Search Engine Optimisation – Page 4

Important SEO Practices

What are the Most Important Search Engine Optimisation Practices?

SEO Liverpool get lots of requests for tips and tricks?

1) When you start doing SEO, write down every thing you do and monitor results closely. If you make a change, write that down too — and continue reviewing.

2) If you work with clients, you may want to opt in for an NDA (non disclosure agreement) so that they don’t “reuse any specialist codes you might be using as part of [your] strategy to work that magic.”

3) Content creation is a full time job and SEO “is five minutes at the start and five minutes at the end.” Content creation entails keyword research, articles targeting the proper keywords, using appropriate titles, and using keyword-targeted links.

4) Create accessible sites and follow accessibility guidelines.

5) Review your analytics and see what works and what doesn’t.

Quick SEO Joke

SEO Expert Walks Into a Bar, Bars, Pub, Public House, Irish Pub, Drinks, Beer, Wine, Spirits, Vodka

If you don’t get it, you shouldn’t be reading this blog!

Re-defining Success with a PPC Brand Awareness Campaign

As an Online Marketing Company, we know the dynamics of an acquisition campaign are fairly simple. You bid on keywords, users click on your ads, and then do one of the following: complete the call to action, become a lead, make a purchase, or move on. Given that, it’s fairly easy to define success and justify the spend, whether it’s click through rates, cost per clicks, cost per leads, or return on ad spend.

However, when you use paid search for branding, rather than Web SEO, things are not so straight forward. Yes, you give users more freedom to interact with your site. However, it comes with a price: inability to track pure conversions. This can be scary territory for most search marketers. That’s why it is so important to redefine your success metrics. Not only will it help you accomplish your objectives and justify the spend, but it can also help eliminate the risk of not getting the campaign off the ground, or getting your budget cut due to either tough economic times or a less-than-convinced boss sceptical about the investment.

Successful branding PPC Campaigns: 6 key steps

1. The first step towards re-defining success is to segment your keywords into different buckets, depending on the intent of the user. To do this, you first need to put yourself in their shoes. Then, based upon the queries they conduct, think about how familiar they are with your brand. You can have several buckets, but in its basic form, you want to divide the keywords into groups of branded and non-branded terms. As you do this, try and assess what action or meaning the words denote. For example, with the non-branded terms, does the query indicate that they are a prime candidate to become a lead or make a purchase, or does it demonstrate that they are too new to the company to be ready to convert yet? You’ll need to take a close look at the branded keyword list as well, only here you’ll want to assess whether they are actively seeking what you have to offer, or if they are simply looking for information about the company or its products or services.

2. Once you have your keywords bucketed, start thinking about what would be important to know about your users. Fortunately, there’s a veritable goldmine of data available at your finger tips. Not only can you tap into data from the engines, but your Web analytics program should provide interesting data as well, and then there’s still more data available — though you may need to do some digging for it.

3. You should also examine what’s going on with your site. And while onsite metrics seem simple on the surface, most companies’ analytics packages are not set up to track these effectively. Given that, here are a few metrics to consider: the clicks your ads receive, page views, the bounce rate, and the percentage of returning visitors as compared with new visitors. In addition, you’ll want to track certain elements of your site that you deem more valuable than others, whether it’s a specific area, or a type of interaction such as downloading a whitepaper or starting a shopping cart. Remember, often the set up for such tracking will take some heavily lifting from your analytics. Also, aim to track each of the above metrics by engine, keywords, and channel. However, don’t mix-up your total site or organic efforts in this new tracking.

4. Next, you should consider looking off-site to track and monitor your competitors’ PPC activity to understand your share of voice for particular keywords or groups of keywords. Doing so will help you understand your brand impression share. Fortunately, there are some offsite metrics that are easy to track and use. For example, impressions and average ad position are two of the most basic, but Google now has a way for you to track loss of impressions.

