The key to having a successfull website comes down to identifying your niche. Every website out there has a niche target, even Amazon bootstrapped themselves with the book niche.
The goal is to identify your niche and become the epicenter for all things around that category. It’s not easy, believe me - even with a blog where I post 1-2 articles per day around my niche (hot sauce) it has taken just over a year to really gain decent rankings in the engines. By decent I mean #3 in Google for a 30,000,000 plus competitive keyword term. And mind you, thats without any external link building - I’ve relied solely on the content of the site to bring in the links.
Content is a hard concept for many online retailers to understand, after all a product page is content to a search engine spider, right? Of course it is, but that one product page is not going to keep the users coming back to your site. And it’s not going to draw in the links. Retailers need to give people a reason to come back and a reason to interact with your site. Here’s a hint: Let your customers write product reviews. Good or bad, they provide perspective on the item which may lead to more sales (customer confidence) and it also provides the search engine spiders with “spider food” (and no work on your part).
But to really own your niche online, it takes a lot more work. I didn’t become the guru of hot sauce overnight, I took a risk by putting myself and my business out into the ‘public’ eye - but it’s paid off. Everyday I get to interact with my target market and they tune into the site on a daily basis. Yes, my competitors are also tuning in and watching my every move but thats the price you have to pay. And it’s definately a small price when you own your niche.
May 11th, 2006
Google announced the release of Google Trends today, prompting a fellow search geek to advise me to “blog the news” as quickly as I can. So here it is folks! Google Trends has been launched. WOO HOO!
Okay, so what is it and how does it benefit my clients?
Google Trends, as defined by Google, enables you to “compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics.” The tool also, “displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often. “
Sounds pretty cool - so I gave it a try. Many of the campaigns I work on are health-related, so I typed in “pelvic pain” and “endometriosis” as my first simultaneous search. The graph I got showed me that a lot more people search on the former term and that the highest search volume comes from two locations in India. The third highest volume comes from Chicago in the U.S. (where my client is located).
Can this help campaign strategizing in any way? Well, my feeling is that it doesn’t really provide a lot of useful information on campaigns I’m already working on - I have mountains of data from these campaigns and I know what keywords are working. Although the info about India is certainly interesting, as are the handful of articles about endometriosis.
Where I really see this tool helping me is in the preliminary research phase of an online marketing campaign. At least, I’ll know that more people are searching for “eczema” than they are for “toe fungus” over the past two years - and believe me, that looks great all graphed up in a PPT presentation! (the trends not the toe fungus).
The best part of the service (in my opinion) are the links to the articles which appear next to the trend chart. It’s very interesting to see news stories that correspond with spikes in search activity, and it seems like a good way to quickly get some background information on a given topic.
May 11th, 2006
