Graphic Design Omaha
Get a Mini-Site Off to a Good Start
I have written before about trying to determine the best size for your business site. I ultimately came down to the insightful answer, “It depends.”
In this piece, I want to concentrate upon the appropriate approach if you have decided that creating a mini-site is most appropriate for your online presence. I especially want to concentrate on your preliminary work, before you even begin designing that first page.
The most important research to conduct before you do anything else, including prior to purchasing your final domain name, related to the relationship between your niche and its keywords. To be successful with a mini-site, you must focus on a few relatively low traffic keywords, especially long-tail key phrases. Furthermore, you must make sure that those keywords are very closely related semantically.
Let me unpack that last paragraph a bit by defining the most important terms. Niche research involves doing keyword research and competition research. Keyword research is really just a form of market research from the vantage point of the customer; we want to identify what combination of words your prospective customers will enter into a search engine in their attempt to find the types of goods or services that you offer. “Long-tail keyword” is merely the term that is applied to a search term that has more than just a few words. I’ll use this as my example: “Television” might be a keyword for your niche. “Panasonic HD television” is a longer tail keyword. “Buy Panasonic high definition 46 inch television in Omaha” is a longer tailed search term (or keyword). Notice that the last of those sample phrases also signals an interest in conducting a transaction; it has what is often referred to as “commercial intent.”
There are two, distinct elements in competition research. One way to study your competition is to visit the sites who rank in the top twenty on Google when you conduct a search using each of the keywords for which you are thinking of competing. You will spy on your competition to find out which other keywords they use, the number of external links that are directed toward the page that the search engine listed and take note of their copy, their design and their marketing strategy. The other side of competition research is to determine how valuable your selected key phrases are by determining the level of competition for them. A quick way to gather that information is to see how many sponsored ads appear on google for each of the keywords that you plan to use. Google, for example, places eight to ten advertisers on the first page of search results; if there are eight or more advertisements appearing in the search results, then you have chosen a competitive keyword. Don’t panic if you find a high number of ads; competition is good in this instance. When lots of other businesses are willing to spend the necessary sums to attract visitors to their site who have search using that term, chances are good that at least some of those businesses are making money on those terms.
Finally, I mentioned that the long-tail key phrases that you select for your single mini-site should be closely related semantically. Using our example, if we take the example of the last key phrase I made up, we might, for example, use that as our main phrase and substitute other series to build our total list. On the other hand, we might also want to change the screen size option to other large televisions that Panasonic actually offers (perhaps, “36,” “42″ or “54″) Or we might want to change the beginning word of the phrase to “purchase” and “deliver” and “best price for” and so on.
It is impossible to over emphasize the essential nature of this preliminary research. Some enterprises choose to not purchase the necessary software and hire professional keyword researchers. Some businesses hire others to do the competition research as part of a complet niche research package. That part is up to you, of course. Your business does belong to you!
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