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It was always the case in the marketing world that to be successful, you needed to offer what your customers were actually looking for. The same applies to the marketing and promotion of your web sites – regardless of whether it’s pay per click or search engine optimisation you’re talking about.
Watch out though – there is a difference. What marketers or copywriters tend to do with more traditional marketing methods is to ‘inflate’ the language they use in order to impress. So if you sell ‘red t-shirts’ – the words used in the marketing might be ‘stylish scarlet top’.
Search engines, in whatever country or language, don’t respond well to this approach. That’s because they match up what your potential customers are searching for with what their automated system considers to be the most relevant sites containing that term or – in the pay per click systems – they show your ad in response to the customer search term.
So if your product is ‘stylish scarlet top’ – but your customers are looking for ‘red t-shirts’ , you’re not going to succeed in the search engines. Present day technology has no way of knowing that red and scarlet could be referring to the same colour – or that t-shirt and top can both mean the same garment.
So the golden rule is “Offer the product to your target customers in the language they use, not what you’d like them to call the product”
Going Global
If you’re taking your product to wider global markets – not surprisingly – the situation is even more sensitive. Just imagine that your web site localisation and translation team translated ‘stylish scarlet top’ into the target language. There might not even be a direct translation – so they deliver an approximation. You can probably guess, that this is rarely closer to what the potential customers enter in the search box of the search engines. Usually, it’s even further away from any sensible link with your customer base.
This is the reason you need to take great care over translation matters and why WebCertain offers a localised and optimised translation service.
How do you know what your customers are looking for?
Search marketing companies, such as WebCertain, can interrogate databases of recent searches in order to help you understand what’s on your customer’s minds. In fact, search term research can be quite revealing in terms of marketing insight and helpful to you in planning or launching new and innovative products.
Tracking what they do on your site?
It’s one thing knowing what searches potential customers are making at the search engines – and another matter altogether turning those potential customers into buyers when they arrive at and navigate their way through your web site.
Step one is to know who’s arriving there having searched for what. That necessitates an effective tracking tool on your web site. If you learn nothing else from reading this page GET EFFECTIVE TRACKING – you will never look back.
WebCertain has its own StatPerfomer tool, which is very popular with our clients but there are many useful tools on the market. Just make sure that the tool you choose has the ability to measure first time and returning visitors – and which search phrases, that bring customers to your site, result in conversions.
Can they find their way around on your web site?
Even if you have been successful in targeting the right potential customers, there’s no guarantee they’re going to buy from your site or find the information there that they were looking for. The navigation system of web sites is almost never designed by the people that are ultimately going to have to use it! You can dramatically improve
Internal Search
Another very powerful method of both providing users with an easy way to navigate around your site and at the same time gaining customer insight is internal search which we strongly recommend. This involves a search box on each page of your in which people carry out free text searches.
It's not just "as simple as that" but that's a good beginning.
| © 2008 WebCertain Europe Ltd Search Language Hub, Northminster Business Park, Poppleton, York YO26 6QW tel: +44 19 04 78 00 30 |
VAT number: 755 9844 73 WebCertain Europe is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 04140825 |
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