So, I have convinced you that you need a marketing plan before building your site.

But where to start?

How do you evaluate the marketing trends of consumers on search engines?

There are several steps the business owner can take to start the marketing evaluation before they engage a search engine marketing team to their project.

• Start by searching terms you think your clients would use to find your product or service. See what comes up and evaluate the types of businesses that are showing up in the top ten positions. Are they your competition? Do the companies that show up in the results operate in your industry? If yes, you are on the right track. If no, maybe you need to think harder about how someone might find you.

• Ask your existing customers how they would look for your service or product on a search engine. You will be amazed at the difference between what they say and the ways you might think they are looking for you!

• Make a list of the top ten competitors in your business environment, go to their websites and view their source code. What keyword phrases are they listing in the META tags? Is their website attractive? Are you finding they offer a wide variety of information, resources and options for clients? This will help you in the design phase as well because you have a good idea what your prospective clients have to choose from. If you know what your competition is doing, do it better and always check back to their website to make sure they haven’t stepped up their game.

• Utilize free search engine tools that allow you to evaluate traffic trends. Yahoo (Overture) used to have a free tool but it has disappeared, so in its place I like http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. Here you can put in general words and the tool will tell you all the ways consumers use those general words to search. So, if I market baseball bats, I would find that people look for:
  • baseball bats
  • youth baseball bats
  • easton baseball bats
  • wood baseball batsleague baseball bats

Now you have a beginning grasp on where your focus needs to be. After the basics, I would then engage a Web Optimization Firm to help refine this research with comprehensive trending and traffic details to really pinpoint and engage all the niche markets that your initial research uncovered. A proper Search Engine Marketing company will not only conduct the initial and advanced research, but will also know all the details that need to be addressed both in your content and code. They will also have a long list of clients achieving #1 results as proof that they know what they are doing. Stay away from companies that offer gaurentees.

Nobody can gaurentee how Google and Yahoo rank websites!

First you must find out how they look for you and then you must apply all the techniques to match up the search with your website. There are many steps to a great optimized website. Doing all the steps allows you to be at the top of your game and done correctly, will leave your competition in the dust and scrambling to figure out how you jumped ahead of them in the rankings or, better yet, how you beat them there in the first place.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 3:27 pm and is filed under SEO Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.