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 jump into the promise and immediacy of Twitter, LinkedIn groups, and Facebook to drive traffic to a blog, that they give little consideration to developing the meaningful, valuable content required to attract interest in the first place.

On the other hand, there are those that tend to lump B2B blogging in with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, social-bookmarking sites, and the like. Many of these people are in niche B2B industries where the pace of adoption of social media vehicles is slow and the potential “crowd” is thin. When they consider blogging as a part of their marketing strategy, they see little promise. Sure, they say, maybe we’ll get 20 subscribers to our blog, but what good is that? We’re not going to get large amounts of followers on Twitter. We’re not going to get large amounts of subscribers to our blog. Social media just isn’t a good fit, whatever form it comes in.

Both groups seem overly focused on the short-term, either somewhat crazed by the potential of short-term gains or convinced that such gains aren’t possible, and as a result, dismissing the very idea of B2B blogging. Both groups tend to ignore the long-term, most valuable benefits of B2B blogging—search visibility and thought leadership positioning.

Earlier this month, Jeffrey Cohen of Social Media B2B, had a great post titled Blogging for the Future, in which he discussed the long-term search benefits of consistently creating relevant, compelling content optimized for search. Even a modest commitment of 2-3 such posts per month will yield 30 posts in a year—and each of those posts will consistently drive relevant traffic to your blog and your site every single month. Forever. And the beauty of search is that you’ll be meeting those visitors at the very time they’re interested.

In addition to driving traffic, those posts will also position your firm in terms of expertise and thought leadership. This enhanced search visibility and positioning can go a long way in reducing the perceived risk potential purchasers feel when considering alternative suppliers, strengthening your position and increasing the chances you’ll be on the short list of contenders.

Sure, this isn’t as sexy as creating a lot of social media buzz in the marketplace, but unless you’re blogging for the long term, I doubt you’ll be successful in the short term, anyway.

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 is a complex sale with an average sales cycle of 2-3 months from first contact to the time work begins. There are typically multiple people from different parties involved in or influencing the buying process, and the average engagement is in the low-to-mid five-figure range.

We had already optimized the professional service firm’s website. Early last year, however, we recommended the client also start a blog, both for purposes of positioning via thought leadership and fulfilling the rest of the SEO keyword strategy we had previously identified. The company is now about 15 months into blogging. They post once each week, and there are seven professional staff members who contribute to the blog.

We made sure the blog was integrated with the client’s site, not a separate domain or hosted blog. We chose WordPress and made sure to integrate plug-ins that would give us the proper optimization options. Then we worked with the client to develop topics, B2B blogging guidelines, and help educate those who would be contributing.

The ongoing work is largely handled in-house, by the client. On a periodic basis, we review the posts and make or recommend changes, both in terms of editing content for readers and better optimizing individual posts for search.

The results have been far beyond expectations. Today, while the blog accounts for 32% of the landing pages on the site, it accounts for more than 53% of the client’s organic traffic. The number of unique keywords for which the firm’s site is found has nearly tripled since the start of blogging. The firm’s website is responsible for more than 50% of its new business. They no longer have need for full-time people dedicated to finding new business; the firm’s new business activity is essentially responding to requests for work, not identifying and nurturing leads.

It should be noted, though, while the business results are good, it’s clear the results aren’t just about search; the quality and quantity of B2B content plays an equal, if not larger, role in positioning the firm and generating leads.

While the site optimization and corporate blogging has been successful, there were three key lessons learned along the way.

Multiple bloggers helps address diverse keyword strategy

In B2B, there is a diverse lexicon for almost every industry. Typically, there is no agreed upon, commonly used language to describe things. A given product, process, or issue may have four or five very different words or phrases used to describe it. This makes B2B keyword strategy particularly complex.

Even within the same organization, people will used widely varying terms to describe the same thing. We actually found this to be a benefit when it came to corporate blogging. Simply by having a broad range of contributors to the corporate blog, we continued to identify important keywords we hadn’t previously considered or found during keyword research.

