SEO Tips: Stay in Touch With Your Market

I think that keeping it real is a common sense in any business, especially in web-based businesses. This is the big advantage of the web: you can’t fake it. You either have visitors to your website or not; you either get comments or not; you either sell or not – you can’t hide. As a result, you need to stay with your feet on the ground and keep in touch with what your market is doing and searching.

There are lots of ways and tools to keep in touch to what your market is doing: you can listen to social networks, blogs, the web, tweets and so on. There are so many ways that you could get lost. That is why I prefer to use two tools from Google: Google Alerts and iGoogle.

How I use Google Alerts

The process is simple. Create a Gmail account, then search for Google Alerts and set your alerts. My advice would be not to rush into it and create too many alerts. Every day millions of articles are being published, so keep it real. Focus on your top main keywords and some important long tail keywords.

This is not only a way to see what others are publishing related to your keywords in your market but also a way to see how the competition is using the keywords you are trying to rank for. It will also offer you an indicator of how crowded the market is: see how many articles appear in a day, week, month.

You can also use it as a source of inspiration for your own content. I don’t read all the articles I’m receiving but I do a quick scan for interesting ideas and how the keywords are used on the page.

How I use iGoogle

I’m using iGoogle because I can incorporate tables from other Google tools. The most important one for me is Google Insights for Search. What I do is basically incorporate tables to see rising trends in search for different related terms. Why is this so important: many times website owners pay money to have their websites optimized for keywords that no one searches for or have low search volumes.

Knowing what’s hot and what people are searching for and from what location can have a great impact on how you plan your business: content, products, geo-targeting and so on.

How do you stay in touch with your market?

What do you think of all this? Share your way to keep in touch with your market, rising trends in searches, problems people might encounter and so on. If you find this article useful please consider subscribing and receive my blog directly in your e-mail.