Your website is the hub of your B2B marketing efforts, so it’s critical that it be found on search engines. As a marketer, increasing your website’s search engine rankings should be a focused, ongoing endeavor. One of the simplest, yet most important steps to improve your B2B website’s search engine rankings is to optimize the page title.
It’s in the Little Blue Bar
The page title is the phrase that shows in the blue bar at the top of your browser when the web page loads. People rarely read page 
titles because their eyes are drawn to the actual page, but search engines use them to determine which keywords each page should rank for.
SERP’s Up
The page title is also the bold text that shows up on a search engine results page 
(SERP) when you rank in a search engine. If the page title is not well-written, visitors may not be as enticed to click through to your site. So your time and efforts toward ranking well won't generate much traffic.
Power Tips for Page Titles
When writing page titles, consider that the page title should:
- Accurately reflect the content of the page.
- Be unique for each page on your site, not duplicated.
- Use weighted targeted keywords. Keep in mind that the earlier words in the page title are given more weight than the later words.
- Separate keyword phrases with the vertical pipe character ( | ) or hyphen ( - ).
- Be brief. Search engines gauge the importance of a given keyword in the page title depending on the total number of words in the title. If a page title has 10 keywords, each word is about half as effective as if the title only had five keywords. So eliminate unessential words, e.g., “and,” “with,” “or,” etc.
- Limit length to about four keywords. 70 characters is the maximum length that will be shown in SERPs.
- Be written for click-through appeal for the aware human visitor who actually reads page titles.
Because you almost always rank for your company name, you may choose to leave it out of the page title, especially on interior pages. If you have the space, though, it doesn't hurt to add it.
Start with your homepage, then work through the most trafficked interior pages. For most businesses, optimizing the interior pages can yield significant traffic increases with just a few optimization efforts.
Need help optimizing your B2B marketing website? MLT Creative can give you a lift. Click here
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Martine Hunter is the creative director of inbound marketing with the Atlanta advertising agency, MLT Creative, which specializes in B2B marketing. She holds the Inbound Marketing professional certification and serves the Atlanta chapter of the Business Marketing Association as a member of the board of directors.
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Last week, I spoke about the importance of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) in B2B Marketing. Since people often make decisions based upon both personal and social attitudes, we will be most effective at encouraging a prospect to adopt our desired buying behavior if we can appeal to both. To do this, we simply must talk to people in the industry, and with this week's blog I’d like to expand on that idea by talking about what methodology we can utilize once we have these people on the phone (or ideally, in a face-to-face).
Sense-making. The communication approach known as sense-making is a methodology that has many theoretic assumptions, but the main idea as it relates to B2B marketing is simple: In order to develop successful messaging targeted toward a prospect, a campaign must focus on how that prospect makes sense of his/her world. As strategic partners, we cannot trust what our clients say about their customers—we must talk to them personally. As an example, when we were developing a campaign recently for an in-flight phone system, we called aviation managers and employed the Sense-making approach to see how they made sense of their world (and how our product fit into that world).
Here’s how it works. To effectively utilize sense-making, you cannot let “nouns” guide the conversation; you need to think in terms of “verbs.” Your conversation must be dialogic and dynamic. Going in with a set of questions is fine as a guide, but it should not be an end-all. If the prospect goes down another trail, let him/her. Follow, and ask questions along the way. Remember that the whole idea is to figure out how they make sense of their world; we do not want to assume we know, because we don’t.
Now what? Think about what you learned, and incorporate it into your messaging to motivate the prospect’s buying behavior. So for us, after speaking to aviation managers and understanding how they made sense of our product, we discovered that the top-selling proposition was price. We thus developed the tagline “Say hello to Forté, and goodbye to the high costs of in-flight phones.” And guess what? It worked. For the 12-month period after the campaign launch, Forté sales were running at 116% of their projected goal.