The key, however, is not to squelch that by shoehorning blog contributions into previously established keyword strategy. Instead, you should embrace that diversity. Instead of changing copy to reflect previously established keyword strategy, optimize B2B blog copy for the newly found keywords. Make sure other on- and off-page factors are optimized for these keywords as well. This way, you’ll constantly be expanding your potential for organic search.

Let people write about what they love

Non-marketers typically don’t like to blog. Marketers, on the other hand, sometimes make the worst bloggers. Oftentimes, the people your clients, customers, and influencers find interesting aren’t the marketing people. They like to hear from the people in the trenches.

This creates a challenge for many businesses. A great question asked by one of the attendees at the San Francisco B2B Summit was, “How do you get people to want to contribute to the blog?”

Our client’s strategy was pretty straightforward.

Ask your people what interests them. What issues are they passionate about? If they’re having trouble, help them brainstorm. People have little problem writing about their passions and interests; it’s when they get forced into writing something else that things slow down.

Then together make a list of those topics and issues and see how they align with the interests of your key publics. Make your selections from there.

Schedule things out. Work with them to identify when each post works into their schedule and the overall editorial schedule of the blog.

Give them generous deadlines. Get their agreement on the dates for each post. Remind them of the deadlines the same as any another item in weekly workflow meetings.

Schedule internal deadlines at least a week in advance of the scheduled post date. This gives you sufficient time for any rework, any copy and headline editing, any necessary copy optimization for search, and for loading, formatting and optimizing the rest of the post (e.g., URL, title tag, meta description, image selection and optimization, etc.)

Follow up the day after the deadline if they don’t email their post to you. You need to hold people accountable through follow up and by making their blogging contributions as important as their other responsibilities. Make it understood it’s part of their job description and overall role.

Organic landing pages are important (and often overlooked)

In a well-optimized site and/or blog, people land everywhere. Yet often we do little, from a usability perspective, to help them with their next step. Landing page optimization receives a lot of attention in paid-search strategy, but we seldom give the same time and effort to organic landing pages.

After a while, it’s easy to see what keywords drive organic traffic to a given landing page. The first thing to do is to make sure that page is actually relevant to the visitors arriving there via organic search for those respective keywords. Is it relevant content in response to their query, or are you merely getting lots of unintended traffic (and bounces) because you happen to rank well for a given query?

Assuming your content is relevant, what are you doing to help further guide and nurture the visitor’s experience? If you know organic visitors are arriving on a given page because of a fairly narrow set of keywords, where do you think you should be directing them next?

The keywords responsible for organic traffic to a certain page should give you some idea of searchers’ intent. Rather than simply avail them of your standard navigation, you should be providing specific on-page links to other content relevant to the most popular queries for that page. Strategically selecting and placing links to other relevant content—not just automatically generated “possibly related links”—will drive deeper engagement and generate more leads.

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.

Recently, I reviewed analytics for one of our sites and found we get a lot of organic traffic for “B2B selling”, nearly all of it pointing to a single page on the site. We don’t really focus on B2B selling. We focus on B2B marketing. While related, they are different. And because the rest of the site is focused on B2B marketing, the page getting a high amount of organic traffic for “B2B selling” has a high bounce rate.

Rather than ignore that traffic, we need to develop content and navigation that keeps those visitors on the site a while longer and offers them a way to engage with us further, an opportunity to create a conversion. Whether it’s subscribing to the blog, downloading an eBook, subscribing to a newsletter, reading to a related article or blog posting, to sharing something with a colleague. After all, people searching for “B2B selling” likely have colleagues focused on B2B marketing. We need to develop a strategy and create content that makes B2B sellers (influencers) pass along or recommend our site, or become ambassadors for our eBooks, and share with their B2B marketing counterparts (our buyers).

