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Assessing Google Instant’s Effect On B2B Marketers

As Google moved from Google Suggest to Google Instant last week, I began to wonder what impact it may have on B2B marketers and how to assess that impact. As with any significant change, the results will be positive for some, negative for others. Here are some things B2B marketers should watch to determine the […]

Content

The Benefits, Limitations, And Risks Of Shared Platforms

There are a number of shared platforms for B2B marketers that promise increased traffic and search visibility for their members. Before you subscribe to a shared platform, be sure you understand whether it will really help you and how to best use it to drive increased visibility in the search results. This article looks at […]

Content

Why B2B Blogs Aren’t Achieving SEO Success

Earlier this month, I led the Hot Seat Lab on Better Blogging for Business at MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum in Boston. In it, three brave B2B marketers volunteered to have their corporate blogs critiqued in front of a room full of peers. While the blogs obviously differed in design and content, their shortcomings from an SEO […]

Content

Will New Changes To Google Places Help B2B Marketers?

Recently, Google enhanced several features of its Local Business Center and rebranded it Google Places. Among the new features is an ability to specify the regions a business serves. But will the new changes help B2B marketers serving a larger region get found? Most B2B company locations serve a large region, and it can be […]

Content

Feeding The Content Marketing Dragon

A dragon is a good thing to have. Everyone knows dragons have magical powers. They are wise, although sometimes also vain. Dragons can be fierce protectors, too. The magic of the content marketing dragon is lead generation, lead nurturing, and SEO (especially if your dragon has a long tail.) But if you’re going to own […]

Content

Organic Search Strategies For Driving Traffic To Channel Partners

B2B brands are often reliant on channel partners to sell products and services to end users. And while manufacturers and others offer traditional co-branding marketing tools, they often fail miserably at driving traffic to distributors, dealers, and other channel partners through B2B search marketing. Optimized channel partner landing pages, bulk uploads of locations to Google […]

Content

A Six-Step Content Marketing Check-Up For B2B Marketers

Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools for B2B marketers, most of whom likely have content development as a substantial part of their 2010 marketing plans. But before you get started with developing more content marketing assets, take a step back to assess your efforts to date. Below are six steps to help […]

Content

B2B Blogging: Short-Term Brains Or Long-Term Gains?

Lately, when we talk to prospective B2B clients, I see increasingly divergent views on B2B blogging. On the one hand, there are those who lust after success stories involving other social media (e.g., Twitter) used to drive high amounts of immediate, short-term traffic to a business blog. Many times, these people are so eager to […]

Content

3 Lessons Learned From Successful Corporate Blogging

I’m just back from speaking at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summits in San Francisco and Boston, where I was giving a joint presentation with a client on SEO. As part of that presentation, we talked about the role and impact of corporate blogging. The client is a professional services firm operating solely in the B2B space. Theirs […]

Content

Tips for Turning Unintended Traffic Into Ambassadors

If you have a content-rich, optimized site, you’re likely getting a substantial amount of organic traffic from channels you didn’t plan on – visitors searching for something related to your business who briefly land at your site and move on. Rather than ignore this extra traffic, you should engage them as potential ambassadors and influencers. […]

Content

Twitter Search Tips For B2B Marketers

By all measures, business use of Twitter continues to expand. Twitter can be a great tool used to follow others in your industry, keep track of what’s being said regarding issues relevant to your customers, as well as identify and learn more about potential prospects. Yet finding relevant Twitter users to follow (and making it […]

Content

Capturing the Value of Content Marketing

Click on one of your shortened URLs in Twitter, and your analytics may show a referral from Twitter. But if you click on that same shortened URL in a Twitter client like TweetDeck, the click-through will probably show up as a direct visit, because TweetDeck doesn’t pass along the referrer string in the URL. How […]

Content

B2B Purchasing: A Risky Proposition

In the last couple years, I’ve written that risk is a primary motivator in B2B purchase decisions, and that fear of making the wrong decision strongly influences B2B supplier selection. And rightly so. The wrong choice can have long-lasting business and career implications. This week, Enquiro, released a white paper entitled Mapping the BuyerSphere (registration […]

Content

A Moving Target: Are Mobile Devices Costing You Business?

There are multiple parties involved in the B2B purchase decision. While several parties have the ability to influence the purchase decision (e.g., purchasing personnel), those with the ability to make the decision are typically very busy, often spending significant time on the road, in airports, in meetings. They may not be tethered to their laptop, […]

Content

Where Professional Service Firms Fall Short

It seems like professional services firms really struggle with search engine optimization. Few do it well. In the audits we do for clients, perhaps the most common issue is inadequate site architecture. That is, not having enough pages in the site to respond to the diverse range of potential search terms. But there are other […]

Content

Best Of B2B Search Marketing 2009

Articles and blog postings on B2B search marketing are often hard to find. At Search Engine Land, we’re fortunate to have a stable of experts who regularly contribute great content and make the Strictly Business column a success. But during the year, I’ve found a lot of other great content, too. I chose 30 of […]

Content

Fortune 500 Begins To Embrace Blogging

Business-to-business (B2B) blogging is be a great way to forge relationships, talk with customers and prospects, demonstrate thought leadership, and dramatically increase visibility in natural search results for targeted search terms. Done right, it ultimately drives substantial traffic when others in the media and blogosphere link to compelling or noteworthy content. Yet the Fortune 500, […]

Content

7 Recession Strategies For B2B SEO

Many people have a “set it and forget it” approach when it comes to SEO. But if you have a good site (in terms of organic search), you should be taking advantage of it—especially during these tough economic times. SEO remains one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, especially over the long haul. If your […]

Content

Ten Copywriting Tips for B2B SEO

B2B copywriting is tough stuff. Instead of, “Wipes clean with a damp cloth,” you may find yourself trying to simultaneously explain and extol the virtues of some complex mechanical system while being creative and persuasive at the same time. Copywriting for B2B SEO is even tougher. Here are ten tips to help you succeed.

