Demand to know your demand – Part 2

by Greg Randall

My last article discussed the ability to gain, for free, fantastic knowledge/insights into your target market without the need to pay exorbitant rates to learn target market demographics. Through the understanding of the demand for your products/services, a considerable amount of business decision making can be made.

One point to note, this article is geared for eCommerce, however, those businesses looking to develop a Lead Generation Strategy for their services would adopt the same philosophy.

Here are some examples of what can be done with this data:

Category Naming:

Many businesses get caught up into how they should be naming their product categories. It is normally an internalised decision which does not take the customer into account. The demand data will state exactly what customers are calling your products. So give them what they are looking for!

The demand data is defining the customer’s buying process for you!! Businesses pay serious money to gain an understanding of how their customers buy products. This information is free!! If the website’s method of selling can match the customer’s method of buying, sales grow.

A great example is a BBQ client of ours. They were adamant the navigation should represent the material of the BBQ i.e. stainless steel, wooden. When we conducted research using the demand tool, we found there was very little demand for BBQ Material terms; however there was huge demand for the size of the BBQ’s: i.e. “2 burner”, “3 burner”. The customer reluctantly agreed to change the category names and sales increased immediately.

Navigation Structure:

It is very common for businesses to miss out on a variation of their products which the market is looking for. A great example can be taken from the data of last week’s article.

• “Jewellery watches” – 450,000 times
• “Ladies watches” – 18,000 times
• “Bracelet watches” – 2,900 times
• “Ladies gold watch” – 2,400 times
• “Dkny ladies watch” – 500 times
• “Ladies sports watches” – 250 times

An online watch retailer, who shall remain nameless, has a very large selection of watches, with a navigation structure which represents product types and brands, with no mention of a category for “Gold watches”. In fact they have a good selection of Gold Watches, but this product type is dispersed throughout the site in different categories. With 2,400 requests for “Ladies Gold Watch” it would be worthwhile to create another category specifically around this type of demand. The market is defining their needs.

SEO strategy:

With the advancement of eCommerce technology, an SEO strategy for eCommerce is becoming increasingly reliant on aligning navigation structure to demand (this is assuming your shopping cart is built to a reputable standard). This is compared to the old requirement of filling your site full of copy. Don’t get me wrong, it is still necessary to comply with a best practice approach to the layout of category and product pages along with sales copy written in a way where it makes sense to both visitors and Google. But the demand data now plays a significant part.

The purpose of an SEO strategy is to send highly qualified traffic to your site for free. Many people get caught up in an SEO approach which attempts to acquire as much traffic as possible for free with no regard for the calibre of the traffic.

The demand data provides the necessary focus and defines keywords which should be targeted. For those who have this notion they need to be organically prominent for hundreds (more likely thousands) of keywords, the question is where does one start? What is the plan?

An effective SEO Strategy is an incremental plan which is built into business processes consisting of building new pages starting with those terms with the highest demand which directly align to your product offering. Nail the low hanging fruit!

Remember the BBQ client example above?? Once the category structure changed to “2 burner”, “3 burner” category titles, the organic traffic grew exponentially. Not only did this traffic source grow, but it was qualified traffic which linked directly to sales, and we all know how hard it is to convert unbranded traffic. Here is a great example of a website becoming more aligned to the customer’s buying process. Sure there are other factors to convert a sale, but this site is now speaking the customer’s language.

It is important to remember the “Demand” data is a representation of what your market is asking for. There are no assumptions here. This data allows websites to align as close as possible to what customers are asking for. The closer the alignment to your customer needs/wants, the greater the growth in sales.