By now, many people understand that you need to diversify your online investment. Most of you probably know that you can’t just build a website and expect the floodgates to open and people will bombard your site and buy from you.
In the industrial marketplace there are four main directories to advertise in. I will list them alphabetically as not to show any favoritism or bias.

GlobalSpec
KellySearch
MacRae’s Blue Book
Thomas Industrial Network

If you are advertising in one or more of these directories - are you really getting your money’s worth? Now, the first step is to looking at your traffic stats. How many people are coming from each directory and are they converting.

A less obvious way to evaluate this is by understanding how your online marketing can compliment your organic seo initiative. You see, when you get into link building (which is a by-product of online directory advertising) the link itself is just as important as the site you are linking from. We’ve discussed this in the anchor link portion of this article.

The real question you need to ask your directory representative is - Can you customize where your product heading links to? For example instead of your ad for Material Handling link to www.website.com, can it link to www.website.com/materialhandling.html? This is important because the landing on a content rich page about the keyphrase will help you organically with that keyword, but it will help your potential visitor.

If they are looking on one of these directories to look for a Material Handling Equipment provider, why would you take him to your homepage when you can bring him right to what he’s looking for? Don’t show him the menu when he already knows he wants the steak.

So I did an experiment. I went to each of the four directories, looking for a Material Handling Equipment provider. Keep in mind, that I’m only doing a sampling, this is not a full blown research project. Nor do I know the inner-workings of each directory. I’m simply doing an experiment. That being said…let’s begin.

GlobalSpec.
As I drilled down to what I was looking for (there wasn’t a general “Material Handling Equipment” list of companies, I clicked to Bulk Handling Conveyors. It provides a lot of information along with the company information. You can click on the company’s name and view their contact information. All the “Web Site” links go straight to the homepage…but when I did some digging I saw that you can click on the product, you can click directly to the product page on the website. That’s great! What’s not so great is that there’s no PageRank on this page. And with all the javascript, I’m not sure if the search engines can even follow that link. So it’s a break even on the effectiveness scale in my book.

KellySearch.
First, I must comment. When I came to the homepage, Material Handling was not a category. So I clicked on “M”. Their listings are not alphabetized. How crazy is that? Sorry KellySearch…not a very “Web 2.0″ move on your part.
Of the 21 advertisers…all of them linked to the homepage only. But, this page at least as a PageRank (2)… again - a break even in the effectiveness scale.

MacRae’s Blue Book.
As I looked through the listings for these advertisers, I started to think that perhaps MBB didn’t allow for link to specific product pages… but alas! 3 of the 25 advertisers had links going to specific content rich pages on the site. This page also has a PageRank (1). We have a winner! Let’s see how the last competitor does.

ThomasNet.
This one was by far the easiest to analyze. Why? Because right underneath their ad, was the full url to click to. Not a “Product Information” with a link or “Visit Website”, but the full url. 13 of the 25 advertisers on this page has link to a content rich page. As an added bonus, a pretty decent PageRank(3)!

At the end of this (very unscientific) experiment, it appears that MacRae’s and ThomasNet both give advertisers a pretty good set up to compliment the organic SEO. That’s not to say there’s no value in the other two directories… I just gave you a little slice of the entire pie!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 9:14 pm and is filed under General, Driving Traffic, Advanced SEO Concepts, Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.