CogBlog

Earlier this week, Bambi Francisco at CBS MarketWatch commented on Business.com (link required registration). The article describes some long lost .com names that are trying to revive themselves with paid search.

She credits Business.com for outlasting earlier rivals who cratered during the bust. But, feels that "the chance that one niche company like Business.com can stand alone is highly unlikely".

I have to disagree on this one. We've been Business.com customers for about 3 years now, and I'm impressed with the growth of their directory. Here are some things I think they have going for them:

1) The quality of the traffic they deliver to advertisers is excellent. In terms of total cost per conversion they have frequently been the most cost effective PPC source for B2B customers. The conversion rate has dropped lately, in part because they have more distribution partners whose traffic is not quite as good as those who go to Business.com directly. This is something to keep an eye on, but they are certainly not alone when it comes to affiliate quality issues.

2) More than any other niche portal Business.com is applying the rules of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to their large directory. And, it is paying off. For example, search Google for "time and attendance" and you'll find the Business.com as number five. This is a phrase that has frequently reached $15/click on Overture, so a high position in natural rankings is extremely valuable. Large niche portals are able to compete for these top places because they have large volumes of highly targeted content.

A couple things to notice when you look at the Business.com Time & Attendance page: That small bit of descriptive text at the top of the page serves boost the prominence of the key phrase by including it as the very first bit of text. If you were to look at the page code, that sentence would reside very high up, right after the Body tag. This is one thing search engines like Google look for when ranking pages. Also, the page is titled perfectly, short sentence with the key phrase at the beginning. The phrase is included in the URL, and the URL does not contain a query string. The phrase is again repeated in an H1 header tag (the orange title).

So, obviously someone is making some specific adjustments to the Business.com pages to encourage natural search traffic from the other search portals. You would be surprised how often this is not the case -- almost always.

I expect to see more of Business.com in the future. They may be snapped up by a Yahoo, or Google eventually, but if I were at Business.com I'd be pretty selective about any offers. There is plenty of room for a niche player that knows what they are doing. I think Business.com has a bright future.