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.
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.
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.