Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

This is the third in a series of articles on Online Lead Generation for B2B companies appearing Wednesdays in this blog.

For the vast majority of our clients – actually the vast majority of ALL business-to-business companies – I recommend starting your online lead generation efforts by building visibility on the appropriate search engines.

Notice I said the “majority” of companies should start here. In order for search engine visibility to do you any good, your potential new customers must be searching – if not specifically for your type of product or service then at least for solutions to a challenge or problem that your product or service can solve.

If it’s not immediately obvious to you that prospects are searching online you can use a handy tool in Google to figure it out. To make this work, you’ll need to have some idea of the keywords that come to mind when your prospects think of your type of product or service. Selecting the right keywords is a complex subject on its own, but for this purpose you can make educated guesses. (Take a look at Eric’s series on Search Engine Optimization and Web Marketing in Plain English for more details about selecting keywords.)

Here’s how to check out your keywords in less than 5 minutes.

1. Go to Google Adwords. You can sign in if you have an Adwords account but you don’t have to.
2. In the middle of the page you’ll see a link called Get Keyword Ideas. Click on that link.
3. Type your product or service category or other keyword into the keyword or phrase field. You can check out multiple keywords – just put each phrase on its on line. Type in the code to show you are a human. Click on “Get keyword idea”.
4. The resulting report will show you – among other things – the average monthly search volume for your term plus a list of other similar terms that Google generates for you.In this example the keyword was “application development services”.

Here are some other words that Google generated:

Now you have either confirmed or disproved your theory of whether or not people are searching for you. You can also, with some additional understanding of the numbers, make some determination of the traffic numbers you can expect to generate with a successful search marketing program. (Caution: you won’t get 100% of the available traffic – no matter how good you are).

Next time we’ll look at specific search engines.

Technorati Tags: keywords, search engines, marketing, SEO, SEM, B2B, business-to-business, search volume