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Millions of industrial buyers go directly
to our network of industrial Websites to source for specific
industrial products and services – completely bypassing
the major search engines.
Why? Our users – your potential customers
– know that Thomas Websites deliver the Web’s most relevant
industrial search results, and are geared specifically to
their needs.
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of our sites’ usage comes direct to Thomas – bypassing
the search engines. |
By ranking high on our Websites, you can
ensure that our highly qualified industrial audience can easily
find your products and services when they’re ready to buy.
Although most search engine users are looking
for consumer goods, industrial buyers often begin their search
on general search engines. That’s why we also target industrial
buyers who come through search engines with a range of search
engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing initiatives.
The result: Thomas Websites consistently
rank high on industrial keyword searches on mayor search engines.
And we drive qualified industrial traffic to your information
through our sites.
Even with the Internet, many industrial
buyers continue to use print and CD-ROM resources as part
of their sourcing process.
Thomas Industrial Network™ print and
CD-ROM directories enable you to target these qualified buyers
on a national or regional level, depending on your business
objectives.
Where do your sales leads come from? Trade
journal advertising? Tradeshows? Word of mouth, perhaps? What
about the Web?
Many companies say their Websites receive
hundreds of hits a day. But supplier beware: such numbers
are not a measure of Internet marketing success. From a business
perspective, the only thing that matters is how many of your
Website visitors become customers. Unless your Website moves
them forward in the buying process and gets them to add to
your bottom line results, thousands of visitors have the same
impact as no visitors at all. The best way to start converting
your Website visitors into customers is to make sure your
site is getting the right traffic to begin with.
As anyone who has taken on even the most
basic Website tracking will tell you, “one visitor”
does not necessarily equal “one customer”. There
is no guaranteed relationship between Website traffic and
sales. If your Website traffic isn’t highly qualified, 1,000
visitors can mean as little as one customer, or even no customers.
Focusing on solutions that help sift viable
leads from the online masses can help deliver more qualified
traffic to your Website.
What do these online masses look like? Well,
there are basically three types of visitors who might come
to your Website:
- Buyers who know exactly what they want, and they’re ready
to buy it.
- Buyers who know the general category they’re searching
in, but need to gather more information in that category.
- Non-industrial buyers who are looking for the non-industrial
equivalent of your products or services. For example, a
user who is searching for high heel shoes types “pumps”
into the search box and clicks through to a site that sells
industrial pumps.
To improve their chances of being found
by industrial buyers, many suppliers are now investing in
search engine optimization (SEO). SEO applies specific methods
of modifying and enhancing a Website with the goal of improving
its ranking in search engine results.
When you include detailed product information on your Website,
you feed the search engine spiders exactly what they crave.
This can increase your chances of appearing in the results
when specifiers and buyers are searching for your products
and services.
For many search engines – Google being the foremost
example – link popularity is another key determinant
of a site’s ranking. Search engine spiders follow links
from site to site throughout the Web. If your site has a
large number of links coming into it, the search engines
are more likely to find it and include it in their search
indexes. The only way to improve your link popularity is
by fostering partnerships and reciprocal linking with other
Websites related to your business.
This includes: title tags, header tags, keyword density,
directory structure, bold text, url’s, meta data, Google
PageRank, “off page criteria”, and link relevance
Even if you fully understand and implement
all of these SEO factors, you have little control over your
actual ranking in search engine results. Search engines constantly
change their ranking rules without advance notice, making
SEO a risky proposition.
So what’s an industrial supplier to do?
For starters, remind yourself of the distinction
between generating “traffic” and generating “qualified
traffic”. Then make sure that your Website is accessible
from the places that qualified industrial buyers are most
likely to search.
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