Digital First: Online Searches are Executives’ First Course of Action

We've shared this statisitic before: Two-thirds of the B2B buyer’s journey is completed online. Digital has been gaining in importance for B2B marketers, and it's now an absolute essential. While I find the research behind that statistic fascinating, what is even more fascinating is that the same study shows that “online searches are executives’ first course of action."

The implication for those of us in sales and marketing is that if you want to be found online by executives (or anyone for that matter), you need to be able to be found online. You should be targeting the top 3 results in a Google search for your products or services, or the kinds of problems you solve for your clients. Why the top 3 results? Well, the top 3 search results account for 61.5% of website traffic, and it drops off pretty quickly from there.

According to a study from online ad network Chitika, the top listing in Google's organic search results receives 33 percent of the traffic, compared to 18 percent for the second position, 11 percent for the third position and the traffic degrades rapidly from there.

Traffic is Nice, Leads are GREAT!

While it’s really nice to be found at the top of Google search results for key terms, that in itself doesn’t do anything for your business (unless you are selling display ads and getting paid per impression, of course). In order to financially benefit from having a website that’s appearing at the top of the search results, it’s important to have some type of lead generation mechanism that’s obvious and of value to visitors. Converting visitors to leads is where many websites and businesses fail. They do a great job of getting traffic to their site but a poor job of converting visitors to leads. Traffic is nice, but generating leads is how you grow your business and how you make your money.