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I knew quite a bit of what Bill Slawski was saying when I read his article - Finding Customers through Anti-Commercial Queries - he wrote on Search Engineland, but he really got me thinking this morning.

When I think of how I buy on the internet, I only type a sales-based query into a search engine when I really want to buy something and quite a bit of the time I don’t tend to find what I am looking for exactly. That said, what about all those other search queries that could lead to a sale?

Business-to-business and the more complex ’service’ sale is obviously, well, more complex; but how often would someone be searching to solve THEIR problem, rather than looking for what you sell (or what you say you sell), when they do a search?

Effective case studies are obviously a great way of doing this simply, but obviously they will only be effective for search if they ask and answer the right questions in the content and it is relevant to the benefits to the customer. That said, it gives you a good opportunity to say similar things in different ways across different projects.

Reading Bill’s example, further down the article, he gets that point across well with writing articles and instructions answering the “how do I…?” queries that may pop-up. He is selling wood but he is ’selling’ the result - the thing people may be looking for - Dog Kennels, Birdhouse, Decking, etc.

So, the question is, what are people actually doing with your products and services?