Every weekday I follow a routine: I drive to the train station and run through the drive-through at the Starbucks next to the station. I always order the same thing, a venti triple latte with three Splenda. The employee taking my order always reads it back to me, correcting the way I ask for it. No matter how I ask for the same thing, they ALWAYS read it back to me in a different way, with that slight “what you meant to say was…” tone to their voice. I’m not offended by this correction; but, it is very amusing that no matter how I ask for the same thing, they always feel the need to correct how I ask for it.
The key thing that I notice about this is that most organizations, including my own, tend to have their own lexicon for how they describe their products and services. This lexicon goes beyond branded terms and often includes both industry and internal jargon. This lexicon isn’t necessarily the same as the one that is used by your prospects and customers, particularly when they are searching for you online.
For example, we are an integrated marketing communication company that specializes in business-to-business advertising. According to our agency style guide, whenever we discuss our area of focus, we are supposed to write it as “business to business” or “B-to-B” (it is hyphenated when used as an adjective before a noun). This is great in that it allows us to make sure that as we speak and write about what we do, we are all on the same page with our style. However, we, like nearly every organization we deal with, need to start taking into account that, as this style effects the way we write about ourselves online; it may also affect our search results.
Your audience searches on THEIR terms, not yours. In our case, I did a quick check with Google trends to compare the relative search volume of the various ways of saying “business to business.” I compared the following search phrases:
- “B-to-B”
- “BtoB”
- “Business to Business”
- “B2B”
The Google Trends results can be seen by clicking the thumbnail below:
Click on the image to view full size
So, how about your organization? Are you speaking the same language as your search audience?
This is an interesting problem. Way back in my early years, I worked with a librarian whose sole function was to create a catalog of keywords for a series of images we shot. It’s amazing what she had to go through to make sure it was all easy to find. So, I totally get this!
Before the dot.com boom, Rich, you never saw b2b or B2B used. It was business-to-business marketing, business marketing or b-to-b marketing. When the quick-buck VCs, business-school grads and technologists circa 1998 started creating all those online industry e-commerce portals and exchanges that were going to reinvent business commerce, for whatever reason (perhaps just to be different) they started using the b2b and B2B nomenclature. In fact, for a time, whenever I talked about b-to-b marketing, some people would assume we were an e-commerce firm, as though 100 years of business marketing was lost on them. I drank the Kool-Aid, too, and used b2b for a while (and still do occasionally). I even remember writing a note to Ad Age’s David Klein weighing in that they’d made a mistake in renaming Business Marketing magazine BtoB instead of B2B, as the latter was coming into greater use, so I told him somewhat authoritatively as I recall. In retrospect, I’m glad David and Crain’s went with and stuck with BtoB.