Now we have covered Business Directory Search Terms and Banners the final important part of the advert you will be offered are the Keywords (also known as Products and Services).
No matter whether you have a small free advert or a large paid one, you will still be offer an amount of keywords, if you are a free listing you are likely to be offered around 5 – 10 but no more, if you are a paid advert you will be offered 50 + ranging as high as you wish depending on what you pay. These are an essential part of your advert and are required to make it function correctly. The products and services you pick will determine what categories people will be able to find you advert under. (For example if you are a supplier of catering equipment it is pointless have keywords related to Clothing, people will not be able to find your advert and you will not gain traffic).
Also providing your keywords are relevant to your advert, some directories offer back links to your actual website.
This is a good way of increasing the importance of your own website and will help it gain places in the search engines. So if you have 5 Keywords you will receive 5 back links to your website, if you have 100 keywords you will receive 100 back links to your website which will greatly increase its importance. In fact there a couple of directories out there that offer 2 back links per keyword.
Business to Business is also referred to as B2B; It is a term that describes commerce transactions that are solely between business and not consumers. An example of this would be a transaction between a wholesaler and a manufacturer or a retailer and a wholesaler. There are two other contrasting terms, B2G (Business to Government) and B2C (Business to Consumer).
As a comparison between B2B and B2C the actually volume of sales is much higher in Business to Business, the main reason for this is business transactions in a typical supply chain tend to involve raw materials or sub components and a consumer transaction tends to be one item (the end product). An example of this would be a car manufacturer… the business transactions would involve the sale of all of the parts, where as the consumer transaction would be the finished product (one single transaction, the car itself).
The term B2B was coined originally to describe electronic communications between enterprises or businesses in order to distinguish it from consumer communication.
This was eventually picked up and used in marketing and now it is used all over the world to describe services and products used by enterprises.
However even though most marketing and sales people work in Business to Business a lot of trade publications and professional institutions focus a lot more on the Business to Consumer side.
If you are looking for these services there are a lot of companies out there that offer them, be sure to look around and find the company that best suits your needs.
In my previous article I wrote about Unique Search terms and how they can help your advert, in this article I am going to write about another powerful feature that many Business to Business Directories offer:
Banners
When you go on to a Business Directory and start searching for companies, you may come across an animated Banner above the list of companies when you type in a product or service you are looking for. These are called banners; companies with adverts can purchase a banner and a set of unique terms that attach to the banner. It is essentially an animated flash file; the designers will take images and text from your own website and incorporate it into the Banner.
Once you have purchased one you will be asked to pick some terms (the amount depends on what you have agreed with the directory), these terms will belong to you for the duration of your contract and no one else will be able to purchase them.
Say you pick Mezzanine Flooring…Whenever some one goes to the directory and types ‘Mezzanine Flooring’ you banner will flash up at the top of the page above all of the companies that offer that product, this encourages people to click on your listing instead of others.
Whilst it does not have the power of the ‘Search Terms’ to get you world wide coverage, it is still a very effective method of drawing extra traffic into your advert and will increase the potential leads you receive.
In the advertising world there are two main categories, you could say advertising is split in 2 the two different types are Business to Consumer and Business to Business. In this article I will write a bit about both types and some of the companies that offer these services:
Business to Consumer
This side of advertising is for companies that wish to offer their products or services to the general public and not necessarily to other businesses. A good example of this is general high street shops, they all offer products that anyone off the street can come in and purchase. In an advertising sense here are some companies that offer advertising for Business to Consumer:
Yell.com - This is one of the larger companies offering this service, they offer advertising for pretty much any industry sector. You will be able to find services like Plumbers, Food Restaurants and Takeaways, Toy Shops etc.
Plumber Marketing - This one specialises in plumbers, if you are looking for plumbers this would be a very good place to go.
Business to Business
This differs because of the target audience. This is much more specialised and is aimed for companies to advertise their products or services that are for other companies to use or buy. If you offer something that is designed for use by other companies this is the advertising that you should look in to. Here are some companies that offer Business to Business Advertising:
Businessmagnet Ltd - One of the leading directories available
Applegate - Well known and been around for some time
Kellysearch - Probably the longest running, however becoming dated and not used so much
There are a lot of other companies offering both services, feel free to look around.