Marketing is war. It’s either, kill your competitor, or be killed. Only one person gets the sale. To get a superior advantage in the war you need the following basic thing.
- Know thy enemy: If you keep tabs on what your enemy is doing you can spot things that you can repeat and reuse. You will come to understand the speed of their marketing and the level of activity that they engage in.
- Know thy customer: Michael Kiely told me the story of when he met the CEO of David Jones. He stood out the very front of the store with him and the CEO pointed at people walking past his store and said: “That person is my customer. That person is not. That person wouldn’t walk into my store.” The CEO and the entire management team of David Jones at the time were able to turn the sinking ship retail company around by manning their cash registers and meeting their customers. They got to know their customer and tailored everything to them. On the internet you need to use tools to do that same thing.
- Research the market: When we entered the home loan niche we did a lot of research prior to putting up our first website just to see if it was going to be feasible to even do. The question is never if there is a gap in the market – instead, you want to know if there is a market in the gap. You have always got to be trying new niches and new websites online to find the new trends and new opportunities. It’s how you stay ahead, and how you research your market.
Here are the top online tools I use to gain an unfair advantage in the internet marketing war, and some of the ways in which I use them.
What are your customers searching for?
The reason you want this information is so you can target people who are searching for those keywords.
- Google keyword tools: This is the flat head screwdriver of the internet marketer and is still one of the top tools I use.
- Google suggestions: When you start typing your keywords into Google you will notice some suggestions start to appear. I am always interested in this as it gives me at the search box information of what people are typing. These results can be manipulated but it still gives you other ideas of what customers are thinking.
Optimising your site for search engines
These tools are the ones you want to use when you are making your website more friendly to a search engine and a search visitor.
- Title and meta description optimisation: What you want to do is maximise the number of characters Google displays in its results for your listings. You want precisely 70 characters in your title tag. I use a little title tag preview tool to optimize these and test out different variations.
Finding links to rank higher in the search engines
You want to use these tools in combination to find links for your website.
- SEOBook’s Toolbar: This is a Firefox plug-in that essentially allows you to see a whole lot of stats about a website like:
– Pagerank: This is a basic one and just an indicator of a sites strength and authority. It needs to be considered with respect to a whole other set of factors like the next few.
– Number of links: The toolbar will give you a quick estimate of how many links are pointing to the page you are looking at. This will tell you how authoritative that page is and how much it will help you.
– Domain age: The toolbar will give you an estimate of how old the domain name you are looking at is. This is again another signal which is important to Google, as generally older domains are more authoritative because they have been around longer. Spam sites tend to come and go.
Combine these tools
The previous tools for search engine marketing are kind of the basics, what you want to do is combine them together for special moves.
Find your competitor in the top 100
What you are trying to do here is see which websites are active in your niche – that is, which ones are actually doing things on their website to improve their rankings.
What you want to do here is find the top 100 websites for a particular set of different search keywords in Google. You can use SEOBooks toolbar function to do this. Then you want to find commonalities between the different keywords – you are essentially looking for similar domains between the different keywords. You then want to use the aforementioned tools to analyse competitors’ websites.
What are your customers doing on your website?
It’s really hard sometimes to actually understand how people use your website – you click through it a certain way, but that isn’t necessarily how others use it. You want to use these tools to help improve your conversion rate – they will help you spy on what they are doing!
- Where do people click? Crazyegg.com ($9) is amazing. It tells you where every click on a particular page is being made. In particular it tells you where users are clicking even when there are no links or buttons there!
- Spy on your customers: There are a couple here userfly.com ($15) and clicktale.com ($25) are two superb ones that essentially let you record a users session on your website. You follow their mouse, where they click, how they scroll and the keyword they came in with. If you thought Facebook was spying on you, you might be surprised to realise others are spying too!
- Ask them what they want: If you want to serve your customers better, ask them what they want and give it to them. Survey tools that are short and sharp can really help. Campyle.com is one polite little tool that asks users for feedback.
Other tools that you might want to consider
These tools might be good but their usefulness will depend on your type of business. For example, real time chat might not work so well for adult stores but might work really well for travel stores.
- Real time chat: You would think that real time chat is dead but in fact it’s alive and kicking. It’s a great tool to actually talk to your customers and it can really help in conversion and customer insights.
- Advanced analytics tools: Once a site gets too big, Google Analytics becomes a lot less effective because there is just too much data. Omniture is a more advanced tool you might want to consider.
- Uptime checking: If your website goes down its probably the biggest factor that is going to kill your conversion rate. Chartbeat is one tool which will email you if your site is down.
Top secret custom tools
I can’t tell you about these as they are secret, but I assure you the rabbit hole goes deeper! Keep experimenting and trying to develop your own custom tools.
This was written by veteran online entrepreneur Fred Schebesta, for any questions you can reach out to him on Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and his blog.