Search your analytics data, and you might uncover similar findings.

1. Using your analytics, run a report of your top 100 organic keywords.
2. Export this to an Excel file.
3. Create new column in which you multiply the bounce rate for each keyword times the number of visits. This will give you the number of bounced visits for each keyword.
4. Sort the data by descending order of bounced visits. This will give you a prioritized list of keywords with the most bounce activity.
5. Then go back to your keyword report and identify the landing pages for these high-bounce keywords.

Once you’ve identified these streams of related traffic and the pages they land on, identify what you what can you do to lower the bounce rate and engage these visitors as potential ambassadors. Here are some ideas:

• Create new content for that audience, something they (the influencers) will want to share with buyers.
• Offer an eBook or some other valuable content asset in exchange for registration. Then, dedicate a segment of your email marketing to continue to reach these influencers.
• At a minimum, put some links on the landing pages to direct these influencers to other related content that might interest them, maybe a blog posting or two.
• Make sure your landing page has prominent subscription options to things like your newsletter or blog, and the ability to easily follow you on Twitter.
• If the landing page is content that can be shared, provide easy, automated ways for people to do so.

Once you’ve made the changes, remember to check your analytics for the results. Did the bounce rate go down? Did you get more conversions? Was the content shared more?

In a couple months, repeat the process. In doing so, you’ll gradually convert that ancillary traffic into meaningful interactions and leads.

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 easy for them to find you) can be time consuming and sometimes frustrating – especially in the B2B space, where the industry lexicons are often very diverse. Here are a few tips to help you in that process.

Search Twitter bios

Searching Twitter user bios is a good way to find others with relevant interests, and TweepSearch is a good search engine to help you do that. For instance, if you searched for “B2B,” the search results would list Twitter users with “B2B” in their profile.

Search results include these details from each user:

• Full text of bio
• Number of followers, friends, and updates
• Time since last update (although this tends to lag actual updates)
• Link to the user’s website

If you’re signed in to TweepSearch, with a single click you can follow any user listed in the search results.

Of course, a Twitter bio search will only return Twitter users who happen to include your search term(s) in their bios. So if you want others to be able to find you for a particular query, make sure you include those keywords in your Twitter bio.

Search other’s followers

Another way to find other users who share your interests is to identify other Twitter users who seem to be leading voices in the niche. You can do this manually by viewing the user’s followers in Twitter, but you’ll have to go through the user’s entire follower list. The list could be long, and a lot of those followers may not be relevant to your interests.

One way to winnow the list of a given user’s followers is to use TweepSearch to search the bios of a particular user’s followers. If you click on a user in the TweepSearch search results, you’ll then be able to search the bios of that user’s followers.

Search for other users on WeFollow

As noted above, searching Twitter bios only works if Twitter bios contain the keyword for which you’re searching. Bios on Twitter are short and tend to not necessarily be optimized for search. There are some other options for finding Twitter users whose bios may not be optimized for your particular queries.

WeFollow is a directory of Twitter users who have indicated they follow certain hashtags. For instance, a search for “B2B” on WeFollow on recently indicated 162 people who have noted on WeFollow that they follow the hashtag #B2B, and that those people collectively have about 111,000 followers. Note: that 111,000 number is a gross number and does not represent unique Twitter users.

Adding yourself to WeFollow for hashtags relevant to your business and issues relevant to your customers is a good way to help prospects and other key people in a given niche more easily find you.

Follow relevant hashtags and phrases

TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop are great twitter clients for following multiple groups of Twitter users or following relevant hashtags and phrases. While you could use a search engine like Twazzup to get search results on current tweets containing a given search term or hashtag, you can also simply monitor them by setting up ongoing searches in TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. This way, you’ll have a running stream of relevant tweets you can use to identify others whom you may want to follow.

Of course, the flipside of this – if you want to make sure others can find you- is to make sure you occasionally tweet with the hashtags and phrases for which you want to be found.

