SEO Solutions For "Undecided Searchers"

In this political season, I liken a segment of searchers to undecided voters. When launching a new product or service, new business venture or new web property, it's important to take an outside perspective and understand that awareness needs to be job one. As a candidate, you need to create awareness of your key selling points where people will be looking for information to help them make their decision. This tactic seems to be how the candidates are approaching their Internet marketing plans at the moment - Obama targeting banner ads on news properties, while McCain spends on PPC for people actively seeking out important issues. Two different tactics, same strategic driver. This is precisely the route one should take with their search engine marketing efforts.

So from a PPC or SEO standpoint, every effort should be made to grab those undecideds and introduce them to your product or service. So what to target? Obviously, any new brand names or unique terminology will not yield results because no one is yet searching those terms. A better approach is identifying category terminology that best coincides with users seeking information. This is where McCain's approach takes more of a one to one relationship with the audience. While Obama is on the right property, his message is too general. McCain actively positions on keywords relating to renewable energy, Iraq, and other important issues (particularly to undecided voters). For those who actively want to learn about these issues, McCain's ads will be there to invite them to hear his take precisely when and where they look.

So how does this translate to your business? You need to plant yourself in the shoes of your "undecideds". So, how and where will they be looking? What do they want to know? This mindset can help you reverse engineer a pay per click strategy or search engine optimization approach that can generate results.

For example, if you are launching a site for a new printing service, you might take this approach: First, identify your products, and differentiators. It might be that you custom design products for unique occasions, and use only recyclable materials. So it would make sense to build landing pages around a page talking about your approach to custom designs, why you use recyclable materials, and specific events that fall within your sweet spot. Of course, these pages would be laced with very business specific keywords you are targeting, and be sure to add your geographic location. Good, highly targeted keywords would include terms like 'buy bridal shower cards' (use this with a header tag for maximum impact with search engines - "Company X - buy bridal shower cards here!"), environmental printing company, custom cards for (insert event here), or even comparisons to competitors products. This will be a great approach to developing the right content for organic rankings for customers in the general research stage.

Even better, this will also help improve your quality score for pay per click advertising. The more relevant the content on your pages, the less you will pay when you choose to advertise. So when moving into the PPC area, you can target slightly more general, and more competitive terms (think 'bridal shower cards' which has a lot of ad competition instead of 'custom designed bridal shower cards' which has little competition on Google as I write this) with geo-targeting, and then qualify visitors by using ad text that accentuates your key selling points - your specialty items, custom designs, and environmentally conscious approach to your industry.

Another example I just thought of would be whitening toothpaste. If people are looking up information on whitening toothpaste on Google, they are probably interested in its efficacy. If you try to optimize simply for "whitening toothpaste" or dive into the realm of pay per click advertising you will be working in a pretty competitive landscape. However, if you think from the standpoint of an undecided, you may find yourself targeting the phrase "Does whitening toothpaste work". The second and fifth ranked results for this term are a question on Yahoo Answers, and an article on Amazines.com. What's the big deal about that you ask? Both locations are free. Anyone can submit an article to Amazines, and anyone can submit to Yahoo answers. This is a good sign that the heavyweights of the tooth whitening toothpaste industry are not targeting it. That, and there's only one paid advertisement on Google for this term. This is such a good opportunity I may just go home and see if I can produce some toothpaste tonight.

When it comes right down to it, you need to think like a searcher to really get the benefits of search engine marketing. Taking a smart approach from the ground up with your SEO and PPC will help customers elect you and your shiny white smile to office...or at least let you print their invitations.

The author is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan search engine optimization, pay per click management and web analytics consulting company based outside of Lansing, Michigan.