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Be a New Vendor Search Master
November 07, 2008
By TJ McCue
The first step for most of your new vendor searches likely begins with Google. But while Google is extremely effective in separating the "daisies from the weeds," you will still waste a lot of valuable time, if you don't employ effective search strategies.
You know that you would like to enhance your pay-per-click efforts to increase your Web site traffic, but you also don't want to fill in forms on vendor sites and get slammed with sales rep calls later.
Here are some tips for faster and smarter online research:
1. Initial Results
First, search the simple term in Google: Pay per click. Hyphens don't matter. There are 24, 200,000 results. (Talk about a rabbit hole.) You could add "vendors" to that search term and narrow it down to only 748,000, but this one additional word gets a list of Web sites that offer vendor reviews and vendor lists. This could be helpful; but it also just may be an affiliate representing the vendor with a slightly biased view.
2. Additional Terms
One small nugget to take note of: Sponsored ad results—these are the pay-per-click ads down the right side in Google (and most others)—will reveal competitors to add to your vendor search. Marchex is one of the market leaders in pay-per-click advertising, so they provide an easy additional term that we can add, plus they came up in the sponsored advertising results for this term. If you avoid the PPC link and just type Marchex into Google, you will mostly get Marchex pages—information about Marchex, by Marchex. Now, there's nothing wrong with this, but keep in mind that you are trying to make a decision—and every vendor drinks his own Kool-Aid and presents his services in the best light, of course.
3. Advancing Your Search Options
The following technique is simple, but powerful. Open Google and, instead of keying in the term in the standard box, click the "Advanced Search" link to the right. This "intuitive" form needs little explaining. Once you do it a few times, you can easily enter the Boolean operators (advanced ways to tell the search engine to do what you want). Nearly every search engine, even specialized ones, have an "Advanced Search" button or link.
Three things to watch for on the Advanced Search page:
• Find web pages that have…
You'll get several options you can fill in here. Enter a specific phrase or term.
• But don't show pages that have…
Put in terms you don't want.
• Need more tools?
This is my favorite part of Google. The third drop down box tells it all: "Search by file type." I hardly ever search without doing this, as the PPT, PDF, XLS or DOC files are the ones that reveal the most information. Now it's a combination of search terms and the file type that will get you to the best results, but this step alone will help you find presentations, reviews done by an actual client and excel files with results.
Final Search
This is what the search string looks like when I'm done:
pay per click Marchex strategies OR success "case study " -www.marchex.com -www.industrybrains.com filetype:pdf
If you cut and paste this into Google, you'll see eight results instead of 24 million. If you enter it all into the advanced search form and select the date range of the past year, you'll get only four results.
By spending a few hours to refine a search effort, you'll sift through the gravel and sand to find the real gold nuggets.
TJ McCue is a sales and biz dev consultant at Q4 Sales who developed Q4WebScout (www.q4sales.com/webscout) to help entrepreneurs and business executives cut down on research time and get to relevant and profitable results. He is also the research editor for Small Business Trends, www.smallbiztrends.com.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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