Using the search tools above, you’ll be able to find relevant Twitter users, and if you’re aware of how these tools work, you can take steps to ensure they’ll be able to easily find you.

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 many other sources of your traffic are like this? Probably more than you think.

Content marketing is very effective for B2B marketers. Think about all of the case studies, white papers, brochures, technical papers, newsletters you have. Likely, many of these assets are in pdf form. They took a lot of time and money to create. When it comes to analytics, you may know how many people download these assets, but you probably have no idea whether these assets help drive people back into your site.

Smart marketers put links into their pdfs. They know many people never print a pdf; they view it electronically. Ideally, links in the pdf drive readers back into your site for deeper engagement. The primary value of these marketing assets isn’t measured by how many people download them. It’s much better measured by whether readers of those assets take further action. Unfortunately, if you’re like most marketers, a click-through from one of these assets shows up as a direct visit. There’s no way to attribute it to your content marketing.

Suppose you’re searching your analytics for prospects. Suddenly, you find five direct visits from a Fortune 500 company in a span of three days. Each visit is fairly long and deep, but it’s also broad; and you really can’t determine their particular interest or what issue prompted that interest. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that these visits came from a particular white paper? That would give you tremendous insight into the visitor’s interest and motivation.

To begin capturing that information, you need to tag the URLs in your links. If you’re using Google Analytics, you can use Google’s URL Builder to append information to the URL. Then use these tagged URLs in the links you put into pdfs and other similar media (e.g. PowerPoint assets you make available). In doing so, you’ll not only be able to track click-through from certain channels of content marketing (e.g., white papers), but you’ll also be able to drill down within that channel to see how much traffic each white papers is driving. If you’re using another analytics platform, find out how to use its tagging capabilities.

If you use shortened URLs in these content marketing assets, make sure you tag your URL before shortening it. Incidentally, you can also do this for your tweets that contain short URLs linking back to your site. That way, in your analytics, you’ll be to identify click-through from people using tools like TweetDeck and distinguish it from direct visits.

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 required). The white paper presents findings of Enquiro’s recent research into B2B buyer behavior; illustrates risk as the common, dominant factor in B2B purchasing; and explores an alternative model for targeting and mapping markets and prospects. Gord Hotchkiss and his team have done a great job, and the paper is well worth downloading.

If you haven’t thought about B2B purchasing in these terms before, it can really make you question and rethink your approach to the market. If risk is the primary motivator, how do you need to adjust your tactics, your messaging, your positioning?

B2B buyers assess risk, and each participant in the buying process is going to assess corporate and personal risk from his own vantage point. To maximize your chances of success, you need to understand each participant’s potential concerns in this regard. What you actually do with that information will vary based on your organization, the market you want to go after, and prospect-specific factors. However, we can talk about a general approach.

If risk is the primary motivator in B2B purchasing, the key to success lies in “tools of assurance.” That is, what do you have (or need to create) that you can use to effectively assure prospects that they’re making the right decision.  To complicate things, there are multiple points along the buying process at which you may need to provide different tools of assurance.

In fact, in some cases, you might be smart to provide assurance even after being awarded the sale. How many times have you been told by an excited buyer that you got the sale, only to find out post-purchase concerns derailed your win before you got a contract in place? Take heed. Euphoria over finally making a key decision is often followed by anxiety.

Some tools of assurance require personal interactions. Some tools of assurance are legal, such as a guarantee or warranty, or, to set yourself apart, your willingness to go beyond the normal industry guarantees. Others potential means of assurance are things you can’t change quickly, such as depth of experience or your location.

But, since this is Search Engine Land, let’s talk about some potential tools of assurance you might use in the online world. Here are few to think about:

Thought leadership. This can be a very compelling tool of assurance. Thought leadership can be evidenced through many different vehicles, including case studies, white papers, published articles, media coverage, etc. Make sure these available and are easily found on your site—and that they’re optimized for natural search. Assess what you have. Make sure these assets indeed provide assurance and reduce perceived risk for your prospects—and that they’re not merely dribbling on about you.

