Is Your Industrial Company Ready for the New Search Engines?

I love doing presentations for prospects and Market Pipeline clients. I enjoy briefing businesses on new technologies and explaining how "new media" can truly benefit businesses and their pursuit of new customers and new markets.

Typically I will use a PowerPoint presentation. A slide that I have used for over 8 years is a slide titled, "What's the Big Deal". Well... here is the big deal! Simply, the Web is the first medium that has the ability to deliver very precise and discrete bits of information to your prospects or customers in a form and time of their choosing. I will usually go on to ask the audience, "Can your competitor offer precise information about its competitive products online that your company can not? If your competitor can do that better than you...you lose when it comes to online marketing."

Whether you are a manufacturer or an industrial supplier, the search engines have become so powerful and precise, your entire product offering must be visible to the search engines. Has your Web site structure been built in a way that search engines find friendly? Unfortunately most of the companies that we see have not built their Web sites to take advantage of current search technologies...let alone what is coming in the next few years.

Web Search 3.0

Now...get ready for the next generation of search engines. As good as Google and their competitors have become you have not seen anything yet. There are many new search technologies coming down the ‘ol info super highway. Some of the geekier folks in our industry call it the "semantic Web". This means that the search engines will have the ability to know exactly what you are searching for...more human-like, if you will. For example, if you are an industrial engineer and you search for "transformers" you get a mix of relevant searches mixed with Web sites about toys. In the new Web when you search for the same term your results will be even more precise and relevant. The next version of search engines will be more popular than the current batch, especially for specialized business markets. Some of this magic comes from "off page criteria" (i.e. inbound links,etc.) and some comes from your previous search preferences which many of the search engines track.

Some of the new search technologies are truly remarkable.

Let me briefly give you an overview of some of the trends in search technology that are on Market Pipeline's radar screen.

Some of the common criticisms for Google and others has been that the major search engines tend to favor very popular sites such as Wikipedia and skew the results towards Web sites that are not relevant to your specific search request. Another complaint is that the search results are not thematic enough. That is, the search results are based on what everyone on the Web "thinks". Not what you think or your specific interests. Another complaint is that Google tends to retain information about the user's search history. Also Google is not a great search option for specific industrial business interests or vertical industrial markets.

These complaints in the market place have sparked a flurry of upstarts and has provided impetuous for a lot of venture capital in the search market.

Cuil.com

Cuil.com launched in July 2008 by a pair of Google veterans claims to index billions more Web pages than Google. Cuil claims to provide more relevant information in your search engine return page (SERP) rather than gather "superficial popularity metrics".

Searchme.com

In March of 2008 Searchme.com was launched to provide a friendlier search experience using a more visual or graphical search engine return page. Try it, it is very impressive. http://www.searchme.com/

Viewzi.com

Viewzi.com was introduced in June 2008. Viewzi also wanted to improve the user experience using graphic elements. Viewzi aggregates results from the major search engines using an innovative and friendly interface. Again...I encourage you to try these new search engines by using similar keyword phrases in each. Notice the difference in results and the entirely different user experience.

Silobreaker.com

Silobreaker.com was introduced in January 2008 and focuses on relationship mapping and trend analysis on specific topics, people, and time frames. Businesses will use silobreaker.com to track industry trends, new products, related news events, etc. and even discover links in all of the above using "explanatory graphics"...a truly unique experience. You will need to spend some time on this site to understand it but it is amazing how they have aggregated all that is going on in current events in a somewhat graphic format.

Go to http://www.silobreaker.com/ and search on "Google (company)" to see what I mean.

And of course the major search engines are not standing still either. After all Google has approximately 17 billion in sales and 10,000 of the brightest engineers in the world attempting to invent a "better mousetrap"

For example, in May of 2007 Google introduced Universal Search. This is Google's attempt at offering a more comprehensive and integrated way to explore online information. Universal Search integrates many different "silos" of information in one universal set of data. Google integrates data from many different sources such as videos, images, news, web sites, maps, books, etc. into a single return page.

Let me give you an example of how this works.

One of Market Pipeline's Internet Marketing Consultants, David Tatro, is an amateur videographer. A friend asked David if he could take a video of a unique surface treatment called flame plasma at his company, TS Automation. David took his video equipment to TS Automation and produced a quick video of the unique surface treatment and then uploaded it to YouTube. (www.youtube.com)

Now go to Google and type in "flame plasma", now click on "more" at the top of the search engine return page and select "video". Notice that the video David took is listed at the top of the page on the YouTube Web site.

Use your imagination.

Let's say that your production plant has developed a unique solution for some industry-old production problem. Take your inexpensive digital camera to your plant floor and upload a video showing your unique capabilities to your Web site, YouTube and other video hosting sites. If you give these video files the proper file name then Google's Universal Search will index your video and return your video when a Web user searches for it. As they say, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Now that is "new media" marketing.

Do not misunderstand me. Industrial marketers still need to rely on traditional marketing channels; your sales force, distribution channels, trade journals, etc. But take a hard look at your customer acquisition costs. How much are these traditional marketing channels costing you? I would wager that you can reach a whole lot more targeted prospects using search engine technologies...especially as search engines improve.

So does your Web site have the capacity to take advantage of all this personalization in search technologies? If someone searches for "Parker actuators" in your geographic area, does your Web page featuring these products even have a chance?

Building a quality Web site is the first step in making your products and services visible to the search engines now and into the future. Understanding how the search engines work, as well as how to take advantage of them, can be a daunting task.

Market Pipeline is committed to understanding search engine marketing and at the same time building Web sites that can be easily updated by your marketing staff, a necessary capability for your most important and interactive sales brochure...your Web site.

In fact Market Pipeline's Line Card Manager, one of our Content Management System modules, allows your products and services to be featured individually so the search engines can easily index them in their databases. Market Pipeline's Line Card Manager is built so that your marketing staff can easily add additional content such as downloadable PDFs, CAD drawings, specification tables, features and benefits, etc....all visible to Google and the other search engines.

Can your Web site give the search engines what they need to feature your products? As an industrial marketer you better be prepared as search engines improve.

Tom Repp
Principle
Market Pipeline Inc.