How B2B buyers search

I really enjoy the articles and case studies on MarketingSherpa.com. I give them my vote for the most useful marketing resource on the web. Their latest report is called How B2B Buyers Use Search; you'll get a survey recap plus a free PDF download of a study done in conjunction with Enquiro Search Solutions. Pretty interesting stuff.

Although Google only has a 36% share of the total online search usership according to comScore data from earlier this year, 82.9% of surveyed business users said Google was their search engine of choice.

54.6% of respondents said they used search 30-90 days prior to authorizing or making a particular business expenditure. This means search is your first line of defense near the start-mid-level of the sales cycle.

 Once again search users have confirmed that 69.6% of the links they click on are ORGANIC and not the paid ads. (This percent rises to 76.7% if they are Google users.)

This last stat is great reason for starting a blog, since Google's page rankings are based on inbound links. (And if you're new to the blogosphere, blogs are built on links; they're network hubs.) I'm always astonished at my page rankings for the strangest Google searches; today I noticed that I'm the 5th listing under "Google company" out of 8.6 million results. Here's a great way to see the total number of links to your web site or blog: MarketLeap's Link Popularity Check.