Are you getting some link-love for your money?

Perhaps you are listed in an online vertical product directory. Part of the value of being listed, beyond the obvious is link-love. Incoming links from these "important" webpages raises the value of your webpages via Google's PageRank system.

The directories have worked hard to create a listing page that ranks high in Google, as evidenced by the frequency that I see Thomas, GlobalSpec, and even IQS in the SERPs (search-engine-results-pages). Then these pages link to your pages, of course.

But what do the directory pages link to? Do they link deep into your site, or just to the home page? I explored this question from a usability angle when I presented at InfoCommerce in 2005. The number of clicks on the directory can be acceptable if they are 'going somewhere', but how frustrating is it to be dumped at an advertiser's home-page and have to continue exploring?

Anyway, the question raised today at Industrial Search Engine Marketing Blog is "Are you making the most of your online marketing?" What is the PageRank of the linking page and where is it linking to.

"If they are looking on one of these directories to look for a Material Handling Equipment provider, why would you take him to your homepage when you can bring him right to what he’s looking for? Don’t show him the menu when he already knows he wants the steak.

So I did an experiment. I went to each of the four directories, looking for a Material Handling Equipment provider. Keep in mind, that I’m only doing a sampling, this is not a full blown research project. Nor do I know the inner-workings of each directory. I’m simply doing an experiment. That being said…let’s begin."

Sites evaluated:
GlobalSpec, KellySearch, MacRae’s Blue Book, & Thomas Industrial Network

I did some casual research on my on at GS and TN, and found the analysis is appropriate. Taking a look at IQSDirectory.com, it looks like nearly all their advertisers are getting links to their home pages, but with some nice PageRank, usually of 3.

That all said, it is probably up to the advertiser to make sure the deep-links are being made by the directories.

Gotta love the internet

The fuel-door cable on my Honda Civic apparently broke. Search Google for "fix civic fuel door cable" and find this site as #1: www.fueldoorfix.com

No AdWords displayed, no other retailers in the SERPs. One link is to eBay where I can buy a used cable for ten bucks (without any description or picture).

The repair part at Fuel Door Fix looks like a plastic casting that costs just pennies, but I just paid $23.95 Canadian with free shipping via PayPal. There is even a short video showing how do the repair.

The Internet is truly a glorious place of solutions...and opportunities.

Media sales rep opportunity

For those B2B media sales guys out there, you might be interested in this opportunity sent to me by Curtis Wharton of Douglas Publications:

"I am looking for an independent Online and Ezine advertisement sales person to handle B2B sales in the fields of Human Resources, Safety and Medical Facilities. We have three magazines in these areas, Human Capital Magazine , Compliance Magazine and FacilityCare Magazine."

His email is as you might suspect: cwharton at douglaspublications.com.

Pricing on your website (Part 4): How not to

I’m ready to be done with the discussion of published pricing on our websites. We got an introduction by Dilbert, then talked about the benefits, why we don’t do it, and done a case study, and chatter in between. (Thanks again for everyone's comments.)

Today lets look at what we can do even if we can’t/won’t publish prices. Basically, we want to:

• let the visitor know how to get pricing, or
• understand the relationship price has to the features of what they are looking at.

1. Let the visitor know how to get pricing:

Create a call to action: I’ve seen a number of sites that clearly call out “get quote” or ‘submit RFQ’ as a text link or a button. One I saw this morning had a right-arrow on the button indicating a direction of ‘moving forward’ that I thought was effective.

If you want to generate calls, “call for a quote” with a toll-free number next to it is great. And even today, I think a toll-free number works like that right-arrow in subtly affirming that this is the correct path to take.

If you rely on distributors, you’ve got to find a way to drive visitors to them (i.e. a directory). Then create a call to action like “Pricing? Contact your local distributor”.

The corollary is that if you don’t use distributors, you may want to make this clear in your call to action, as well. The only thing prospects hate more than having to call for pricing, is being given the run-around.