5. Then there are conversion metrics that you can use to help guide the branding success metrics. For example, if you have an acquisition, add that into the mix, cost per lead, return on ad spend, call tracking, increased sales, or interactions at physical locations. This gives you data about how many times someone may visit the site from the branding campaign before they convert, or the downstream value of a user that does click on certain keywords.

6. Once you’ve decided on the data you want to track, start thinking about the best combination for the different buckets of keywords you have, and the weights you want to assign to each. Remember, no metric should carry equal importance in the overall definition of success. For example, visits to certain sections of the site, or increased pages views might be more important to you than the percentage of returning visitors. Then test. Tracking a PPC branded campaign takes a lot of effort and will require you to test the various combinations and weights in order to get the most out of your budget.

Putting it all together

To make the above work, you need to be creative; try different combinations and weightings of the vast amount of data available to you. And keep in mind that you get to define success metrics here, so it’s up to you to go and be successful.

Overall, a PPC marketer looking to leverage paid search for branding purposes needs to take the time to first redefine success. Not only will it help you accomplish your objectives and justify the spend, it can also help to eliminate risk, and instill the value.

Social Media – Who’s It For?

My SEO Manchester friends and I on occasionally, get down the pub for a few pints and go over some FAQ’s, Tips and generally talk about our industry. I thought we’d go a little social today.

The use of Social Media.

To connect with people. Reach the people where they are in the way they are used to.

Keep brand positioning. Keep brand awareness to relay offline marketing campaigns.

Generate more traffic for website

Enlarge the targeted segment. Different types of people use different types of media.

Increase the use experience, testing and engagement

Plus leverage current marketing results, get better brand awareness, get better brand management, get better user stickiness, get better quality products, get more sales.

The requirements for Social Media

Global means local. Because we deal with communities we need to be close to them. The communities are still local, if you want to go global, you need to be where they are an in their language.

Resources. Community managers need to get more focus.

Consistency. The effort should start and last. Be sure to keep users with your community.

Content. The content should get more focus and be relevant.

How you can use social media to benefit you in conjunction with or independently of your search marketing campaign?

Social media is really broad – Twitter, IM, Facebook, blogs, etc. We find the most viable part of social media is to increase your visibility, ranking, links to your site, etc.

Lets be honest, as an SEO Company we know all want you guys really want is a website that gets lots of relevant traffic. If you want a Google number one listing, the important factors are: Domain Age – On Page Factors – links.

Links are much harder to get these days, especially with problems with getting paid links. Social media can really help you here with links, traffic, visibility, and branding.

How it do it: create content on a section on your site, find specific communities that will react well to your topic (don’t put your political content on a dog site), and engage the people in these communities.People with blogs are looking for content and look at these communities. If you get your content on these sites, you get lots of exposure. People write about you, link to you, even talk to you outside of the web (TV, newspaper). You’re getting two types of links – community links (profiles showing what individuals voted on), and industry sites plus others that write about you. The second type usually has better visitors, and you get long-term influx of links (weeks/months).

Social Media Tips

Have a site that is social media friendly. Don’t plug advertising and marketing stuff. A week or so after you’re successful, then you can put advertising back on.

Pick communities you relate to. Research these communities, see what communities are appropriate.

Check what worked before. Do more research, see what was successful for others in your field.

Create high quality content.

Understand how to submit and push social campaigns.

Understand what to do with success.

Be social! Treat it like a real life social event.

Blog Case Studies

I remember reading a fair few months ago, according to Technorati;
100,000,000 + blogs have less than 20 in-bound links.
400,000 blogs have more than 20,000 in-bound links.
The top 2,500 bloggers have greater than 100,000 in-bound links.

Maybe I’m naive, this illustrates to me that reaching the top isn’t a monumental task.

Blogs on their own can do very well as a marketing tool. When optimised, socialised, and linked out to other blogs, they’re phenomenal. Basically, if you can optimise content that’s relevant, a good read and adds value, then you’ll get promoted.

Blog Case Study 1: Our Online Marketing Consulting

A senior citizens housing developer. Worked with the developer on a consultancy basis. Strategy was to create a communication channel to target a market that’s less formal than on the corporate website.

