Two words: Market Research. Before entering any single market, take the time to educate yourself on many markets. Within each market, you’ll want to look across a broad list of measurements - and not all of them necessarily involve numbers. There’s also no excuse for poor research practices because most of the information is free.
At Snowcap Labs, we understand the importance of researching a market thoroughly before entering it. We’ve spent many hours researching topics from vinyl records to yoga, on such metrics as total search volume and the number of Google bidders on the top term.
It would take quite a while to cover all of the tools and tactics we utilize to study and compare markets. Properly taking a group of topics through the entire market analysis phase takes months. In the following video, I reveal several basic mathematical metrics we use in the initial phase of the research process.
The main question we get here at the Lab is from smart people looking to get their names/products/services/brand out online. They want to know “Where do I get keywords?” or “How can I create a strong keyword list?” It seems like plenty of people know what their core competencies are, they just don’t know how to get the word out about them on the web. (Watch for a later post if you haven’t actually picked a market yet, we’ve got some secret recipes in the Lab for that as well.)
Today I’m going to show you how to take your “keyword seeds”, the broad terms that define your market, and blow them up into thousands of keywords. You need to go through this process if you want to compete in the Pay-Per Click markets, of course, but there are a number of other reasons you might be interested in learning about the “keyword continuum” surrounding your market:
what are people looking for? (what terms are being searched on)
how many people are looking? (volumes)
what words should be in my domain name? (a Lab-Approved SEO tip!)
how big is my niche? (or are there multiple niches, here?)
what type of information are people looking for? (what “conversation” do they want to have?)
where are people looking? (literally! what cities, states, countries, etc)
how do i address my audience? (”ya’ll”, “you’se guys”, “yinz”, or “hey idiots! buy my #&%$ing product!
That’s a lot of disparate types of information! If you immediately think “I bet there’s a lot of data to manage”, you’d be right, there is. But you don’t have to do everything at once, and its really easy get started: you only need a little bit of data to accomplish any given goal, so you can get right into the fun (and believe me, it can be really fun, perhaps even addictive…)
So today i wanted to share our addicti… errr, occupation with you, kind audience. I’m going to expand an example keyword list for a given market. Yesterday we had an excellent comment from Josh’s recent post on Keyword List Building Basics, where Scott asks how to get started with his chosen market of “personal development”. It looks as though Scott hasn’t yet launched his web asset (he has chosen to start a blog.) But this is a good thing, because he can take the time to refine his focus, find his audience, and learn to speak their language before he ever creates a single paragraph of content.
So let’s get started with today’s Snowcast entitled How to Turn a Market Idea Into a Keyword List:
That’s all for today, we hope you found this information useful! If you’d like to see more examples like this, or in other parts of the web marketing process, drop us a line in the comments and we’ll do our best to pull a recipe and demonstrate it for you.
Running a search campaign requires that you collect and analyze a bunch of data. Of all the metrics you are collecting what is most important question that you should be asking? Some might say what is my conversion? Others might state cost per click. But chances are you aren’t collecting the most important thing.
What should you be asking: Why are my potential customers here? This is by far the most important and overlooked aspect of a campaign. Let’s say for example that you are a jeweler and advertising on terms related to “ruby.” Now, from your perspective that makes perfect sense. You sell rubies so you should naturally be advertising on them right? Not always.
What you should be asking yourself is what do people typing in this term really want? In the case of “ruby” most of that traffic is actually looking for information on the Ruby on Rails programming language and framework. So you might be paying for quite a lot of traffic that completely misses the mark.
When you are researching your market you want to break up all your keywords into really tight groupings. Each of these is a segment. Now ask each of these segments. So in our jewelry example we might have a tight group around “ruby” terms. When you drive traffic from this segment you’ll want to ask them “What were you looking for today? What is your most important question?”
When you start collecting this data the psychology of each and every single terms starts to unfold. By analyzing their answers you’ll realize that a majority of the traffic search on “Ruby” wants computer stuff and not gems. On the other hand you might find that “Rubies” is the where your audience truly lies.
