All too often, we run into clients who tell us (or simply act as though) search-engine ranking is the most important goal of their online marketing.  Truth be told, in many cases it’s not really the goal of the marketing exec nominally in charge of the effort, but that of someone one or two pay grades above his/hers.

So we were glad to come across Todd Miechiels’ piece for Rain Today, Your Search Engine Ranking Doesn’t Matter (as Much as You May Think), in which he contends that the pursuit of rankings is really indicative of a newly-discovered but not-so-rare disease called Ranking Obsession Syndrome.  People with this syndrome come from big and small companies alike;  even the wisest of business leaders can fall victim.  Sadly, it causes otherwise savvy business people to obsess over their organic search rankings, when in practice they have little or no control over day-to-day results.  It’s a lot like a non-professional long-term investor checking the stock market indices 8 times a day.

None of this is to say that you shouldn’t become alarmed if… [Read more...]

Over at marketingprofs.com, we came across some sage advice from Roxanne Lott in her piece, The Power of Search Within a Complex Sales Cycle.  It’s a bit in the tried-&-true category;  but because we continue coming across tech B2Bs who don’t realize or truly believe that search can help sell their $200K widget, we feel it can’t be overemphasized.  We’ve put a good deal of our own spin on Roxanne’s structure, but in broad outline we’re saying much the same thing.

Start from the fact that 85% of B2Bs use the Internet at some point during the buying process.  In fact, StatMarket has reported that 64% of B2B users make search their first stop when researching [Read more...]