Content

Five Steps To Successful Site Architecture For B2B SEO

A couple months ago, I noted that one of the 6 mistakes B2B marketers continue to make with organic search was inadequate site architecture-the fact that many B2B sites don’t have sufficient content to respond to desired search terms. The solution, however, isn’t simply adding more content. Proper site architecture is also critical. Here are […]

Content

Keeping Visitors Engaged With Site Search

B2B sites 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 laden with so much diverse information. While site owners can engineer enhanced usability, better optimize and structure content, or create […]

Content

The Big List Of Major B2B Search Engines

Most search marketers focus on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. But B2B search marketers also have a growing number of vertical search options. Clicks and leads from these vertical search sites may not yield the same traffic as general search engines, but the percentage of qualified traffic and conversions can increase dramatically with leads from these […]

Content

Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue To Make With Organic Search

By now, many B2B marketing professionals know the basics of content optimization and how to make a site search-friendly. With that complete, their focus turns to link building. While that’s an admirable pursuit, it may not yield the maximum results if unaddressed website issues aren’t resolved. Here are some of the most common mistakes we […]

Content

Eight Tips For Successful B2B Blogs

Virtually all marketers have realized that blogs can be a powerful part of an overall search marketing campaign. This is especially true in the B2C marketplace, but what about for B2B focused companies? What do successful B2B blogs have in common? In looking at hundreds of B2B blogs, eight common characteristics were apparent to me. […]

Content

B2B Blogging: Using Thought Leadership To Drive Positioning & Sales

The B2B world is wrestling with how to effectively harness “word of blog” marketing—let alone the glittery new world of social media marketing. How can we use social media sites to create that viral buzz that sends awareness and sales soaring? We see what occasionally happens in the consumer market, and we want some of […]

Content

B2B SEO: Capturing Geo-Specific Search

Local search results are great for B2B if your physical location is in the middle of the city you serve—and your prospects actually use search terms that include the name of your city. But what if you serve a broader region (e.g., Northern California)? Or what if your office is in a smaller town and […]

Analytics & conversion

B2B Web Analytics: The Search For High-Value Prospects

The objective of B2B search marketing is often to capture lead information through registrations for white papers, case studies, newsletters, free trials, research data, etc. But what about site visitors that don’t take the bait? Does that mean they’re not serious prospects? Of course not. It would be arrogant to assume that any prospect worth […]

Content

A Magic Carpet For B2B Marketers

As any company trying to set up operations in China knows, getting things done is a little more difficult than in the western world. In the United States, finding a supplier is relatively easy. You can look for partners at trade shows, industry publications, or put an ad in business directories, among other places. There […]

Content

Search Marketing For The B2B Technical Buyer

Recently, Enquiro, in conjunction with MarketingSherpa and Survey Sampling International, released a report entitled Marketing to a B2B Technical Buyer (requires registration). Comprised of roughly equal parts research report and Enquiro marketing perspectives, the document seeks to analyze the behaviors of B2B technical buyers and convey their priorities. While there are a few interesting takeaways, […]

Content

Eleven Tips For Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines

The SEO purist may argue why anyone would ever want to use PDF content on a website for search purposes. The reality, however, is that many businesses have a lot of PDF assets. These may include sell sheets, brochures, white papers, technical briefs, etc. The purist simply says why not convert these to html? In […]

Content

Leveraging Existing Assets For B2B SEO

The typical B2B company often has plenty of literature available on its products and services. Once closely guarded as proprietary and available only to prospects vetted by the sales staff, this literature increasingly appears on company websites as B2B companies struggle to differentiate and distance themselves from competitors. While this is great information for those […]

Content

Organic Landing Pages: A Case Study

Much is written about engineering landing pages for PPC campaigns, but all too often little thought goes into creating the right landing pages for SEO, even less so for B2B SEO. Obviously, for any given query you can’t dictate to the search engines the exact page to which a particular organic search engine result points, […]

Content

B2B Search Marketing: Is SEO Or PPC Most Effective?

When it comes to B2B search marketing, what’s the best strategy—Organic search engine optimization or pay-per-click search advertising? In large part, it depends on what you’re selling, your budget, your company’s investment philosophy, and searchers’ actual behavior.

Content

Navigating Keyword Strategy In B2B SEO

Perhaps nowhere is keyword strategy more complex than in B2B SEO. The lack of shared lexicons, the obscurity of most B2B brand names, the multiple parties involved in the purchase decision, and the extended nature of the buying cycle present unique challenges for B2B marketers. Here are some tips to keep you on course.

Content

Driving Traffic to Channel Partners with B2B Search Marketing

Although corporate brands are vitally important in driving B2B sales, B2B brands are often reliant on channel partners to sell products and services to end users. And while manufacturers and others offer traditional co-branding marketing tools, they often fail miserably at driving traffic to distributors, dealers, and other channel partners through B2B search marketing. Channel […]

Content

B2B Search Marketing: Branding’s Best Friend

Despite the key role it plays in B2B purchasing, branding seems to move further and further down the list of corporate priorities. In the drive to generate revenue in today’s ROI-driven world, don’t ignore the influence of corporate branding on B2B sales or focus search marketing solely on product offerings. In B2B, corporate branding drives […]

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