B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine » You Gotta Get On Board the Search Train!

You Gotta Get On Board the Search Train!

May 12th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

It may be tempting to think of search engine optimization (SEO) as an optional expense or activity… something that can be put off almost indefinitely, with no real harm done.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. By failing to optimize your website, your B2B is probably missing much if not most of the business impact that you built a site for in the first place …which is to generate leads and ultimately sales.

And this effect can be quite dramatic. eMagine recently redid a website for one of our clients, a software/SaaS provider. Although a number of things were changing at once, their raw content remained much the same; so the biggest change affecting lead generation was simply optimizing the site properly for the very first time. The result? …their search-engine-originated leads increased by more than five fold!

Any one or two of the leads from that increased flow that turns into a sale, of course, would easily pay for that client’s entire website rebuild and SEO. So clearly, the longer you put off properly optimizing your site, the greater the pure opportunity cost… leads not captured and sales not made. (And perhaps the longer you’ll need to invent reasons why your firm’s site is on the low end of industry Web-marketing ROI benchmarks…)

And it gets worse…
Actually, the effect of a sub-optimized site is somewhat cumulative; so that the longer you let it persist, the further you get from a possible turnaround. Why is this?

Because when the search engines visit your site and find no significant improvement from their last visit, they typically lower your site’s “relevance” score and put it down for a return visit at a longer time interval than the previous one. So doing nothing in fact puts your site into a bit of a downward spiral of relevance, and makes it that much longer from the point when you do take action to the point when the engines properly reflect it …and you start reaping the benefits.

The moral: do it now!!
Clearly, the right thing to do is to stop delaying the optimization, since the delay costs your company revenue by the day and makes it ever-longer until the effect of the cure kicks in. Further, we strongly recommend turning the job over to professionals; there are very few B2Bs who can justify assembling the in-house expertise to deal with the complex science of SEO (see our post, “Why it Usually Makes Sense to Outsource Your SEO”).

Oh, yeah… and then keep doing it.
Both search-engine algorithms and keyword usage (among other things) change over time; so if you optimize once and just let it ride, you can expect the benefit to erode over time. (We blogged about this recently, too.) It’s penny-wise and pound-foolish to do that, since your SEO consultants can keep it fresh for probably not a whole lot more than you’d lay out at Starbucks for a daily latte’.