Thursday 16 October 2008

Think Like Your Customers

In last week's article, we looked at the absolute importance of understanding your own business before embarking on your SEO journey. If you haven't read that article then I suggest taking 5 minutes to go through it before reading this follow on as, simple as it sounds, it is vital you understand exactly what you are selling before trying to optimise your site.

Too many businesses apply the 'shot-gun- approach to marketing, trying to be all things to all people and failing by ending up appealing to no-one. The key to successful internet marketing is understanding the sheer size of the potential market and then accepting that cornering even a small percentage of that market still means a huge potential client base to market to. And this leads onto today's topic - How To Think Like Your Customer.

Why is it important to be able to think like your customers? Quite simply, 99.99% of all your internet marketing strategies will be reliant on your placings in search engines - when someone is looking for an item on the internet, the first place they tend to turn is their favourite search engine and in the UK, for over 90% of your clients, that means Google.

Lets take a second now to think through the process a potential client goes through in Google to search for the items you are marketing.

1. Client enters a word or short phrase describing what they are looking for.
2. Google takes that input and then applies its own algorithms to try and rank returns in order of relevancy.
3. Client is given a list of websites that Google believes are most relevant to their original input.
4. Client probably restricts themselves to choosing from the 10 returns on page one.

That seem a fair description? In this article, we are focusing on the first part of the process -

"1. Client enters a word or short phrase describing what they are looking for."

This is where many keen SEO enthusiasts make their first and most serious error - you need to identify the keyphrases and keywords your clients may use, not the words and phrases you think they should use. Lets look at an example:

Your company produces and sells a specific component for XYZ washing machines - this component is a '12" galvinised rubber spin-drum grommet'. Although this is the technically correct name for the item, how many clients are going to type that into Google hopeing to find your item? If you were to SEO your website to such a specific description, you may not attact much traffic. So, you need to try and see what words and phrases real clients have already used to try and find such items.

There are a number of ways to try and find keywords and keyphrases and a number of products are available to make this process easier for you. Personally I use a program called iBusiness Promoter as I manage a large number of websites and find it easier to have a program to manage most of the tasks for me. A cheaper method is to take advantage of Google's free adwords system.

Although Adwords is primarily set up to help potential Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisers, you can use the same system to build lists of words and keyphrases that have already been used by people searching Google. Set up an account if you don't already have one and then read the helpful FAQ section before making a start. What you are looking to identify is a short list of focused keywords and keyphrases that have had a number of recent searches and have little existing websites in Google's index.

Using our above example, we could identify keyphrases like:

"sealing washer for XYZ washing machine"
"spare parts for XYZ washing machine"
"XYZ washing machine leaks water"

and so on - but you can see the point I am trying to make - the keyphrases I have chosen are all phrases that your average client might input into Google to find your product. By narrowing the list down to 3 or 4 keyphrases that you know have little or no corresponding websites on Google, you can optimise your own site to include landing pages specifically optimised to these phrases.

Next time »
"How To SEO Your Landing Pages"

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