What steps should you take to ensure your marketing mix has targeted the right niche segments?

Choosing the right niche segments can be a hard task and the road to finally getting the right segments can be laden with incorrect analysis facts and figures often leaving the marketing director with a head ach! I have lost count of the amount of times I have been sat in a directors meeting, watching the web of confusion as to which efforts have yielded the best ROI.

First, a full competitor analysis should be carried out. This is to identify the market share. It should be noted that the market share and competitors on the search engines may not actually be the Companies actual industry competitors and a decision as to which competitors to track should be agreed upon as soon as possible at the early stages of SEO discussions.

Then, Analysis of competitors PPC campaigns should be carefully carried out to highlight the most effective keywords.

A maximum budget should be used to structure a campaign that is able to compete for long tail keywords or T1’s, T3’s. The idea isn’t to simply carry out a PPC campaign but if this process is followed, you are often left with a much clearer view of which keywords to target within the organic SEO campaign.

The resulting keywords should be considered as multiple niche segments.

Often, starting off with the PPC can be very useful in conversion tracking in order to understand which keywords are most cost effective. The first process of researching competitors will make this process a lot easier as the learning curve is shortened dramatically!

So why do many directors meetings with SEO’s result in confusion?

This is often a result of a poor conversion tracking process. It may be that the SEO has recommended a particular system for tracking conversions (telephone, face to face etc) so that Internet based conversions can be calculated optimally and it simply hasn’t been implemented?