Always remember that we are not just marketers—we are strategic partners. We must know about our client’s industry in order to develop effective strategy, and we also must know that we can never stop. So though Sense-making is important for a campaign, it is also just as important to continue using it throughout the year. Give someone a call out of the blue and just ask about the industry, and then sit back and listen to what s/he has to say. Who knows—you may even find out about a need they have that your client can fulfill so that, the next time you call, it may be related to a whole new campaign.
Vann Morris is the Director of Buying Behavior Studies with the Atlanta B2B advertising agency, MLT Creative. She is a Social and Behavioral Scientist who is currently working on her PhD in Communications, and uses her strong theoretical background in order to show how scientific theory should be used to develop strategy and effective B2B marketing campaigns.
As both a B2B Marketer and Behavioral Scientist, I am constantly examining individuals’ buying behavior in order to determine what motivates them to make purchasing decisions. And as I was browsing the library of successful marketing case studies on MarketingProfs.com today, of course the following title caught my eye (though for a very different reason!): SEO and Sex: A Recipe for Success. A case study about a dentist who wanted to stand out among the competition, it told of how Dr. Helaine Smith broke through the clutter with a combination of inbound marketing and finding her niche; other than just a successful case study, I noted it was also a great example of why incorporating theory into strategy is a necessary endeavor. 
Though the case study was directly related to B2C, there were some definite nuggets that could be carried over to the B2B industry. As a B2B inbound marketer in Atlanta, I understand the importance of developing important content, distributing it through multiple channels, and always remembering to include keywords throughout; however, this case study had an interesting addition in that it reminded me of the importance of “finding your carrot”. In order to break through the clutter we must find something that will make us not only stand out – but also draw people in. For Dr. Smith, this carrot was sex.
As the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) posits, people often make decisions based upon their own attitudes as well as the social attitudes related to that behavior. So in order to encourage a prospect to adopt our desired buying behavior, we will be more effective if we appeal to not only their personal attitudes, but also the social attitudes related to the product/service we are promoting. And that’s exactly what Dr. Smith did – she appealed to the personal attitudes of the individual, but also appealed to the social relationship she found between oral hygiene and sexual relationships. (After all, we all know we should go to the dentist to prevent cavities, but we also know that our society values a nice smile and often finds great smiles sexy; so in going to the dentist this social attitude may be motivating me just as strongly as my own personal attitude.)
So in applying this theory to B2B Marketing, remember that as we promote ourselves and our clients, we must take into account not only the personas of the prospects themselves, but also the social norms that may be influencing their buying behavior. How do we do this? Well, the first way is through constant dialogue with the client; find out as much as you can about their industry, their customers, etc. Unfortunately, this may often be the hardest part, as I know clients are often busy, but dialogue is a necessary component of any campaign so this is a battle that simply must be fought. Second, pick up a phone and find out what other people in the industry think – your client is a great resource, but not the only one (and sometimes might not even be the best). Third, read trade magazines. In doing these things, you’re finding out what’s big with individuals in the industry, as well as what social issues might be of importance.
Finally, don’t quit. Sure the information you find may be useful to a particular product/service campaign, but don’t lose those relationships. Call again a few months later and see what is new in the industry, and always keep reading the trade pubs. And in the end, remember what TRA has taught us: the key to your prospect’s buying behavior may be a combination of both social beliefs + personal beliefs – so whenever possible, pinpoint both and include them in your outreach.
Vann Morris is the Director of Buying Behavior Studies with the Atlanta B2B advertising agency, MLT Creative. She is a Social and Behavioral Scientist who is currently working on her PhD in Communications, and uses her strong theoretical background in order to show how scientific theory should be used to develop strategy and effective B2B marketing campaigns.
B2B buyers who search on Google are goal oriented; they're always looking for something. If they are searching for a product, service or information related to your business, you want to be found on page one. There are many ways to improve your site's search results. The following simple SEO techniques can help you gain exposure and increase page rank on Google:
- Use your essential keywords for the site's page titles
- Add a unique meta description for each page
- Keep page content on the shorter side, but make sure to still completely communicates a full idea
- Create keyword rich URLs pages
- Focus on writing compelling content for humans, not for search engines
- Keep your headings short and use one h1 header on each page
- Include a keyworded "alt" attribute for images on each page
- Keep refreshing your site's content
These easily modified on-page features will directly influence your page rank on Google and over time increase your B2B website's exposure.