Tactically – upgraded the blog, optimised it according to our advice, and reach out to other bloggers in their space. Within a few months, became a top source of traffic to site: rankings went up, visitors increased. Very nominal effort with very tangible results.

Blog Case Study 2: Large SEO Investment

A book and game retailer wanted to generate sales. Many in the buying space are passionate about games and brain teasers. We wanted to create a place for people to play games.

Tactic – created an SEO’d blog, created communities on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Stumbleupon. We mined Twitter data to find out what people are talking about and to friend people based on this research. Result – great top 3 rankings for target keywords.

Did a social promotion for an old style carnival game. Created a flash version, and promoted that via social media.

Results – Many wrote about this game and we create a big spike. There was another spike as a latent effect, people started searching for the game. Traffic and page-views quintupled! Now the blog sell ads in addition to products and generates a very good revenue stream.

Blog Case Study 3: Small Business SEO

An Online Marketing Blog. Strategy – Increase thought leadership – cover tips, thoughts, news and the SEM basics. Goal – Eventually to generate leads. Tactic – create unique content on a regular schedule via relevant SEM subjects, agency insights, etc.

What happened over time? Generated No.1 Keywords, regular readership and brand awareness.

Next Step – Make the blog into a conversion tool for consultancy and create advertising revenue.

Still a slow burner as budget and time are limited, but has great potential and a very important digital asset.

Key takeaways:

Goals drive content. Automate SEO as much as possible – Socialise – Measure – Refine – Repeat. Make sure you focus on end objectives.

SEO Through Blogs

Not yet running a blog? Then you’re missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. You guys really need to learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimisation.

Blogs, SEO, and marketing. Blogs should not be just part of an SEO play. They’re a real part of the marketing program. Importantly, they create alternative keyword media. Not just the ones you are chasing, but an opportunity to find new keywords. Allows you to extend the reach of your web communication – its marketing and SEO. Building a community deepens SEO relations. Build business or brand – connect with consumers particularly with products that address a particular issue. Any kind of marketer can enjoy the benefits of Blogs.

Lets get tactical! Things you need to think about “before” you launch. Will it be an official blog? Or a personal blog? Will it sit on a subdomain on the company’s website, or sit on its own and take on a new life. The look and feel – will it before personal, or company branded? Will it be a multi-blogger platform or a lone blogger platform? At Summit Online Marketing we’re very pro multi-person blogs.

Will it sit on WordPress or open source Drupal type platform? There are very good arguments on behalf of each.

The optimisation process – four key steps:

* Customise and optimise the CMS.
* Customise and optimise the RSS feeds.
* Conduct and apply keyword / tag research.
* Socialise the blog and create a community.

Important points

* Tweaking CSS.
* Title tag optimisation.
* Permalinks that show real titles, not the text “permalink”.
* Use a robots.txt.
* Use favicons.
* Sitemaps.
* Widgets/blidgets… stands for “blog widgets” – can be useful.
* Validate, tweak, and stay put.

Use the blog plugins! Every blog CMS has plugins for every activity – sitemaps, 301 redirecting, etc. Then – optimise the feeds. Will there be enough content to populate feed? Don’t want reader to unsubscribe. Here at SEO liverpool we like full text feeds. Increase items in feed from default 10 to 20 if the blog has frequent posts. Decide how to handle multimedia – if you have audio or video. Manage feeds with Feedburner (personal recommendation).

Tips:

* Optimise the RSS feed – use keywords in feed in title tag, less than 100 characters.
* Most readers display feeds alphabetically – helps to be an A or B.
* Write description as if for a directory.
* Use full paths on links and unique URLs.
* Provide email updates.

Process for content production.

1. Write post.
2. Review keyword research list.
3. Include a keyword in the headline.
4. Review the body of the post.

Make socialisation easy for people with buttons. Cross link your blog and website aggressively. Notify other bloggers via comments and emails. Join the blog community.