But wait, it gets better. when you collect this data you can immediately integrate it into your search campaigns. When you analyze the data you can prioritize a list of concerns that people in a particular segment have. You can use this information in your landing pages and absolutely trounce conversion. When you speak to your audience in the same language and hit on all their major concerns you are much more likely to close the sale.
Go out and start digging into the psychology of your market. I bet you’ll find a huge pot of gold.
Branding is a tough game to play. In traditional advertising building a brand can cost millions of dollars. The big boys on the block (think Wal-mart, Sears, Coke, Miller) literally spend billions of dollars annually building the brand. I’m sure that you would be happy to to have that kind of money to throw around, but chances are that your budgets are significantly smaller. Let’s take some learnings from the big guys and show you how to apply them to your business.
Measuring the value of a brand is pretty tough work. Owning the trademark for Coca-Cola has got to be worth something right? In practice it is hard to nail down a price because a brand is not a tangible thing. In truth, it’s more of an art than a science. In the financial world when they put a dollar value on a brand they call it “goodwill.” This is the figure that traditionally gets tossed around.
In the online world there are a few fantastic ways to measure the penetration of your brand. The two best metrics you should follow are:
Direct Navigation Traffic
Number of monthly searches on the brand term and it’s derivatives.
Take Bidz.com for an example. I went to Google Trends and typed in “bidz.”
As you can see, over the last few years, they have enjoyed about a 20% increase in their brand term searches. Now, that’s cool. The data above is Google’s view of the world. When you are assessing the demand for your brand you’ll want the hard facts from your web analytics package.
Go back six months. Measure all the traffic that you received from search engines that included a brand term. Do the same for last month. What is the change in the traffic from these two periods?
Do the same process for your direct navigation traffic. Is your brand getting more prevalent or less?
Start now. Go measure the pulse of your brand.
Have questions about this post? Ask a good question in the comments section below and I will answer it and give you a link on our blog roll. Fire away!
Grinding out a proper keyword list is like foreplay – it requires time and patience to do it correctly, but most rush through and do a very poor job. A robust, exhaustive, and targeted keyword list is the foundation of well executed online search marketing campaigns.
I usually begin with as many relevant “seeds” as possible. A seed is the main word or phrase pertaining to your market. For the example in the video, I only used one seed – “green card.” For a full campaign prepared for launch, I would have chosen even more seed terms like “immigrant” “immigration” or “lawful permanent residence.”
In this video, I talk further about the basics of Keyword Building:
As promised, here is the Excel file with the full ad group layout for the seed “green card” and an additional tab with a template that’s ready and waiting for your keywords.
“Interesting presentation Charles… as more and more people purchase properties as income generators, do you see Google modifying its algorithm to prevent these kinds of sites from showing up in the first 10 listings of a search?”
It’s a good question and I wanted share my response with you.
Duncan,
Good question. When purchasing web properties you need to make sure that you follow a few hard and fast rules to avoid being penalized by the big G and the like.
1. Make sure the domain is transfered anonymously
2. Put the site on a new C-block IP address.
You’ll need to make sure that when the domain is transfered in that you register with privacy protection. For reference, Google is also a domain registrar so they have access to all the domain records. Registering the domain anonymously keeps them from knowing that you are aggregating sites. There is some heated debate about rankings and transferring ownership of a site. Some people have had issues. In my experiences the traffic has stayed consistent.
Put the purchased site on a new c-block level IP address. You want to make sure that you aren’t aggregating too many sites into one IP. If Google sees that these sites are linking to one another and concentrated in the same IP, you risk them pinning all the sites to you. We use SEOHosting to spawn new web hosting accounts onto separate IP blocks. Their setup is great, you are able to spawn new accounts and set them up very quickly using the standard web host manager and cpanel software packages. It’s really a breeze. It works out to about $7/month per account if you buy the 10 site package.
Good question, what questions do you have? Ask a good one and I’ll add your site to the blog roll.
