Does your web site target a particular market? Is it geographic
or demographic? Male or female, young or old? Business or
consumer?
Targeting your niche market via search engines can be a very
efficient and effective way of pinpointing your visitors with
the most potential to buy your products and services. With a
little planning, you can determine exactly who visits your site
and who doesn’t. How? Well, by using search terms throughout
your site that are geared specifically towards your own niche
markets. We’re going to show you how to do it right now.
Take a minute to write down the specific markets your products
and services are aimed at. Now drill down even further. Do you
service only one country, State or city? Are you mainly
targeting men in their twenties? Parents? Low-income earners?
To give you an example, let’s take a fictional florist located
in Miami, Florida who specializes in wedding bouquets. Their
target markets would be something like this:
- women in their early to late twenties - people living in Miami
and surrounding suburbs - brides-to-be living in Miami and
surrounding suburbs - dating males - couples (especially around
Valentine’s Day)
There are probably more potential markets than this, but let’s
stop there. Ok, now that you have narrowed down your target
market/s, try to get inside their heads. If you were a single
parent/ frequent traveler/ retiree, what would YOU type in to
the search engines to find the goods and services offered on
your own site?
Start writing down these search terms as they come to mind.
Using our florist example again, relevant search terms could
include:
- flowers - roses - bouquets - Valentine’s Day - wedding flowers
- florists - gifts
Now start adding qualifying terms that will help define your
market even more closely, ensuring the chosen terms are
extremely relevant to your geographic region, or specific
product / service offering. Unless our fictional Miami florist
sends flowers outside the State, they wouldn’t want to attract
any web site visitors from outside Florida right? Perhaps not
even outside Miami. Also, if somebody searches the web looking
for advice on growing roses, our florist wouldn’t want them
visiting either, agreed? Adding qualifying terms reduces the
likelihood of these visitors. For example, let’s add the
following terms to our original list:
- [send] flowers [Florida] - [send] roses [Miami] - [wedding]
bouquets [Miami] - Valentine’s Day [gifts Florida] - [Florida]
wedding flowers - florists [Miami] - [send] gifts [Miami]
See how a few selective terms narrows down the searches
considerably? Visitors that arrive at the site after typing in
such specific search terms are already highly qualified to buy
from the site. This increases the visitor/sale conversion rate
while reducing the 'click away' rate considerably.
Ok, now you know your niche markets and you’ve narrowed down
your target search terms to reach these markets. What next?
Well, now you scatter these search terms throughout your web
pages, in a logical way so as not to interrupt the flow of
writing. Then you replace keywords in your existing META keyword
tag with your new target terms and use the most important ones
within your META description and title tag too. If you’re not
confident enough to do this yourself, give the terms to your web
designer or a SEO and ask them to do it.
Now when the search engines index your site, they’ll find it
more relevant for these target searches and (hopefully!) rank
you highly for these new terms. The result: effective targeting
of your online niche market, less 'click aways' and more real
customers.
About the author:
Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank. Kalena was one of the
first search engine optimization experts in Australia & New
Zealand and is well known and respected in her field. For more
of her articles on search engine ranking and online marketing,
please visit http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com
