How to define your keywords and
search terms for your market niche!

Why you need to market to a niche?

We have witnessed a huge shake up in the DotCom world in the past couple of years. Many very big, well financed players have gone belly up. Why?

Well there are many reasons, but the analysts generally agree that a common factor in a majority of the collapses was their failure to define a niche market.

The Internet is so huge and fragmented that the cost of marketing to it as a whole is very high and the results gained too small.

For smaller businesses with limited funds and resources, it is even more essential to define a very tight market niche, to minimise promotion costs and to ensure good response rates.

How do you define a tight niche market?

Let us give you an example.

Say you are a public speaker and motivator who specialises in helping people to greater success in life, business, sport or whatever by showing them how to change their attitudes and thought patterns. You have created books and CD's to this end, which you want to sell on the Internet.

What is your market? Basically it is anyone who wants to improve their level of success, a huge market especially as the Internet makes your product internationally available.

Do you try to promote to this market? Absolutely not, not even if you have unlimited funds, your success rate would be minimal.

Look at your total market and work out which part of it spends the most time online, business people, younger people involved in sports or any other segment of your overall market? Does that segment have the spending power to buy your books and CD's? Which segment is the most open to buying online, or even buying books and CD's such as yours?

There are other questions you need to ask yourself in this process but many will be specific to your industry or product, so we will leave the rest of this excersize up to you. Go for it!

When you have made this decision, then you must decide how you are going to promote to your market. There are many ways including, email, newsletters, banners etc. But the main way of attracting large numbers of visitors to your site, is to get your it listed on all the major search engines and to appear in their top ten search results for your major keywords.

Click here to view a great article on Search Engine Basics. Don't forget to come back and continue with our tutorial :-}

We recommend that you concentrate your initial promotional efforts on this and to do so, you will need to create a very good keyword list!

It may be that your decision is to work on several well defined niches at once, in which case you will need to create pages relevant to each market niche which will become 'portals' to your website ( see our SE_Optimisation tutorial for more info) and each of these will need it's own unique keyword list.

How to Build your Keyword list

You have defined your market(s), now you need to consider the words and phrases ( search terms ) the target market may use to find the type of product you are seeking to sell them.

If you find this difficult, do it with associates who could help you to brainstorm.

One factor you may need to consider is geography. If your product can only be supplied to a local market then your keyword list will need to reflect that fact. Define the geography with the name(s) of the area(s) you wish to sell in, ie Texas California Houston etc

You will need a maximum of 3-4 words or phrases ( terms ) for each 'portal' page, do not repeat words even in phrases ie success in sport, success in business.

SE robots ( explained in the SE optimisation tutorial ) will use any combination of keywords if they are separated by spaces not comma's, so you do not need to repeat words. Indeed repetition of words could be regarded as spamming the SE's.

Get your list of words and phrases, edit out the duplicates and set them out separated by spaces.

You are now ready to start the page optimisation process.

To learn more about page optimisation, click here.