When you visit a Web site, do you ever wish that you could find a particular piece of information quickly on that site without having to dig deeper into the site ?

Or, are you ever confused to find as to what product or service that the site selling?

In such moments, you realize the “critical info ” that this site is missing.

But as a potential customer, you know about it - don’t you?

Okay, now put the shoe on the other foot so you’re now the Web site owner.

What do your customers wish they could find on your Web site?
What types of product / service information are they looking for?
What products or services do you sell that are difficult to find immediately ?

Talk to your customers! Find out from them what they’re looking for!
Make sure you have many ways to navigate your site with a site map .

Group products together in several different ways. But YOU don’t know
how your customers think.

TIP : Take the time to pick up the phone and call a few of your best clients .
You won’t be sorry you did.

1. Detailed specifications for your products and services. Price discounts offered , service packs..etc
2. Articles, PDF’s / white papers / FAQ’s to educate the customer about your product / service .
3. Interviews / view points from company executives, and clients.
4. Case studies showing how your product or service has benefiting customers.
5. Presentations of any research your company has done in your field.

“Small and midsize businesses are using search in place of newspaper and magazine advertising,” said Marissa Gluck, managing partner at Radar Research, which conducted the online survey of 867 search-engine advertisers and agencies in December and January. “We’re seeing a definite shift from print. That’s because [search is] efficient, and [advertisers] understand what they are getting for their money.”

Gluck said search’s edge is attributable to its efficiency and easy-to-track ROI. “Advertisers are really looking for efficiency and they want to mitigate risk; and search engine marketing fulfills both of those because you only pay for those [online users] who click.”

The North American search marketing industry grew overall from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion last year, exceeding SEMPO’s earlier projections of $11.5 billion.

This year, it predicts spending will reach $15.7 billion.

An overwhelming majority of dollars spent in 2007 (87.4%) was captured by paid placement, while organic SEO garnered 10.5%. Technology investment nabbed 1.4% of spending, and paid inclusion, 0.07%.

Nine of 10 advertisers (89%) said they use SEO. More than half (56%) said they expected to spend more on organic search this year compared with last year.

( source btobonline)

Business-to-business marketers have unique challenges when it comes to measuring the success of their Web site. Because it’s not as obvious as number of product sales, b-to-b marketers must look deeper into Web analytics data to derive conclusions about brand building, advertising effectiveness and prospect interest.

The first step, as with all successful optimization strategies, is to define your goals. Are you trying to drive Web site visitors to ask for a quote? Register for membership? Complete a request form? Pick up the phone? This event is the “desired action,” and you will want to measure traffic to this action and all of the components of your site that lead visitors to take this action.

The next steps are testing and optimizing. Do more visitors click through to the desired action when the link is in the top-right corner of the site or in the left-side bar? Which is more effective—text links, buttons or clickable pictures? This process is vital to the success of your Web site.

It’s also important to combine online ad data with Web analytics data to get a sense of how and why visitors are coming to your site. Pulling in information from search marketing campaigns allows b-to-b marketers to better understand what visitors searched for to find their site and what text-based ads elicited the highest click-through and conversion (action) rates. In turn, these data can help marketers optimize their sites with language that resonates with their target audiences and customize their home pages with links that are most important to their visitors.

The same is true for banner ads and e-mail. Monitoring the effectiveness of banner ads, e-mail and search campaigns to drive visitors to the desired action can help marketers more effectively allocate advertising budgets.

Finally, brand exposure and customer activity can be measured by number of page views and length of time spent on the Web site.  ( source : target media )

As the chart below indicates, during the last major
economic downturn which began in September of
2001, traditional ad spending fell 10 percent in the
overall US ad market according to AdAge. Paid Search
advertising grew more than 175 percent that year. And in
2002 as the economy made a slow but steady recovery,
traditional ad spending rose a modest 4 percent while
Paid Search grew an additional 210 percent.

· Web Site re designs—Make your web site more compelling and maximize it for strong conversions, by helping prospects find quickly what they want, piquing their interest and having strong calls to action &  compelling landing pages. Industry research has shown that a very high percentage of  business web sites in numerous industries fail to achieve core objectives.

· E-mail Campaigns—With high ROI, they are the best way to keep in front of prospects as they go through a normal buying cycle.

· Internet marketing —PPC, organic SEO, banner ads…all work extremely well for most products and services.

· Blogs and web PR -Effective use blogs and press releases to enhance your “online business value” relevant to your industry (Google loves blogs ).

Source: MarketingSherpa, Inc. Search Marketing Benchmark Guide

There are many things that can negatively impact the experience a visitor has at a website. To improve conversion, a busines / merchant has to identify impediments and improve the customers purchasing experience. Some things to avoid include:

1. Requiring customers to register. You should never require customers to register in order to checkout. Doing so will frequently cause massive abandonment from the order process. Customers simply do not want to register to make a purchase and checkout. Give customers the option to register or save their information at the very end of the process-not the beginning.

2. Not having or portraying a secure shopping environment. Customers want to be able to checkout in a secure environment. Having prominently-placed security logos on your site can help assure a shopper his personal data is safe in your hands. Security logos add a perceived level of credibility. The range of conversion improvement achieved through the use of security logos like GeoTrust, Verisign and Hacker Safe fluctuates among ecommerce websites with average gains between 5 percent to 10 percent.

3. Not having clearly-defined exchange policies. Another common reason why people are gun-shy about an ecommerce transaction is they do not feel they are going to get easy return and exchange policies. ( M Bettis)

• Does not ask you about your business
• Does not ask you any questions about your Search Engine Marketing and Optimization programs
• Begins the new design without discussing with you the goal of your website
• Begins the new design without discussing with you who your target audience is
• Puts visual impact ahead of the usability of the web site
• Recommends a Splash entry page (Search Engines cannot normally ‘see’ Splash pages. This is a dated feature that tends to put off site visitors – who will often simply leave the page (and the website) before it has had a chance to load)
• Recommends your entire site be in Flash (Search Engines cannot ‘see’ Flash pages)
• Recommends putting your site in Frames (Search Engines have great difficulty ‘seeing’ Frames pages – there are workarounds for using Frames but they are a costly retro-fit. A good designer will recommend using tables rather than Frames if you have your heart set on a Frames look)
• Does not realize that the <title>, <meta name=”description”>, and <meta name=”keywords”> tags should be different on every page

• How to optimize a website for Search Engines,
• How to design a website that will be user friendly for your target customers, and
• What you want to achieve with your website.

“Paid search offers advantages that other forms of advertising just can’t,” says  Wehr / Oneupweb. “When integrated with a natural search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, and overall marketing plan, it will return more for every dollar spent.”

According to the paper, as the amount of online advertising has steadily increased over the past decade, paid search advertising remains its largest single component. The numbers tell the tale:

• Paid search accounts for more than three times the dollar revenue of classified ads, the nearest online marketing format.
• Paid search claimed 48 percent of total U.S. online advertising spending in 2007.
• Paid search grew 32.2 percent in 2006, while traditional media grew just .5 percent.

Wehr explains that because it’s much more measurable than traditional media, paid search advertising can be assessed and refined more easily. PPC ads can be created faster and less expensively, and better facilitate responses to changing marketing conditions.