Some companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars buying Likes and Sponsored Posts on Facebook. Others invest in multimillion-dollar Super Bowl ads while many put countless hours into tradeshows and cold calling. At the end of the day, you pick the marketing platform that works best for your company. Go where your customers are, and you will find business — that’s what common sense and business school tell you.
The numbers will tell you that with few exceptions, almost every company’s customers are on Google, searching for their services. Odds are, even your customers are searching for your business online, and your niche marketing efforts should incorporate a sound website strategy. Skeptical? I’ll prove it.
The search numbers don’t lie
Google processes more than 40,000 search queries every second. That’s 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. So there are a lot of searches in general. But you already knew that. What about niche services?
Well, here are a few search terms that can directly relate to real marketing efforts in specialized industries, with real monthly search numbers from Google:
- Structural engineer: 27,100
- Injection molding: 18,100
- Steel fabrication: 5,400
Those terms are still a little general within the fabrication, construction and engineering industries. So I’ll dive a level deeper. People are even searching these terms:
- Electrical engineering company: 260
- Shooting range construction: 70
- HVAC St. Louis: 170
- Safety equipment supplier: 140
A brief Gorilla case study
At Gorilla 76, we don’t just talk up SEO and Inbound (pull) marketing like some overzealous marketing cheerleader. We walk the walk and use them to generate real leads for ourselves (and our clients of course). To show you how these search numbers apply to your marketing efforts, I’ll very briefly walk you through how Gorilla 76 turns search terms into real business.
We did a little keyword research and found out that the term “construction advertising” gets 260 searches per month, according to Google Adwords data.
We then wrote this blog post on construction advertising (and followed the full range of SEO best practices). Now, Gorilla 76 ranks number one in organic (non advertisement) search results for the term “construction advertising” in Google.
As a result, we get a steady stream of highly relevant traffic to our website. That’s the beauty of search marketing. The people who type in that highly specialized term are looking specifically for information directly related to our business. At the end of the day, we’re a niche business, and we want highly qualified traffic and leads. Because of our business model, it only takes one closed sale to more than pay for all search marketing costs. If you’re in a niche, B2B industry and work with clients on bigger projects, you can probably cover your marketing costs with one sale that results directly from your marketing efforts. That means you can help your business by ranking for highly relevant keywords — even if they’re only searched 10 times per month.
See the numbers for yourself
Still not convinced your customers are looking for you online? Here’s how you can know that SEO and Inbound marketing can bring the right people to your website.
- Search for the “Google Keyword Planner tool”
- Click on the first result (you’ll need to set up a Google Adwords account)
- Click “search for new keyword and ad group ideas”
- Type a number of terms directly related to your business into the search box at the top — separate each term by a comma
- Click the blue “Get Ideas” button at the bottom
- Click the “Keyword Ideas” tab
- View the numbers
Or better yet, click below and download our Inbound Marketing Guide to learn how to generate leads through your website and other online marketing tools. Learn what industrial marketing using the inbound methodology can do for your company.
