By almost any measure, B2B marketers are embracing search engine marketing. A few statistics:

• Roughly one-third of all commercial searches on Google are B2B in nature
• More than 50 percent of Google’s target advertisers are B2B
• Almost 38 percent of Yahoo!’s target advertisers are B2B

This means that B2B companies will spend somewhere on the order of $3 billion on paid search engine marketing this year.

Despite all this spending, many B2B marketers continue to find it difficult to find search marketing solutions that meet their needs. This is because most commercial solutions are designed for high-volume B2C clients, not the unique challenges of B2B companies.

Why? One reason is that B2B marketers tend to be more fragmented and smaller than large consumer advertisers, spending as little as a few hundred dollars a month on search. Most search marketing vendors find it unprofitable to work with any client spending under $25,000 a month on search and ignore this "long tail" opportunity.

The other reason is that B2C search marketing is very different from B2B search marketing, and vendors that specialize in B2C search find it difficult to serve B2B clients as well.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of "Optimize for B2B Search Marketing", where I will discuss the key differences between B2B and B2C search marketing.