According To Search Engine Journal, over 60% of online sales come from the bottom 20% of keywords.  The bottom 20% are the long tail. These are terms that consumers search as a result of an education process.

Think of yourself as a consumer searching for something online. You start out by searching a general term. You look quickly at the results and you process the information. Most likely it’s not exactly what you are after. But you may have learned something. Maybe you see a few words that educate you about your search. So you do another more descriptive search.

If you are really a buyer, you keep drilling down your search until you find what you want. If you don’t find what you’re after, you quit or go onto to something else. But when you find what you want to stop. You stick on that site. Because they have what you want you immediately trust the source.

The only way to capitalize on the long tail conversion is to know your niche. The more you know your niche the more you know what consumers want. Create the content on your site that consumers want and you’ll see a conversion to sales. Even if your site visitor doesn’t buy from you today they might later. That depends though on how well you have defined your niche and how well you have communicated your message.

Dig deep into your niche keywords. Create content that keywords tell us your customer wants. Give your customer what they want, not what you think they want. Thta’s what puts money in your pocket.

The easiest way to know who is getting all your business. Just go onto Google and start searching for a business that does what you do, as if you were the customer. Think before you start this exercise.

Put yourself in your customers shoes. What does your customer search for? They are not searching just for a phone number or directory listing. If that’s what people searched for we wouldn’t need the internet. The Yellow Pages would do.

Your customer is searching for information, that’s why they search. They want information that’s valuable, educational. That’s what Google is in the business of delivering, quality information. When you start your search, do you know what your customers are thinking about when they sit at their keyboard?

Let’s say you are a kitchen remodeling company.  Your client who wants a new kitchen probably doesn’t know where to start. But they’ll start somewhere with a few clicks. To put ourselves in the mind of our customer let’s take a look at keywords that clients search for.

Using the Google Keyword Tool I found 95 keywords under the term “Kitchen Remodeling”.   Some terms you might think to discount at first because they don’t have a lot of monthly searches. But look closely at the terms. Some terms only apply to certain niche markets. For example “kitchen cabinet remodeling“. Someone searching this term isn’t looking for a complete remodel. They are looking for new cabinets. What goes with new cabinets? A kitchen cabinet remodel might open up lots of issues. Like damaging the floor or back splashes, the ceiling. Wait…I just found another. How to remodel kitchen and kitchen remodeling cost.

Here’s more terms, small kitchen remodeling costs and kitchen remodel before and after. Now we can start seeing what is in the mind of your client when they do a search. This is only the beginning. Do another search for kitchen cabinet remodel and you’ll find another list of keywords. Or just search kitchen cabinet. You’ll keep finding more terms that relate to your business. Keep searching and put these terms into your excel spread sheet.

Once you’ve put together a list of a few thousand terms, start putting together a list of those terms that most closely match your business. You might start seeing a niche emerging that you didn’t see before.

When you search for your competition you know what your customers are looking for. Now, what you want to do is write content for your web site that answers what your customer wants. Each web page will have a couple of specific keyword terms. Write your content by staying on the topic of those terms. This is what your customer wants.

This is the paradigm shift caused by the internet. Consumers no longer get what they get. They get what they want. If you deliver what they want, you are on your way to creating a relationship with your potential customer. And that’s what converts to sales and develops new word of mouth business.

So if you are getting smoked by your competition, you know the steps to start taking to reverse the trend. Even though the recession is still raging, there is business in your market. What you need to do is smoke your competition by delivering what your customer wants. Build your web site that delivers the content your customer wants, optimize it in your local market. Your customers will find you, buy from you and not your competitor.

This is a topic I’m exploring constantly. What is the model for making money online for your business? As I’ve mentioned you need to start with the keywords that relate to your business. Once you start digging into keyword research you likely will find niche markets for your business that you didn’t know existed.

Once you find those terms, you need to start looking at how much online competition there is for each keyword phrase. If  the competition is too steep then it’s going to a tough uphill climb. Highly competitive keyword phrases are not only tough to get, they are tough to keep. So what is your strategy and can it become profitable?

I’m still trying to figure out how to make money with affiliate marketing. I read stories about affiliate marketers making millions promoting products online. I wonder how many are really true. If you are selling small ticket items you need lots of traffic and a site with high conversion to sales.

Where I’ve discovered tremendous success and what has become my niche is in the local real estate and construction markets. That includes a lot of niche markets. One of my favorites is the decorative concrete market. Projects can easily be in the $3,000 – $10,000 range with high margins. Some of my clients have picked up projects that range from $10,000 to over $500,000.

The beauty of this market is that everyone is searching online before they make a decision and because of the versatility of the products there are thousands of keyword phrases. This is a niche market that is ripe for local SEO and Social networking if its done right. Other great markets are local real estate investing, mortgage brokerage and all kinds of contracting.

