Potential Customers Are Searching For Your Services/ Products On Search Engines.

• Where do B2B buyers go for information?

The 2013 Buyersphere report (a comprehensive survey into the behaviours and attitudes of the B2B buyers in the UK , France and Germany: http://www.baseone.co.uk/documents/BUYERSPHERE_2013.pdf) shows that buyers go direct to a company's website or to a search engine to identify suitable suppliers:

Generate New Business

Search is mainly a new business generation platform. Once you know the (non-branded) keywords that are important to your business (i.e. the search terms your audiences use to look for services you can offer), these can be used as part of your search strategy to increase new business.

Build Trust With Your Audience

• As well as detecting the main sources of information used by B2B buyers, The Buyersphere report also identifies the most influential sources.
• This showed that whilst the PDF document was the most used, it wasn't the most influential.
• Advice from a friend was regarded as the most influential, followed by search engines and videos:

Build relevant traffic to your site

• '80% of traffic to a site begins with a search query, and 60% of clicks (to a site) are generated by the top 3 search results (on the search engine result page)' – Source: econsultancy- 2013
• If you do not have a search strategy in place, your search traffic will mainly come from branded keywords, i.e. from people who already know your business. This means that you'll miss out on the potential new customers who do not know your brand and type service-oriented search terms.

Use Keyword Research To Discover New Trends, Markets And Improve Your Site To Boost Sales

• Keyword analysis is a powerful tool to grow your existing business, but is should also be used to discover new profitable niches and market opportunities that you might have overlooked.
• A search strategy will allow your business to stay on top of what is trending within your sector, as keyword research will show you what people are looking for on-line right now.
• The other benefit of search is that it will allow you to optimise your landing pages after analysing how your visitors behave once they've reached your website via search. Knowing what people search for will be extremely valuable in order to create relevant content on your site to boost enquiries or sales.

---