Google Insights for Search is a sophisticated tool that can help B2B marketing professionals create more effective brand associations. It can help you gauge interest between relevant search terms, which is a must for inbound marketing. For example, Google Insights can help examine seasonal and regional variations in search behavior to determine which messages or keywords go over best.
Business-to-business marketing specialists can use Google Insights to compare brands in real time over real markets. You can also use it to flesh out keyword ideas and perhaps tweak PPC campaigns you're running. If there's a clear indication that a particular campaign is working well in a particular region or city, you can more accurately target offline advertising and even promotional events.
You won't need a Gmail account to access Google Insights, but you will need a Google account to download data to spreadsheets. An animated map function allows users to see graphically how interest changes with time and region.
Google Insights is such flexible tool, you can find countless ways to use it. Beyond just expanding your keyword lists or looking at economic trends, you can also use it for things like satisfying your curiosity about why some other site ranks higher in the search engines than yours.
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Martine Hunter is the creative director of eMedia with the Atlanta advertising agency, MLT Creative, which specializes in B2B marketing. She holds the Inbound Marketing professional certification.
The first time I heard the term Inbound Marketing, my mind's eye envisioned a scrappy NCAA point guard taking out the ball, then inbounding it to his teammate with a sneaky underhanded bounce pass. Now that I'm a student and practitioner of inbound marketing, I realize that my first impression was not too far off - figuratively, anyway.
The goal of inbound marketing is to position your website as your marketing hub, so that your prospects and customers find and connect with you through the many remarkable content options you've syndicated across the web. They "bounce" onto your website after seeing "open" links placed in a tweet by someone they follow, a LinkedIn group discussion, or the comment section of a trusted blogger.
With inbound marketing, instead of having a single player toss in the ball, it's like the whole arena is making inbound passes. You've drawn the whole crowd into your game. OK, I admit that would be one crazy basketball game, but with your website, it's one score after another; visits become leads, and leads become sales. By maintaining content that is remarkable, relevant and consistently updated, you can increase your site's inbound links, and everyone wins!
If you want to get in the game, I recommend making Inbound Marketing, your definitive playbook. For warm-ups, here's some tips from the book:
• Add something collaborative to your site like a blog
• Create compelling content your audience wants to consume, like white papers, case studies or webinars.
• Track your traffic-producing keywords with Google Analytics
• Converse with your audience on social media, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook
• Contribute to social media and industry blogs with comments
• Pay attention to your site's inbound links
• Monitor and track your progress
• Be patient
Our B2B marketing firm has enjoyed positive results with our inbound activities. What inbound marketing ideas have you put in play?
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Martine Hunter
is the creative director of eMedia with the Atlanta advertising agency, MLT Creative, which specializes in B2B marketing. She holds the Inbound Marketing professional certification.
Google can now discover and index text content in SWF files of all kinds, including self-contained Flash websites and Flash gadgets such as buttons or menus. This includes all textual content visible to the user. Google supports common JavaScript techniques.
In addition, Google can now find and follow URLs embedded in Flash files. The search engine will crawl and index this content in the same way that it crawls and indexes other content on your site — you will not need to take any special action. However, Google does not guarantee that it will crawl or index all the content, Flash or otherwise.
"The ability to index all text including links in Flash is a huge break-through for a web designer. It opens the door wide again for designing great-looking websites with interaction and functionality that can only be accomplished with Flash," says Brian Sheppard, interactive creative director of MLT Creative. "I'm sure we'll begin to see, in the near future, a trend back towards flash-based B2B sites, as was the case years ago, before SEO became the driving force behind web design and designers shied away from it."
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