Vertical Search Engines vs. Google – Ending the frustration for B2B software companies?
Frustration. It’s the one word that often best summarizes the general feeling of many B2B software marketers when they refer to their Search Engine Marketing efforts and results.
And it’s just not the software industry that’s feeling frustrated as they attempt to use the major search engines – but most all B2B industries are feeling some type of similar pain. Most B2B marketers, by now, understand that you simply can’t compare the popularity and effectiveness of search engine results to B2C markets. The bottom line is that the relevant factors that the major search engines use to determine rankings simply don’t work well for B2B companies.
However, one answer to this frustration may be vertical search engines.
Vertical search engines (like Knowledgestorm or ThomasNet) are a growing trend as B2B users look for very specific information related to their business needs. The specific information they may be searching for often gets “lost” in the vast amount of information that may be returned by using the major search engines.
I’m not ready to conclude that vertical search engines are going to overtake Google anytime soon. In fact, it’s clear that B2B buyers still prefer Google and the other major search engines by a wide margin. However, it’s clear that vertical search engines are starting to make an impact in the B2B search process.
Here are a few links to recent articles that address vertical search engines from a couple of different perspectives:
In his recently published article on MarketingProfs, Jason Prescott points to a 2006 study by Outsell reported a 31.9 percent failure rate among business users when researching topics using the major search engines.
Jason goes on to write “General search engines rely heavily on the popularity theory that rewards sites with authoritative inbound links. Web site popularity and keyword relevancy (among other variables) help determine rankings. The relevancy model works well for consumer search, as the general population usually finds what it is looking for fairly easy in search results.” You can read his entire article here.
Last fall Enquiro’s Business to Business Survey 2007 was released. The survey results not only indicated the increase in vertical search engine use, but also provided some very interesting information regarding when B2B buyers were using search engines and online research during the buying process. It’s worth a read.
And last, Sramana Mitra’s article Google’s Achilles Heel has some interesting thoughts on what the future might hold for vertical search engines.
