Industrial companies waste billions on Web sites

Every year, companies spend thousands of dollars on Internet services for Web site design, hosting, and programming. This totals in the billions of dollars when looking at the entire U.S. industrial base.

A new study conducted by Search Circus, a North Royalton, Ohio-based specialist in search engine optimization (SEO), shows more than 70 percent of that investment may have been wasted due to potential customers not being able to find those companies.

The study, 2006 U.S. Industrial Search Engine Optimization, indicates only 26 percent of the 500 industrial Web sites researched has an “excellent” SEO strategy—one that, according to Wendy Suto, president of Search Circus, consistently appears in rankings of top search engines Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. However, a score of “excellent” did not necessarily mean a Web site ranked well in search engines. It just meant that some kind of Web site marketing strategy exists.

Search Circus randomly selected 500 sites covering 14 industries, including chemicals, polymers, pharmaceuticals, automation, and material handling. Five pages within each site were then ranked on seven key criteria such as META tags, robot tags, flash, frames, and overall strategy.

“In today's competitive industrial environment, companies find it necessary to continue to invest in their corporate Web sites,” says Suto. “The study demonstrates that these same companies are simply not doing enough to draw traffic to their sites, and gives solid suggestions on how to improve.”

Copies of the 2006 SEO study can be obtained at www.searchcircus.com.