International SEO
I still prefer reading a printed item rather than looking at a screen, and many co-workers laugh at my predilection for printing reports, e-mails, and even blogs! Outside of the office, I subscribe to our daily newspaper and have a number of magazines collecting dust around the house. Admittedly, the magazines are school fundraisers for the local middle school, and I have a quixotic desire to keep the local newspaper in business.
Picking good keyword phrases is going to be one of the hardest tasks that you will do after deciding to build your Industrial website–or redesign it with Search Engine Optimization in mind. I will be the first to tell you that there are different schools of thought on this, at least once you are at the stage of researching these keywords for SEO value. What I am going to cover today is more elementary than that. I am talking about picking out your initial keywords for the SEO company you will be working with.
Yahoo has announced that their search results in the US and Canada are now fully powered by Bing. You can see the “Powered by Bing” text at the bottom of Yahoo’s SERPs.
It will be interesting to see what impact, if any, this will have for search rankings in Yahoo and Bing. How similar will the SERPs be for these 2 engines with the transition complete? You know we’ll be watching!
Industrial websites face plenty of challenges when it comes to the complex B2B buying cycle, especially when the purchases are costly. A whitepaper from GlobalSpec points out that the number of decision makers in a purchase is rarely made by one person; in fact only 7% make purchase decisions on their own. And the greater the cost, the more decision makers are involved in the process.
Because multiple people with varying roles are involved, your website needs to have multiple formats and multiple types of information to address their questions. Each one has unique concerns that need to be addressed, and none of them want to look or feel stupid.
Additionally, with today’s sluggish economy, many of the people involved in the purchase cycle are stretching beyond their normal work duties. With companies trying to do more with less, some decision makers are covering the workload of 2 or 3 people. And, with the lack of job security, the fear of costing the company money or losing one’s job over a poor purchase decision just adds to the challenge of gaining new business. (more…)
Jakob Nielsen’s latest usability post had some interesting findings about how people read corporate blogs.
“On corporate blogs, summaries are usually superior to full articles because they let you expose users to a broad selection of topics. Offering more topics increases the likelihood that users will find something that really interests them and thus will click through to read more. (As opposed to leaving.)”
Interesting, because we were seeing similar trends lately and changed our blog’s home page to have summaries rather than full articles. (What do you think of the change?) (more…)
I have heard this many times: My contact Us page views have increased, but my completed forms are not where I would like them to be. My general answer to this is: How many of those viewers that went to your contact us page, went there to get your phone number and then gave you a call to place an order? Most of the time, the response I get is “I don’t know”. (more…)
There are many ways to help visitors find products on your site. We’ve found user-friendly configurators to be one of the best ways to get the right information into the hands of the right people. The problem is that what many people think of as configurators aren’t actually configuring anything, and therefore, missing the boat. (more…)
I am going to stray a bit from the Search Engine Marketing that I usually cover here and talk about something new that seems to be important for the Industrial Marketplace right now. I believe that this concept will help many industries with their ecommerce solutions in the near future. This will also bring the need to be on top of your Search Marketing game as it will increase the competition levels for many products. Content Syndication seems to be a new “buzz” word in the online Industrial world today. I will see if I can break this down a little for you. In basic theory, this is when a Manufacturer is able to share their catalog, products and information with their distributors. Here is a graphic that may help explain this better:
As you can see this would make sharing the same products with multiple distributors very efficient, you can every decide which product to share with each one on an individual basis. So if, Distributor “A” carries all of you products and Distributor “B” only carries a few of them, you only give them what they sell. This is all taken care of by the Distributor Support Web Content Syndication solutions.
One of the biggest challenges industrial websites face is helping potential customers find the products and services they need. This is especially true for complex products that require numerous requirements to be chosen prior to quote generation. And for highly customized products, part numbers may not even exist until someone wants to purchase them. Then, add in the complex purchasing cycle for your customers, with different roles like engineers or buyers all taking part in the purchase and you’ve got a complex process. If you can be known for making it easy for all those players to do business with you, then you could gain a competitive advantage. (more…)
Ok, you are an upcoming, growing industrial force in your industry and you recently developed your online presence with a fancy (and shiny) new website. Now what? Do you think it is like that TV commercial from a while ago, that when the owners turned their site live, the traffic was so overwhelming they didn’t know what to do. Well, if that is what happened, congratulations! If you are like most of us starting out online, you need to make the search engines find you, so your customers can. (more…)
For more information on industrial web site design and marketing, visit ecreativeworks