I tend to push the RESEARCH part of the marketing a lot with my clients since many of them already have a know-it-all attitude about their business. In fact many businesses are lost when it comes to marketing via link building services on the World Wide Web. A brick and mortar owner claims he knows his business because he’s been on the corner of 5th and Vine for the last 20 years. Yet his Web site which has been online for a year or two has no traffic, hence no business. What could be the problem? The better question is, what are the problems? Selling online is all about knowing what your customers are looking for. For a startup company this research is really an advantage to know if anyone really wants your product or service before you even get started. The research will actually tell you what the customers want. So if you know what the customer wants then you have a viable business to target.
Recently I asked a potential client who his online competitors are. His response was, “ you’re an SEO you should know.” I asked him to humor me so I could see who he thought was his competition. The client said well just search the Web with his highest ranking keyword phrase and I could follow along with him on the phone. So we both got on the same page at Google and used the same keyword phrase. As I got to the page I said OK and I began to read off the top listing companies by name as his competitors. The client stopped me and said NO, NO they are NOT my competitors, only the ones at the middle and the bottom of the page were his direct competitors. I asked why is that? His response was that all the others have store fronts and since he only sold online they were NOT his competitors.
Imagine that. This was a TRUE example of what CEO’s and business owners think they know about their online business competitors. It’s no wonder that businesses making these bad assumptions are having problems ranking or getting the most out of their traffic.
Another reason for this kind of research is the fact that many businesses are confused about how to sell their products or services. Some web sites offer too many unrelated services or products. One site requesting SEO had a domain name that was unspecified.com which tried to sell casinos in your home, travel insurance, drivers licenses for Mexico, real estate and cars for sale too. Talk about knowing your market. My advice was to trash the Web site and deliver a clear message to his customers and search engines by building 5 separate Web sites, one for each business. Otherwise there would be a very slim chance of ever getting any really targeted traffic to this calamity of services offered on one Web site. The most important thing he forgot was creating a trusted and valued Web site. No one really wants to deal with a jack of all trades. With the Web being so competitive one really needs to focus on specializing with your products and services so they are easily cataloged and indexed by the search engines as well as being understood by real visitors.
Below is an example of some of our targeted keyword phrases we researched at Google Suggest ,Google Competition ,Overture Users, and Yahoo Competition. We wanted to look at the ranking values and compare them to the competition or the number of Web pages that have been listed for a specific keyword phrase. This kind of information is very valuable when reviewing 1,000 to 5,000 keyword phrases for a specific industry you are targeting. We want to use the top sources to gather the best data so that our conclusions are more accurate and thereby developing the foundation to our target market for our business. Without doing this kind of research your Web site’s ranking is really a roll of the dice. If you look at the competitors’ numbers at Google and Yahoo you can be sure that the TOP listings have done their research and honed in on their marketplace and keywords. |
