As suggested, targeted visitors are people who arrive on your site with
some knowledge of the kind of information or product promotion that
they are going to find when they do so. Thus, because they already
have an idea of what they’re going to find and have made a conscious
decision to visit your site nevertheless, they have already indicated that
they are interested in what you have to say.
In effect, such a visitor is already pre-sold on the idea of doing anything
that you want them to do when they arrive on your site.
Contrast this with untargeted visitors, people who have chanced upon
your site completely by accident. There is probably less than a one in a
thousand chance that an untargeted visitor will do what you want them
to do when they arrive, hence visitors of this type have far less
potential value to your business.
Targeted visitors will always generate considerably more money for
your business than will untargeted visitors, so your marketing efforts
should clearly be aimed at finding targeted visitors. To do this, you
need to focus on how people seek information of the kind that you are
providing on your site.
Nowadays, as the internet becomes an increasingly interactive center of
social activity, there is a far greater variety of methods for searching for
information online. Nevertheless, the vast majority of people still use
‘traditional’ search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN to seek the
information that they need or want.
Consequently, most people who are searching for something will get
online, open up their favorite search engine and type in the phrase that
best describes what they are looking for. For example, they might use
Google to find information related to ‘dog training’ or ‘antique clocks’.
If they do so, they are shown a results page that lists adverts on one
side of the page, and ordinary web pages on the other, all of which
have been selected by the underlying Google search algorithm as being
the materials the best match the search term being used:
As far as the adverts are concerned, they are shown because the search
term being used is a match for the phrase around which the advert had
been constructed plus the amount that the advertiser is willing to pay to
appear on the search results page.
On the opposite side of the page, where ordinary web pages are shown
in the natural search results, the web master behind the pages at the
top of the ‘popularity chart’ have made sure that their website is built
around the same phrase which matches that used by the searcher.
In both cases therefore, the promotional materials are being shown
because the keyword phrase around which webpage or advertisement
has been constructed matches the search term being used.
This is the essence of promoting your business on the net to attract
targeted visitors. If you can find a suitable keyword term that is
appropriate to your marketplace and then dominate a single keyword
term that you know people are using to search for information like
yours, it will drive targeted traffic to your site. And by ‘dominate’, I am
referring to your ability to get your page listed as high as possible in the
natural search results.
All that you then need to do is find another suitable keyword term that
can drive targeted visitors to your site before doing the same again.
One of the most common mistakes that new online marketers make is
to try to get too ambitious, too quickly. They look for keyword phrases
that can send 10,000 or 20,000 visitors to their web pages every day
and build their site around those phrases, never for a moment
considering that doing so is a complete and utter waste of time.
Later on, we will take a detailed look at keyword research tools,
because they form an essential part of your online marketing armory,
but just by using one such tool, we can see that according to Google
themselves, the term ‘weight loss’ was searched 13.6 million times in
the previous month (February in this case) and that the average
number of monthly searches over the previous 12 months is in excess
of 9 million every month.
This equates to something around 300,000 searches for ‘weight loss’
every day, and if you could attract that number of visitors to your site
every day, you would probably be a multimillionaire within the space of
a few months!
However, look at the completely shaded block for ‘Advertiser
Competition’ (on the left) as well. This indicates that there are many,
many other companies advertising in this market, giving you your first
inkling that this might be a market where the competition is pretty
tough.
You can establish just how many companies are advertising ‘weight
loss’ related information or products by scrolling to the bottom of the
column of advertisers shown on the right-hand side of the search
results page to click on the ‘More sponsored links’ link:
This will give you an exact number of current advertisers:
This represents a lot of competition, so the chances of you being able to
advertise cost effectively using ‘weight loss’ as your keyword term is
extremely limited.
You can further confirm this by establishing what the competition is like
in the natural search results by running a standard Google search to see
how many web pages they have indexed (listed) for this particular
search term:
There are approximately 107 million individual web pages that Google
has listed and ranked which are based on the phrase ‘weight loss’.
Competition at this level indicates that it is going to take you years to
have your webpage achieve any kind of decent ranking if you decide to
build a page that focuses on ‘weight loss’ as your primary keyword
term.
Now you can perhaps see why trying to ‘go big’ as soon as you launch
your first business is never likely to be effective. You have to be less
ambitious than this, searching for keyword terms which have a realistic
chance of pulling targeted visitors to your site.
The most important thing to understand is that you do not need
massive numbers to start with, because even if you find a keyword
term that only brings 10 visitors to your site every day, it represents
300 people who will see the offer that you are making every month.
Just a 1% conversion rate (which is pretty low if the offer is even half
decent) would represent three sales, which is putting money in your
bank account.
Find 10 keyword phrases that can pull this number of visitors to your
site every month, and you can clearly see that the cumulative effect of
finding lots of keywords of this nature should generate a reasonable
income level.
What you therefore need to do is find a low competition keyword which
can realistically pull traffic to your site. The next step is to ensure that
your site or a page on it appears near to the top of the natural search
results on the left-hand side of the results page before finding another
key word with the same qualities to do the same thing again.
From all of this, one thing should be clear.
Whilst most marketers are looking for suitable market niches in which
they can build their business, it is instead better to focus on finding
suitable keyword phrases because everything in online marketing starts
with keywords, not at a niche level.
This makes sense, because one of the things that marketers who
recommend hunting for potentially profitable niches from the beginning
tend to forget is that even at a niche market level, there can still be a
great deal of information flying around and lots of competition fighting
for traffic.
To get ahead of the competition, it is necessary to start working from
the keyword level, rather than from the niche level, because it is finding
suitable keyword phrases that should point you in the direction of a
particular market. Hence, the first thing to do is see what possible
markets there might be so that you can then dig down for good
keyword phrases.
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