Blogging. Blogging provides a great forum for demonstrating thought leadership. It also let’s you show forth some personality, a glimpse of what it might be like working with you (a form assurance). Blogging is also great for SEO. Done right, it can also help you get found for desired search terms. Your interaction with other bloggers via links and comments can accelerate your visibility and help position you in the marketplace. There’s more on B2B blogging in an article here and here.

Search engine optimization. Your ability to be ubiquitous in your niche can play a huge role in terms of assurance. Sure, you can buy your way into PPC visibility, but B2B buyers overwhelmingly look at and click on organic results first (see Enquiro’s earlier research; registration required). Regardless of your size or market share, you can be perceived as a leader if you seem to be everywhere in the organic results for your niche (but only if your site continues to build on that perception once the searcher clicks through). And don’t forget, it’s not just web search: it’s news, video, image, book, blog, and local search, too.

Paid search. You can use paid search to augment your organic visibility or to make up for the lack thereof. But don’t just go after head terms; remember the long tail. As buyers progress in their decision-making process and look for assurance on their direction, their search terms change. Now in addition to the head term, they may append “case studies,” “white paper,” “article,” “warranty” and other modifiers.

Social media. Your corporate and personal profiles and what you say and do on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, and in social bookmarking sites, forums or wikis, says a lot about you and your company. Be visible, but be smart. Do you instill confidence, trust, and assurance, or do you create cause for concern? What do others say about you or your brand? Are you a professional on LinkedIn and a loose cannon on Twitter? It only takes a couple of seconds to find out—and the number of Twitter searches is accelerating at an astounding pace, up more than 500% from January to April, according to Hitwise.

Positioning. How you position your company online strongly influences perceived risk of doing business with you. Ideally, you want to identify and migrate to a position of market leadership where your brand has few credible substitutes in the marketplace. For most companies this means narrowing your focus, which can be scary. But people hire experts. And they pay them more. And they recruit them from further away. Why? Because specialization reduces risk. Because the seller’s historical success in a focused niche helps assure prospects that the seller has the knowledge, people and processes in place to replicate past success with future clients.

So step back and evaluate how your target market perceives you. How you position your company online, the search terms for which you get found, and what you say and do in social media all contribute to how prospects perceive your position in the marketplace—and the risk in doing business with you. Are you the safe choice? Are you reducing your prospect’s risk or giving them cause for concern?

Most web analytics tools, including Google Analytics, attribute online conversions to the most recent visit. Sure, you can define the funnel and see how many people enter the funnel, the visitors who abandon the funnel, and how many people ultimately convert, but only if all of these events happen in a single visit. Conversion in the B2B world doesn’t necessarily happen that way. There may have been many previous visits to your site via other channels that influenced a visitor to finally take the desired action. If you’re not capturing this information, you may not be making good decisions.

In March 2009, Business.com completed an analytics study of more than 27,000 B2B web sites. It’s a great study and well worth downloading. Here are some of the findings:

• 93% of sites can’t see the influence that multiple campaigns/keywords have on conversions
• 49% use a third-party web analytics program that only provides basic site traffic data or which, by default, use the “last click” method for connecting a prospect action (e.g., clicking on a banner ad or link in an email newsletter) with a conversion, such as a purchase or registration. (82% of these B2B sites used Google Analytics or Urchin software by Google)
• 44% use no web analytics or, in rare cases, use a custom in-house solution

Most analytics programs attribute conversion to the last trackable link clicked before conversion, the “last click” method. In some cases, this may be just fine; perhaps conversion actually did happen in a single visit. But with lengthening sales cycles and the significant amount of purchase research that happens in the B2B world, prospects may have visited your site several times through various means before they returned once more to ultimately take action.

