I am participating in the design of a web site for a B2B (enterprise software) vendor, whose offering has an initial buy-in in the low 5 digits and above.
We have identified three types of stakeholders whom we wish to speak to in our messages: executives and owners; business managers; and IT managers.
Is it plausible that, given good SEO work, we will see significant, relevant inbound traffic from any of these groups?
I see executives and business managers (the two primary groups who would drive a purchase decision) as generally not going out on the web and looking for enterprise products.
I see a web presence for this type of vendor as being seen by relevant visitors (IE, those in our targeted groups) because they were visited by a sales person or received direct mail, and went to the URL printed on the business card.
In other words, I see a site like this as being driven by traffic generated by personal contacts, not as being driven from SEO.
People Google for a text editor or for an accounting package. They don't Google for an enterprise HR system. Or do they?
If end users do Google for enterprise software, then we need to understand how they would look for it.
The reason this impacts us is that we need to allocate effort between copywriting and SEO, and we need to understand if SEO is even fruitful at this level. We are unclear whether we should have entry pages for each type of stakeholder, or just focus on one type of stakeholder.