A special page: You may want to make a special page that explains why you don’t publish prices and clarify the value of contacting your for a quote. Its your chance to sound fair and to put them at ease with your sales process.

Make a promise about quote turn-around time. These to-be-prospects want their answers in a hurry. Offering a quote may not be enough for them. Maybe that call-to-action grows a little “Get a quote today”.

2. Clarify the relationship between price and features (value):

Provide clues about pricing. In Home Depot, I’ve seen some products displayed as ‘good’, ‘better’, and ‘best’. In other cases a graphic “price barometer” could be effective technique to give a clue about pricing. These techniques are useful when comparing between your own products, but it'll be a bit harder to do this versus your competition. Here's a sample I just made:

Use percentages. Most obvious might be to say “10% less than other brands”. Or “upgrade to our next size for 10% more”.

Anyway, you get the idea. Folks are looking for your price and you are under no requirement to publish it. But use this knowledge of their desire for pricing to your advantage. Draw them in, let them understand, let them feel in control. In the long run, I think both you and your prospect will be the better for it.

Is published pricing dangerous?

More on pricing: Rick Short of Indium Corp. posts Dangerous Editorial where he rants about a CEO publicly complaining about too many vendors and price pressures in his industry.

While the focus of his rant is the poor signal that this CEO is giving to his customers and competition, this also relates to our recent discussions of published pricing. Rick's concern is that this information becomes a signal for a price war...something published pricing also can do.

As a marketer, he reacts this way:

"In essence, only the savvy low-cost producer (and there is only ever ONE of those) can ever win a price war. That arena ia almost NEVER the place to steer things. Focusing on YOUR key points of DIFFERENTIATION is the only way to help your customer choose you."

Are we trapped? If we publish pricing on our websites, our prospects are happy and more likely to buy. But if we do, we risk them making a commodity decision and thus forcing a price war. Different marketplaces and different brands may be affected to different degrees, but this may be one of the strongest challenges of the pricing issue.

Google to personalize results: You got a problem with that?

Someone suggested I take a little time to consider the ramifications of Google personalizing search results. And it is worth some thought.

The biggest impact to us marketers is loss of true tracking of SERP standings, because they will vary from user to user. After doing a few searches today, I think this holds much less impact for B2B because the results are pretty strong already. (I also didn't see any indication of personalization when making a comparison logged in vs. out.)

You might not know you are #1 on your favorite keyword-phrase anymore, but you traffic shouldn't be impacted. Hopefully, tho, this reduces some of the gaming for the top slot and focus on results instead. There are some B2B terms with double meanings that could benefit from such personalization.

Apparently this has renewed some concern about the Google-monster taking over vertical search again. If search is personalized, vertical sites/directories may be rendered useless as a distinct filter of content. I wasn't so sure, and needed some empirical data. Luckily I found something useful:

Taking a closer look at Google's recommendation page for me (which is a part of the personalization program), everything relates to consumer-related searches. I suspect that B2B searches don't have enough traffic to generate useful recommendations. As a matter of fact, I'd say the recommendations were actually an inaccurate reflection of my search behavior.

While we could have long discussion of whether users will give up privacy to benefit from this new service, I think it is just a red herring. Results are not going to change much either way, IMHO.

PPC campaigns: Outsource?

First it was the appearance of the SEO consultants, now the PPC consultants are coming.

I just learned of this specialty last week. Up till now, I assumed that Search-Engine-Optimization services were the appropriate (and only) place to turn over management of your Pay-Per-Click programs. It makes sense, tho. PPC is tightly focused on three things:

1. Keyword/placement selection
2. Ad content
3. Landing page

which don't have anything to do with SEO except keywords.

One key difference in how you work with PPC consultants is money. No matter how much control they promise you, they are still spending your money. "SEO Clare" (co-worker of "SEO Ruby") is looking out for those venturing into this outsourcing with a PPC Customer's Bill of Rights:

1. The right to comprehensive reporting
2. The right to ask questions
3. The right to participation
4. The right to ongoing support
5. The right to responsiveness

In other words, this is a relationship, not a simple 'outsourcing' or purchase. But I hope anyone going this route has enough sense to be nervous about giving up control. Ruby just helps put that nervousness in a check list.

