It isn’t enough to simply bring thousands of visitors to your website. Those visitors must have an interest in your products or services. The reasoning is simple: traffic that is predisposed to purchase your product or service will be easier to convert to a paying customer. Because of this, your SEO program must be design around the concept of targeted internet marketing.
Targeted internet marketing allows a webmaster to create a marketing program specifically designed to draw the attention of a predetermined group of people or demographic. In order to accomplish this successfully, it is important that three questions be answered:
1. What is different about my product or service? What value will my customers receive by selecting me as their provider?
2. How will my targeted demographic find me? What words or phrases are they likely to use? Will they be drawn to a particular search engine?
3. What type of people make up my targeted demographic? How old are they? What is their socio-economic status? What is their education and employment history?
The answers to these questions can be used to create a component of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) program designed to bring in targeted traffic.
Use the information to create a profile of your ideal customer and determine their probable behavior based on the answers. For example, if your product is organic pet food, you can likely assume that your targeted demographic is in their mid twenties to mid thirties, has a degree of expendable income, owns at least one pet and is likely interested in green living. This information can be used to determine what sort of sites to advertise on as well as which sites you may wish to link to. In this case, you may find that linking with ‘green’ living sites or high end breeders may be helpful.
Use the information gleaned from question number two to further your keyword research. By putting yourself in the mind of your potential client, you may very well discover that the words or phrases they use to find you are unique. This keyword research can be further refined by checking the popularity and relevance of the words or phrases. In this way you can develop a list of highly unique and relevant keywords that your targeted demographic is most likely to use.
Most importantly don’t assume anything about keywords / phrases … research them! There are plenty of free tools, not the least of which is Google’s keyword tool. You can lean exactly what keywords and phrases should be targeted based on relevance and search volume.
Targeted internet marketing is as much about understanding how people think as it is about knowing your market and product. People are sometimes drawn inexplicably to make a purchase and those online business owners who learn to tap into this phenomenon are likely to be the most successful.
If you are working with an SEO consultant, be sure to review your targeted demographic with him or her. They will be able to seamlessly incorporate your goals into your overall marketing plan.
Contact us now to learn more and grow. We can help.
June 7, 2010
2 Comments
Thank you Melissa for this useful article. I’ll use this in my SEO strategies.
Excellent post!
Alongside targeted keyword research, which has its benefits, getting access to a targeted audience also requires targeted list building to accomplish better results. One needs to be smart in the affiliate marketing world and there are many ways of getting targeted quality traffic to your site and exposing it to targeted content meant purposefully for them.
The common perception is “wait for a prospect to show up to the squeeze page, capture his or her email and email back with an offer later”.. Unfortunately this doesn’t work on all occasions.
Smart affiliate marketers are using cutting-edge tools like SEPCON, http://www.sepcon.info to beat their competition to the customers. It’s probably one of the most powerful tools new internet and affiliate marketers have at their disposal.