How to keep your momentum

* Develop a mindset that this is a long term, continuous effort.
* Build a battle plan to maintain quality of blog.
* Use Google Analytics (personal preference) to guide editorial choices.
* Post original material often.
* Weed out comment spam.
* Keep blog fresh.
* Build ‘blidgets’ for social media to drive traffic back to blog.

More On Press Releases And SEO

We’ve been discussing in our previous post about search engine optimization training. Specifically that SEO training as should include press release optimisation and submissions.

Part 2 will give readers an idea of possible distribution networks, and how to optimise on your digital assets for PR submissions.

Step 2: Distribution

Many companies offer varying levels of service for distribution. I’ll outline a few:

1) Business Wire.

The leading source for press releases, photos, multimedia, and regulatory filings from companies and groups throughout the world, and suited for businesses of all sizes. Pricing for their optimised releases is currently $225 per release with a Business Wire circuit, and $295 if ordered standalone (a free membership to Business Wire is required). These releases via EON (Enhanced Online News) offer the use of anchor text and links, trackbacks, Web site preview, and customisation of the permanent URL. This is also great for targeting long tail terms.

2) PRNewswire.

More than just an online network, they’ll distribute through the traditional and interactive outlets. Hyperlinks are often removed from online releases, although the releases can rank well in the organic results. The newsline you select and the length of your news release determine the distribution cost. Each newsline covers a specific geographical area: local, regional, national, and international. Their optimised releases are included in US1 releases for $680 or can be added to any other release for an additional $255. Membership is $195 annually and releases start at $180 depending on the location you’re targeting.

3) PRWeb.

Great for small to medium-sized businesses, PRWeb is a leader in online news and press release distribution:

Standard Visibility: Basic submission, inclusion on Google and Yahoo News, two-day distribution, $80.

Social Media: Basic plus social bookmarking links for increased Web 2.0 distribution (tagging, etc), $140.

SEO Visibility: Allows for controlling anchor text of links in the release, next day distribution, and advanced SEO statistics (keywords referring traffic to the release, etc.), $200.

Media Visibility: Guaranteed distribution through the AP and top U.S. newspapers, addition of embedded video, $360.

4) PRLeap.

This is one of the newest and least expensive outlet. Has the fewest press releases being submitted on a daily basis, and is great for smaller businesses. My company has successfully distributed press releases through this channel into Google’s universal results.

Basic: Google and Ask News inclusion, text links, inclusion in PRLeap RSS feed (600 word limit), $49.

Plus: Basic plus AP and UPI distribution, social media tagging/bookmarking, allows for one media attachment, and next day service (1,000 word limit), $99.

Premium: Plus benefits and allows for five media attachments (2,000 word limit), $149.

The amount of press release sites are vast. I’ve given you guys a little taster but obviously budget plays its part.

Step 3: Publish Press Releases on Your own Web Site

While you’re going through the trouble of creating and submitting all of these press releases for distribution, don’t forget to publish all of your press releases on your own Web site to aid your SEO efforts. The search engines love sites that add keyword-rich pages on a regular basis. The more pages, the better. And, if you can organise your press releases by category (similar to how you might organise blog posts), all the better.

One other note: if your press releases are posted correctly (i.e., a unique title tag, header, and other content), this will avoid duplicate content issues with the release that exists on the distribution partner’s Web site. There can be issues with other syndicators of this content (they may not go through the trouble of creating unique title tags, headers, etc.), but the good ones will rank.

Let me know your thoughts

Analytics, Testing and General Landing Page Tips

Here at SEO Liverpool we often hear ‘so how does this testing lark work’?

Well.. It’s really simple. Now that you have these reports, what should you do? I am a big fan of Google Analytics – because it’s free – and you get great stuff from it, and maybe you decide to pay for a product later on. Anyway, the basic concept is, let’s take all the traffic coming in to your page and split it among the different sections of the page. Take a script at the top of the page, track at the bottom of the page, and track your goal page.

