the number of pages being indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN

On-Site Optimization

These are the factors that you can control on your website.  This is what most people think of when it comes to website optimization and primarily consist of HTML Elements.

• Analysis of popular keywords in the URL
• Identify Keyword font size and font effects.
• Identify text presented in graphic form
• Page title analysis
• Meta description tag analysis
• Meta keyword tag analysis
• Other meta element analysis
• Alternative image tag analysis
• <H1> and <H2> Headline Text analysis
• HTML comment tag analysis
• Visible text analysis
• First sentence analysis
• Overall keyword density
• Anchor text analysis 
• Site Map verification
• Outbound anchor text analysis
• Analysis of Content Management System

Content/Copy Writing

The only thing that search engines can read is words.  If our recommendations are implemented, and the site presents frequent updates and useful original content, it will obtain a significant amount of organic search traffic.  When a site has useful content, other webmasters will naturally place links to the site, increasing its popularity and flow of visitors. 

When visitors discover a useful website, they tend to refer other visitors by emailing or instant messaging links.  As a result, SEO practices that improve website quality are likely to outlive short term practices that simply seek to manipulate search rankings.

• Word counts of individual pages
• Analysis of on- page themes.
• Evaluation of titles, headlines, meta tags and on- page optimization in relation to the page theme
• Analysis of site copy to determine additional expansion possibilities
• Analysis of on- site press releases
• Analysis of on-site on site white papers
• Analysis of on-site on site articles
• Analysis of on-site on site PDF files
• Analysis of pages for unique content
• Local/regional/national content evaluation

Off-Site Optimization

There are only so many on-site factors you can optimize to help your rankings.  Off-site optimization simply refers to the things that are off your site but influence your page ranking.  Incoming links determine sites link popularity.  However, popularity is only part of the equation.  All major search engines also take into account the quality and context of the links.

• Barrier to entry analysis
• Evaluate the number of incoming links
• Evaluate sites for excessive cross linking
• Evaluate referrer pages for theme
• Identify the popularity of referring page
• Identify # number of outgoing links on referring page
• Determine the HTML title of referring page
• Analyze the anchor text of incoming links
• Search for duplicate content and copyright violations
• Search for Directory Listings
• Evaluate Google PageRank® distribution of incoming links
• Analysis of the number of expert/hub/authority sites yours/competitors have in common.
• Evaluate feasibility of iInclusion in major shopping and comparison websites
• Determine inclusion in local search listings
• Evaluate press release plan
• Evaluate article distribution plan

Website Analytics

• Analysis of current traffic trends if available
• Analysis of current search engine referral results if available
• Analysis of current conversion rates if available
• Analysis of online “buzz”

With some simple math, you can figure out exactly how much a customer is worth to you so you can maximize your revenue.  By monitoring the incoming and outgoing traffic, using web analytics, to see which parts or pages of your site are popular trends, such as one specific page being the most common exit point can be identified.  Unless we spend the time measuring our activities and documenting them there is no way to understand what is working and what is not.  Measurement allows us to identify successes and expand on them.