Understanding Your Audience and Finding Your Niche

1. Mapping Your Products and Services

Successful SEO requires a thorough understanding of the business organization itself. What products, services, and types of information and resources does your organization have to offer?

As we outlined in the preceding section, a critical SEO activity is to understand who is searching for what you are trying to promote, which requires thoroughly understanding all aspects of your offering. You will also need to understand the broad market categories that your products fall into, as each of these categories might relate to sections of your website that you may want to create. By having sections of the site for those categories, you create an opportunity to obtain search traffic related to those categories.

You also should consider business development and the company’s expansion strategy at the outset of the SEO planning process. Consider Amazon, which began as a bookseller but has evolved into a general purpose e-tailer. Sites that go through these types of changes may need to be substantially restructured, and such restructurings can be a source of major SEO headaches. Anticipating those changes in advance provides the opportunity to recommend architectural approaches to dealing with those changes.

2. Content Is King

One aspect of determining the desired audience for your website is determining who you want to reach, which requires an understanding of what you have to offer visitors to your site, both now and in the future.

You may have a deep library of “how to” content, great videos, a unique photo gallery, or an awesome tool that people are interested in using. Each of these can be valuable in building a world-class website that does well in the search engines.

The content you have available to you will affect your keyword research and site architecture, as your site content is the major source of information that search engines use to determine what your site is about.You need relevant content to even be “in the game” in search (i.e., if someone searches for lefthanded golf clubs and you don’t have any content related to lefthanded golf clubs, chances are good that you won’t rank for that search query).

On-site content also affects your link-building efforts. Link building is very similar to PR in that the success of your link-building efforts is integrally related to what you are promoting (i.e., what are you asking them to link to?).

Consider Site A, a site that has built a really solid set of articles on a given topic. However, 20 other sites out there have an equally solid set of articles on the same topic, and many of these other sites have been in the major search engine indexes for much longer than Site A.

Site A has a serious problem. Why would someone link to it? There is nothing new there. Chances are that Site A will succeed in getting some links to its articles; however, it will likely never be able to establish itself as a leader because it has nothing new to offer.

To establish itself as a leader, Site A must bring something new and unique to the market. Perhaps it can offer a solution to a problem that no one else has been able to solve before. Or perhaps it covers the same content as its competition, but it is the first to release a high-quality video series on the topic. Or perhaps it focuses on a specific vertical niche, and establishes itself as a leader in that specific niche.

One of the most important decisions Site A’s leadership needs to make is where and how they are going to establish themselves as one of the top experts and resources in their market space. If they plan to make their website a major player in capturing market-related search engine traffic, this is not an optional step.

When looking at content plans it is critical to consider not only what you already have, but also what you could develop. This relates to budget for resources to build the content. A publisher with no budget to spend on content development has few choices that she can make in her SEO plan, whereas another publisher who has a team of in-house content developers looking for something to do has a lot more options.

As a result, a critical part of the SEO planning process is to map the SEO and business goals of the website to the available budget to add new content, and to prioritize the list of opportunities to estimate the size of the ROI potential.

3. Segmenting Your Site’s Audience

Let’s not forget the audience itself! This is very important background information for the SEO practitioner. For example, Site A may be a website that sells gadgets. As a result, the site’s developers go out and implement a brilliant campaign to rank for the terms they consider relevant. Being young and energetic, they focus on the way their peers search for gadgets, but Site A is focused on selling gadgets to people who are age 50 or older.

Uh-oh, Site A is in trouble again. Why? One reason it may be in trouble is that the target audience for Site A (the over-50 crowd) may use different search terms to search for gadgets than the younger generation does, and now Site A is bringing in search traffic from people who are not interested in its products, and not bringing in traffic from those who might be!

Similar things can happen with gender. For example, women and men may not search for their shoes the same way, as shown in Figure 1, which lists the top shoe-related search terms from Wordtracker.

As you can see in Figure 3-2, search terms used can vary significantly by gender.

Another major criterion to consider might be location. Searchers in Austin, Texas may naturally want a different version of your product than searchers in Chicago. For that matter, because they want different products, they may use different search terms, which requires extensive keyword research—yet another critical aspect of the SEO process.

4. Advanced Methods for Planning and Evaluation

There are many methodologies for business planning. One of the more well-known ones is the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis. There are also methodologies for ensuring that the plan objectives are the right type of objectives, such as the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timelined) plan. Next we will take a look at both of these in the context of SEO.

