In a previous blog post, it was shown that B2B marketing professional reported significant success in driving targeted traffic to their respective websites via from organic search. This post will provide an in-depth analysis of Optify’s study to discover just how valuable search engine optimization campaigns proved to be for B2B companies in 2012, and what type of insights can be applied to general online marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Market Share

“Hmmm…I don’t know the answer – let me Google that.” More likely than not, that’s something that you have said in the past when trying to decide who won Superbowl 17 or which actor was in that hit movie from 1986. In fact, “googling” a question has become so popular that the verb “google” was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2006. In terms of B2B marketing, Google remains the king of search engines, ending the year 2012 with an average market share of 88.21% for all searches made. Bing was second with 5.95% of the search market share, with every other search engine combining for 5.85% of all searches.

(Not Provided): the ire of advertising professionals

Pull up any Google Analytics account and you are bound to see that the term “(not provided)” will account for the bulk of visits via organic search. This proved to become more prevalent in 2012, as the “not provided” rate went from under 15% of all organic visits at the beginning of the year to reaching heights of 40% in September and October. When users utilize Google’s secured search, search engine optimization professionals will not be able to identify the keywords that drove that particular traffic to their respective sites because the referring data is blocked by Google.

Google vs. Bing

As illustrated in one of the aforementioned paragraphs, Google proved to be the dominant search engine, driving over 88% of all organic traffic. However, in terms of measuring performance, it seems as if Bing is providing users with a similar, if not, better user experience. The average conversion rate from all visits via organic search on Bing came in at 1.86%, with Google slightly behind at 1.61%. Bing also generated 3.33 pageviews per unique visit, resulting in 15% more pageviews than it’s search engine counterpart.

Summary

Even though Bing’s performance metrics were stronger for B2B marketing professionals, there is simply not enough traffic coming from the #2 North American search engine; on the other hand, 36.07% of all B2B online marketing traffic came from Google. Evidently, mastering search engine optimization for your B2B business should be focused on dominating the page on Google to capture the majority of all organic search traffic. Tailoring your SEO campaigns to rank highly on Google will drive more targeted traffic and help you generate a significant amount of leads in a cost-effective manner.

Images and statistics courtesy of Optify.