As an SEO guy, I look at myself as a translator… translating the language of the expert (business owner) into the language of the customer. And then using that language on the web pages. Those pages should be very specific so that searchers can find the answer quickly.

The only way to achieve this is to do a Search-term assessment exercise. I call it the STACA – Search-term, Traffic and Competition Analysis.

This shows the site owner the number of searches for each term but crucially for them, the level of competition that they can expect. That way we can target lower competition Search-terms which will get ranked faster than those with more competing pages.

This STACA has another massive benefit. It becomes the centre point to your whole business and marketing planning.

Why?

Because a good business plan is written around a solid market research exercise.

There are two main problems with any market research project:

•    Response and
•    Bias

Getting people to respond in suitable numbers, especially if your budget is limited, is a real headache.  How can you find people.  Where are they?  How can you get them to participate?  And many other questions too.

And however, well phrased the research questions, there is always an element of bias.  People will feel that you want a particular answer or they feel obliged in someway.  And the results are clear in the number of new products that don’t make the grade, sales profits.

So what better market research than the exact words your customers are typing into Google when they are eager to spend money.

It simply couldn’t be better research material.
You can use those exact terms in all of your marketing messages then – off-line too.

By finding out exactly what people want I’ve helped companies go from the obscurity of Page 4 to over 30 different Page 1 results.

They may be very small search volumes but when added together they come close to the big 600 pound gorilla terms they were failing to rank for previously.
That’s much better business for them and…… far better for the customer too as they can easily find what they want.

In business you will always fail if you don’t find out what your market wants.
Using good keyword tools, the market tells you what they want.

And for the local businesses or local branches of big businesses, t’s important to understand that around 60% of significant local purchases start with a Google search.

Finally, most people get the web process the wrong way round.

They spend hours and $000s agonising over the shade of a colour, the position of an image, what’s on the image. Then tack on keyword research and SEO if there’s any budget left. None of that is relevant to Google. None of that will get you ranked.

What will get you ranked and found is using the right Search-terms in the right places.

And it will help you write your marketing plan too.

Technorati Tags: 5S SEO, Market research, new zealand marketing, SEO