Research your Marketing Effort - part 1
By Editor • Jul 13th, 2008 • Category: MarketingLike any industry you do not want to waste money on your marketing effort. This article highlights how you can use your marketing spend more effectively. We are going to look at freely available internet tools to give you more knowledge about your market and maximise your advertising.
How well do you know your market?
Is your market in decline or on the up? We can look at general trends and target specific areas. Google has a great tool called Trends. Follow this link to find the latest trends for REAL ESTATE. Below is a snapshot of the results in July 2008.
In addition, you will get information about the most searched countries and cites.
“Real Estate” is very generic and trends may be completely different for niche real estate markets - say “French Property”, “Victoria Real Estate” (Australia), or very targeted “New York”. Studying these results might indicate which markets you should be getting into!
What are your competition doing?
Do your major competitors have websites? How much traffic are they getting to their site? Alexa.com (and new kid on the block Compete.com) rate sites. Their figures are not absolute but are a good indicator. So go to www.Alexa.com, type in your website address and get your ranking. Do the same for your major competitors. Lower value rankings imply high traffic sites. So the likes of Yahoo, Google, and Youtube will have rankings of 1,2 and 3. How do you compare with your competitors?
Spy on your competitors?
You can find out what “keywords” (in the search engines) are successful for each competitor by visiting - www.seodigger.com. We would suggest you sign up for a free account as you will get more results. So for example, if you were evaluating the French Property market. Do a search in Google for “French Property for Sale” and find the top sites. As a top site, it would suggest you should study 1st for French Property. So enter “http://www.1st-for-French-Property.co.uk” into the Seodigger toolbar - and look at the number of pages with #1 rankings, and the number of daily searches in Overture and Wordtracker (remember the number of searches will be much larger in Google.com!). They have over 100 #1 ranking terms - and many of them have many daily searches. Here is an extract of the Seodigger report.
Remember, these are “natural search engine rankings” not paid search (Google Adwords, etc.). It would suggest that 1st for French Property have lots of content pages relating to these topics. In fact, it is probably their strategy to create content pages (and probably use SEO to get top rankings). All of this is giving you clues to your competition and how you might compete! The WT column tells you the daily searches on WordTracker.com for each term. Click the column heading to see the terms that get the MOST traffic. Remember: the daily searches on Google will be much HIGHER than Wordtracker.com. So now you know where your competition are getting most of their traffic from on the Search Engines. The Google search engine brings in over 60% of searches done on the Internet!
In Part 2 - we will look at evaluating keywords, discovering how competitive keyword phrases are, and choosing keywords that have a higher percentage of converting to sales!
Editor is based in England.
Email this author | All posts by Editor
