Cactimedia's Sagely advice on Keyword Research and going where your customers are at

Getting your thinking straight before hunting for keywords In order to effectively translate website visitors into customers, you’ll need to think about beyond SEO and the actual process of finding the right keywords and do some brainstorming by asking yourself some very important questions. This will help a lot with your online presence and visibility. When doing your keyword research, you want to ask yourself:

• What are customers searching for? What problems are they trying to solve?
• What specific words and terms are they searching for in order to find your business and how do they end up seeing what products and services you have to offer?
• What can you solve for them and what information can you provide them in order to give them the value they’re seeking when they search?
• How can you use the keywords that you know people are searching for to increase your visibility online?
• What information you can provide to educate them about your business? It will not only help them but also make your life easier.

You want to be the person they go to for a solution, and preferably end up becoming their go-to. So you need to think about what you can offer so they can get what they want. To be able to do that, you’ll have to know what specific words they type in the search engines. Knowing this, you can make use of those keywords to increase your visibility online, building your audience, therefore increasing your sales.

Read this blog post on how to do the actual keyword analysis. Keep in mind these keywords will have a wider business impact that’s not just restricted to SEO.

Where are your customers hanging out: places

How and where are you going to find your target audience online?

During the humble beginnings of the internet, people who had access to search engines would just search. They had to know right away what they were looking for and, once they’ve found it, they log off. That’s just the way things were back then. People were surfing and browsing. It was a fast-paced, seek and destroy type movement. It’s really not like that anymore.

Today, you have people spending their time on the Internet. That’s hours and hours of seemingly random browsing. People spend a few minutes at a time looking for something they’d already had in mind, and then browsing through results, and something this leads them way off to a different topic. But that’s where the randomness stops.

If you pay attention to web users’ online activity, including yours, it’s a lot of routine and repetition. People go to the same sites for minutes – sometimes hours – at a time, several times a week – sometimes several times in a day – and just going through the same things over again. People spend thirty minutes at a time on Facebook. They spend several hours on their favorite blogs consuming content. Use this to your advantage.

Because, really what you’re seeing there is a lot of repetition – people frequenting specific places. You want to be thinking about the Internet now as a series of places. They’re on the search engine looking for things kind of like a highway intersection. It’s like the information highway.

They go to Google and they’re looking and they spend about five minutes there. The rest of their time online is spent really hanging out in the places they like – the places that resonate with them. So when you’re looking to find your target audience online, the very first thing you need to ask yourself is: Where do your potential customers spend their time online?

…. And you need to do a lot of research to figure that question out. Where are they at?

If you know what social networking websites, blogs people frequent, then you will be able to find a platform in which you can present your service to your target market, and you will be able to create messages that will really work to reach out to them.

To find out where your potential buyers are, and go there. This is where quality SEO services can be of great benefit.

Most marketers find that majority of them are on Facebook – personally, socially, business, family, and friends. That’s a really solid social channel that you can be sure that if you put a presence there, you’re going to catch a good percentage of your target audience.

Make a Facebook business page. You’ll get lots of traffic and, because it’s a social media website, people will feel like they’ll getting to know you beyond a business perspective. Remember, nothing sells products better than an emotional connection.

Do you know which blogs your consumers are reading? What content are they consuming? What information are they reading? Who are they following? Where are they at?

If so, it wouldn’t hurt to invest in a little advertising. Pay the author to host ad banners on the sides of their pages so that people notice and remember you. Plus, if their favorite author is the one endorsing it, they’ll think that this might actually be a great service or product. Even if it is out of curiosity if you have great layouts and great content, they’re bound to feel glad to have made the try and stay.

Here is another post you might like, its a quick list of all our SEO diagnostic tools.

Edited By: Avdhoot Shitre