Importance of Market Research
This is a very brief introduction to keyword research and how it relates to Internet marketing.
First a couple of concepts that are important…
What is a “market”?
- A segment of the population that have a common need or desire.
- … That have the wherewithal to buy.
- … Are motivated to acquire a commodity or service that meets their need or desire.
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Often people like to define segments in terms of niches. A niche is effectively a segment of a market. For example:
- Market: People interested in earning extra money
- Mega Niche: People interested in a home business
- Niche: People interested in network marketing
- Micro Niche: People interested in your business
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The premise is, on the Internet, market and keyword research are synonymous.
This is because on the Internet, people with common need or desire, can be defined by the keywords that are commonly and regularly used by people within that market.
What’s so wonderful about the Internet is that you can actually target people that have a specific need by focusing on the keywords that they tend to enter to find that need. In the offline world, it is much harder to target a specific market and may have to look at specific things like buying habits, salary, age, or location.
Not all keywords are equal though. Some keywords have a lot more traffic than others, or they may have more competing web pages. With the keyword “home business,” there are millions of pages online about it while for “global domains international,” there are much fewer pages.
As an Internet marketer, you are interested in finding keywords that have a commercial value. If you have a group people with common need or desire and they are looking to buy something, probably they are going to use certain keywords. That’s going to be an indication about what they are interested in buying.
Some people who search for free content and use the word “free” as a modifier in their keyword search may be less interested to buy something.
Your goal is to find the keywords that are used by a large enough group of people who are willing to buy a product – that relates to the keywords / market being searched for – and for which there is an acceptable level of web page competition.
In the past, the process to find keywords with sufficient traffic and appropriate competing pages was more like a hit-and-miss affair. It was also definitely a manual process. You had to go and do a lot of manual searches to find it.