4.1. SWOT analysis

Sometimes you need to get back to the basics and carry out a simple overview strategy of where you are in the marketplace, and where you would like to be. A simple SWOT analysis is a great starting point. It creates a grid from which to work and is very simple to execute.

As you can see from the SWOT chart in Figure 2, Strengths and Weaknesses usually stem from internal (on-site, business operational, business resource) sources, whereas Opportunities and Threats are from external sources.

Where does SEO fit in here? To explore this, it is helpful to use an example. Take Business X. It has a website that was built on WordPress, makes use of category tagging, adds at least one page of content every two days, and has excellent knowledge of its industry. Its domain name isn’t ideal—Businessnameandkeyword.com—but it is decent.

Business X does not get much traffic from search engines, but its rival, Business Y, does because Business Y has had its website up for a long period of time and received some great links along the way. Business Y doesn’t have any SEO plan and relies on its main page to bring in all traffic. This is because Business Y has a keyword-rich domain name and people have linked to the site using the domain name (giving it keyword-rich anchor text), and because of its longevity on the Web.

There aren’t a lot of target search queries; in fact, there are fewer than 50,000 for the core set of keywords. Business X’s site ranks on the second page of Google results, whereas Business Y is ranked #3, with Wikipedia and About.com taking up the top two positions.

Neither of the businesses is spending money on PPC (paid search) traffic, and the niche doesn’t have much room for other entrants (there may be 10 to 15 competitors). Both sites have similar link authority in terms of strengths and numbers. The businesses deal in impulse purchases—the products evoke strong emotions.

Figure 3 shows what the SWOT for Business X might look like.

The preceding analysis suggests quick wins for the Business X site, as well as where the priorities are. It also forms a great starting point for a long-term strategy and tactical maneuvers. This example is simplistic, but it illustrates how instructive a fleshed out SWOT can be. It does require you to have analyzed your site, the main competitor(s), the keywords, and the search engine results pages (SERPs).

4.2. Get SMART

Every company is unique, so naturally their challenges are unique. Even a second SEO initiative within the same company is not the same as the first initiative. Your initial SEO efforts have changed things, creating new benchmarks, new expectations, and different objectives. These all make each SEO project a new endeavor.

One way to start a new project is to set SMART objectives. Let’s look at how to go about doing that in the world of SEO.

Specific objectives are important. It is easy to get caught up in details of the plan and lose sight of the broader site objectives. You may think you want to rank #1 for this phrase or that, but in reality you want more customers. Perhaps you don’t even need more customers, but you want higher sales volume, so in fact having the same number of orders but with a higher average order value would meet your objectives better.

Measurable objectives are essential if one is to manage the performance in meeting them—you can’t manage what you can’t measure. SEO practitioners have to help their clients or organizations come to grips with analytics, and not just the analytics software, but the actual processes of how to gather the data, how to sort it, and most important, how to use it to make informed decisions.

Achievable objectives are ones which can be accomplished with the available resources. You could decide to put a man on Mars next year, for example, but it is just too big an undertaking to be feasible. You can be ambitious, but it is important to pick goals that can be met. You cannot possibly sell to more people than exist in your market. There are limits to markets, and at a certain point the only growth can come from opening new markets, or developing new products for the existing market.

Aside from basic business achievability, there are also limits to what can rank at #1 for a given search query. The search engines want the #1 result to be the one that offers the most value for users, and unless you are close to having the website that offers the most value to users, it may be unreasonable to expect to get to that position, or to maintain it if you succeed in getting there.

Realistic objectives are about context and resources. It may be perfectly achievable to meet a certain objective, but only with greater resources than may be presently available. Even a top ranking on the most competitive terms around is achievable for a relevant product, but it is realistic only if the resources required for such an effort are available.

Time-bound is the final part of a SMART objective. If there is no timeline, no project can ever fail, since it can’t run out of time. SEO generally tends to take longer to implement and gather momentum than paid advertising. It is important that milestones and deadlines be set so that expectations can be managed and course corrections made.

“We want to rank at #1 for loans” is not a SMART objective. It doesn’t identify the specific reason why the company thinks a #1 ranking will help it. It doesn’t have a timeline, so there is no way to fail. It doesn’t state an engine on which to be #1, so there’s a guaranteed argument if it means to rank on MSN and you get the job done on Yahoo!.