How Can You Compete?

Last issue we started a two-part article "Is Search Optimization Right for Your Company?" with the first part focused on how frequently people are searching for your products.

Now we can consider, "How You Can Compete"

The good news is that there are a number of ways to compete for search terms that are similar to other marketing (and Art-of-War) tactics.

The Head-to-Head Assault

Often, marketers want to be numero uno on Google for the highest frequency search terms, which, in the case of widgets would likely be the singular or plural. Using the Google AdWords tool described in the previous section, you can see some competition factors for AdWords – which is sometimes a good indication of the natural search competition. And you can see in the graphic below that it has top competition levels and will cost a few dollars to get near the top of AdWords.

This top term will likely provide the most conversions on your website since its frequency is so much larger, although it shows a fairly generic level of interest so it will not convert at the same rate as some lower frequency terms. Since many people have this term in their sights the question is whether it is a good target for natural rankings.

To see how strong your website is take a look at it in the Yahoo Site Explorer. Go to Yahoo Search and enter site:http://www.yourwebsite.com into the search bar. It will bring up a page showing the number of pages on your website. If you then select "inlinks", "except from this domain", and "entire site" from the drop downs at the top of the results field, you will see the count of incoming links to your website. Now type in the URL for some sites that are ranked at the top of a Google search for widgets. If the websites are focused on widgets, have several orders of magnitude more pages and links to their site, maybe it will be a long road to the top ranking.

BTW: if the top rank is for a website that is only partly about widgets, use the exact URL that shows up in the Google search so you see how important that section of the website is.

The Flanking Maneuver

Say you decide you cannot compete with the big boys for the straight term "widgets", what are you going to look at next? The answer is to seek out the lower frequency search terms in Google's AdWords Tool. The good news about these terms is that they often have a higher frequency of conversion, since their greater specificity shows a higher level of intention on the part of the searchers. Maybe one of the things your company does is to make custom widgets. Looking at the screen below you can see that this term has far less competition (50% that of the straight term) and a price of 0.05 will get you on the top three AdWords listings. This is a good sign, so repeat the procedure described above in the Yahoo Site Explorer.

Guerilla Warfare

If the competition for the secondary search terms is still too weighty for your 97 pound weakling website, there is still hope. You can look further down the list, you can enter combined terms into the Google AdWords Tool using terms from the list with another term to see if it carries frequency, or you can go off the grid. There are myriad searches that are too infrequent to categorize. 20% of the searches on Google have never been used before. But how can you hope to capture these terms if you don't know what they are? The answer is in-depth copywriting. This copy will naturally have associations with terms that you would never imagine someone will search for but they will. For example, write articles and add them to your website on second level pages or ones linked off the home page (to make sure Google is spidering them), and they will start providing traffic. And if you write about interesting and relevant topics, people may start to link to you. This, in turn, will alert Google to the worthiness of your website so that you might start moving up the food chain of search terms.

Next Month: Website Structure: Adding basic geometry to your website to make readers and search engines happier.

To see if SEO is right for your business, contact Jeb at jblair@praxisagency.com.