There is an online marketplace around any business website, made up of news and information sites, blogs, directories and many others. You can get your website established in the online marketplace by persuading quality sites within it to publish editorial and links to your website. This article outlines how.
When I worked in the center of Boston some years back, I’d often have lunch at Faneuil Hall - a food market buzzing with restaurants and food outlets of every flavor. Sometimes, I’d leave the office knowing exactly where I was going and what I was going to eat. But most times I had no idea and I’d wander around until something took my fancy.
There were hundreds of people doing the same - attracted to Faneuil Hall not by one restaurant but by the lively mix of many. Each restaurant or outlet benefited from being part of the collective whole.
The same type of clustering happens online but what binds websites together is not geographical location but the hyperlinks between them. There is an online marketplace around every business or topic area and just as with the restaurants in Faneuil Hall, each individual website benefits from being part of the collective whole.
Understanding the language that people use and the words they enter into search engines is the key to mapping out this online marketplace. And once you’ve done that you can establish your competitive position within it.
To illustrate I’ll take a fictional example of Virginia Veg, a company that wants to sell vegetarian dog food online. (See Wordtracker’s Keyword Research Guide for the full story).
There are several marketplaces Virginia Veg should explore:
- The first of course are the websites that already sell vegetarian pet food - why limit the effort to dogs - there are just as many cat owners who buy food for their pets.
- The second is the market for general pet care. The people who populate this marketplace are already looking for products to care for their pets.
- The third is the vegetarian marketplace. Many vegetarians will be pet owners and ideal potential customers for a range of vegetarian pet food products.
Once you know the most popular keywords for each marketplace, you can conduct searches on Google to identify the websites that make up the marketplace.
Imagine someone searching for pet food. He’ll enter some keywords and browse through the results until he finds something interesting. He’ll find suppliers of pet food, he’ll find sites that provide information and advice, and links to further resources. He’ll follow these links and find more suppliers and more information. Now imagine hundreds of people searching for vegetarian pet food. Each will use different word combinations to find what they’re looking for and each will get slightly different results. But as they search and follow links, the same sites will come
up regularly - these sites will tend to dominate the marketplace for vegetarian pet food.
Once Virginia Veg has identified these marketplaces, the company can establish a position within them.
There are four steps:
- Build an initial set of keywords
- Conduct research on Google using these keywords
- Scan the sites returned in the results for more keywords and content ideas
- Build a definitive list of popular keywords and merge these with content ideas.
Here’s how Virginia Veg explored the marketplace - you can follow the same steps for your own business.
1. Build an initial set of keywords
Start by brainstorming the obvious keyword phrases such as:
Dogfood, dog food, vegetarian dog food, vegetarian cat food, vegetarian pet food, vegetarian dogs, vegetarian cats, vegetarian pets, vegetarian diets, vegetarian diets for dogs, healthy diets for pets… and so on.
Virginia Veg had some questions: is ‘dog food’ more popular that ‘dogfood’? which is the most common, “dog food”, “cat food” or “pet food”?
I use Wordtracker to predict how often each phrase will be searched for daily. Here’s the results:
Once I’ve got an initial list of say 20 of the most popular keywords, I’ll do some Google searches to uncover the marketplace.
2. Conduct research on Google using the most popular keywords
Do searches for each of the keywords, looking in particular for news and information sites. For example. I’ll enter these terms into Google:
- “vegetarian dog food” information
- “vegetarian cat food”
- “dog food” market research
- “cat food” healthy options
And so on.
By doing searches using these keywords and analyzing the results, I can quickly build up a picture of the online marketplace. Here’s a tiny sample of the resources uncovered in initial searches:
- Existing Vegetarian Pet Food Resources. You’re considering a new market that you know very little about so you’ve got to find out fast. Our research identified vegetarian dog food distributors, and a list of Commercial Vegan Dog and Cat Food suppliers. Verona re-Bow and Jonathan Dune have published a book, Vegetarian Dogs and you can also find a discussion forum
at VegPets.com. - Pet care and animal welfare. People who use these sites will place a high priority on the health of their pets. Sites include HelpingAnimals.com who have conducted a Dog Health Study of 300 vegetarian dogs.
- Vegetarians. Vegetarians provide a ready made and substantial online community that will be interested in your products. Our searches uncovered sites such as the Vegetarian Society who have published a guide, “Dogs - a Vegetarian Diet?”, and the Vegetarian Network of Australia who have published ” Why Feed a Vegetarian Diet to Pets?”.
3. Scan the sites returned in the results for more keywords and content ideas
Browse the identified sites to find out two things:
(i) the keyword phrases that competitors and news/information sites are using. Draw up a list.
(ii) important issues addressed by editorial and news items. Look for news stories, important debates, concerns, posts in forums and discussion groups. Sign up for any interesting newsletters that you find. Again, draw up a list.
Look for news stories, important issues, debates, concerns, posts in forums and discussion groups. Sign up for any interesting newsletters that you find.
What issues are making the headlines? What are the people who are interested in vegetarian dog food talking about? What language do they use?
In everything you find look for more keywords and for links to more resources.
After this exercise, you’ll have:
- a much expanded list of keywords
- a clear picture of the competition you’ll face online
- many portals and news sites that could link to your website
- ideas for the content you’ll need to persuade those sites to link.
4. Build a definitive list of popular keywords and merge these with content ideas
Enter your newly expanded list of keyword phrases into Wordtracker’s exact search tool and you’ll get counts of how often each keyword phrase has been used. Now combine the top scoring keyword phrases with your content ideas to produce a list of article titles that will be highly relevant to your target markets AND score well on search engines.
For example, “vegetarian diet” is a popular keyword phrase and animal’s health is an important issue for pet owners. Combine these and you get an article idea, “Does a Vegetarian Diet Produce Healthy Animals?”
Do the exercise for your own website and brainstorm as many content ideas as possible. Write a title for each article using at least one important keyword phrase.
Now review the titles, pick the best and develop them into full articles of around 600 words each. Choose some articles to publish on your own website and submit others to important news and information sites within your own marketplace.
Provide them with quality content and you’ll get quality links as a result.