To be effective you need a plan. You will have a difficult time if you start without aligning your business with an online plan. A quick and easy start is with a pay per click strategy. You’ll get visitors to your site and maybe even a few calls. If you haven’t built an educational site around the keywords that your visitor is looking for, then the kind of client you get may not be profitable.

If you build your online presence correctly one step at a time, you will get exactly the kind of clients you want. If your site educates and defines what you do, you will not get clients that waste your time.  Do the keyword research first. Choose the terms that directly relate to your target market. Define the geographic area that will support your business, then start creating the content that educates and converts to sales.

Some local niche business only need a a town or two to be profitable. Others might need to work an entire county, state or region. Be careful what you go after. Large markets sound exciting and highly profitable. Having worked with and taught many niche businesses, I have found large markets lead to lack of productivity and small niche markets to be extremely profitable.

In many cases, success is a direct result of your plan, not your skills.

The simple answer is that Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of getting highly ranked on Google and others like Yahoo and Bing. The result is conversion to sales. Just like yellow pages. To get the call from a buyer they have to find you. If they don’t find you, they will find your competitor.

Is That It?

That’s the basic idea.  The results are awesome. But like anything, it doesn’t come easy or free contrary to what you might think. When you have an optimized web site, it’s like you’ve hired a virtual salesman selling your services.  To succeed at SEO you need to understand that it’s a process.

The Process

SEO starts with keywords relative to your business. For most businesses there are thousands of keywords that people search for. Think about when you search for something and why. You sit at your keyboard and start searching for something you don’t know about, that’s why you are searching. Your customers do the same thing.

Your customers don’t know your business. So they start searching for what makes sense to them.  They start typing in words and phrases. These are keywords and keyword phrases. They type, click search and look at the listings. The first thing they see are organic listings. They might look at the paid listings next. They glance fast and process what they see. If they don’t find what they want, they search again.

Their next search is more refined. They learned something on that first search.

Choosing Keywords

Google has an excellent keyword tool. You can search a term. Google lists the term and the amount of monthly searches. It’s not exact from my experience. It’s more like a guide. The tool gives you a list of keywords that relate to the one you searched. Sort from most searched to least and look down the list. You’ll see that there are 50-100 terms. The terms listed down the list are high conversion terms. Don’t think that you need the highest ranked terms. The ones down the list tell you what your customers are thinking about. These are “Long Tail Keywords”. They tell the real story.

Start listing the phrases that most closely match your niche. Don’t just search 1 term and stop there. You can search phrases that might be in the top 5 on your list. For example, try doing an individual search for #5 on the list. You’ll get another completely different list of keyword phrases. The deeper you search the more phrases you will find. You will be amazed at what you find. Many of these terms with few searches have no online competition and are high conversion to sales terms.

What Do I Do With All These Keyword Phrases?

The phrases you found should be put in an excel spread sheet. Then put them in a file, you’ll always use them. Once you have your list, you need to start laying them out by category for your website. Now you are laying out your site and business architecture. Once you have the terms organized it’s time to start writing your site content. Write your content using the selected keywords. You will find that you are now starting to understand the mind of your potential visitor.

By giving your visitor the content they want, you are on your way to creating content that converts to sales.  You are also on your way to refining your niche business.  You will find niches within your niche market.

For example, let’s say you are a concrete flooring contractor. Up until now you probably take any kind of concrete floor job that comes along. Some may not make economic sense, but you take them anyway hoping that one of these days you’ll get your big break. Don’t feel like you are alone. We all make these mistakes.

What you are discovering is that your target customers actually search for terms like restaurant floor or retail store floor. That opens up a new idea. Restaurant or retail stores are usually about 1,500 -4,000 square feet. Do the math and you might find that is a highly profitable niche. Now you need to go after floor projects like these. You can get these jobs by writing about them on your site. Explain everything that your target customer needs to know. Educate them.

As you think about this niche, you will start thinking about what your customer wants  to know. Like how to maintain a restaurant floor. Now you’ve opened up a new categories of keyword phrases. Floor cleaning and maintenance, products for cleaning, tools for cleaning. How about floor colors? The list goes on and on.

This is a a start. As you can see, search engine optimization is a process for defining and developing niche markets. This process develops a niche that you can brand. How to brand your business is another topic, but as you may start to see is a process of search engine optimization.

Tools For Optimizing Your Website

I’m going to get into how to optimize your optimization on Niche Quest frequently. It’s not hard to understand and you don’t need technical skills to master the process for your business. Your online marketing  efforts relate directly to the kind of business you are building. Much of what your business needs  for online success can be outsourced. But to outsource you need to understand the processes.

Here is a list of tools;

1. Keywords
2. Logo
3. Website
4. Blog
5. Article Marketing
6. Social Media
7. Word of Mouth Marketing

Search Engine Optimization incorporates all the above and more. You just need to learn. Come back frequently and I’ll show you how. In the process I’m sure I’ll learn from you too.