Marketing isn’t about letting as many people as possible know about your business, it’s about letting the right people know about your business. How you market and to whom you market make all the difference in the world.
If you were trying to sell skateboards you probably wouldn’t run advertisements during an episode of Golden Girls, which is a show primarily watched by older audiences. In this case, your marketing would be much better targeted if you were to air advertisements during cartoons, because children and teenagers are generally the ones interested in learning to skateboard. Target marketing increases efficiency and decreases advertising costs.
Target marketing for SEO is similar in that it attempts to concentrate of specific segments of the marketplace, mainly those who are interested in your product or services. And, while SEO is a unique type of target marketing, it provides similar opportunities.
1. Know that not everyone is interested in purchasing your product or service, and that’s okay.
2. Know that people purchase products for three reasons: To satisfy basic needs, to solve problems, and to make themselves feel good. Figure out what your product or service provides before beginning your SEO target marketing campaign.
3. Find the right keyword phrases. SEO target marketing allows you to hone in on very specific keyword searches, and finding the right phrases is extremely important. If you run a paint supply store in Dallas, Texas, you should target your keyword search to your local area, because that’s where your target market is going to be coming from. SEO copy optimized for ‘paint supply store’ will turn up far fewer customers than copy targeted for the phrase ‘paint supply store Dallas’. You may get fewer visitors to your site with a locally, but this is a good SEO strategy that will attract more of the right kind of visitors (local ones, in this case).
4. Don’t get caught up in trying to attract the most visitors to your site…SEO target marketing is concerned with attracting the right visitors to your site, even if there are less of them.
5. Write copy targeted for your intended audience. If your selling skateboards, don’t write in language that only a college professor will understand.
6. Many misled search engine optimizers spend hours obtaining as many links as possible in order to increase inbound links. While inbound links are important to SEO, you should be concerned only with obtaining relevant inbound links from sources your target market will visit.
7. Know your audience. Conduct research if you have to. How much does your audience make per year? Where do they hang out on the internet (Facebook, Myspace, Forums, Youtube)? Spend some time doing the things your target market does in order to understand how they think and what interests them.
8. An intelligent search engine placement service varies its marketing methods, placing some resources in Pay Per Click, others in Social Media Marketing, and others in standard search engine optimization techniques such as link building and SEO copy writing.
9. Research your competition. SEO target marketing is also concerned with figuring out what the other guy is up to. Utilize Ahrefs.com to determine where your competition is getting their links, and determine whether or not you too should target these locations.
10. Check the effectiveness of your SEO target marketing. Utilizing an analytics program (such as the free tool provided by Google) monitor your visitors and your conversions. An effectively targeted campaign should have less than a 55% bounce rate for visitor traffic.
