How To Find Commercial Intent Keywords For B2B Lead Generation

The Big Picture

In this post, you will discover several examples of finding keywords for lead generation through the search engines for business-to-business (B2B) queries across a wide range of intents. While most people want to jump into the conversation about which keyword tool to use, there are dozens of great articles on how to use a handful of quality keyword tools for various purposes.

Instead, this post is going to focus on what actually happens in the real world from nearly a decade of my interacting everyday with clients who simply want one thing: a steady flow of qualified, prospective customers (or clients) whom they believe that they can convert into long-term business once on the phone or communicating by e-mail or other means.

While this may seem to be “pedestrian” to seasoned internet marketing professionals, akin to helping the local plumber who wants more calls by just posting a simple ad on Craigslist, the truth is that even the B2B space company owners and executives simply want more leads. Remember that if they could grow their businesses at a respectable level by word-of-mouth, trade shows, mailings, TV ads or other older models of marketing and advertising then they would do so instead of having to trust outside help for the “confusing” internet marketing such as SEO, YouTube ads, Facebook ads with retargeting, hashtags and other things which (at first) they don’t believe have anything to do with their particular business models.

Real World Conversations

Everything I will mention here is based on dozens of actual conversations which have taken place with owners and executives over the phone, in their offices’ coffee break rooms, via e-mail, in fancy executive offices, in car rides, or over lunch and coffee shop conversations. These conversations took place with companies across vary different parts of the United States and Canada such as Los Angeles, suburban New York, Dallas Texas, mountain areas of Colorado, Chicago, Tucson Arizona and other United States cities and small towns.

One other way you can pick up new keywords, along with the prospective customer’s (client’s) motivating reasons for calling, is to listen to actual customer phone calls or first e-mail communications to the company. If you can get access to these calls, such as archived audio files from lead generation tracking phone numbers or copies of e-mails to the sales department, you will glean a lot more than you probably realize!

Examples Of Clients For This Post

To help you discover how to find good B2B keywords, in addition to your listening to actual customer calls and reading initial customer emails, here are the examples I will be using:

  • Manufacturer of a specific kind of part you find in laptop computers, tray tables on airplanes, consoles for trucks and SUV automobiles and small medical devices

  • Attorney who wants to reach owners and executives of healthcare practices and related businesses who need legal representation when accused by the government of fraud and other federal healthcare violations

  • Concrete company based in the suburb of a top-five United States population area who needs to reach property owners and managers for B2B sevices like parking lot repair, concrete containment pads, dock leveler construction, and concrete core drilling

  • Advanced experiential design and visual content studio which works with Fortune 100 companies, NBA and NFL teams, major universities and top 20 U.S. City museums on interactive/immersive experiences. These include augmented reality trade show exhibits, creating VR sports games for professional teams, 3D building projection mapping for museum openings, and related services

International B2B Manufacturing Keywords

For the manufacturer of parts which wants to reach mechanical engineers and product design engineers around the world, this can be more challenging than you may believe initially. In addition to foreign translation of landing pages (along with geo-targeted AdWords campaigns also translated into the foreign language), just finding out what is being sought in this B2B dynamic is not always so easy.

We started by going back through Analytics and determining if there were some special phrases which were not obvious that kept repeating. The president of the company and I sat down for over an hour and went through about 300 phrases, narrowing the list down to 15-20 keyword phrases which we would not have thought of originally.

As for the main keywords, we used the various forms of the product sold by the company. There are 4 versions which customers use all the time, so we built our keyword lists from those root phrases.

To modify for the B2B space, and also to “get inside the mind” of a mechanical engineer sitting in a cube deep in an office somewhere in North America (not the easiest target audience to reach!), we also went back to the original emails and remembering real world conversations the president had at trade shows and customer meetings. The big keyword modifiers in this case were:

  • “OEM”

  • “custom” (the company designs custom parts to then be used when an engineer is trying to spec in the part into the design)

  • “manufacturers” (and “manufacturing”)

Only once all of this work was done did we go into the Google Keyword Planner and use the various features such as related keywords, seeing what competitors were targeting on their meta title and meta description tags, etc. We then used the Keyword Planner to see if there was any demand (at least 10+ searches/month) for the specific phrases; and we found about 40 more keywords which were based on concepts which engineers seemed to be entering including:

  • Direction-based such as “one-way”, “360 degree”, “pivot”, etc.

  • Compliance-based such as RoHS, REACH, etc. — as the engineers needed to make sure that the parts that they including meet their needs to reduce liability for their companies. Again, this is “getting inside the head” of the prospective customer to adress his/her needs even before the question gets asked

  • Weight-related such as “foot-pounds”, “under X ounces”, etc.

Discussion of how to integrate all of these B2B keywords we discovered will be mentioned in the last part of this post.

United States-Based High End Service To Major Corporations And Organizations

For the company providing high end “experiential” brand storytelling, this presented a different set of challenges. The company’s market is major U.S. Corporations, professional sports teams, big city museums and major civic organizations and colleges.

The keywords we decided to use needed to meet three different means of being found:

  • Google – both regular search results as well as Google Videos and Google Images

  • YouTube (and Vimeo) for searches being done within the video platform

  • LinkedIn – keywords to be used to “rank” well for queries entered either in LinkedIn’s “people”, “companies” or “content” searches

In this case, many searchers are looking as casual “browsers” rather than “buyers” of the services offered. They search for phrases like “experiential marketing”; but the “buyers” are searching for phrases like “experiential design studios” or “immersive marketing and branding companies”.

The B2B searchers occasionally make question-based searches like “How can I use augmented reality in my trade show exhibit?”. These are tough to determine, so for a high-end service company it will be a case-by-case basis. If time and budget and content permit, then go ahead and pursue those for your SEO efforts.

