Are You Playing Hide and Seek With Your Market?

December 6, 2009 · 140 comments

Don't Hide From Your - Photo Credit PRactical Ramblings

Don't Hide From Your Market! - Photo Credit PRactical Ramblings

Many seem to be following the “if you build it they will come” business plan.

That simply does not work.

Most of your market is trying to find you by searching somewhere – whether that is on a search engine, blog search, on their favorite Social Networking sites, using search tools like FeelTipTop or in Local Search Directories.

The key questions you must answer when building traffic for your Web site are:

  1. WHO is YOUR target audience
  2. What exact words and phrases (your anchor text) are they using when looking for what you offer

The very first thing every business, blog, or ecommerce site needs to know is what their most important keyword phrases are – because how you write about and promote those phrases determines whether your Web site gets found online and by how many.

Make this task your highest priority today.

  1. First identify your target audience – who would look for what you offer and where do they look?
  2. Brainstorm – ideally with others – how your target audience would go about searching for you online.
  3. What exact words and phrases would they use? Remember that many will NOT know your industry jargon or the specific names you use.
  4. Check your existing positions for those phrases (see tools below). Your target is to be found on the first page of results at Google, Yahoo and Bing.
  5. Identify your very best page or post for each phrase. If you don’t have a compelling pillar post for that phrase create one.

Here are some tools to assist you with the above:

FREE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS:

There are many others but the first two are what I use most and the last two are what Murray Newlands recommends on his Affiliate Marketing Blog.

SEARCH ENGINE POSITION TOOLS:

One you know what they are, use your most important keyword phrases:

  1. To write posts that target specific keyword phrases
  2. When leaving comments in blogs using KeywordLuv or that allow you to add links with your own anchor text within the body of comments
  3. Share them with your blogging buddies, blogger alliance, blog club, or collaborators so they know precisely which posts are most important to you and what keyword phrase to use as your preferred anchor text
  4. Focus on them when doing blog outreach

If each of us will take the time to share this type of information with our collaborators, it will make a HUGE difference in the results we will see and how fast we attain them. Once we have this information we can select the best anchor text and landing page to use whenever we link to each other. When I blog I also add Twitter IDs and I recommend doing that too.

In case anyone doesn’t know, anchor text is simply the words that are used in hyperlinks you create. Instead of always using someone’s blog name or their name start LINKING their optimum anchor text phrases because your target audience includes the masses who don’t know your business name or blog yet.

OTHER WAYS TO BUILD TRAFFIC:

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{ 106 comments… read them below or add one }

Frank from Rent Log Cabins June 25, 2010 at 10:12 pm

Hello,

If the market crashes, what will paper money be worth? What would be a good currency to hide under the bed?
Really great post, enjoyed reading it. Thanks,

Frank

Reply

growmap June 28, 2010 at 2:41 am

Twitter: @GrowMap

Hi Frank,

Even if the market doesn’t crash paper money won’t be worth much. Although gold, silver and platinum will hold their value and pearls should go up steeply (because polution is reducing the ability to grow cultured pearls = lower supply and rising prices), what people really need are NECESSITIES.

Few even know what that means anymore. Here they are in priority order:

1) Drinkable water
2) Food
3) Shelter

Growing a garden and stocking up on staples such as beans, rice, pasta, flour, corn meal, sugar – storing them properly is critical. People need to learn how to cook staples from scratch.

Did you know 20 pounds of potatoes costs the same as one bag of potato chips? That many potatoes go a long way! Even if you can make $100 / hour it is better to plant a garden because even $100 might not buy much food when hyper-inflation kicks in – and that $100/hr work might evaporate when 30-35% or more are unemployed and another 30-40% are underemployed.

Finally, when things get really bad being surrounded by desperate, hungry people will be dangerous so if you have the wisdom and foresight you need to be living in a remote area at least three hours from any sizeable town or city with others who are prepared too.

People are not likely to go roaming far from where they live as gasoline prices will be high and money scarce so if you are far enough away the danger of violence will be minimal.

There are stats and links in the Word of Mouth Marketing post in CommentLuv that clearly show how bad it already is. Only the naive should be believing the media spin that we are “in recovery” but “could slip back into recession”.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Word of Mouth Marketing =-.

Reply

John Alden from Web Tasarim July 4, 2010 at 7:03 pm

Thank you for the detailed post Gail. This post is actually one of those that every potential SEO company customer should read ahead to be perfectly honest. Sometimes some companies that apply to us are so “interesting” that we often find out that they’ve been targeting the wrong audience for their website for a long time and even if there was a successful marketing campaign before coming to us, it would fail miserably. Those are the ones that truly play “hide and seek” with their market.

P.S. I like the SEOBook toolbar. It goes fine along with SEOMoz toolbar ;)

Reply

Chris from Classic Cars for Sale July 5, 2010 at 12:54 pm

Thanks for the reminder about SEO Book – I use the keyword tool quite often but haven’t really looked into the other tools they offer. It is so easy to get inundated with useful SEO tools and toolbars. :)
.-= Chris@Classic Cars for Sale´s featured blog ..1952 Mercedes Benz 300 Adenauer for Sale =-.

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same day payday loans July 6, 2010 at 3:01 pm

Submitted this link to Reddit and Digg. I hope you get a response!
.-= same day payday loans´s featured blog ..Payday Loans =-.

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Vince Buchert July 6, 2010 at 7:14 pm

I’m interested in work at home info. Your site is nice!

Reply

KyAus from Online Mobile Backup July 23, 2010 at 4:26 pm

Wow, I have been going at this all wrong. I was using the name of my blog and not my keywords. Lol I feel stupid.
Thank you for the article. Now I should be doing the Keyword luv correctly :)
.-= KyAus @ Online Mobile Backup´s featured blog ..Webmasters Dont Get Scammed =-.

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neil from one way links August 27, 2010 at 3:50 am

“The very first thing every business, blog, or ecommerce site needs to know is what their most important keyword phrases are ” very true, people make the mistake of trying to perform SEO on a wide range of keywords. it should initially be limited to a small set number
.-= neil@one way links´s featured blog ..Standard Membership Free! =-.

Reply

C5 from Solutions, Ideas, Conclusions August 31, 2010 at 4:58 pm

Twitter: @ceefive

I really had difficulty deciding on a keyword for my older blogs since I blog about almost anything decent. Thanks for this post, I may be starting aright on my new blog, which is more planned.

Bookmarked! :)
.-= C5 @ Solutions, Ideas, Conclusions´s featured blog ..Welcome! =-.

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