How To You Get Top Ranking On Google Tutorial Part 14 ( The seven-step approach )

Who are your customers and what do they want?

Segmenting your audience is a key part of any marketing or PR strategy and, make no mistake, search engine optimization is essentially a marketing and PR activity (albeit somewhat different to some of the more

Traditional parts of this field).

Key questions at this stage (most of which will be directly relevant to your SEO campaign) include:

Are your customers local, national, or international? How might this change in the future? Is language a barrier to them doing business with you?

Is your customers business-to-business (B2B), business-to consumer (B2C), or both? Do you need very different treatments for each segment? (The answer is probably yes.)

Do your customers vary by demographic? Are they mainly of one sex or age bracket? Do they sit in any particular socioeconomic class?

Do your customers buy predominantly on price or on quality? Do you want to target upmarket users or appeal to the value end of the market? (Trying to do both at the same time rarely works.)

Is time a factor for your customers? Do they need to buy quickly? Do they only tend to buy at particular times of the day/week/year or at particular points in their life?

What is the potential for upselling customers into more expensive products? Or cross-selling them into the different product ranges?

What is the prospect of repeat business? How many of your customers are likely to form a long-term relationship with the business?

Brad undertakes some fairly extensive market research, including telephoning previous customers to find out what motivated them to buy originally and why they did or did not return. He develops a group of five different micro segments who will be the main focus of the new website (and gives each a name, just for fun). These are just two of the five, to give you a flavor:

• Juan Manband. Juan is a business of one, being both an IT contractor and a home-based internet entrepreneur. He has his fingers in lots of different pies and at least eight different business cards in his pocket that carry his name. He orders his business stationery and printing himself. He finds traditional printing firms difficult to deal with as he doesn’t need either logo-design services or large print runs. He is cost conscious but also time poor and tends to trade off the two. He is very willing to order over the internet and do some of the work himself. He does not need his printer to be local.

• Cara Lotte. Cara is personal assistant and office manager to the managing director of a local business with 50 employees. She handles everything from statutory accounts to payroll to stationery and printing. She prefers the personal touch, local suppliers, and people who keep their promises. She would use the computer for research, but is suspicious of using it to buy products. She looks for value (rather than the lowest price), putting a high emphasis on product quality. She would not expect to do any work herself.

In short, Brad Hess (like most businesses) identified both a local and a national angle to his online presence. He has also proved that there is indeed demand for printing over the internet on small print runs with rapid delivery. This will be his focus.