Business.com’s study cites the following example:

Let’s say that ABC Company is hosting a webinar next week.  ABC knows that the average value of a registration for one of their webinars is $10 (e.g., if they get 100 people at a webinar, they’ll typically generate a total of $1,000 in revenue from that set of attendees over the following 90 days). If a prospect clicks on a banner ad, visits the web site and registers for a webinar, then that banner is credited with causing the prospect to register for the webinar, and the banner is credited with the $10 value for a webinar registration. That prospect could visit the company web site three times in the last month after clicking on a sponsored link in a general search engine, an online directory listing and a link in a company email newsletter to which they subscribed months ago.  The banner ad only served to remind them that the webinar was coming up and they hadn’t yet registered.  A “last click” web analytics program ignores all the other activities that influenced the prospect to sign-up for the webinar.

In today’s hyper-ROI-focused economy, this could lead to some flawed decisions. In the above example, if the majority of people did exactly the same thing, management may decide to funnel their investment solely to similar banner ads. In doing so, they may eliminate touchpoints that played a strong role in ultimate conversion, critical touchpoints experienced early in the buying cycle-and the overall results from the banner ads may suddenly decrease due to the lack of such influencing factors.

In B2B, conversion is a process, not an event. It’s important to understand all the factors involved in that process and how each contributes to your desired conversion. As with most things in life, the best decisions are made with a full understanding of the facts and issues. Make sure your analytics tools are providing them.

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, but most are inseparable from an iPhone or BlackBerry.

While these decision-makers may not initiate purchase research, they often receive purchase recommendations of others via email, and these emails contain links to sellers’ sites. What could be easier than clearing some emails or doing a couple quick searches with Google Mobile while waiting for the next plane? In the next 10 minutes, an executive could form her initial perceptions of your firm based on what she sees on her iPhone. Are you happy with what she’ll find? Do you even know what she’ll find?

Years ago, we were finishing the build of a new, optimized site for a client. The client wanted the site’s primary navigation to be in Flash. So we incorporated other ways for search engines to get to the site’s content from the home page. We also had plenty of html-based intra-site linking within the copy of the site’s pages. One night, I wanted to check the team’s progress on the site. I grabbed my BlackBerry. I quickly found that the only way a mobile user could actually get into the site from the home page was through html links for things like the site map and privacy policy. While I could get to all the content, it wasn’t a pleasant experience, to say the least. The next day, we began to make changes to speak to the mobile user.

Last spring, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study on the use of mobile devices. As of December 2007, 19% of respondents had used their mobile device to access the internet; 7% said they did so regularly, on a typical day. Certainly, these numbers have gone up dramatically since then, and they’ll continue to do so.

If you don’t know what mobile users will experience when they visit your site, you should take the next five minutes to find out. How does your site display? Are there features of your site that don’t even load? Is your site’s primary content easily accessible to mobile users? Are mobile visitors drawn to take desired actions with the same persuasion and ease as desktop users? How long does it take for your site to load? How are images displayed? How easily can mobile users navigate? Is your site engaging to mobile users? Based on what you find, you should either make some changes to your site or create a separate experience for mobile users.

You can also use your analytics to see what mobile users are doing. Most analytics programs allow you to see what platforms visitors are using. You can see what percentage of your visitors are using Safari, Firefox, IE; a Mac or PC; and even XP or Vista. But you can also see how many visitors are using Safari on an iPhone, and you can segment these visitors to determine if their behavior is different from more traditional visitors. How do the bounce rates compare? How long do they stay? How deep are the visits? What are the conversion rates? Wide variance from traditional visitors may indicate the need for changes.

When you look at your analytics, you may be tempted to discount this population because they have far less average page views than traditional visitors. Just remember, your site (not the visitor) may be the primary reason for this. You also may be tempted to discount the importance of this population because mobile users are a small percentage of total site visitors. Keep in mind this population is going to do nothing but grow.

How does your site look on an iPhone?