Every single hyperlink out there is a contract between you and your visitor. Listen to this, it’s very important and the top seo companies should constantly reinforce this point “Different people might type in the same keyword but have a different intent”. Web Analytics measures these things. Some people will get rid of the keyword, say the keyword didn’t convert. But it’s not the keyword – you need to understand the intent behind that keyword.

Example
Take a look at big retailers and how they are selling digital cameras – by brand, megapixels, features. They have been selling cameras the same way for many years. What about by shuttle refresh rate? What people are actually frustrated about with the camera? No one mentions that a specific model is the fastest, takes 5 pictures in 5 seconds!

Tip
There is a great plugin for Firefox that pulls the reviews – but nowhere in the ad copy does it talk about the topics that people are mentioning in their reviews! If this is what matters, why aren’t retailers putting it up front… Do it!!!

How people gather information and how they make decisions: this is what it’s important to an online marketing company. For example an advert for automated strapping banding machine, which is more logical/methodical and which is more emotional. People act differently with your content! Some look straight at the image and leave. Others look at the content. You don’t need to be an expert in personality types to understand this. Jakob Nielsen says there are 4 types of eye tracking when people come to your site. Spontaneous, humanistic, methodological, competitive (people coming in quickly and leaving quickly if they don’t see what they want). So, now that you know that different people act differently, how can use it to optimise your page?

Start simple. The analytics may say that 90% of people who came to a page bounced. Let’s look at the personality types and think about what they would want to see on the page. You need to appeal to them. Every day that hole is not fixed in your site cost you money. Go through every page and make sure the pages appeal to all personality types.

Also look at reviews and see what people saying about the product: the way it looks and feels (emotional) vs. the functionality and practicality (methodological) and you can adjust the product copy accordingly. Use their voice to give back to them. Use the voice of customers and integrate into product descriptions.

Using product images – also applies to videos, not everyone will respond to videos – 24% of photos in a study did not allow the customer to enlarge a product image, and 65% did not offer multiple views of a product! That will have an impact on the consumer.

Some sites focus on the glamour, that they miss the basics.

Let’s talk about credibility issues: some examples – who are you? People care about the “About Us” page, it will establish some of the confidence. Contact information – have it! Put the contact info in various places, it will inspire more confidence and legitimise the site. Does your site look professional? Even if you are not a design person, you can tell. Other examples of breaking confidence: small font type in gray! Be conscious of these things.

What can you add in to build confidence? Point of action assurances: We value your privacy. How long it will take for a customer service rep to contact someone who fills out a form. Return policies, guarantees. Make sure it’s all there for the consumer.

Other points: 59% of sites according to a recent Nielsen study did not provide shipping costs early in the check out process, and 35% have a checkout process with more than 4 steps! 41% do not provide assurance points in the checkout process. Many sites do not offer in stock availability. Make sure you offer estimated delivery date, etc.

Others credibility points to add to your site: certifications, awards, other review sites that look your site.

Testimonials can also be very effective, but also can have no impact on you. Look at different styles and see what works best for you.

What kind of financial impact can this have on you? You can double your sales just by adding policies.

Analytics – Basic Help We all Need

Analytics, it all sounds rather easy, but where do you start? Everyone should always be testing. But you need to start with the idea of a scent, and grow from there. Let’s take a look. Summit online marketing our Liverpool based SEO company, has always tried to provide tips for our readers. Read this post for some basic Analytics help.

Tip Focus on the high traffic areas with big revenue potentials: landing pages, site overall, internal site search pages, and leaky funnels.

How do you know if the page is actually broken, or the keywords?

Lets start with a metaphor: Imagine a map of Liverpool. Now you’ve just been hired you to minimise traffic accidents in the city. What will you do first? Look for: where is most of the traffic? Where are the most accidents occurring? Do we have wrong or no street signs? Seasonality issues like rain or snow? Timing: any events going on at the Echo arena?

It also helps to know your website. Maybe you want to watch a friend click about, and navigate through your site.

I know from experience that when you start going into the reports, the data is overwhelming.

