SEO – Diversification like Mastication: Chew on this!
People often hear buzzwords like SEO, Search Engine Marketing, or Social Media Marketing, and they get excited…really, really excited, even if they don’t know specifically why.
Is it the ability to streamline marketing campaigns? Lower marketing overhead? Precise metrics for ultimate control?
Maybe. But for the most part, people who don’t have much marketing experience hear buzzwords and get excited for one thing: $$$.
That’s okay. Online marketing CAN generate significant cashflow for businesses small and large, but you have to know how to use it effectively. Let’s talk about hitting your target audience via SEO campaigns.
Picking search engine keywords or keyphrases on which to base your online marketing campaign requires finesse and critical thinking. You can’t just brute force traffic to your website. You need to intricately funnel meaningful visitors to your business.
Your Internal Monologue:
Let’s see… I have a home remodeling business. I should optimize for “home remodeling”. It’s brilliant! There are 500,000 searches a day on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! The leads will practically fall into my lap and beg me to take their money!
The Reality:
Generic terms have heavy competition. If you’re hoping to get leads by optimizing for “shoes”, “food”, or “consulting”, then you’re in for a steep learning curve. Yes, these terms probably get a metric ton of traffic, but consider this:
1) Traffic quality is too generic. People could be looking for service industries, informative articles, how to’s, etc. They might not be looking for your service.
2) Competition. Large conglomerates spend millions of dollars on marketing to steal the market share of these generic search engine terms.
What you need to do:
Find your marketing niche. You can apply local terms such as state name, or city name, or even county name. You might think of qualifiers that describe desired types of services, such as “easy”, “cheap”, “fast”, etc. If there are multiple services performed within your business, don’t consolidate them all into one term or phrase. You can comprise your online marketing campaign of a number of different terms or phrases.
Example: Instead of “cleaning”, you might try a combination of “cheap austin maid services”, “commercial cleaning services (area code)”, or “(county name) janitorial services”.
The point is that you can pick a number of search terms that highlight specific facets of your business, and together they can compromise your online marketing campaign. Your SEO can highlight these terms with strong copy writing on your website. While each term might not generate significant traffic on their own, together they can provide a number of leads. This is important not only because it diversifies your online marketing campaign, but the specific nature of the terms ensures that each visitor is a quality lead for your business. If you gather useful information for how people are finding your website via online analytics, you will be able to see which terms are effective, and from there you may adjust your campaign accordingly.