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 common problems, too. Here are some of the issues and what you can do about them.

Types of staff

Prospects and referral sources may be searching for a particular type of staff member. With law firms, there is typically only one class of professional staff member-attorneys. But with other professional services groups like architectural and engineering firms, the types of staff members are more diverse. Architectural firms generally have architects, interior designers, engineers, and others. Engineering firms often have numerous types of engineers-mechanical, electrical, environmental, civil, structural.

Each class should have its own page on the website, and the sole focus of the page’s on- and off-page content should be on the individual, not the service. For instance, too often I’ll see a firm with a staff page about mechanical engineers, but the copy, headings, title tags, and everything else is focused on mechanical engineering, i.e., the service instead of the person. Don’t make that mistake.

Industries served

Often, prospects define their needs (their search) in terms of the industry they work in. They may work in healthcare, hospitals, manufacturing, churches, colleges and universities, retail, automotive, or any number of other sectors. Don’t simply have a single page that lists the industries you serve. Make sure you have at least one page on your site for each sector you serve. Keep the on- and off-page content focused on that sector and its issues as they relate to the services you offer. Write engaging copy that shows you know the sector and its unique issues. What sectors do you serve? Does your site have a page for each sector?

Types of services

Make sure you have a unique page for each service you offer. Not only is this a smart approach with search engines, it’s a smart approach with your prospect. Prospects what to know you’re an expert in the exact service they need. And don’t skimp on copy. Your ability to write extensively about the specific individual services you offer is directly related to the amount of credibility you’re able to instill in the prospect (and the search engines).

Geography

All too often, we’ll see professional services firms have a single page listing their various offices. Usually, the address of each office falls under a heading noting the city of the office. If you expect prospects to find your firm using geo-based terms in their search query, merely listing your offices on a single page isn’t going to work. You should have a page for each city, state, or region you serve, and you should have a couple hundred words of copy on each page. The first question I get when I say this to clients is, “200 words? What am I going to write about?”

Write about the city/region and your office there, the number and nature of the staff members at that location, the services offered by the professionals in that office, the local contact person. You should have no problem coming up with a couple hundred words. Before you start writing, make a list of the search strings a prospect may enter when searching for what you offer in that region. Later, make sure those keywords are in your copy and in the other on- and off-page factors for the page.

Keep page copy focused

Even in cases where professional firms have adequate site architecture to accommodate a diverse keyword strategy, we’ll often see rambling page copy. It’s not that the subject matter is rambling aimlessly. It’s that there is absolutely no discipline when it comes to the keyword strategy of the page. The very keywords for which the page was created are hardly used in the copy. Writing engaging, compelling copy for B2B SEO is difficult. It takes focus and discipline. If you want the results, don’t shirk from your responsibility. Stick with it, or hire an expert to write the copy for you.

Keyword research & site architecture

In many professional services sectors, there often is no standard or agreed-upon lexicon. There are many different terms for the same thing. One prospect may be looking for a forensic accountant; another may use the search term “expert witness accounting”. Depending on the level of organic competition, you may need separate pages for these terms. Do your keyword research and adjust your site architecture accordingly.

Title tags

It seems like professional services firms often take a breadcrumb-like approach to title tags. It’s not uncommon to see, “Dewey Cheetum & Howe | Industries & Practices | Employee Benefits”. It would be far better to focus more strongly on the practice group and its issues. For instance, “Employee Benefits Attorneys | ERISA COBRA FMLA ESOP | Cleveland”.

ALT tags

Professional service firms generally struggle to find interesting images. I understand why. It’s hard to find a gripping picture of tax consulting. As a result, bland photos of consultants and business owners get used. However, when we check the images on the sites of professional service firms, the images rarely have ALT tags. Consultants and business owners might be in the picture, but the picture needs to have a keyword-rich ALT tag, and it needs to talk about tax consulting and other related keywords.