Have a look at a standard Google Analytics report. Look across the top at the traffic over time for a selected date range. Do you know what bounce rate is? It’s when people leave right after coming to your website. Below that, we tell you geographically where people come from, and then virtually where people come from. On the left side navigation, we start with the visitors, the content, the goals, then the e-commerce.

Understanding that mental model and applying it can really help.

The most relevant part of the reports is in the content section. Any one of those sections will have great data for you to look at. Number of entrances and landing pages, bounces and bounce rate. Bounce rates are a big opportunity.

Next is funnel reports, one of my favorites, do you know about this? People can enter through the center or side of funnels and you want to look at where people are leaving the funnels, the leaky pages. It’s valuable to know something about your site. Where people are exiting is a great place to start.

Then I have a look at site overlays, where people are clicking, converting, buying. It’s very useful. Just looking at this you can come up with some great ideas. Maybe switch placements of products or services on the page. It will give you some ideas.

Internal site search: basically, if you have a search box on your website, are people using search within your website? We have a whole section of reports on site search. Where did visitors start their searches and which page did visitors find?

Back to the question: how do you know if it’s the ad or the page?

We have Analytics pages on landing page optimisations: shows keywords and entrances. You select “non-paid” keywords, and take a look at the bounce rates. Take a look to see if the page is the problem. Select “paid” keywords, and it tells you 0% bounce rate! So that means it’s not the ad copy that needs rewriting, it’s the page that needs attention.

One practical tip: I’ve worked for small and big companies; sometimes in a small company you can go to the main point of the website. But in a big company you sometimes need some consensus building: I believe in something but I really needed my client to believe in it. So start small, focus on improving one area of the site.

Link Building: Where We Are?

At SEO Liverpool we’re always stressing the importance of link building as a key strategy for high search engine placement.

Like all Web marketing, the greatest aspect of link building is the trackability. This helps you quantify your progress and prove your worth to your superiors and clients.

However, there hasn’t really been a standardised tool that the industry accepted as “the” link monitoring tool. In fact, there are more tools that will tell you wrong information than there are tools that will tell you right information.

Most of the major search engines have link identifying queries that you can do. The standard search query is: link:www.example.com.

If you do that search, you’ll get a list of pages linking to that page. Because I can get you the complete set of data, I’ll do this for a current client.

Doing this query on Google returns about 14 pages linking to that URL. Doing this query on Yahoo returns 1,103 pages linking to that URL.

That’s a major difference! This is because Google intentionally doesn’t want to disclose all of the links it knows about a domain, which explains 14 links versus 1,103 inlinks. Google only gives a small sampling.

The more realistic number is 1,103. Yahoo is more open when it comes to link disclosure. Virtually every link analysis tool you use (such as SEOQuake) relies quite heavily on Yahoo’s link data.

Incidentally, you can do those searches for specific pages to see how many links point to that particular page on your site. That information can be telling of how a particular story or link bait tactic is fairing in gathering links.

However, the link reporting trail doesn’t end there. There’s one final way of getting a much more comprehensive tally of the links pointing to you. The most comprehensive, detailed list of links pointing into your site is found at Google’s Webmaster Tools.

If you haven’t setup your site in the Webmaster Tools section, I strongly encourage you to do so. All you need is a Google login. Then they ask you to either upload a page with a strange custom URL they give you or add some meta code to the of your site. Doing that verifies you own the site.

This gives you complete access to a ton of great information about your site. Not the least of which is your link information. If you recall, the total number of links Google showed on their front-end search query for my client was about 14 links pointing into that URL. Yahoo had 1,103. Google Webmaster Central has 1,471.

I have seen client data that is shockingly different.

Additionally, Webmaster tools nicely lays out how many links are pointing to each page of your site.

This information is interesting because I can instantly see that my clients blog gets nearly three times the number of links than the home page. This tells me that people are more interested in linking to the blog than the home page. So, as I move forward in asking for links I probably would want to suggest people link to our blog.

