February 5th, 2007 - Search Engine Marketing, Aussie-Style
The growing dot com pool, coupled with the global nature of the internet, makes it difficult to winnow a global audience down to real potential customers. The clients I have worked with typically face one of two problems. The first is a lack of traffic. They’ve built what amounts to a billboard in a basement. The second problem occurs when a site has good traffic volume (often arrived at through efforts to solve the first problem), but the quality of traffic is low. It’s wonderful to rank well in search engines for a competitive search phrase, but if your product is only available in Australia, how much time and bandwidth can you afford to waste dealing with North American visitors?
Here are some simple steps to help solve both problems:
Understand regional search qualifiers. In our lab setting at Quarry, we’ve watched many people search for regionally-limited products or services. Here’s the most common pattern we’ve noticed. Typically, they will start with a fairly broad search, then scan the results looking for regional pages, in this case judging location by URL and page title. After three to four seconds, if they haven’t found a match many will search again using a regional qualifier. If the original search was for “car insurance information”, the next search is for “car insurance information Australia”. A subset of users will repeat the search after selecting “Australia web pages only.”
With a good keyword research program you will know in advance which regional qualifiers potential customers are actually using to search for the products or services that you offer. Without this, you are marketing in the dark. Our keyword research process goes further, next looking at the search volume of these keywords and comparing it against the number of competing pages. When you find medium to high search volume on a regional phrase and also few competing pages from other sites, you’ve found some low-hanging fruit.
Host locally. One of the factors a search engine will use to determine where your website is located is through the location of your Web server. If your site happens to be hosted overseas, you can still compete with Australian websites, but the hill is steeper. Switching your hosting location is no trivial effort, and probably not worth it for this reason alone, but keep this in mind for future hosting decisions.
Build local links. Search engines are placing increasing weight on the quality of the inbound links that point to your site to determine how it ranks in search engine results. If your focus is on the Australian market, you will want to work hard at creating a strong network of Australian link partners. This will boost your relevancy for those regionally-target search phrases. Also, let’s not forget the other thing that links do: drive traffic. I have seen search marketers conduct aggressive link-building campaigns, adding links from everywhere and anywhere, who are somehow surprised when their links in those web directories in Korea and Taiwan actually start sending traffic to their site. “Whoops, sorry, our product is only available in our region. Australian links mean Australian traffic.
Geo-target PPC: I’m still a little surprised that marketers spend eight times as much on pay-per-click advertising as they spend improving their organic search rankings. But when it comes to targeting a geographically-defined audience, nothing beats the precision of pay-per-click advertising. Here you can define your advertising region by country, by city, or by defining a targeted radius on a map.
Start with a Solid baseline: I’ve heard horror stories from clients who launched an SEO campaign without a full understanding of how their site currently ranks for relevant search phrases. The problem is, despite some good intentions, the changes you make to the site can inadvertently wipe out any quality search rankings that you currently have. Always first have a good understanding of where your traffic comes from and what top 20 or top 30 rankings you have in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and their local search engine offerings. Quarry offers a free SEO report that shows your current rankings, your competitor’s rankings, some keyword research applicable to your industry, top pay-per-click bids for the keywords you choose, and specific recommendations to help your site get better rankings. Yes, I did say free.
These tenets should help you get the attention of a local audience as you plan your search engine marketing efforts. Consider this a local supplement to the standard set of SEO and PPC best practices discussed on this site or the articles I have linked to.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Great post Dan! I’ll definitely look into this for our site. Keep more of this stuff coming.
June 28th, 2008 at 7:16 am
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.