Admittedly, these are some of the basic issues. There’s a lot you can do beyond these steps, but unless you have the basics down, your chances of meaningful success are slim. Take some to audit your site for the above factors. Then commit to making some changes. You’ll be glad you did.

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 my favorite B2B search and internet marketing posts from 2009. To that I added three of my own articles that were especially popular or helpful to people. I know I’ve missed some great content. If you know of others, please add them via comments.

Just as the search landscape has changed greatly in 2009, so has the economic landscape. There are a lot of people hurting out there, many who never dreamed they would be in situation they are now. If you’ve been blessed this year, be thankful. And if you sense somebody in need, pay it forward.

Happy Holidays.

10 Overlooked Optimization Tips by Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketers | Jody Nimetz / Enquiro

Top 10 Tips for B2B Search Engine Marketing | John McCarthy / WebMetro

B2B Search Marketing: The Cost of NOT Showing Up | Patricia Hurst / Smart Search Marketing / Search Engine Land

Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue To Make With Organic Search | Galen De Young / Proteus B2B Marketing / Search Engine Land

Leveraging PR To End The B2B Content Development Struggle | Brian Kaminski / iProspect / Search Engine Land

B2B Website Research 2008 | Erik-Jan Bulthuis / Onetomarket

SEO Keyword Strategy: Why There is More to Keyword Research than Search Volume | Jody Nimetz / SEO Space

B2B SEO: Marketing Strategy for Specific Niches | Erik-Jan Bulthuis / Yoast

B2B SEO: Link Building | Erik-Jan Bulthuis / Yoast

Coffee, Tea, or Link Love? | Justilien Gaspard / Search Engine Watch

7 Search Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers & Distributors | Andy Komack / Komarketing

The Big List Of Major B2B Search Engines | Galen De Young / Proteus B2B Marketing / Search Engine Land

Increase Online Registrations By Improving Downloadable Assets | Patricia Hurst / Smart Search Marketing / Search Engine Land

What You Don’t Know About Optimizing PDFs Can Hurt You | 17 Strategies for Success | Galen De Young / Proteus B2B Marketing / Search Engine Land

Ten Elements Every Company Blog Should Have | Mack Collier / MarketingProfs

Learning From Business Blogging Mistakes | Lee Odden for Business Blog Consulting

The Role of Social Media in B2B Marketing | Barry Harrigan / Accelerating IT Sales

Social Media Now a Top Information Source for B2B IT Buyers | Bill Gadless / B2B Web Strategy

Social Media for B2B Marketing | Debra Murphy / Social Media Today

Using Social Media to Shorten Sales Cycles | Barry Harrigan / Accelerating IT Sales

Good Reasons to do Social Networking in a B2B Environment | Roger Warner / Velocity

Search Illustrated: B2B Long Tail SEO | Elliance / Search Engine Land

5 Keyword Strategies for B2B PPC Campaigns | Andy Komack for High Rankings Advisor

Are Your B2B Paid Search Campaigns Trying To Serve Two Masters? | Todd Miechiels / Search Engine Land

B2B Marketing | Expanding Your Web Site Content | Thomas Schmitz / Portent Interactive

Content IS Your Brand | Paul Dunay for Marketing Profs

Tracking Offline Sales Back to Your Web Site | Mike Moran / Biznology

The Limitations of Landing Page Optimization | Anna Talerico / ion interactive

B2B & Gen Y: An Opportunity Not 2B Missed! | Andrew Wheeler / iProspect / Search Engine Land

Local Search Marketing Tips for B2B Marketers | Julie Shumaker / Smart Search Marketing / Search Engine Land

5 Question Website Performance Quiz – Is Your Business Website Performing? | Judy Lewis / Search Engine People

A Web Analytics Checklist for B2B Search Engine Marketing Programs | Derek Edmond / Komarketing

Website Redesigns: A Hot Topic in the Business to Business (B2B) Space | Jody Nimetz / Enquiro