Moving the prospect forward: Fear or relate?

With me high on the poor effectiveness of fear tactics from reading Change or Die, I was stunned by the title of this week's newsletter from SalesDog.com: Teaching Consequences to Your Prospects. Are we supposed to threaten them? LOL

Actually, the article opens up well with a couple good points and stories:

"Like a miserable plague, the educated, experienced buyer confronts and confounds us. What happened? How did buyers get better at buying than we are at selling? How can we adjust to this epidemic of enlightenment that is taking money out of our pockets?"

Then about halfway, that ugly title rears its head again:

"In selling, you want to talk about how the repercussions of not buying from you can damage the prospect's business in some way. Consequences might include a slowdown in sales, diminished production, angry shareholders, or serious damage to the future of the business. Your job is to point the prospect to the real aftermath of his or her unsolved problem."

Holy mackerel, how old school is this sounding? As we learned in Change or Die, fear doesn't affect change, and that means you aren't going to change the prospects actions with this approach...or can we?

The newsletter writer, Dan Seidman of SalesAutopsy.com, then gives us an example. Turns out he is asking questions about the prospect's situation and relating to him to the point that the prospect actually ends up asking Dan what he has for a solution. So, its not really fear of consequences that is being used, but exploring with the prospect to find out what the consequences are.

I've been playing chess with my kids lately. It's a teaching situation. If they make a bad move, I don't tell them "you can't do that or the queen will take you", or at least not right away. No, I'm more likely to say "are you sure about that?" or "why did you do that?" Asking questions, letting them explore the situation and consider other solutions.

Getting someone to do what you see they need to do is a tough job for sales, marketing, and parents. Taking you time and not firing off your solution is probably the biggest lesson here: Relate first.

Pricing on your website: Carts without prices

I want to jump back into the public pricing issue.

Suppose you can't display your pricing? What you should do is address this issue up front, so the user knows what is going on and is not 'tearing their hair out', as Jakob Nielsen alleges.

Part of the solution is giving the visitor a clear path to getting the prices. Toll-free numbers in H1-tags and contact/guestbook pages are so 1999, as effective as they have proven to be.

One of my active commenters and fellow blogger, SEO Ruby, has posted one solution that her company ecreativeworks has provided:

RFQ Carts: Giving industrial companies an alternative to Ecommerce: "An RFQ cart will give the power to the buyer to simply drop the product into a cart with contact information and tell the business exactly what they would like."

Makes sense...give the user a familiar shopping cart that fulfills my suggestion of a clear path to prices. Thanks for sharing, 'Ruby'.

Running this up the flagpole

You may know that I like the podcast Motivation on the Run and its host Larry Hendrick. Larry, like myself, was just 'working for The Man', enjoying what he does. Well, MotR's weekly shows have been less consistent lately, but with good reason. Larry has stopped working for The Man and has started his own venture.

Larry is now selling state and US flags at www.flagsbay.com. It's front page is actually a blog titled the Daily Flag, which is off to a great start with appropriate content. The flag store itself is a WordPress plug-in that Larry has promised to tell us more about. As simple as the site is, it is well executed, I think.

I share this with you for two reasons:

Shameless plug:
I think his risky step forward deserves some Page-Rank 6 love from b2blog.com.

Inspiration:
Am I the only one who looks at the web trying to think of a winning business, then realize that someone has probably done it already, or other 'reality checks'?

Larry just steps ahead and launches anyway with a simple product that certainly has competition. Its the execution that counts, as Seth recently admonished: "The hard part is actually executing the thing you've thought of."

So even without a podcast to listen to this week, I still am feeling motivated. Thanks, Larry, and best wishes on FlagsBay.com!