Real World Computing
Optimise and prosper
One way to do this is by surveys: if you're in the planning stages, consider setting up a one-page site promoted via AdWords that targets the keywords you expect your customers to use. On this page, outline briefly what you're planning and ask the visitor to spend a couple of minutes answering a few questions. To get a good response, you'll need to offer something worthwhile, in the shape of useful information or a freebie (ask yourself whether you'd give out your email address in return for whatever you're offering). My advice is to be bold.
By adopting this approach you win two ways. First, you get answers to your survey, which will go a long way toward shaping the web application or site you're developing - these people have told you what they want, all you need do now is satisfy that need at a price they're prepared to pay. Second, you get a mailing list of people interested in your product to contact once the site launches.
If you have an existing site, survey people who buy from you and those who don't. When we did this for Passyourtheory it completely changed our view of who our customers are. We'd thought our customers would be 17-19 year olds, more male than female and highly technically literate - in fact, the people buying our most profitable product turned out to be typically 25-35, more female than male, and unconfident around technology. We also discovered the specific keywords these profitable customers were typing in, and this enabled us to target our AdWords campaign far more accurately. This exercise proved hugely successful, not least because none of our competitors bothered to undertake it, so our ads appeared either on their own or sometimes with just one other.
Knowing who your most profitable customers are and what they're searching for is like gold dust. Google Analytics will help to a point, but surveys are the most direct and flexible way to get to know your customers. As a result of this work, you'll know what your customers search on and what they're expecting to find when they reach your site.
You also need to analyse your competitors, to find out what they're offering in great detail and gain a good understanding of their marketing strengths and weaknesses. The really good news is that the majority of ads are poor because the businesses that create them don't understand the basics, and this goes double for SEO. In fact, I'd suggest that implementing the following ten steps will put you ahead of 90% of other sites:
Step 1: properly organised content
Google's success is largely due to the quality of its organic listings, which means taking great care to list pages according to how closely it thinks they match what the searcher wanted. It does this by analysing and working out what each page of your site is about. Imagine you run a firm called "Jim's Fish", selling goldfish, tropical fish, and related equipment and supplies. Your most profitable customers are tropical fish keepers, and you've discovered that these people will often type in the name of a fish species rather than a more general search term.
When organising the content of your site, reflect these habits by creating separate pages for each species, which has the effect of concentrating the relevant keywords and making the job of the search engine spider so much simpler. A page on catfish will contain that keyword along with associated ones, but it isn't going to include "goldfish" or "rainbow fish", which would have the effect of diluting the relevance.