I also see that one particular page has 24 links. This is new for us in 2011. We’ve done no link building campaigns for this service. So, I’m encouraged to see that people are already linking to it with no suggestion on our part.

Finally, I would be able to take this data to a client or superior every month and track the progress of any link initiatives taking place. I would easily be able to chart link growth on a page-by-page level.

However.

Google discusses their link reporting at the bottom of that page, they write, “Note: While the External links page provides a larger sampling of links to your site, not all links to your site may be listed. This is normal.”

So, even in the Webmaster Tools section, we still may not know everything Google knows…. but it’s a decent start.

Keep visitors engaged with Site-Search

Some websites do tend to be more difficult for visitors to find what they’re looking for!

Perhaps it’s because things don’t always fit neatly into more intuitive consumer categories. Perhaps it’s because B2B sites are often filled with so much diverse information. While site owners can engineer enhanced usability, better optimise and structure content, or create better organic landing pages, none of these options is a quick fix.

I’ve worked with a large knowledge management company, who’s product involved extracting information from vast online content and bringing the desired relevant information to the forefront. This technology was extremely expensive but created massive efficiencies for clients.

Google’s Site Search offers a quick, inexpensive way to keep visitors engaged and (hopefully) get them quickly to their destination on your site.

With SEO PPC, we’ve all clicked on promising organic search results and been quickly disappointed that the landing page doesn’t contain what we’re looking for. In many cases I’ll often land at a site I’m fairly certain contains what I want, so I’ll take a few clicks through the site’s navigation. But if I don’t find what I want in a few clicks, I don’t have the patience to keep searching. I’ll go to another site. All of us see these visits in our analytics, too. A four-page, 20-second visit. Then, they’re gone.

Site search functionality offers a way to keep visitors engaged a while longer. If visitors don’t quickly find what they want through navigation, they may try the site’s search tool. Many B2B visitors will go to the site’s search tool right away as an alternative to navigating to find an answer.

While many larger sites have already have site search functions, more often than not I’ve been disappointed with their search results. When I’m looking for a specific product or service, I’ll get hundreds of search results, but the first 30 results will be investor news releases or obscure technical articles. The results aren’t relevant to my quest. Not only do I leave without my desired answer, I’ve also formed some negative perceptions of the company and its website.

But then I tested Google Site Search. I think it’s a good answer for many B2B sites. It doesn’t cost much. Pricing depends on the number of pages indexed and the number of annual queries. For a site with less than 5,000 pages and less than 250,000 annual search queries, the cost is $100 per year. Pretty reasonable.

Getting all of your content indexed by Google can be a challenge, especially with large B2B sites. Google Site Search offers the opportunity of deeper site indexing for site-specific search. While this deeper site indexing won’t get more pages indexed by Google or help you in your Google rankings for web searches at Google.com, it will help you ensure all of your pages are reflected in the index of your site’s Google Site Search. This means searchers will get different (and likely better) results using Google’s Site Search on your site than if they used Google.com to search for information on your site (e.g., incorporating site:www.yoursite.com into the Google query).

Google’s site search also gives site owners the opportunity to “bias” the search results in a couple ways. For sites in which new content is typically more important, site owners can ensure search results are more heavily weighted to newer site content. Site owners can also bias search results to reflect certain sections of the site more than others, e.g., product-related pages more than company-information pages. This can help drive searchers more quickly to revenue-generating pages. This has been so impressive, under our search engine optimization training, we recommend this for our e-commerce customers.

If you don’t have search capabilities on your B2B site, it makes sense to spend £100 to try it. There’s not much you can do for $100 these days. So try it out. Then watch your analytics. Notice what visitors search for. That alone is great information. Also, see if your bounce rates decline, or if the average time on your site goes up materially. And watch your conversion rates.

If you already have search functionality on your site, you still may want to test out Google Site Search. Set it up and do some comparative searches. See if you think the search results are more relevant or if the user experience is better. I’m not sure if Google’s Site Search will be better than what you already have (and I’m not trying to sell Google’s Site Search), but again, for $100, it’s worth a test.