Your Online Marketing Research

Online marketing research is no different to its physical, retail counterpart.   You're trying to find what products are in demand and selling well, how big a market there is for it and what kind of competition you’re up against.

But instead of visiting your local regulatory authorities to see what’s happening in your area regarding population and retail growth, you use the Internet to gauge product supply and demand.

It doesn't matter if it’s your own product you’re selling or an affiliate.   Your main job is to bring online buyers and sellers (yourself in the first instance) together, and when a sale takes place, you get paid.

Keyword search strategy = buyers.

Most buyers start out as someone merely searching for information via a search engine – Google for example.  You need to interpret what exactly they've got in mind when they enter their search word and then provide just the right web page for them to land on – one that answers their needs.   Your web page then has the job of persuading them to buy your product.

Wrong visitors ... ?

You also want qualified leads.  Let's say someone types in the search word “conure".  It might be an 8-yr old trying to find out what a conure is – for a school project.  So all that's wanted is information for a project, but if your website is a sales page selling an e-book on breeding conures, your visitor will quickly leave.  Worse still, if you've used Pay-Per-Click advertising to get them to your site in the first place, then you’ve just lost money on an unqualified lead.

It doesn’t hurt to get wrong visitors - as long as you haven’t paid for advertising to get them there, but they won't be buyers.  It wastes all your hard work, your time, and you've lost sales because you failed to properly match the website content and its keywords incorporated into it, with what the visitor had in mind at the time.  They’ll come to your page, find it’s not what they want and hit the exit button.

Give 'em what they want

Use your online marketing research to find the right keywords for your web page content, then those visitors will become qualified leads.  Not only will you get more sales but your Pay-Per-Click advertising costs will drop because people who click on your ads will be qualified leads – they'll find exactly what they're looking for on your site and be genuinely interested in what you offer.

So your website needs to target the right keywords.  In the above case you would need to tightly focus on search terms that are highly relevant to your web page content – “How to Breed Conures”.  This way you’re weeding out many of the wrong visitors and only those interested in breeding conures will read your web page.

Good keywords ... gets the best

So your online marketing research must begin with a good keyword search strategy – a must-do phase when making money online, otherwise what’s the point in bringing the wrong person to your landing page or trying to sell something the market doesn’t want?  The last thing you want is hoards of visitors leaving your site because it’s not what they’re looking for, or no visitors at all because nobody wants to buy your latest, you-beaut product.

So now we’ve established that:

• Your product must be what the market wants.
  
  
• You need the right keywords to target so that when someone visits your web page, it is indeed what they had in mind at the time of their search.  Your web page keyword must also match the keyword the searcher is typing into the search box.  If your keyword fails to come up in their search results, the two of you fail to meet.

Put it another way, go where the fish are biting (don’t expect them to come to you), learn what they feed on, and offer the right bait – bait that they - not you, relate to.

Your online marketing research should tell you what search terms or keywords are popularly used by searchers, how often they’re used, and how many other, competing websites are also targeting those keywords.  The next part of your keyword search strategy is to do a keyword analysis to determine whether your website has a reasonable chance to appear on page one of Google's results page using those particular keywords.