You get the telephone calls just as I do. "Hello, my name is Janet and I am with SEO Slugs. We work directly with Yahoo and Google to make sure your link comes to the top of the page with your specific keywords."
How nice of them to take the time and make the call just to offer me this wonderful privilege! Of course you may know the rest of the conversation which ends up with me being at the top of those and other search listings for my keywords and more importantly in my market. When asking them the price you will find they generally charge three to ten times the price you would pay if you went directly to the search engines and bought the terms yourself.
In the event you are unaware of what they are doing to "guarantee" your top placement they are simply overcharging you, dramatically, to purchase ads which you can do very simply yourself. This, however, is not the focus of this article which is intended to show how I have consistently been in the top ten for my most important keywords in my market area year after year. With a little understanding and a little effort you can do the same.
Regardless of your reason for needing to be in the top five or less on the major search engines you will most likely need to understand the most important key to winning the search engine game is to know what people are searching for who find your site. If you are in a business where visitors must be converted to customers it is equally important to understand which keywords result in the highest conversion ratio. This is where you want to focus.
Social media professionals have called this "long tail search engine optimization" for many years and while the description is interesting the truth is this is nothing more than good old fashioned prime target marketing which has been taught for decades. With this technique we weed out the time wasters, the incorrect search results and the undue load on your resources. There are literally millions of examples but we will use a real estate agent and her needs in this short example.
Our agent, Barrina Hopos, is an agent in Cerdus City, New Baltimore. She is not a broker and has no staff but is a solitary operation working under a broker who does not provide leads. For her to make a reasonable annual income she needs to sell at least five million dollars worth of homes per year to make a decent income and would prefer to double that so she can fulfill some dreams.
Like most real estate agents Barrina is limited by licensing to selling homes only in New Baltimore. Since Cerdus City is inhabited by roughly five hundred thousand people and there are over thirty thousand homes for sale all she needs to do is beat her roughly one-thousand competitors to the punch about twenty times in one year and she is a very successful agent.
Barrina has attended a few SEO classes offered in her local area and given by other real estate agents and she has a decent grasp of how it works. She puts the words "real estate" and "homes for sale" in almost everything she does. Her blog over at Attractive Gains has titles like "New Home For Sale" and "Builder Supplied Real Estate". Still her web traffic has not picked up and her business is still very slow while her major competitors are writing blogs about how well they are doing from blogging a micro-blogging.
Here is the point of issue to all the Barrinas out there: stop competing on a global scale when you only need to win on a local scale. After speaking with our resident professional Barrina started focusing on her prime market. Beginning with her main area of focus she developed a strategy to go after her ten most important communities. Within a matter of days she become number one on all three major search engines with "Mason Cove homes for sale Cerdus City" and was already showing a home there by the time her second contact came from a search on "handicap certified homes in Cerdus City".
Like Barrina you can find a niche, a very fine target area, and dominate much more easily than competing on a global scale with the Big Guys on terms like "real estate" or "homes for sale". Once you dominate a couple of niche markets you can begin to spread out to others and start to build your company. After all, if you contacted Barrina to ask questions about a home for sale five states away it would do you no good and waste time for both of you. Be like Barrina and dominate your true market.
Ken Cook is co-host of JCKC radio (including the popular Twitter Tuesday Radio show), the blogger, content developer, and social evangelist for Novation Mortgage in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also a knowledgeable and entertaining public speaker for hire, author and trainer. He may be reached at 678-946-0101 or through http://twitter.com/thekencook
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