Otherwise consider a LinkedIn company page post with that question as the lead sentence; and then run a hyper-targeted paid ad to people with the specific job titles and who work at companies of specific sizes to reach the audience with the “question” as the “hook” which encourages the reader (via LinkedIn paid ad) to want to discover more about the company.

Local Businesses In Major City Targeting B2B Phrases

The concrete company in a suburb of a major city, and serving the entire region, gets to play more of the typical “local SEO” game. The keywords here are more straightforward.

We went after three categories of keywords:

  • Services which get entered normally, but only get entered by those with commercial intent such as “parking lot repair CITY” or “concrete containment pads CITY”

  • Services which normally have consumer intent, but modified with the word “commercial” in front of them such as “commercial concrete drilling CITY” or “commercial asphalt removal CITY”

  • The generic phrases like “commercial concrete contractors CITY” and phrases indicating some sort of pre-existing experience such as “bonded concrete contractors CITY”. The latter may be searched by a municipal employee needing to go outside of the normal channels to get something accomplished, but still requiring some sort of reassurance before that person calls the local business

Attorney Reaching Medical Practice Owners/Executives Across USA

The attorney who aims to reach people in all 50 states who own medical practices and other medical businesses such as toxicology laboratories has his own challenges for SEO. Instead of trying to rank locally for phrases like “DWI attorney CITY” or “personal injury attorney CITY” (both of which can be VERY challenging keywords to rank #1 in big cities!!), the challenge is to convince owners/founders/partners of a high-dollar medical business that this attorney can minimize damage to their personal reputations, prevent the loss of millions of dollars of fines to the federal government, and minimize the risk of prison time. Again, these are federal cases so the risks are severe for being charged with Medicare fraud and similar crimes since those convicted get mentioned on the Department of Justice website, local news stations and other outlets which can damage the lives of their loved ones for years.

The types of keywords we chose include:

  • Going after the very specific niche practice area of law. These could include phrases like “Stark Law defense attorney” and “federal healthcare fraud attorney CITY” (for major cities)

  • Giving reassurance of previous indicators (yet no guarantee of future) success. This could manifest in keywords like “former federal prosecutor for healthcare fraud” and “federal healthcare defense attorney case results”

When it comes to marketing for legal practices, be sure that you are compliant with that firm’s state bar’s marketing and advertising regulations. Some states are very stringent and restrictive in terms of what you can do with your online marketing. If you were to outrank another legal firm paying for SEO services (because you know what you are doing!) then any violation of the state bar’s regulations – no matter how out of date those laws may be – could cause fines and reprimands due to the other law firm reporting the violation(s). Tread carefully here, but you could do very well if you speak with law firms (and other licensed businesses) in your state and let them know that you can market them successfully… and within their licensing board’s marketing and advertising regulations.

Integration With The Rest Of Your Search Marketing Efforts

You are able to use the keywords you find in several ways. For the keywords with the most demand (monthly search volume), you likely will put those in the SEO meta title and description fields; and you even may use the keywords in the <h1> and other header tags, anchor text for internal links, etc.

Your secondary keywords (or LSI synonym keywords) can be used for other purposes in your search engine marketing and other inbound search platforms. For example, your secondary keywords could included in:

  • The text of the content on a relevant page

  • In the image meta data (before uploading the image) or in the alt text, caption or image filename

  • Tags or description for a relevant YouTube video

  • Text of a LinkedIn company page update

  • For local B2B companies, include the keywords in their citations and Google My Business listings (services section, “about me” section, etc.)

  • YouTube channel’s “About” page and “Discussion” tab

  • Etc.

Additionally, you can bid on the extra keywords in relevant ad groups in a search network ad in Google AdWords; and remember to improve your ad quality scores to lower any “surcharges” you might recognize (per click or per 1000 impressions) assigned to that particular ad/keyword combination.

Finally, by listening to the inbound phone call recordings and/or reading initial inbound e-mails to sales teams, you also can use the keywords or phrases (which lead to problem solving or dealing with high emotion) in your online banner ads, trade show marketing, and other marketing & advertising efforts.

I hope that these examples of actual conversations and real world situations help you with your B2B marketing efforts. If you need any help then you are welcome to reach out and contact me through my website (click here) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/morethanseo-com).

Repost – Local SEO And Lessons From The Stock Trading World

Greg used to run Search Simplicity, a website dedicated to SEO and other online marketing topics.  This is a repost from a guest post he added to his site back in the early Fall of 2014.

 

Stock Trading Lessons Applied To Local SEO Search Phrases

Stock Trading Lessons For The Selection Of Local Keyword Phrases

Greg, from Search Simplicity, recently asked me to contribute a guest post about helping select solid keywords for local search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.  Often, people only target two or three keywords.  By borrowing from the short-term stock trading principle of “multiple time frame analysis”, one can become much more artful in choosing keyword phrases to help accomplish the ultimate goal of any local SEO campaign:  getting the phone to ring consistently with first-time new customers or clients!

Here is the link to the article:

 

Greg modified the text a little bit in order to emphasize his recent real estate SEO post & industry-specific service.  That is fine with me.  Just know that when you see the word “plumber” that was the original example I used.  He did his best to modify, so I am okay with the adjustments.  Remember, it is his blog and I granted him the professional leeway to modify the text to serve his needs as well!

Feel free to contact me with your questions and if you would like to schedule an appointment about your local SEO efforts, not just the keyword research and selection process.   Thank you and please consider sharing this post (or the specific URL on the Search Simplicity blog) with those whom you think might find it useful.