Target tailored search engines, B2B search marketers advised

12th May 2008

Business-to-business (B2B) search marketers should target niche search engines as well as general sites like Google and Yahoo, new advice recommends.

Writing on Search Engine Land, Galen De Young notes that leads from specialised search engines can yield a higher percentage of conversions and qualified traffic, even if overall traffic volume is lower than that derived from general sites.

General B2B search sites such as Business.com, which receives six million unique visitors each month, enable marketers to reach a more concentrated audience, while smaller equivalents of this site are also said to be worth testing.

Meanwhile, industrial search engines and directories, such as GlobalSpec, may be useful for businesses in the fields of engineering, manufacturing or technology.

And sites like KnowledgeStorm provide links to white papers, webcasts and reports to the IT sector, while IT.com orders its search results with "dynamic peer ranking".

"Whether it's organic listings and rankings, directory inclusion, content marketing, PPC, banner ads, or sponsorships, there's plenty of opportunity for marketers to target their efforts more precisely through B2B general and vertical search," the blogger claims.

A recent article in E-Commerce News observed that user-generated platforms are growing increasingly important to B2B marketers.