SEO Target Marketing and Finding Your Niche! It is important to find your target audience and cater to those prospects who have the greatest need or affinity with your products or services.
Just like a bustling city, the online experience offers similar ways to be entertained. Just like you may encounter street entertainers performing feats of amazement, snake-oil salesmen pitching a product at the top of their lungs, nifty little shops with the most adorable trinkets or a vendors with convenient refreshments such as coffee and pastries to enjoy. Online the call to action is equally as compelling.
Naturally, you will gravitate towards what your feeling at that moment. When you are online, theoretically the scenario is no different, only virtual, so half the battle of target marketing is finding the right niche and maintaining the attention of the crowd.
The Problem, The Pitch
It may be too difficult to assume the premise of each and every one of your visitors, but there is one constant (change and curiosity) that can work in your favor. The whole idea of link bait is, to put just enough out there and reel them in for more. As a host, your environment should be inviting (your website theme, navigation and usability) your topics should be broad enough in contrast to appeal to a wide cross segment, yet specific enough to provide a solution or at least (not to embellish on a prior thought) entertaining in passing like the street entertainer above. Or is your site like a place with unique treasures, cool trinkets (gadgets, products or accessories) to appeal to the utilitarian or based on folly and comfort (like the conveniently located latte or pastries).
The Solution
Finding the right niche online is essential, but knowing that all traffic is not created equal, some having value for creating a transient short-term effects such as enhancing your link popularity through using link bait or to get a high click through rate for a special promotion. Or if you are seeking a long-term source for traffic that converts (if you are in retail or sell products, services or offer affiliate programs) requires a different type of appeal. In either case, finding the right balance is crucial.
The whole, if you build it, they will come mentality can be pretty much summarized as a fluke when it comes to internet marketing. Building readership for a blog for example is a full time task, at least in the beginning until the content goes viral. But how does one survive in the meantime, if their livelihood is also tied into their website? The solution, SEO Target Marketing!
One method is to fire up your favorite word tracking tool and input the most broad search term (1 word term) related to your category. Write it down, then find another word that works in tandem, now input both of those terms and see where the tail drops off.
For example for the terms SEO, using word tracker the first term we select marketing, a term that receives 2,275 to 4,012 searches per day collectively. Unless you have a secret stash of PR 9 websites at your disposal and about 9 months of some serious link building, then you may wish to add another keyword to make this whole SEO Target Marketing exercise a reality.
Now the SEO Target Marketing / link building part
So, depending on the popularity of your website, the number of back links you have from other websites with authority and the age of the domain & how competitive a niche you are involved in, all of these factors have an impact on the outcome. Having said that and knowing specifically where we would like to position yourselves you then find another two of three words which share something in common with the crowning achievement of your website.
Try to select a term that has moderate search volume with virtually no competition as well as the end result you wish to accomplish. The target is all of the phrases in between that have traction in search engines. You can call this targeting the tail, climbing the ladder, selecting a target or whatever you wish, the fundamental is you have to start somewhere as you attempt to conquer a keyword or key phrase with some serious search volume. So trying to work from the top down may be futile, unless you can implement milestones along the way to illustrate progress for your efforts.
In our case, this very article is an example of this type of philosophy in theory and in practice as the targeted terms “SEO Target Marketing” have tactfully been interwoven into the content and context of this post, the related qualifying term selected “SEO” since we already have a strong presence for that term and the additional qualifier “target” which is virtually unused on our pages, but when you have traction for two out of three words, sometimes all you need is a good description tag to pull it all together.
So now that the on page factors are in place, this is the seed. We just need to throw it in a place where it will have the most traffic and nutrients (attention) to flourish. So just add social network, a few links from authority sites (25-50) usually for a national term, let the results get indexed and if you hit the top 20, then move on to the next two or three word phrase that is related.
In this way, over time, the search engine will begin to associate your website with the collective content on the pages and when all is said and done when the long tail of search kicks in, you will see pages working in tandem and pulling each other up in the search engine result pages (SERPs). All the while, you should continue to build a steady flow of links to specific pages using any one of the qualifiers for that page. For example, for this page, over the course of a month I may build 20 links with the word “SEO” 15 links with the words / anchor text “Target” and 10 links with the term “Marketing” and then 10 links with the complete term in anchor text “SEO Target marketing“, let the results get indexed, then find the next series of terms.
This way you can systematically dial in the keywords you wish to rank for over time, across a broad range of terms all based on your main keywords and then dial in the secondary key words through strategic link building.
So what are you waiting for, common sense will provide the most resourceful responses, but it never hurts to see what the search volume is in advance. It’s not the first time people set out to optimize terms they assume are fruitful, only to find that after three months of SEO, the keyword in question was a dud.
Going back to the analogy, it’s almost as if you have to have a little bit of each of the various individuals you encountered in the square, a bit of the snake oil salesman for honing your pitch and creating a buzz, something trendy and cool like the trinket shop, enough refreshments to keep the crowd happy while they pass through (to create comfort while they ingest their content) and a little song and dance to entertain (persona behind your message).
As difficult as it may be to try and make a round hole and square peg fit, such as using the analogies above to get to the subtle link bait and underlying purpose of this post (ranking and relevance) all the while sharing a nugget or two of the process is a testament to giving the people what they want, without compromising what it is you bring to the table (in this instance a tidbit of SEO strategy). Then just imagine what you can accomplish by using the same tactic, tactfully to acquire an entire category of high ranking search terms.